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The second half of the 19th century is fascinated by the uninhibited relationship to feminine sexuality it attributes to the Enlightenment. On can note in particular the fascination of the Realists and Naturalists (from the Goncourt to Zola through Maupassant) for an 18th century dreamt up as a lost paradise of frivolous pleasure, a lost world of “fêtes galantes” like nothing so much as Watteau revisited by Verlaine. In contrast to what happens to lustful women in realist or naturalist literature, the beautiful listeners of the fêtes galantes century are not presented as monsters but on the contrary as delicious coquettes. The literature of the second half of the 19th century recycles the topos of a free and spontaneous flirtatious banter in the style of Marivaux, thus drawing in negative the portrait of its own period and its fantasies.