SOURCE: "The Moment's Notice: Crébillon's Game of Libertinage," in Enlightenment and the Shadows of Chance: The Novel and the Culture of Gambling in Eighteenth-Century France, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993, pp. 198–228.

There is little the characters in Crébillon fils's novels would rather do than gamble. Most of their bets turn, of course, on the feminine virtue and masculine honor staked or bluffed as they maneuver each other toward an alcove, a sofa, or "one of those large armchairs as favorable to temerity as they are suited to indulgence [aussi favorables à la témérité que propres à la complaisance]." With surprising regularity, however, key events in Crébillon's novels play themselves out around the less lubricious but equally risky perimeter of the card table—an emblem of the socialized yet threatening hasard at the core of Crébillon's esthetic.

Crébillon's dialogue-novel Le Hasard du coin du feu takes place entirely in Célie's bedroom, where, on a cold winter day, she and the duc de Clerval spend a long afternoon trying to seduce each other. Célie will yield only if Clerval first tells her he loves her. Clerval, however, insists that at least at the level of le coeur, his fidelity to his current mistress precludes any such statement. Early on in their conversation Clerval asks Célie if she herself was ever young and naive enough to have actually believed that the "love" she so insists on hearing about could ever deliver the eternities it promises. His question prompts Célie to tell the story of her first lover. Norsan, Célie is forced to admit, had carefully calculated every stage of her seduction. And it was the social ritual of the card game that allowed him to force from her, at the level of gesture, the same declaration she would now withhold from Clerval: "We decided to play a game of brelan, and he all too easily forced me to accord to each of his actions that anxious and concerned attention which I have never known to be without danger for us, and which is itself perhaps the first symptom of love." …

Crébillon's best-known work, the memoir-novel Les Egarements du coeur et de l'esprit, likewise tells a story punctuated by card games where everything is staked and won, staked and lost. It is during a card game in her home that Madame de Lursay, secretly worshiped by the young Meilcour, overcomes her scruples at taking the first step with a younger man and reveals the affection Meilcour feels he must be certain of before he can overcome his timidity. "We sat down to cards. During the entire game Madame de Lursay, doubtless more susceptible than she believed and carried away by her love, gave all the strongest signs of it [her love]. It seemed prudence had abandoned her, that nothing now existed for her other than the pleasure of loving me and telling me so, and that she foresaw how much, if she were to beguile me, I needed to be reassured."

Later in the novel, after a chance meeting at the Opera has led Meilcour to fall in love with the young Hortense de Théville and abandon his suit of Madame de Lursay, it is around the same card table that, in no more time than it takes to turn a card, the whole of Meilcour's stake on the belle inconnue is swept away by her rival: "Our eyes met. The languor I saw in hers fixed in my heart the effect her charms had initiated and whose force seemed to grow with each instant. The few sighs she seemed to only half utter completed my overthrow, and at that dangerous moment, she benefited from all the love I felt for that unknown woman."

The novel's final scene is also built around a game of cards, a game recapitulating in miniature the back and forth, beckoning and repelling, understanding and mistrusting movement of the entire novel. Now completely smitten with Hortense and duped by the jaded Versac's lies about Madame de Lursay's past, Meilcour returns to her home only because he hopes to find Hortense there. While many guests are present, Hortense is not, and Madame de Lursay is engaged in a card game. Seeing Meilcour, she plays her cards in such a way that the new arrival receives exactly the message she wishes to communicate: "I was seated next to her, and from time to time she commented on the strange hands she was being dealt, but in a detached way. There was so much gaiety in her eyes, and her wit seemed so free, that I had no doubt she had forgotten me."

The finesse with which Madame de Lursay masks her true feelings generates for Meilcour a moment of self-discovery within chance that captures the very essence of the Crébillonesque scenario. Suspecting that Lursay may be feigning her lack of interest in him, Meilcour decides to study her closely as she plays. It is precisely as he is taken in and becomes certain he is not being fooled by any feigned indifference on Madame de Lursay's part that he becomes the dupe of his own unsuspected feelings: "To get to the bottom of the matter I studied her carefully. The more surely my scrutiny convinced me her change was real, the more I felt diminish the joy that thought had first brought me." Madame de Lursay invites Meilcour to join the game, to take a hand alongside the marquis de——, to whom she has been paying particular attention. Once the game resumes, she leaves little doubt who is the desired partner and who the dummy: "Each time I glanced at her I found her eyes fixed on the marquis, and she no sooner noticed my attention in observing her than she quickly brought them back to her cards, as though I were the person from whom she most wanted to hide her feelings [comme si c'eût été à moi surtout qu'elle eût voulu cacher ses sentiments]." As the stakes rise, Meilcour's own play becomes an index of the success of Madame de Lursay's stratagem: "I could not help showing signs of an impatience she knew very well was not my usual reaction to gambling and which I could thus hardly blame on it." Thanks to Lursay's consummate feints, all the pieces are now in place for the game's and the novel's final confrontation, one that will be played out alone by Meilcour and Madame de Lursay after the other guests have left.

…..

Gambling is a privileged activity in Crébillon's novels not only because as social ritual it allows for the communication of nonverbal messages but also because as a conflict of the momentary and the continuous, of what diverts and what obsesses, it is a literal twin to sexual desire as Crébillon's thematics of choice. As a dialectic of the momentary and the continuous, desire provides the organizing polarities of his most popular dialogue-novel, La Nuit et le moment. Late one evening, after all her guests have retired, Cidalise is surprised by the arrival in her bedroom of Clitandre. The entire novel consists of the conversation and other activities carried on by these two characters until first light the next morning. At every stage they demonstrate, in the direct present of speech and action, how desire is born, declares itself, and is consummated only to the extent that it disguises itself as what it is not.

Cidalise has chosen her guests carefully: all four of the other women visiting the chateau are former mistresses of Clitandre's. When she expresses her surprise that Clitandre should choose her bedroom as the object of his nocturnal stroll, he replies that those other women are only dim memories from a forgotten past: "Why should anyone imagine that in the midst of everything social life imposes on us, those whom chance, caprice, and circumstance once brought together for a few moments [des gens que le hasard, le caprice, des circonstances ont unis quelques moments] should recall what in fact interested them so little [se souviennent de ce qui les a intéressés si peu]?" Using an on that simultaneously depersonalizes his statement and establishes it as a general rule governing society, Clitandre enunciates a philosophy of desire and chance summarizing all the world-weary wisdom of the legions of dissolute dues, marquis, and chevaliers populating so many novels and plays of early eighteenth-century France:

We are happy together, we sleep together [On se plaît, on se prend]. And if we grow bored with each other [S'ennuie-t-on l'un avec l'autre]? We separate with no more ceremony than we took each other. Are we happy with each other again? We sleep together again with just as much pleasure as the first time we met. We separate again and never get upset about it. It is true that love has nothing to do with all this; but love—what is it other than a desire we were pleased to exaggerate, a movement of the senses our vanity enjoyed taking as a virtue?

Life and desire are presented as a succession of disjointed moments following one another with no more coherence or continuity than one might expect between cards dealt from a well-shuffled deck.

Speaking in a more personal voice, Clitandre goes on to insist that his own experience eminently confirms this law. As concerns Julie, for instance, "After all, I only had her one time after a dinner. Can you really call that having a woman?" Had it not been for the heat wave that summer, Julie's state of undress when he arrived, and most of all her blind devotion to the revered physicist Pagny, whose latest lecture she repeated to the effect that—in obvious contradiction to Clitandre's visibly rising excitement—such heat inevitably produces "an annihilation [un anéantissement] … caused by an excessive dissipation of the mind and a relaxing of the vital fibers," nothing would have happened between them. If Clitandre provided Julie with "the most furious refutation imaginable of her opinion," it was purely the result of le hasard governing this series of chance events over which he exercised no control and for which he bears no responsibility. Speaking of his affair with another of the guests, Araminte, the woman for whom Eraste, Cidalise's former lover, left her, Clitandre repeats that important term: "In returning from our walk, chance [le hasard] led us to pass by a small and dark grove. Equally by chance [Par le même hasard], we had unknowingly separated ourselves from the others."

Clitandre underlines everything that was accidental and ephemeral about his relations with these other women not so much because he would align himself with the promiscuity preached by the societal on of the libertine voice but to underline how different is his present with Cidalise from all those past moments. Clitandre's whole seduction of Cidalise turns on his careful manipulation of the period's distinction between desire and love. Characterized by distinct temporalities, desire exists only in the present, lasts only for the moment, and implies nothing about a future it leaves entirely free. Love, on the other hand, redefines the present as the promise of a future assured by the continuity of the lover's passion. Desire celebrates and limits itself to the present moment. Love may begin within the present, but only because that present is the single point of access to an unlimited future giving the present its real meaning.

Within the scenarios of libertinage, love is associated with virtuous women and naive young men; desire with jaded libertines of either sex. The entire plot of La Nuit et le moment turns on Cidalise's self-deceiving attempts to convince herself that in yielding to Clitandre, she is responding not to his desire but to his love. Clitandre's stories of his former affairs are reassuring, not because he seems forever ready to blunder into any arms that open before him, but because he insists that none of those moments of past desire imply any interest continuing into the present he now shares with Cidalise. Clitandre's strategy is to raise the payoff on the clear longshot that he is actually in love to such a level that Cidalise's narcissism can no longer resist betting on the possibility that he is not lying. His portrayal of his sexual past as a random concatenation of meaningless desires generates for Cidalise the flattering image of herself as the one woman who, unlike all those who came before, has been able to inspire true love and true passion. These maneuvers constitute Clitandre's response to Cidalise's insistence that she will surrender herself in the present only if she is convinced that their present is the beginning of a shared future.

Love and desire differ not only in their relation to the future but in the way they relate to the past. Listening to Clitandre's declaration of love, Cidalise raises what, since they have known each other for many years, is a logical objection: "Either you do not love me today or, and I have strong reasons not to believe it, you have loved me for a long time." Since Clitandre has already consigned his earlier adventures to the insignificance of random desire, he can reply, "Yes, Madame, I have been in love with you since that happy moment I first saw you." If he did not act on his love earlier, it was because Cidalise was herself involved first with Damis and later with Eraste. Women, especially the woman to whom one is declaring one's love, are assumed to love, and as a supposedly virtuous woman, Cidalise cannot, like Clitandre, blithely dismiss her own past with those other men as nothing more than a series of passing desires. Love requires a reshaping of the past, its renunciation as a lie at last recognized as such thanks to the new light of passion's truth. Cidalise declares to Clitandre: "You cannot know how much I love you! How much I abhor having belonged to anyone else! How I hate you for waiting so long to love me [Combien même je vous hais de m'avoir aimée si tard]!" To portray herself as hating the now beloved Clitandre for not having loved her sooner is symbolic of the heavy paradox and self-deception within which Crébillon's characters continually navigate.

Clitandre may seduce Cidalise, but he must do so on her terms. Those terms, however, never remain entirely her own. Clitandre's final words to Cidalise, spoken as he leaves her bedroom the next morning, capture all the ambiguity of their enterprise: "Adieu, may you, if it is possible, love me as much as you yourself are loved!"

…..

Crébillon's novels all tell different versions of a single story: that of how desire, born of a chance moment, transforms itself into, attempts to transform itself into, or disguises itself as something else—as a love capable of redefining both past and future. In telling this story, in underlining the contrasting temporalities of desire and love, Crébillon's characters ultimately speak not only of the sexual mores of the Regency but of the novel itself and its role within the society it addressed. Understanding what Crébillon's thematics of seduction tells us about the novel as a form might best begin by juxtaposing his treatment of the contrastive temporalities of desire and love with the surprisingly similar version of that opposition offered two centuries later by Jean-Paul Sartre in La Nausée and its critique of the illusions of storytelling. Sartre's Roquentin explains his growing disgust with what he calls "the sublime" through an analysis of how storytelling perverts and misrepresents the most fundamental reality of everything it claims to represent. His critique is developed through an extended contrast between living life and telling a story, between the event and the adventure, between a vision of the self as simply a person and the mythologizing of the self as hero.

In the same way that Clitandre presents his past seductions of Cidalise's houseguests as disconnected chance moments bearing no relation to what came before or after, Roquentin comes to accept the arid truth that life is a series of moments during which "the scenery changes, people come in and go out, that's all. There are never any beginnings. Days are tacked onto days without rhyme or reason in an interminable and monotonous addition." In the same way that Crébillon's illusion of love depends on an imaginary future inflecting every moment of the present, the bad faith Sartre denounces at the core of every "story" implies that "we forget that the future was not there yet, that the guy was walking in a night without signs which offered him its monotonous riches in a jumble and that he made no choices." Life becomes story, its events our adventures, and ourselves its hero only when, as with love's promised future, "it all began with the end. It's there, invisible and present, giving these words all the pomp and value of a beginning." Abstracted from existence as a concatenation of chance-driven moments, life-as-story begins from what it is destined to become rather than from what it happens to be: "The story goes on in reverse, its moments no longer pile up haphazardly [s'empiler au petit bonheur les uns sur les autres], they are drawn along by the end of the story [happés par la fin de l'histoire] as it conjures up each of them as well as the ones preceding it."

Crébillon's novels center on seduction, on how those who see life as a series of chance desires are able to manipulate others whose belief in a (love) story promising continuity, purpose, and meaning marks them as the perfect prey. Crébillon's demystification of love through the opposition of a self-enclosed present to an illusory future parallels Sartre's indictment of narrative through the oppositions of life to story, event to adventure, and person to hero. To be seduced is, quite literally, to listen to and believe a story. Crébillon's reflections on seduction through story thus speak of a danger that extends far beyond the tragicomic, self-deceptive scenarios of sexual conquest wherein would-be seducers are always on the prowl for victims sufficiently naive to accept the pledge of a fictitious future in return for their present surrender.

Les Egarements du coeur et de l'esprit is perhaps the best illustration of this danger. Often described as a novel of initiation, a Bildungsroman like Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale or Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist, Les Egarements tells the story of its principal character's worldly education. And the lesson Meilcour ultimately learns is that of the failure of all stories. The novel opens with its main character in full possession of a firm and unquestioned sense of self: "I made my entry into society at the age of seventeen, with all the advantages that can make a man be noticed there." If Meilcour knows exactly who and where he is, it is because his identity is defined by a series of mutually sustaining stories. Since like all the characters in Crébillon's novels, he is a noble, his story is in one sense another chapter continuing the already illustrious story of his ancestors. In Meilcour's case, his dead father has bequeathed him not only a name but—because he was killed fighting in the king's service—"a noble name whose renown he himself had increased." The dead father functions as the biological foundation of two complementary stories: the long-term, generational history of the family dynasty Meilcour continues and the short-term but more glorious story of the feats through which the father distinguished himself as hero. On the other side of the family, Meilcour's mother is a source of both material security—"I had expectations of considerable wealth from my mother"—and the ongoing story of an unswerving devotion compensating for what has been lost through the death of the father: "Beautiful, young, and rich, her tenderness for me led her to imagine no other pleasure than that of educating me and making up for all I had lost in losing my father."

The ensuing 250 pages of this novel, describing a period of roughly two weeks, chip away the certainty and sense of identity with which the work begins. The novel may end with Meilcour and Madame de Lursay understanding each other, but the encounter with Hortense as well as Versac's lies about Lursay deprive that ending of the sense of closure and completed quest so ardently desired by Meilcour in the work's opening pages.

Les Egarements is a memoir-novel, a novel written in the first person by the main character long after the events he narrates. This first-person form allows Meilcour to offer a double perspective on everything he relates. At every point in his narration he retains the option of describing events either as he experienced them at the time of their actual occurrence or, using a retrospective past conditional, as he has since come to understand them from the vantage point of age and wisdom. Les Egarements ends with a veritable crescendo of this second perspective, and in order for the readers to understand what actually happened during its final evening, they must deduce it, not from what is actually narrated, but from the abstracted lesson Meilcour draws from his experience. The novel ends with the bankruptcy of what Meilcour had until then accepted as the sum of worldly wisdom: Versac's secret doctrine of society as a locus of universal hypocrisy demanding absolute self-control. As Meilcour first listened to Versac's revelations, he was awed by their unveiling of a previously unsuspected intellectual dimension within this older and worldly-wise man he had so long admired. Versac's extended exposition of how the world really works represents the one "true" story that, along with the earlier stories of paternal distinction and maternal devotion, might be seen as defining Meilcour's future. But the experiences of the two-week period narrated in the novel teach Meilcour something quite different. Looking back on the evening with Madame de Lursay and how her "extreme connaissance du coeur" allowed her, to his astonishment, to render him "enchanted" with the very woman he had hated only a few moments earlier, Meilcour realizes that a continued adherence to Versac's doctrine, "l'usage du monde," would only have rendered him more corrupt and more vulnerable to manipulation: "The conclusion I draw today is that had I been more experienced, she would only have seduced me more quickly, since what we call knowledge of the world only makes us wiser by making us more corrupt."

With Versac's lesson dismissed as "cette commode métaphysique," Meilcour finds himself cut off from the assurance that would have allowed him to control himself and others. Having lost faith in Versac, he has lost the ability to live life as a story whose assumed ending will provide the significance of each of its episodes. Instead, Meilcour's experiences leave him caught up in an immobilizeing oscillation of antithetical feelings: "Exiled from pleasure by remorse, and from remorse by pleasure, I could not for a moment be sure of myself."

The key word in Crébillon's title, égarement, is all but impossible to translate into English. 'Distraction' is the term to which most dictionaries resign themselves, usually following it with examples demonstrating the English word's inability to capture the more diverse and serious connotations of the French term. Barbara Bray tried, none too felicitously, to finesse the problem by choosing as the title for her 1967 translation of Crébillon's novel The Wayward Head and Heart. Jean Sgard makes the point [in "La Notion d'égarement chez Crébillon," Dix-huitième siècle, 1 (1969)] in speaking of Crébillon's text that "the concept of égarement is doubly interesting: it expresses an ambiguous and disconcerting state, a 'trouble,' a 'delirium' defying analysis; and it implies at the same time a norm, as an égarement can only exist in relation to a straight path." While Sgard claims that égarement implies the existence of an abandoned norm, it is significant that Crébillon modifies his own usage of the word with two adjectival phrases—du coeur and de l'esprit—which themselves, because they represent opposing principles of human conduct, substantially compromise the possibility of any such single "correct path." Egarement is, according to Le Robert, derived from the Frankish warôn, meaning 'to care for, to safeguard, to secure in a sure place.' E-garer thus implies a lost security, a setting off into an uncertainty compromising any defined rectitude.

Les Egarements ends with Meilcour unable to continue as the admiring acolyte of a supposedly all-knowing Versac. He finds himself instead in a state where "I could not for a moment be sure of myself (emphasis mine). The concept of le moment here alluded to functions throughout Crébillon's work as an emblem of life lived as a sequence of fortuitous events determined only by chance. Earlier, in Clitandre's explanation of his past to Cidalise, we saw its role in the libertine's ever-playful dismissal of personal responsibility. At the close of Les Egarements, the term appears again, but now as providing the temporality of the character's far more somber inability to know or master his fate once he is deprived of the security of stories and forced instead onto the uncertain seas of experience and contradiction.

…..

[In the development of probability theory] the most important figures within that science emphasized its power to dismiss chance as an illusion. Presenting their finite permutations of the possible, of what might happen next, as perfectly adequate responses to the quite different question of what will happen next, the probabilists substituted their mathematical models for the reality they claimed to explain. I rehearse this basic strategy of probability theory because it parallels in important ways what are the distinctive characteristics of Crébillon's novelistic style. His plots usually limit themselves to the simplest situations: in La Nuit et le moment, Clitandre has arrived in Cidalise's room and sets out to seduce her; in Le Hasard du coin du feu, Célie would insist that Clerval declare he loves her before she yields; in Les Egarements, Madame de Lursay wants the timid Meilcour to take the first step before she reveals her own feelings. The actual texture of Crébillon's novels could be described as an infinitely extensible dialectic between two conflicting views as to what should happen next. One character argues the case for one course of action, while the other parries with a contrasting array of reasons for the alternate course.

Crébillon's narrative technique and the protocols of probability theory share a tendency to postpone indefinitely the actual occurrence of the event by opening up what becomes a potentially infinite space devoted to the analysis of its possible implications. It is precisely for this "overly analytical" or "overly psychological" style that Crébillon has been most consistently criticized. It is his style, far more than his undeserved reputation as a pornographer, that explains why, even today, his importance to the history of the novel remains unacknowledged.

There can be little doubt that Crébillon's style frustrated the reader of his time. Accustomed to the more or less realistic or more or less romanesque representation of a rapidly moving sequence of events, the eighteenth-century reader could only be perplexed by Crébillon's insistence on structuring his novels around the analysis of a static situation whose potential implications were then considered in seemingly infinite detail. This deferral of the novel's forward progress, of any easy movement from event to event, has a number of important effects. At one level, it forces the reader to realize that the standard novelistic diction of an untroubled and expeditious representation of events is an option rather than a rule of the genre. At another level, Crébillon's concentration on the interval between events, on the intricacies of his characters' feelings as to whether and why something should or should not be done, emphasizes the potential infinity of interpretation each character brings to a given situation. Crébillon's characters are masters of argument capable of initiating an endless dialectic around almost any question. The pleasure of reading Crébillon lies in admiring how his characters find new ways to surprise, parry, and elude the rhetorical traps they continually set for one another. By forcing his reader to recognize the difference between the event and its analysis, Crébillon emphasizes a disjunction between the two. We may speak, reason, cajole, threaten, and plead all we wish; those acts can never of themselves determine what actually happens next. The event occurs in a realm set off from the endless words spoken by its protagonists. And it is chance and the moment, far more than the characters' words, that determine what actually happens.

In writing his novels as he did, in emphasizing a diction all but antithetical to their form, Crébillon undercut what we saw to be the period's justification of the genre through a claim to didactic realism. The most frequent defense of the novel in the prefaces of the eighteenth century grounded the genre's utility in its power to represent people and events as they actually were within the real world. The novel, as Prévost argued, was a less dangerous and more accessible supplement to experience. Furthermore, the novel's ability to portray evil as punished and virtue as rewarded qualified it as teacher and reformer. Novels set in the real world of their readers could teach men and women how they should act not only morally but in accordance with the secular norms of polite society.

Crébillon subverts any such justification of the novel not so much because his characters are hardly paragons of conventional virtue as because his entire portrayal of how things happen between individuals subverts the effortless and purposeful progression from event to event at the core of the didactic novel. Crébillon's style is particularly intriguing because while it borrows probability theory's analytical bent, it works against the implicit belief in determinism that science shared with the emerging ideology of the novel. In Les Egarements du coeur et de l'esprit, all the truly decisive events in those two weeks of Meilcour's life occur by chance: one evening he is smitten with an unknown woman who happens to be seated in the box next to his at the Opera; a few days later he happens to hear that same woman's voice through the labyrinth of the Tuileries. Hurrying along its twisting paths, he positions himself so as to cross her path. Hoping to manipulate that chance encounter to his own ends, he learns instead the sad lesson of the novel's inefficacy as a Prévostian supplement to experience: "I then recalled all the episodes from novels I had read that treated of speaking to one's mistress and was surprised that there was not a single one that was of any use to me." Like probability theory, novels may teach us many things—but their lessons are never quite appropriate to the specific situation at hand.

Even Crébillon's seducers, those characters who are masters at concocting the mini-novels of love's promised future, can be stymied by the specificity of the moment. In La Nuit et le moment, Clitandre tells how his affair with Luscinde began the evening he took her home from a dinner at which her lover, Oronte, had not only insulted her but left early and taken her carriage. Clitandre's strategy is based on an excellent analysis of where, given the evening's events, Luscinde is sure to be most vulnerable. What better way to avenge herself on Oronte than a brief affair with Clitandre? The abstract appropriateness of his approach, Clitandre knows, is beyond question. The problem, as always with what is only probable, comes in applying that abstract principle to the specific here and now of the actual situation: "I had no problem convincing her she should avenge herself. But as angry as she was, I could not persuade her so easily as I liked to think I could that she should avenge herself at that very moment [dans le moment même]."

All the lessons the novel of experience might teach, like those of probability theory, are circumscribed by an inability to address the hic et nunc of this situation at this moment. Toward the end of Le Hasard du coin du feu, Clerval reacts to Célie's pouting remorse over her surrender with an explicit and brutal parody of all the supposed reassurance to be found in novelistic and probabilistic representations of reality. Anticipating by a century what would become the dominant discourse of statistics, Clerval cavalierly suggests that the best way for Célie to soothe her conscience would be to situate her indiscretion within the context of the large number: "Do you really find your conduct with me so extraordinary? Alas, what has just happened between us is happening in front of more than a hundred Paris fireplaces at this very moment, and between people who, I assure you, have not nearly as good reasons for it as we." It would be difficult to imagine a strategy more alien to Crébillon's esthetics of the moment's singularity than this offhand dismissal of the couple's specificity in favor of the quantifiable aggregate. What is lost in any such referral to the average is the essence of Crébillon's limitless attention to the delicately comic yet ultimately pathetic interaction of individual desires declaring themselves within a universe ruled by chance.

…..

Anchored in the complexities of the present, Clerval—like Clitandre, Versac, and so many of Crébillon's characters—enacts a scenario of libertinage. It is, however, a libertinage du moment whose focus on the fleeting opportunities of the passing instant is distinctly different from that portrayed a half century later by Laclos in Les Liaisons dangereuses. While Laclos was certainly influenced by Crébillon—Le Sopha was part of Merteuil's warmup reading as she prepared herself to be the hundred women in one for her lover, and many critics have chosen to read Merteuil as a feminine version of Versac—his scenarios of libertinage are always part of projects far larger and more ambitious than those found in Crébillon. When Merteuil and Valmont set out to seduce, sexuality is never an end in itself. A means for achieving something else, sexual conquest in Les Liaisons is only one among a number of ploys for controlling another person. And that control of the seduced other is itself more often than not an instrument whose real purpose is a more effective aggression against a third party. One tactic within a larger strategy of domination preceding and completing it, Laclos's libertinage is, in every sense of the word, un libertinage conséquent. Crébillon's libertins, on the contrary, do not act in terms of a long-range plan but are confined to an acute awareness of everything happening around them as they stand ready to seize every unexpected opportunity. Crébillon's seducers rely, not on a carefully planned strategy, but on the unpredictable luck of the hunter. His Clitandres, Clervals, and Versacs move through their world like stalkers in search of game. Never knowing when or where their quarry will appear, they are always at the ready. The success of their hunt depends on chance, on whether stalker and quarry happen to intersect at the same place at the same moment. Versac goes to Madame de Lursay's only so he can bring with him Monsieur de Pranzi, Lursay's former lover, and thus consolidate her humiliation in Meilcour's eyes. Once there, however, he comes upon a woman he has never seen before: the young and beautiful Hortense de Théville. After only a moment's surprise, he begins a stalk of which no one is more perfectly the master than he: "Surprised that so rare a beauty had so long remained hidden from him, he stared at her in astonishment and admiration…. He displayed his charms: he had a good leg and showed it off. He laughed as often as he could so as to show his teeth and assumed the most imposing postures to set his figure off to best advantage and demonstrate its graces." In this case his almost comic stalk is unsuccessful, but like the veteran hunter, he is always ready to try.

Crébillon often uses the term le moment in its more restricted sense of a specifically feminine susceptibility, often unsuspected by the woman herself, to the maneuvers of seduction. "No one is answerable for the moment; it is a realm where nature acts unhampered [il en est où la nature agit seule]," we read in L'Ecumoire ou Tanzaï et Néardarné, Answering Célie's query as to what he means by le moment, Clerval responds: "A certain movement of the senses as unexpected as it is involuntary. A woman may hide it, but if it is noticed or sensed by someone interested in taking advantage of it, it puts her in the gravest danger of being more compliant than she believed she should or could be [un peu plus complaisante qu'elle ne croyait ni devoir ni pouvoir l'être]." The element of chance inherent in le moment concerns, in other words, not only the objective coordinates of time and space inflecting a given rencontre but an aspect of our own psyches as repositories of intentions that, whatever our resolve, remain open to the possibility that we will surprise ourselves, that an unexpected event will lead us to act in ways we could never have anticipated. If Crébillon sees this aspect of le moment as particularly characteristic of women, it is because most of his male characters, the libertins, have constructed their entire persona through obsessive protocols of self-control and deception adopted as frantic attempts to extirpate all susceptibility to the tug of le moment.

Le moment as a force disrupting the continuity of the present with past and future inflects not only Crébillon's thematics of seduction but the very form of his novels. Listening to Clitandre's story of his brief affair with Julie, Cidalise exclaims: "That certainly worked out well for both of you, and the episode could not have ended more nobly." "Ended!" Clitandre immediately corrects her. "Ah, but we are not there yet." In fact, finishing the story is always a problem in Crébillon's novels. None of them ends on a note of real closure leaving the reader with the sense that earlier expectations have been satisfied and all remaining questions answered. La Nuit et le moment ends, as we saw, with Clitandre's ambiguous wish that Cidalise love him "as much as you yourself are loved." Le Hasard du coin du feu ends only because Clerval must leave and not because any question has been resolved. In his preface to Les Egarements, Crébillon promises at least six parts to a novel that in fact has only three: the first and second, showing Meilcour's innocence and first loves; les suivantes, of which we have only one, showing the sad influence of others on his life; and the never written dernières, promising his salvation by an unspecified femme estimable.

Crébillon's desire to preserve the openness of the present moment likewise manifests itself in his abiding preference for the epistolary form. Three of his novels are collections of letters—the Letters de la Marquise de M——au Comte de R——(1732), the Letters de la Duchesse de——au Duc de——(1768), and the Lettres Athéniennes (1771)—while another—Les Heureux Orphelins (1754)—although it begins as a translation of Haywood's Fortunate Foundlings, ends as an original series of letters written by the character Lord Chester to a friend in France. Crébillon's tendency toward the epistolary is a sign of his reluctance to adopt toward the events his novels recount anything like the distance and control implied by the alternative of a third-person narration. The epistolary form privileges each sentence as a statement open to whatever disruptions the present may bring.

As though even the writing present of the epistolary implied a form too determined by the remembered past of a time before pen touches paper, Crébillon's most profound stylistic tendency is toward reproduced speech, toward dialogues representing the characters' voices as they speak within a shared present. Even in a memoir-novel like Les Egarements, Meilcour's properly narrative voice does little more than stitch together confrontations between characters that consist for the most part of directly quoted conversations. Like an unsettlingly gallicized Ivy Compton-Burnett, Crébillon seems most himself when his writing retains the openness of actual speech to whatever might happen within an unpredictable present. His characters speak, not in complete, fully articulated sentences summarizing themselves and their positions, but in broken, interrupted fragments generated by the continual clash of all who would have their say. Speech in Crébillon's novels is speech as dialogue. Just as his narrative interest centers not on the sequence of events but on the intervals between those events, his dialogues portray not the substance of the isolated character in monologue but the interaction between characters, their repartee, the way they respond to and are redefined by what the other happens to say. Crébillon's characters continually interrupt, clash with, and rebound off one another in directions none could ever have anticipated before the actual exchange.

Novels such as La Nuit et le moment and Le Hasard du coin du feu read far more like plays or film scripts than novels. In each there is an unnamed narrative voice telling us (or winkingly hinting at) the movements and amorous activities not explicitly referred to in the dialogue. Rather, however, than consolidating any illusion of the carefully structured tale, these anonymous narrative voices satirize the conventions of the genre by alluding to the work's existence in yet another dimension of the present: that of the reader reading and imagining. In response to Cidalise's "Is it really true that you still love me?" the narrator breaks in with "Clitandre tries to banish Cidalise's fears by smothering her with the most ardent caresses. But as everyone may not prefer his method of responding to doubts, those of our readers to whom it seems appropriate may adopt another method, such as having Clitandre recite the most touching words or whatever they feel is most effective for reassuring a woman in such a case." Then, as though no break in the dialogue had occurred, Clitandre replies: "So! ungrateful one [in-grate]! are you reassured?"

Crébillon's refusal of narrative closure, his preference for dialogue, and his delight in interruptions of all kinds contribute to the strong sense throughout his work of an always changing and unpredictable present, of life lived sur le moment. These choices are, of course, directly contrary to the canons of the novel of experience. Writing in 1754, Fréron [in L'Année litteraire, 3 (1754), cited by Clifton Cherpack in An Essay on Crébillon fils (1962)] excoriated Crébillon's recently published Les Heureux Orphelins as, to his eyes, an endless and disorganized conglomeration of dialogues, enclosed stories, moralizing, epigrams, and digressions. However highly some might rate Crébillon's prose style, Fréron insisted, his works clearly lack the indispensable hallmark of the true novel: "facts which are new, necessary, and believable [des faits neufs, nécessaires et vraisemblables]." For Fréron, the true novel was one whose narrative achieved believability because its events followed each other with absolute necessity. Once the initial situation has been established, the novel's episodes should appear to take place as though they could not have happened otherwise. Fréron's rejection of Crébillon is important because it brings into focus the extent to which his novelistic practices differed from the period's mainstream expectations of the genre. It shows how his refusal of sequential determination stamped his work with the marks of the haphazard and the scandalous….