We are all familiar with the difficulties involved in describing the amorous practices of the classical age. We know that contemporary authors, les moralistes themselves, spoke of love a great deal, but they did so in terms so general that they never seem to refer to the experiences of an individual or a phenomenon of their society. So we are left to investigate demographic statistics, birth registers, and confessors' handbooks; but the search for information about actual amorous practices continues to prove futile; nothing shows through beyond the fleshless abstraction of figures. For those who remain undaunted, there is the novel, which had already become numerically significant by the seventeenth century and which dominated the eighteenth. Love often provided its subject matter. Some would say that it was the preferred subject matter, if not the only one. The novel was even to come under attack for this reason, on the grounds that it corrupted young men and sullied young women. When Dr. Bienville comes to seek the causes of nymphomania when relating the case history of one of his patients, it does not take him long to point to the harmful influence of servants and the pernicious effects of Marivaux's novels. Ah, who would ever have imagined—and dared say—that it was so! Similarly, when J.-L. Flandrin, in his remarkable Amours paysannes, leaves the barren shores of sociological and statistical sources and seeks evidence of actual experience, it is to Restif's fiction that he turns.