ABSTRACT
Early novels were an experimental wager between writer and reader, with each side attempting to establish what might be accomplished in the new form. This chapter explores a very particular and early case of this experimental method, Madame de Villedieu's 1675 historical novella Les Desordres de l'amour, a text that in its attempts to experiment with different forms of writing marks something of both the nervousness and the scope of a new genre. Villedieu has come into critical favour in part because of her bold generic flexibility: over the course of a successful career she produced a huge corpus, including plays, fake memoirs, and epistolary novels, among other genres. Fictional freedom has perhaps too lofty a ring, for Villedieu finds her way to writerly authority not through large pronouncements but through a series of gestures and generic appropriations. Villedieu's novelistic proofs function something like a Pascalian wager.
