In one of the most notorious examples of the genre, Thérèse Philosophe (1748), written by the philosopher Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, Marquis d’Argens, a great variety of copulations is used to communicate what is in essence a materialist and mechanistic metaphysics. In anonymous bedrooms, bodies brought together by individual need and interest collide just like the atoms of the natural philosophers (Jacob 1996: 160). And the bodies themselves are described as machines powered by the relentless motion inherent in matter, by passions they cannot control: 