If Marivaux, yielding to his sense of etiquette and good breeding, was sparing in his criticism of his contemporaries, he was certainly not spared by them. The circle of his friends was small, but intimate, and his timidity with men, his suspiciousness, his lack of self-assertion, made him an easy prey to such unscrupulous opponents as Voltaire. Fond of the refined society of the salons, and repelled by the less feeling and more boisterous set of the cafes, which he avoided, Marivaux became a convenient object of attack for the cabals set in motion by the latter, and, although, in spite of his general suspiciousness, he refused to give credence[154] to an idea so obnoxious to him, it is not unlikely that the frequent failure of his comedies on their "first night" may be most satisfactorily explained in this way. Marivaux was ever ready to accept a criticism that seemed to him deserved. "J'ai eu tort de donner cette comedie-ci au theatre," he says in the preface to his _Ile de la Raison_: "Elle n'etait pas bonne a etre representee, et le public lui a fait justice en la condamnant. Point d'intrigue, peu d'action, peu d'interet; ce sujet, tel que je l'avais concu, n'etait point susceptible de tout cela...." At another time, having been present at the first performance of one of his comedies, and noticing the undissimulated yawns of the parterre, he confessed, upon leaving the theatre, that no one had been more bored than he.[155] However, notwithstanding his readiness to acknowledge his own defects, and to defer to the opinions of others, Marivaux required the criticism to be fair- minded and impersonal.