Jacques Cazotte

Jacques Cazotte (1719–1792) wrote Le Diable amoureux (The Devil in Love, 1772), in which a young man conjures a demon that takes the form of an alluring woman, a subtle, ambiguous tale that critic Tzvetan Todorov placed at the very origin of the literary ‘fantastic’. Cazotte, a mystic and royalist, was guillotined during the French Revolution.