How the French invented love : nine hundred years of passion and romance / Marilyn Yalom.

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

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.

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.