The success that greeted _Marianne_ was calculated to make his rivals in the field of fiction jealous. Perhaps no one felt more keenly than did Crebillon _fils_ the growing popularity of a novel the purity of which but enhanced the obscenity of his own writings. To this feeling may be attributed his attack upon Marivaux's style in a very free and tiresome story, entitled _Tanzai et Neadarne, ou l'Ecumoire_, in which his rival's muse is represented as a mole. The mole relates her life, in a most diffuse and wearisome manner, constantly interrupting the story with reflections and digressions. The imitation was so clever that it deceived even Marivaux himself into thinking that a justification of his style was intended. Doubtless the offense that he felt was the greater, owing to this additional wound to his _amour-propre_. At any rate, for the first time he dignified a criticism by a reply in print. Even here he did not go so far as to mention any name, but the allusion to Crebillon _fils_ was evident. "Il est vrai, monsieur, que nous sommes naturellement libertins, ou, pour mieux dire, corrompus; mais en fait d'ouvrages d'esprit, il ne faut pas prendre cela a la lettre ni nous traiter d'emblee sur ce pied-la. Un lecteur veut etre menage. Vous, auteur, voulez-vous mettre sa corruption dans vos interets? Allez-y doucement du moins, apprivoisez-la, mais ne la poussez pas a bout. Ce lecteur aime pourtant les licences, mais non pas les licences extremes, excessives; celles-la ne sont supportables que dans la realite qui en adoucit l'effronterie; elles ne sont a leur place que la, et nous les y passons, parceque nous y sommes plus hommes qu'ailleurs; mais non pas dans un livre, ou elles deviennent plates, sales et rebutantes, a cause du peu de convenance qu'elles ont avec l'etat tranquille d'un lecteur."[91] The morality set forth in this passage is not stringent. Attention has already been called to the leniency of Marivaux with regard to weaknesses of a certain type, and to his confession of his own shortcomings. When we consider the extreme immorality of French society in the eighteenth century, to which taste Crebillon _fils_ truckled, as did most of the dramatists and novelists to a certain degree, to which even Montesquieu in the _Lettres persanes_ paid his tribute, we can esteem at its full value the "chaste pen" of Marivaux, in whose theatre the dignity and sacredness of marriage is never once abused, the moral tone of whose journals and of _Marianne_ is uplifting, and even in whose _Paysan parvenu_ the tone stops short of license, and illegitimate love is left unsatisfied.[92]