SOURCE: "Crispin's Inventions," in The Attraction of the Contrary: Essays on the Literature of the French Enlightenment, Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 73-82.

In the following essay, Rex investigates the role of vraisemblance—or the appearance of truth—in Crispin, Rival of His Master, proposing that "the whole text is a forgery to make us believe in ersatz imitations."

Even before Hegel had given the theme such a grandiose philosophical setting in his Phenomenology, numerous individuals in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had been aware of the special importance of the master-slave (valet) relationship for the literature of Enlightenment, and today it has become a commonplace of theatrical criticism to cite the developing drama one observes in the social oppositions, as one goes from Molière to Beaumarchais, that is, from the fascinating complexities in the tensions between master and valet as depicted by the greatest writer...