17th-century French Literature - Prose - Baroque Comic Fiction

Baroque Comic Fiction

Not all fiction of the first half of the 17th century was a wild flight of fancy in far-flung lands and rarefied, adventurous love stories. Influenced by the international success of the picaresque novel from Spain (such as Lazarillo de Tormes), and by Miguel de Cervantes' short-story collection Exemplary Tales (which appeared in French beginning in 1614) and Don Quixote de la Mancha (French translation 1614–1618), the French novelists of the first half of the 17th century also chose to describe and satirize their own era and its excesses. Other important satirical models were provided by Fernando de Rojas' Celestina and John Barclay's (1582–1621) two satirical Latin works, Euphormio sive Satiricon (1602) and Argenis (1621).

Agrippa d'Aubigné's Les Aventures du baron de Faeneste portrays the rude manners and comic adventures of a Gascon in the royal court. Charles Sorel's L'histoire comique de Francion is a picaresque-inspired story of the ruses and amorous dealings of a young gentleman; his Le Berger extravagant is a satire of the d'Urfé-inspired pastoral, which (taking a clue from the end of Don Quixote) has a young man take on the life of a shepherd. Despite their "realism" Sorel's works remain highly baroque, with dream sequences and inserted narration (for example, when Francion tells of his years at school) typical of the adventure novel. This use of inserted stories also follows Cervantes, who inserted a number of nearly autonomous stories into his Quixote. Paul Scarron's most famous work, Le Roman comique, uses the narrative frame of a group of ambulant actors in the provinces to present both scenes of farce and sophisticated, inserted tales.

Cyrano de Bergerac (made famous by Edmond Rostand's 19th-century play) wrote two novels which, 60 years before Gulliver's Travels or Voltaire (or science fiction), use a journey to magical lands (the moon and the sun) as pretexts for satirizing contemporary philosophy and morals. By the end of the 17th century, Cyrano's works would inspire a number of philosophical novels, in which Frenchmen travel to foreign lands and strange utopias. The early half of the 17th century also saw the continued popularity of the comic short story and collections of humorous discussions, typified by the Histoires comiques of François du Souhait; the playful, chaotic, sometimes-obscene and almost-unreadable Moyen de parvenir by Béroalde de Verville (a parody of "table talk" books, of Rabelais and of Michel de Montaigne's The Essays); the anonymous Caquets de l'accouchée (1622); and Molière d'Essertine's Semaine amoureuse (a collection of short stories).

A select list of baroque comique writers and works includes:

• Agrippa d'Aubigné (1552–1630)
  • Les Aventures du baron de Faeneste (1617, 1619, 1630)
• Béroalde de Verville (1556–1626)
  • Le Moyen de parvenir (c.1610)
• François du Souhait (c.1570/80 –1617)
  • Histoires comiques (1612)
• Molière d'Essertine (c.1600–1624)
  • Semaine amoureuse (1620)
• Charles Sorel (1602–1674)
  • L'histoire comique de Francion (1622)
  • Nouvelles françoises (1623)
  • Le Berger extravagant (1627)
• Jean de Lannel
  • Le Roman satyrique (1624)
• Antoine-André Mareschal
  • La Chrysolite (1627)
• Paul Scarron (1610–1660)
  • Virgile travesti (1648–53)
  • Le Roman comique (1651–57)
• Cyrano de Bergerac (Hector Savinien) (1619–1655)
  • Histoire comique des Etats et Empires de la Lune (1657)
  • Histoire comique des Etats et Empires du Soleil (1662)

In the second half of the 17th century, contemporary settings would be also used in many classical nouvelles (novellas—especially as a moral critique of contemporary society).