Jeux de Miroirs. Saint Paul, La Fontaine, Mao, Genet et Jean-Jacques Rousseau by Anne Srabian de Fabry (review)

460 LETTERS IN CANADA 1982 political affairs of the day. There are also about 50 letters, all written with great affection, from Helvetius to Anne-Catherine after their marriage . Many of these have to do with the illness and eventual death of his father (1755), his dealings with the government and court because of family connections and his position as tax-farmer, and the construction of his new house. The last group consists of 25 letters from Voltaire to Helvetius mainly on the subject of writing literature of which Helvetius was an ardent practitioner. Other correspondents include such notable figures as Nivelle de la Chaussee, Baculard d'Arnaud, Mme du Chatelet, Montesquieu, Palissot, Boulanger, Dumarsais, and a variety of lesser lights. Not only are most of the letters in this volume published for the first time but important emendations have been made to correspondence previously in print. All the letters have been edited according to the most scrupulous editorial principles and practices, and the presentation conforms to the meticulous standards we have come to expect from the Voltaire Foundation and the University of Toronto Press. We await volume two with impatient enthusiasm. (AUBREY ROSENBERG) Anne Srabian de Fabry. ]eux de Miroirs. Saint Paul, La Fontaine, Mao, Genet et Jean-Jacques Rousseau Editions Naaman. 142 In a previous study of Rousseau, Etudes autour de LA Nouvelle He/oise (Editions Naaman 1977), Professor Fabry's gift for intuitive and impressionistic criticism, allied with a profound knowledge of the text, combined to produce a myriad of original and penetrating insights into Rousseau's epistolary novel. On this occasion, however, the method fails, mainly because there is not sufficient substance on which Fabry can exercise her particular talents. The unifying element in this new collection of disparate articles is not a particular work of Rousseau but the author himself,. his life, his works, his philosophy. What to many would seem to be only fragile links between Rousseau, Saint Paul, La Fontaine, Mao, and Genet, in Fabry's hands become veritable chains of steel. Nothing is more hazardous than the study of sources and influences , nothing more open to abuse than the identification of precursors and disciples of great thinkers and writers. Fabry, however, seems undeterred by such considerations, and marches on where critics fear to tread, finding all sorts of new and startling affinities between the life, temperament, style, and ideas of Rousseau and his illustrious predecessors and successors in the republic of letters. To the observation that Rousseau had a vision on the road to Vincennes , and that Paul had one on the road to Damascus one is tempted HUMANITIES 461 to say, 'So what!' And similar responses are provoked by the revelation that both men were persecuted, both considered mad, both had a low opinion of women, and so on. It is these sorts of parallels, together with psychoanalytical inferences of the most dubious kind, that demonstrate the excesses of Fabry's critical approach. The best of the four essays is the final one, on Rousseau's Dialogues. Here Professor Fabry might have expanded her interpretation by taking more account generally of what has been written on the subject of dialogue and, more specifically, of C.V. McDonald's 'The Model of Reading in Rousseau's Dialogues' (MLN, 93 [1978J 723-32), instead of referring to Genet and his work on the pretext that it is helpful if not absolutely essential to understand Genet in order to appreciate the subtleties and complexities of the Dialogues. It is to be regretted that the sudden death of Fabry has deprived the academic world, and particularly the field of Rousseau studies, of a scholar of great promise. (AUBREY ROSENBERG) Emile Zola. Correspondance, editee saus la direction de B.H. Bakker Montreal et Paris, Presses de )'Universite de Montreal et Editions du CNRS Tome 11 (186B-77), I9&>. 644. $48.00 Tome III (1877-So), directeurs adjoints: Alain Pages et Albert j . Salvan, 1982. 543· $45.00 David Baguley. Bibliographie de la critique sur Emile Zola, 1971-1980 University of Toronto Press. 235- $37.50 Dans Ie champ des etudes zoliennes, l'actualite recente ramene notre attention sur deux entreprises fondamentales: I'edition franco-canadienne de la...