fabliaux and the novel, and from them developed the characteristic eighteenth-century conte, in narrative, letters, or dialogue, as we see it in Marivaux, Laclos, Crebillon fils. Crebillon's longer works, including Le Sopha, with their conventional paraphernalia of Eastern fable, are extremely tedious; but in two short pieces, La Nuit et le Moment and Le Hasard du Coin du Feu, he created a model of witty, naughty, deplorably natural comedy, which to this day is one of the most characteristic French forms of fiction. Properly, however, it is a form of the drama rather than of the novel. Laclos, in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, a masterpiece which scandalised the society that adored Crebillon, because its naked human truth left no room for sentimental excuses, comes much nearer to prefiguring the novel (as Stendhal, for instnace, is afterward to conceive it), but still preserves the awkward traditional form of letters. Marivaux had indeed already seemed to suggest the novel of analysis, but in a style which has christened a whole manner of writing that precisely which is least suited to the writing of fiction. Voltaire's contes, La Religieuse of
