The Fables of Reason: A Study of Voltaire's "Contes philosophiques." (review)

88 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 7:1 the private space of public lives such as those of Solon and César in Les Amours des grands hommes, and arguing that private passions are what constitute the driving forces of history. Under Villedieu's pen, historical narratives therefore serve to lend credence to a story in terms of its "vraisemblance," but they are simultaneously undermined by being transformed into private fictions, which frequently angered Villedieu's critics. Endorsing Erica Harth's argument in Ideology and Culture in Seventeenth-Century France (1983), Klein sees this desire to reveal the "private" side of history as an "embourgeoisement" of writing in the seventeenth century, a need to privilege the individual, private, and desiring subject over the public, idealized, and abstract one. In the work of Villedieu, this takes on a further feminist inflection as, for example, in her Annales galantes de Grèce, where Greek history is regendered and retold through exclusively female protagonists. Klein therefore reads Villedieu as both an innovator of the "nouvelle galante" and as an influential rewriter of the role and position of the female protagonist. She argues that Villedieu's creation of a feminine space through the language of sentiment and "galanterie" produces female subjects who are not reducible to the abstract ideals of the romances, and who possess a distinct agency in terms of the negotiation of desire. Klein's work on Villedieu is timely and provides a convincing analysis of how the question of gender and genre mutually inform one another. Klein could have extended her reading beyond the "nouvelles" to some of Villedieu's other works, such as Les Désordres de l'amour and the Mémoires de la vie de Henriette-Sylvie de Molière, which both continue to address, in challenging ways, the question of female subjectivity and representation. This also shows, however, that the valuable work begun by Klein needs to be continued and expanded upon. Christine Roulston University of Western Ontario Roger Pearson. The Fables ofReason: A Study of Voltaire's "Contes philosophiques . " Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. xii + 268pp. $94.50. ISBN 0-19-8158807 . One of the few admirable things in the Soviet Union was the quirky way government agencies established the prices of newly published books. Instead of basing the price on the length of the book, officials set it according to quality: the better the book, the higher the price. With this principle as a gauge, it appears that Roger Pearson's study of Voltaire's contes at $94.50 must be a very good book—and it is. His exploration of Voltaire's story-telling, he informs us in the preface, was prompted by his recent vocation as a translator of Candide, an exercise which showed him that Voltaire's contes were designed not "to convey a number of intellectual and moral truths," but rather "to foster a spirit of irreverence and to instill in the reader a habit of mind with which he or she may embark upon the independent pursuit of wisdom." The immersion in Voltaire's prose also left Pearson with "a Panglossian desire to pronounce further." That he has done, and magisterially so, in an exhaustive sweep over the twenty-six contes and the mountain of bibliography that has accompanied the stories in the last two and a half centuries. Pearson has surveyed what he calls the "fables of reason" in a solid, exegetical style and has provided, at the end of his essay, a provocative discussion of the REVIEWS 89 two radical interpretations conferred on Voltaire—as the apostle of Enlightenment (Paul Valéry) or the precursor of twentieth-century totalitarianism (Isaiah Berlin). What distinguishes Pearson's essay is his readiness to take on the big names in Voltaire studies and offer more nuanced views of Voltaire's purposes and attitudes. This boldness stems perhaps from his exhaustive dissection of all the contes rather than just some of them. Thus he tackles the conventional view of the contes as a series of mere puppet shows without character or story line development by showing that this is a fragmentary approach. There is both diachronic and thematic development in the contes, and Pearson furnishes persuasive...