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The article sets out to analyse the philosophical implications of ‘badinage’ in Marivaux’s La Vie de Marianne and Crébillon’s Lettres de la Marquise, seeing it as answering Pascal’s question about the self. Because they stage heroines who think and act according to fictional models, Marivaux and Crébillon present the self as a fiction in the modern sense of the work of imagination for the one, and in Plato’s sense of illusion for the other. But if fabulation has a capital role in subjectification, it is not without danger: when fed by fiction, how can the self remain in charge of representation? Whereas Crébillon shows that a playful smile is not strong enough a shield to protect one against fictional alienation, Marivaux actually uses transitively the phrase “consider in a playful manner” (prendre en badinage), thus anchoring badinage in a dialectical tension between imagination, feeling and memory.