This study scrutinizes the ancien regime's practices of unsafe sex, and the scenarios of libertinage in which both sexes were equally stylish antagonists. It also shows that women paid unequally, sometimes fatally, for the power games of libertine experiments.

I Reading in Pairs: 1. Repairing the Tradition; II Men's Reading, Women's Writing: 2. Rereading as a Woman: The Body in Practice; 3. Men's Reading, Women's Writing: Gender and the Rise of the Novel; 4. Cultural Memory and the Art of the Novel: Gender and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century France; 5. 1735: The Gender of the Memoir-Novel; III I's in Drag: 6. I's in Drag: The Sex of Recollection; 7. L'Histoire d'une Grecque moderne: No-Win Hermeneutics; 8. Justine, Or, the Vicious Circle; 9. Juliette and the Posterity of Prosperity; IV Exquisite Cadavers: 10. The Exquisite Cadavers: Women in Eighteenth-Century Fiction; 11. Tender Economies: Mme De Villedieu and the Costs of Indifference; 12. Tristes Triangles: Le Lys dans la vallee and Its Intertext; 13. Novels of Innocence: Fictions of Loss.