In the 1730s, many French novels – from Marivaux’s La Vie de Marianne to Prévost’s Histoire de Cleveland and Mouhy’s La Paysanne parvenue – were published in serial form. In that mode of publication, the interval between two offerings is always a risk, since the novel can be interrupted, thus ceasing to exist as such. Novelists had therefore to develop different techniques to guard their works against that risk. This paper emphasizes the role that eighteenth-century French novelists played in the development of suspense, particularly in the evolution of that specific form of punctual suspense that we now call the cliffhanger.