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N O ONE who has read Bernardin's Paul et Virginie can forget Virginie's last few moments of life on the deck of the foundering Saint-Geran as she repulses the naked sailor who wants her to disrobe and swim ashore, and then, with one hand on her clothing and the other on her heart, raises her eyes to heaven just before she disappears into the waves. It is a memorable scene, whether, as many have done, one ranks it with the most touching moments in French fiction, or, along with others, finds it the most outrageously mawkish event in all of literature. Indeed, what is astonishing about the reactions to Paul et Virginie over the years is their variety and intensity, ranging from tears to hilarity, and from mocking satire to outrage and vituperation. Of late there has probably been more laughing than weeping among the relatively few nonprofessional readers that this work still attracts, but among scholars strong feelings of rancor and of admiration continue to be found. Etiemble, for example, both notes and exemplifies this phenomenon when he writes: "En ceci du moins Bernardin n'est pas tout a fait meprisable qu'il partage a vif ses lecteurs: on l'aime, on le deteste. Je ne puis le supporter.''1 But he goes on to say that there are at least two intelligent contemporaries who are disposed to defend him. The first of these, Pierre Trahard, is, in fact, little more than tolerant of Paul et Virginie: "I1 ne faut done pas denigrer systematiquement ce petit livre, qui fut un heureux coup de de, ni l'exalter a l'outrance. Sa place est et doit rester modeste."2 The best he can say in its defense is that it is a "temoignage precieux" of the moralizing and antiquarian aspects of the Louis xvi style (p. xliv), that it is notable for its exact observation of natural phenomena, and that it is saved by "un don poetique assez rare" in the description of nature and in its uses of symbolism (pp. xlv-xliv). He seems not to have caught the enthusiasm of Jean Fabre, the other supporter of Bernardin mentioned by Etiemble, although he cites an article which Fabre designed, in his own words, to renew "connaissance avec une ceuvre trop populaire et un ecrivain trop delaisse."3 Fabre's defense of the work against both superficial admiration and unfair criticism consists in conceding the defects and the ambiguities caused by its didactic aspects and, without analyzing these, passing over to the statement that the work is, after all, not a conte moral, but rather a pastorale brought back to its origins and, at the same time, to its point of perfection: "Pour cette raison simple mais capitale, a savoir que l'idee poetique en deborde de toutes parts, et contredit l'intention morale et la pretention philosophique, et que c'est elle qui, en definitive et malgre tout, se subordonne et ordonne tout le reste, a commencer par la forme" (p. 178). This poetry, he goes on, combines with and infuses the religious tonalities of the work so that a topographical survey of the exotic Ile-de-France is blended with a nostalgic evocation of the Garden of Eden. And it is this blend that enabled Bernardin to escape the artificialities of the pastorale as conceived and defined by his contemporaries in order to create a genuine, and thus essentially inexplicable, masterpiece.4 Those readers who share some of Fabre's vast knowledge of French literature will agree that he has made a good case for Paul et Virginie's relative superiority to the moralizing effusions of Marmontel, Florian, and Gessner. But this comparative approach may seem to pass too quickly over the apparent defects of the work, even as it concedes them. The underlying assumption seems to be that the didactic, philosophic, and moralizing passages in the text can easily be disregarded, since, for all their increasing importance to the author (Trahard, p. xxi), they are not necessarily linked with the poetry and the form, and, indeed, as indicated by the quotation from Fabre above, are often in contradiction with them. This assumption may well be regarded as a serious, even crushing, indictment of the work by those who believe

(1971). Montesquieu's Usbek: Paper Persian or Anti-Hero? Kentucky Romance Quarterly: Vol. 18, No. 1, pp. 101-110.

It is not surprising that André Chénier's poem L'Invention has been much discussed, and that the discussion has been conducted almost exclusively along the lines of literary history. To begin with, this poem excited the greatest attention on the part of critics and scholars in the heyday of the historical method. Secondly, it is, or seems to be, a poetic manifesto, containing doctrines and ideas which lend themselves to consideration in abslraclo. Thirdly, this manifesto is uniquely provocative of historical and comparative analyses since it appears to mark a turning away of the poet from the aesthetic which characterizes the bulk of his extant work, and to herald the composition of important new works which exist only in disappointing fragments. Thus, the reader who follows the tortuous course of Chénier criticism plotted by Paul Glachant and who has read Paul Dimoff's more recent study, finds raised over and over again, in connection with L'Invention, questions which have little to do with the poem considered as a poem. Was Chénier the last of the classicists, the critics and scholars ask, or was he the first of the romanticists? Did he have two manières, or three, or one which could be pulled inside out and only appear different, like a reversible garment? If Hermès and L'Amérique, the poems which L'Invention seems to foreshadow, had been completed, would they have been masterful epics, or epic failures? These questions, and others like them, are discussed at length, but only rarely and negligently do the students of L'Invention hint that it is itself a poem and not merely a discursive recipe for the writing of poetry. Yet, L'Invention obviously is a poem in spite of its doctrinal “message,” and as such must be read with an eye for those poetic principles which should inform it, which should guarantee its organic unity, its formal autonomy. Such a literary reading must be the basis for any discussion of the ideas contained in the poem.

Critical and historical investigations of eighteenth-century French literature have been hampered by inadequate and often irrelevant schemes of periodization. If, as has been claimed, the secular division itself is arbitrary and does not respect the realities of literary production, other principles of division, such as literary generations, have not seemed more realistic. As for the contested attempt to equate the eighteenth century with the Enlightenment, its effect on literary studies has been to stress unduly the literature of ideas, especially as produced by the outstanding philosophes. Attempts to elaborate a rationale for a rococo-style periodization have raised more problems than they have solved, and may lead to unproductive theoretical bickering. Logically, it is only a systematic survey of the literature itself in the light of literary tradition that will yield truly literary periodizations, and it is only when these have been achieved that we can meaningfully investigate literature's relationships with other aspects of what might as well be called, with due reservations, the eighteenth century.

HOWEVER DIFFERENT in form and intent the recent writings on Prevost's fiction may be, all of them have in common the fact that they take what is said in these fictions as seriously as they would the content of treaties or other discursive writings. Given the various goals of these investigations, such acceptance as truth of literary "content" may not seem surprising. Jean Sgard, by his own repeated admission, is more interested in Prevost's inner life than in his fictions as works of literary art, so that he regards these fictions primarily as sources of intimate biographical information.' He writes, for example: "Prevost romancier vaut beaucoup plus que ses romans ... ." (p. 34), and "les romans de Prevost nous passionnent, mais plus encore Prevost romancier" (p. 37). Indeed, he comes remarkably close at times to creating a classic example of Harold Cherniss's wellknown formulation of the biographical circle: "it is . . . a vicious circle to intuit the nature of the author's personality from his writings, and then to interpret those writings in accordance with the 'inner necessity' of that intuited personality."2 Another recent writer on Prevost, Jeanne Monty, although the fictions interest her as such, is also interested in Prevost's "pensee morale," so that she is compelled to regard many passages in his works as having, to use a clumsy, but common and useful phrase, truth-value.3 Somewhat less recently, Robert Mauzi, Jean Ehrard, and Roger Mercier have written studies containing references to Prevost's fiction which combine the approaches of intellectual history, the history of ideas, and Geistesgeschichte. They all follow the

NE of the most vexing aspects of the systematic investigation of the Encyclopedie is the question of ultimate sources. Allusions to the problem abound; and, although much has been done in this vein since le P. Berthier had the pleasure of pointing out the eclectic redaction embodied in the first volume, the sources of many important articles, and, consequently, their function in the publication, are still a mystery to us.' Students of the Encyclopedie will have observed that, while a few scholarly articles have dealt directly with lists of works used by the editors,2 their borrowings are usually brought to light in the course of synthesizing studies of specific subjects or individuals as treated in scattered sections of the bulky work. The present article, however, will follow a different tack. I propose to start with a fecund source, the translations of part of the writings of William Warburton, and to describe the adaptations and modification of this material by Diderot and his colleagues according to their editorial needs and philosophic interests. The basic fact that Warburton was an indirect contributor to the