There had been great novels, indeed, before Balzac, but no great novelist; and the novels themselves are scarcely what we should to-day call by that name. The interminable _Astrée_ and its companions form a link between the _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 instance, 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 Diderot, are tracts or satires in which the story is only an excuse for the purpose. Rousseau, too, has his purpose, even in _La Nouvelle Héloise,_ but it is a humanising purpose; and with that book the novel of passion comes into existence, and along with it the descriptive novel. Yet with Rousseau this result is an accident of genius; we cannot call him a novelist; and we find him abandoning the form he has found, for another, more closely personal, which suits him better. Restif de la Bretonne, who followed Rousseau at a distance, not altogether wisely, developed the form of half-imaginary autobiography in _Monsieur Nicolas,_ a book of which the most significant part may be compared with Hazlitt's _Liber Amoris._ Morbid and even mawkish as it is, it has a certain uneasy, unwholesome humanity in its confessions, which may seem to have set a fashion only too scrupulously followed by modern French novelists. Meanwhile, the Abbé Prévost's one great story, _Manon Lescaut,_ had brought for once a purely objective study, of an incomparable simplicity, into the midst of these analyses of difficult souls; and then we return to the confession, in the works of others not novelists: Benjamin Constant, Mme. de Staël, Chateaubriand, in _Adolphe, Corinne, René._ At once we are in the Romantic movement, a movement which begins lyrically among poets, and at first with a curious disregard of the more human part of humanity.