How the French invented love: nine hundred years of passion and romance

Abélard and Héloïse, patron saints of French lovers

Courtly love : how the French invented romance

Gallant love : La Princesse de Clèves

Comic love, tragic love : Molière and Racine

Seduction and sentiment : Prévost, Crébillon fils, Rousseau, and Laclos

Love letters : Julie de Lespinasse

Republican love : Elisabeth Le Bas and Madame Roland

Yearning for the mother : Constant, Stendahl, and Balzac

Love among the Romantics : George Sand and Alfred de Musset

Romantic love deflated : Madame Bovary

Love in the Gay Nineties : Cyrano de Bergerac

Love between men : Verlaine, Rimbaud, Wilde, and Gide

Desire and despair : Proust's neurotic lovers

Lesbian love : Colette, Gertrude Stein, and Violette Leduc

Existentialists in love : Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre

The dominion of desire : Marguerite Duras

Love in the twenty-first century.