Includes bibliographical references (p. [371]-390) and index.

A note to the reader

Prologue: Abélard and Héloïse, patron saints of French lovers

Chapter 1 - Courtly love : How the French Invented Romance

Chapter 2 - Gallant love : La Princesse de Clèves

Chapter 3 - Comic love, tragic love : Molière and Racine

Chapter 4 - Seduction and sentiment : Prévost, Crébillon fils, Rousseau, and Laclos

Chapter 5 - Love letters : Julie de Lespinasse

Chapter 6 -Republican love : Elisabeth Le Bas and Madame Roland

Chapter 7 - Yearning for the mother : Constant, Stendahl, and Balzac

Chapter 8 - Love among the Romantics : George Sand and Alfred de Musset

Chapter 9 - Romantic love deflated : Madame Bovary

Chapter 10 - Love in the Gay Nineties : Cyrano de Bergerac

Chapter 11 - Love between men : Verlaine, Rimbaud, Wilde, and Gide

Chapter 12 - Desire and despair : Proust's neurotic lovers

Chapter 13 - Lesbian love : Colette, Gertrude Stein, and Violette Leduc

Chapter 14 - Existentialists in love : Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre

Chapter 15 - The dominion of desire : Marguerite Duras

Chapter 16 - Love in the twenty-first century.

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Illustrations

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Acclaimed scholar Marilyn Yalom distills the central tenets of the Gallic gospel of love from her reading of the great French literary works, as well as from the people she has known and her own memories of France, examining almost a thousand years of divine culture in search of the intimate moments that reveal how the particularly French concept of l'amour has endured and evolved.