_Manon Lescaut_, which appeared in 1731, as an episode of the first of these, is a tale of fatal and irresistible passion. The heroine is divided in heart between her mundane tastes for luxury and her love for the Chevalier des Grieux. He, knowing her inconstancy and infirmity, yet cannot escape from the tyranny of the spell which has subdued him; his whole life is absorbed and lost in his devotion to Manon, and he is with her in the American wilds at the moment of her piteous death. The admirable literary style of _Manon Lescaut_ is unfelt and disappears, so directly does it bring us into contact with the motions of a human heart. In the second half of the eighteenth century, philosophy, on the one hand, invaded the novel and the short tale; on the other hand it was invaded by a flood of sentiment. An irritated and irritating sensuality could accommodate itself either to sentiment or to philosophy. Voltaire's tales are, in narrative form, criticisms of belief or opinion which scintillate with ironic wit. His disciple, Marmontel, would "render virtue amiable" in his _Contes Moraux_ (1761), and cure the ravage of passion with a canary's song. His more ambitious _Belisaire_ seems to a modern reader a masterpiece in the _genre ennuyeux_. His _Incas_ is exotic without colour or credibility. Florian, with little skill, imitated the _Incas_ and _Telemaque_, or was feebly idyllic and conventionally pastoral as a follower of the Swiss Gessner. Restif de la Bretonne could be gross, corrupt, declamatory, sentimental, humanitarian in turns or all together. Three names are eminent--that of Diderot, who flung his good and evil powers, mingling and fermenting, into his novels as into all else; that of Rousseau, who interpreted passion, preached its restraints, depicted the charms of the domestic interior, and presented the glories of external nature in _La Nouvelle Heloise_; that of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, who reaches a hand to Rousseau on the one side, and on the other to Chateaubriand. CHAPTER II MONTESQUIEU--VAUVENARGUES--VOLTAIRE I