The Cambridge History of French Literature

This chapter discusses the major variants of narrative fiction in chronological order, beginning with the pastoral and heroic romances of the first half of the seventeenth-century, moving through the comic-novels of Sorel, Scarron, and Furetière, the proto-realist novellas of Segrais and Saint-Réal. It also reviews the early experiments with the epistolary novel, before giving pride of place to the single undisputed masterpiece of the century, Madame de Lafayette's La Princesse de Cleves. The first major novel of the seventeenth century, Honoré d'Urfé's L'Astrée, is emblematic in this regard. In the aftermath of the Wars of Religion, a terrible and bloody civil war which had literally rent the body politic of France, L'Astrée offers a civilized and civilising solution, providing a literary alternative to violence and discord based on a theoretical ideal of love, itself embedded within a practical ideal of polite conversation.