Les impostures innocentes, ou, les opuscules de M***

Meusnier de Querlon’s Innocent Impostures, or M***’s opuscules begins with a preface by Mlle de Gourani regarding Montagne’s Essays that sets the tone for the novel: “It is not the candid and speculative discourses on love that are dangerous; it is the soft and delicate ones, the artistic and sensitive stores of romantic passions, and of their effects that are visible to novels and poets: dangerous, I say, still, but that would be much less, without the increase and the high price where the laws of the ceremony and their exemptions raised Cupid and Venus. Nevertheless I admittedly have a great fear that humankind cannot know more dangerously which animal is love, when nobody tells him or her.” If education is essential to producing a moral person, how can one “know dangerously”? Innocent Impostures offers the public a chance to experience the immoral in fiction in hopes that reader will choose the moral path in life.