Constant's Adolphe is a landmark in many ways, not least because it marks an unmistakable break with a particular tradition of the French novel, a tradition which had been popular throughout the eighteenth century, the roman libertin or novel of seduction. In its first pages it creates something like the situation of a story by Crébillon fils – and then gives it a quite unheard-of twist. At its publication Adolphe was a nouveau roman, a new novel in the most useful sense of the phrase: it was a revitalisation of the genre and at the same time a renewal of accuracy and rigour in the presentation of the inner life of characters and of the pressures under which they must exist. As Paul Delbouille has shown, it met the fate often reserved for works of great originality in the form of a largely uncomprehending or hostile reading public, and many decades were to pass before it acquired the status of a classic which it now holds. Some of those closest to Constant – Mme de Staël's daughter Albertine and Constant's cousin Rosalie, for example – appreciated the subtlety of his thought and craftsmanship, but among reviewers and writers, with rare exceptions, Adolphe's qualities went unrecognised. Lady Caroline Lamb, who tried to persuade the London publisher John Murray to take the novel, told him ‘it is one of the cleverest things yet written but it will only make one vol.’ (Nicolson, p. 244).