MLR, 101.3, 2oo6 847 complete or unfinished, but the editor's extensive footnotes and annotations provide information about additions, deletions, and modifications to the text which enable the reader to follow its evolution. A good index and bibliography complete this edition, which, while being too detailed for some readers' needs, will, with its painstak ing reconstruction of the texts, constitute an excellent contribution to the study of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century libertins. UNIVERSITY OF STRATHCLYDE JOY CHARNLEY Les (Euvres completes de Voltaire. Ed. by NICHOLAS CRONK and others. Vol. xvi: Writings of I736. Ed. by THEODORE E. D. BRAUN, JOHN DUNKLEY, CHRISTIANE MERVAUD, RUSSELLGOULBOURNE, H. T. MASON, FRAN9OISMOUREAU, and RALPH NABLOW. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation. 2003. xxi+5o9 pp. Liio. ISBN o 7294-0794-2. For Voltaire's years at Cirey with Mme du Chatelet, I736 rather sets the pattern: an immense range of activities from science to satire, theatrical success in Paris, im prudent writings, triumphs and scandals. This volume includes two major works composed during that year: the five-act comedy L'Enfant prodigue and the philoso phical poem Le Mondain. Both, curiously, are written not in the usual alexandrines but in decasyllables. The significance of this metrical choice is discussed in the sub stantial introduction to the first work by John Dunkley and Russell Goulbourne. It accomodates what Voltaire in his own preface to the play calls its 'melange [. . J de comique et de touchant' (p. 94). L'Enfant prodigue is not a drame avant la lettre, precisely because its tone ismixed. Nor, despite its biblical subject (Luke I5), is it aChristian play (though Voltaire was happy to give that impression, as with the contemporary Alzire, to please or tease the authorities). But its family values and pathos anticipate Diderot and Greuze. What the play's editors nicely call 'the style of cultivated informality' (p. 2i) applies still better to Le Mondain, presented here with other relevant pieces by Haydn Mason. Voltaire accompanies his celebration of worldly pleasures with a gratuitously squalid evocation of life in the Garden of Eden. Underlying this double provocation is an argument for consumption ('par le luxe enrichir notre etat': p. 308) and free trade ('un heureux echange': p. 296) which was new in France and historically significant. (Might we not also see decasyllables here as the elegant French equivalent of the aggressive English doggerel used byMandeville for The Fable of theBees?) Voltaire in these domains, as in others in this period, shows himself to be an advanced thinker. The year I736 also marks the beginning of Voltaire's long flirtation with Frederick of Prussia. His Epitre au prince royal de Prusse is introduced here with gracious per spicacity by Christiane Mervaud. The briefer pieces in this volume show Voltaire at his worst and best. Jean-Baptiste Rousseau, a long-time enemy, is the object of gross personal attack, notably in the mock-heroic La Crepinade, while his later poetry is disparaged in an Utile examen, both edited by Francois Moureau. Self-defence is at tempted in the rather pettifogging Discours deM. de Voltaire en reponse aux invectives et outrages de ses detracteurs, contextualized by T. E. D. Braun. One turns readily to the section on shorter verse, edited by Ralph Nablow. Voltaire's occasional episto lary pieces, addressed variously to young admirers such as Baculard d'Arnaud and Saint-Lambert, to friends, and toMme du Chatelet, are charming. Conventional yet personal, courteous and witty, flattering and self-ironic, each is artfully turned for the pleasure of the writer and the recipient. The bibliographical sections in this vo lume, the textual apparatus, and the presentation generally, maintain the exceptional 848 Reviews standards of the Voltaire cEuvres compl'tes, which one might describe as cultivated formality. BIRKBECK, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON ROBIN HOWELLS Franfoise de Graffigny: Her Life and Works. By ENGLISH SHOWALTER. (SVEC, 2004:l i)Oxford: Voltaire Foundation. 2004. xix+374pp. ?69. ISBN o-7294 o847-7. The modern rehabilitation, which began over two decades ago, of Francoise d'Hap poncourt, Mme de Graffigny, as a significant literary figure of eighteenth-century France, is now almost complete. Six critical editions of her best-seller, the Lettres d'une Pruvienne (I 747), one...