Un Orient peut quelquefois en cacher un autre À propos d’Arsace et Isménie

In Arsace et Isménie, which Montesquieu wrote twenty years after the Persian Lettres, nothing happens quite as one would have expected a priori. A sentimental episode very critical for its genre, a Mirror of Princes which encourages one above all never to do violence to the ordinary course of things, parallels a curious On the proper use of suicide.