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REVIEWS 81 desire. Dubost has unearthed a later text, L'Histoire du Prince Apprius (1729), which he places within this tradition because its codification of sexuality can be read as anagrams of desire (Apprius = Priapus). Moving on to such eighteenth-century texts as Les Egarements du coeur et de l'esprit (1738), Antl-Pamela (1742), and Vénus en rut (1771), Dubost characterizes libertine writing as unstable mimesis, exhausting itself in objectifying desire. On the other hand, libertinism exposes economic exchange as cunning, and individual freedom as a relentless process of appropriation: against his will, the immoral libertine turns into a moralist. A short section of the book considers works by Mirabeau, Nerciat, and Rétif de la Bretonne. Mirabeau's texts especially are seen as unique combinations of realism and libertine idealism. Bourgeois and libertine will converge, producing revolutionary energy. The final chapter discusses Sade, whose "cruel philosophy" Dubost regards as the quintessential and yet most alien form of libertine writing. Sade's libertine voice is the paradoxical negation of God and doubling of his omnipotence. Distinguishing between discourse and textuality, Dubost defines Sade's works as expositions of evil within and by the text. In these evil discourses, the reader does not encounter bodies but ideas. They are not perversions of morality but the flip side of the ethical coin: they expose the problematic nature of an essentially "empty" moral law (i.e., Kant's categorical imperative). Sade's works develop the imagery of evil itself, resulting in a never-ending anamnesis of inhuman man. In addition to a bibliography and an index, the appendix to Dubost's book contains a very useful anthology of key passages from the texts discussed in this study. Dubost has also provided excellent translations of these passages into German. Less helpful are the definitions of narratological terms given in the "methodological appendix," since they are, in most cases, too brief and will be obscure for those readers not familiar with Genette's works. Although the book occasionally suffers from an excessive use of jargon—especially in the introductory remarks—it is a fascinating study of the rhetoric of eroticism within the libertine tradition. Credit is also due to the author for the careful and detailed analysis of several texts that have been ignored so far by scholarship. Ulrich Scheck Queen's University Nicolas Mavrocordatos. Les loisirs de Philothée. Texte établi, traduit et comment é par Jacques Bouchard. Athènes et Montréal: Presses de l'Université de Montréal, 1989. 249pp. $35.00. The Phanariotes, aristocratie and educated Greeks who held high office in the Ottoman empire, do not fit very well either with the populist and nationalist ideology of the modem Greek state or with the Habsburg view of Turkey as a state of anti-Christian barbarians. Figures like Nicolas Mavrocordatos (1670-1730) thus receive far less attention than they deserve. Mavrocordatos was the quintessential Phanariote. His father, Alexandres, was Turkish plenipotentiary at the peace treaty at Karlowitz in 1699. Nicolas was a semi-independent prince in Moldavia (1704-1715) and Wallachia (1715-1730), but it was as an intellectual that he was admired in his own time. Alexandras obtained the finest Greek and Western teachers for his son, and used his diplomatic influence with the Venetian senate to find him the latest books. The court of Nicolas Mavrocordatos at Bucharest attempted, like many others, to realize the Platonic ideal of the philosopher king. 82 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 3:1 Nicolas, like his father a remarkable polyglot, chose to write in classical Greek, attempting to give it the same status that Latin still enjoyed in the West. The linguistic skills and intellectual stature of figures like Mavrocordatos help explain why the classicizing katharevousa form of Greek has given way only in the last few decades to the vernacular dhimotiki. Although the language was archaic, the ideas were not. In Les loisirs and On Duties (Leipzig, 1722), Mavrocordatos combined elements of classical culture (both Greek and Latin) with the best of the "tulip era" of Sultan Achmed ?? (1703-30) in Turkey and such Western figures as Bacon, Hobbes, and La Rochefoucauld. Jacques Bouchard faced a considerable challenge in presenting the work of...

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