Love and Reason

This work is a novel written in French by Pigault-Lebrun and belongs to one of the more representative types of narrative text in the French popular-literature tradition. The author was active from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century, and his writing often treats the tension between emotion and reason in a light tone; the title itself points to this core theme. For Chinese readers, the value of this book lies first at the documentary level: it is an electronic text of public-domain French literature, through which one can observe how popular novels around the time of the French Revolution handled the relationship between love, marriage, and reason, as well as the rhythm and flavor of narrative language at the time. Readers should not expect profound philosophical argumentation, but should regard it as a novel with a flavor of social comedy, attending to the wit in the characters' dialogue and the lightness of the plot's progression. It is suitable as supplementary reading for students of French literature or enthusiasts of French culture, and can also serve comparative-literature researchers examining the interaction between popular narrative and Enlightenment discourse. Since it is the original-language edition, the barrier to reading lies mainly in language rather than length.