SOURCE: "The Moment's Notice: Crébillon's Game of Libertinage," in Enlightenment and the Shadows of Chance: The Novel and the Culture of Gambling in Eighteenth-Century France, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993, pp. 198–228.

In the following excerpt, Kavanagh examines the role of fate in Crébillon's writings, observing that his novels "acknowledge a limit to human power as it confronts the reality of chance."

There is little the characters in Crébillon fils's novels would rather do than gamble. Most of their bets turn, of course, on the feminine virtue and masculine honor staked or bluffed as they maneuver each other toward an alcove, a sofa, or "one of those large armchairs as favorable to temerity as they are suited to indulgence [aussi favorables à la témérité que propres à la complaisance]." With surprising regularity, however, key events in Crébillon's novels play themselves out around the less...