In the Mercure for August, September, and October, 1717, and for March and June, 1718, appeared from the pen of Marivaux “five letters to M. de M——­, containing an adventure, and four letters to Mme. ——­, containing reflections on the populace, the bourgeois, the merchants, the men and women of rank, and the beaux esprits.”  This seems to be a turning point in his literary life.  He appears now to have grasped the idea of his own limitations and of his own powers, powers which will be disclosed, not only in his journalistic work, but in his novels and his plays.  I refer to those excellences which are the direct result of the acuteness of his observation.  These writings gained for him the agnomen of Theophraste moderne, which his sense of fitness and natural dislike of over-praise led him to disclaim in a letter to the Mercure of October, 1717.  That same year a Portrait de Climene, ode anacreontique, proves that he had yet to sustain a real defeat in the line of verse before he came to realize that he should confine himself to prose alone.  The Mercure of March, 1719, contained some Pensees sur divers sujets:  sur la clarte du discours, sur la pensee sublime.  The next year, 1720, however, was one of the utmost importance in determining his future career.

The statement has already been made that when Marivaux came to Paris his fortune, if not munificent, was at least ample for his needs, and, fond of his ease and indifferent to business affairs, he might have enjoyed independence for the rest of his life, had he not yielded to the influence of certain friends and entrusted his fortune to the speculations of the Law system.  When the crash came, in May, 1720, he lost all that he had.  In a letter, written in 1740, he relates the circumstances of the affair in so philosophical a tone that it is well worth reading.  He says:  “Oui, mon cher ami, je suis paresseux et je jouis de ce bien-la, en depit de la fortune qui n’a pu me l’enlever et qui m’a reduit a tres peu de chose sur tout le reste:  et ce qui est fort plaisant, ce qui prouve combien la paresse est raisonnable, combien elle est innocente de tous les blames dont on la charge, c’est que je n’aurais rien perdu des autres biens si des gens, qu’on appelait sages, a force de me gronder, ne m’avaient pas fait cesser un instant d’etre paresseux, je n’avais qu’a rester comme j’etais, m’en tenir a ce que j’avais, et ce que j’avais m’appartiendrait encore:  mais ils voulaient, disaient-ils, doubler, tripler, quadrupler mon patrimoine a cause de la commodite du temps, et moitie honte de paraitre un sot en ne faisant rien. moitie betise d’adolescence et adherence de petit garcon au conseil de ces gens senses, dont l’autorite etait regardee comme respectable, je les laissai disposer, vendre pour acheter, et ils me menaient comme ils voulaient...  Ah! sainte paresse! salutaire indolence! si vous etiez restees mes gouvernantes, je n’aurais pas vraisemblablement ecrit tant de neants plus ou moins spirituels, mais j’aurais eu plus de jours heureux que je n’ai eu d’instants supportables..."[39]