854 Reviews disturbed by grossmiscarriages of justicewithin theFrench judicial system, thecauses celebres involving La Barre, Calas, Sirven, and de Lally. His campaigns reflectedwhat was his greatest message to his times and our own-the need for tolerance in all matters of belief and ideology.Voltaire provided himselfwith a smallmeasure ofpro tection against persecution by the French authorities by setting his fiction in the late seventeenth century-his massive documentation forLe Siecle de Louis XIV greatly assisted him in this regard, of course- but since the system in France had barely changed since thatperiod, his contemporaries can have been in no doubt about the work's relevance to their own age. As Richard A. Francis notes in his introduction to this superlative edition of the novel, 'an oppressive legal and political systemwas still at the service of an intolerant religious establishment' (p. 49). Voltaire's use of a Huron Indian as hero seemed to exploit awell-worn Enlightenment technique of seeing Europe through thenaive eyes of a traveller froman exotic culture; in fact, the centrality of 1'Ingenu to thenarrative and his victimization, aswell as thatof his lover Saint-Yves, at thehands of the system reveal how Voltaire recreated and renewed the genre. In his lengthy introduction, after a brief section entitled 'Prehistory', Francis goes into great detail in dealing with Voltaire's sources, dividing these sections or chapters, usefully, into background (Brittany and Huronia), events (I689, I767, and autobiographical allusions), debates (the religious issue, the savage and his education, the question of evil), and forms, concluding his presentation with the publication and reception of the novel and-standard in the Foundation's monumental edition of the complete works-sections on editions inVoltaire's lifetime, translations, and his edition's principles. In every case, Francis betrays wide-ranging and judicious scholarship (including mastery of theVoltaire corpus), serene weighing of the evi dence, measured argumentation, and enlightening annotation, all ofwhich make this themost scholarly and insightfuledition of thework ever published. SWANSEA UNIVERSITY MICHAEL CARDY L'Image i la lettre. Ed. by NATHALIE PREISS and JOELLERAINEAU. (Les Rencontres de laMaison de Balzac) Paris: Paris-Musees. 2005. 314 PP. E49. ISBN 978 2-87900-882-0. This carefully edited book will be particularly useful for scholars who work on the relationship between image and text innineteenth- and twentieth-century French art history, culture, and literature.The essays are all well argued, amply illustrated and documented, with up-to-date bibliographies; they often offeroriginal insights into lesser-known aspects of thiswell-trodden field.They provide us with a vast explo ration of the image fromdifferentperspectives: aesthetic, historical, and literary. We might not be able todraw ground-breaking conclusions, but we are kept alert and we do learn about many overlooked aspects of the image. The book is divided into three sections. The first, 'Lire et interpreter', contains essays by Bernard Vouilloux, Christophe Genin, and Annie Duprat. Vouilloux's 'Textes et images en regard' establishes what he calls 'the logic of the image' (p. 21), contradicting some of the 'shortcomings' normally associated with images: no univer sal reference, lack of temporality, lack of principles of causality or contradiction-all the common attributes of verbal language. Vouilloux explores these alleged 'lacks', via the detour of linguistics,Roger de Piles, Panofsky, focusing on writings on art by Flaubert, Zola, Huysmans, Balzac, Diderot, and Ponge. Genin's essay isparticularly enlightening on thenotion of 'ecritures' found inpaintings, van Eyck's Arnolfini Por traitand thebrilliant tags byMiss Tic, 'je ferai jolie sur les trottoirs I de l'histoire de l'art'where writing, tagging, and painting are intertwined togive the 'flaneur' a shock MLR, 102.3, 2007 855 experience and call forchallenging views of contemporary French culture. Duprat's essay 'Jacques-Marie Boyer de Nimes et l'image polemique' provides the readerwith an in-depth analysis of this caricaturist, who did his best work during theTerror before being executed in 1794. This excellent essay cannot but enhance the study of caricatures and their function in shaping public opinion, with theTerror being seen as awatershed in thepopularity and impact of caricatures. The second section of the volume focuses on nineteenth-century illustrations. Anne-Marie Bassy's essay on the inventor ofMonsieur Prudhomme...