If Corneille's career marked the transition from the tragi-comedy to tragedy, Marie-Madeleine de Lafayette's work has been enshrined in literary history as the quintessential example of the shift from ‘romance’ to ‘novel’. These generic transformations in dramatic literature and prose narrative are not unrelated. As we saw, the tragi-comedy often took its stories from popular fiction, and the adjective romanesque clung to many such dramatic works as a way of emphasising the presence of implausible and, especially, fortuitous incidents in the plots. So it is significant that when Lafayette was asked about the book that later established her in the literary canon, The Princess of Cleves, she felt that it was important to say that this text is not ‘romance-like’ (romanesque):

The Shipwreck of Romance

Several years before writing The Princess of Cleves, Lafayette had, however, written a romance, Zayde (1670), a story full of the adventures and surprises that mark the genre. In fact, it may be so romanesque precisely because it was either a kind of farewell to the genre, already in decline, or even, as Nicholas Paige suggests, a parody of romance.