The story of Meilcour’s sentimental education and initiation to the ways of eighteenth-century worldliness may not be the novel which brought its author either fame or literary recognition in his own time. Still, Crébillon’s

[The Wayward Head and Heart] is a text which readers, scholars, and historians have continued to revisit, if not for the early modern circumvoluted beauty of the sentences, then for clues about the tacit system of rules associated with the liaisons of Parisian aristocrats during the Regency and early years of Louis XV’s reign. Many readers, like the Earl of Shaftesbury, enjoyed Crébillon’s novel as a guide to France’s “galante” etiquette. More crucially,

has also…

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Citation: Ganofsky, Marine. "Les Égarements du cœur et de l’esprit". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 09 March 2017 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=35885, accessed 21 November 2024.]