La duchesse Louise Dorothée de Saxe-Gotha entre christianisme et Lumières

Les mille et une fadaises seem to announce a satirical and libertine parody of Antoine Galland's 1001 Nights. But Cazotte's work instead, by a subtle interplay of paradoxes and reversals, poses the question of the influence of the public on literary creation. It attacks the classic fantastic tale, by simplifying its structure and removing all trace of orientalism, by a burlesque use of elements of the Gallic fairy-tale and a critique of the libertine tale. But above all, by reversing its model's narrative situation, it transfers the criticism from the story's subject to its public. While Galland aimed at keeping readers awake and stimula¬ ting their imagination, Cazotte implies that the French fantastic tale wanted to send them to sleep. Nevertheless his is a lively tale portraying in a pragmatic way the decadence of public taste, as Father Bougeant had done in his novel Le voyage merveilleux du Prince Fan-Férédin, with which it bears a close intertextual and aesthetic relationship.