The French novelist and dramatist Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux (1688-1763) created a complex and eminently personal style, indicating the gradual transition in France from 17th-century neoclassic art to an introspective art of individual sentiment and experience.

Born in Paris, the son of a royal mint official whose bourgeois origins fringed on those of the lesser nobility, Pierre Carlet de Marivaux spent his childhood in the provinces and returned to the capital in 1710. While ostensibly though rather fitfully studying law, he was already immersed in literary efforts, composing first satires and then serious imitations of extravagant adventure novels. Little is known about his private life, except that he married in 1717, fathered a daughter 2 years later, and never remarried after his wife's death in 1723.

The year 1720 was doubly significant for Marivaux: he was financially ruined in the collapse of the Law Bank, and he saw his first dramatic...