rupting 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]

Mention has been made of the feminine side of Marivaux's writings, but the
_Paysan parvenu_, published in 1735, some six years before the last
publication of _Marianne_ is of an entirely different type. Its principal
character is not here a woman, but a young man, Jacob by name, a peasant
boy, who, finding provincial life distasteful to him, comes to Paris, and,
by the aid of