À la table d'Apollon : de l'abondance à la modération dans Francion

The first edition of the Histoire comique de Francion by Charles Sorel (1623) contains numerous references to the eating and drinking. My study examines narrative sequences focused on a fluctuation between deprivation and abundance, frustration and jouissance. In addition to the domain of food, I consider allusions to sexuality and knowledge, insofar as they share the same narrative paradigm, and shed light on each other. This analysis also shows how Sorel relates ambivalent references to food to some of his moral claims, expressed through subversive uses of the tradition of comic fiction. The four books added for the 1626 and 1633 editions of Francion can be perceived as a wavering attempt to displace Bacchus, who presides over the protagonist’s birth and is emblematic of the various immoderations in the first edition.

Paris polymorphe: égarements et détours dans Polyandre de Charles Sorel

Polyandre (1648), Charles Sorel's unfinished novel, deconstructs the picaresque schema which traditionally operates in seventeenth century comic novels. Sorel, in the preface which accompanies the last avatar of his comic trilogy, develops an aesthetic of diversity based on naturalness. An urban pícaro, Polyandre, a middle-aged man back in Paris after a provincial interlude, abandons the formative aspect of the ‘Grand Tour’ in favour of the art of perambulation. A bourgeois novel, depicting the life of the most varied and mediocre figures, Polyandre is also an impressive account of the topography of Paris and social archetypes circulating inside this burlesque geography. In fact, Polyandre's wanderings act as an aggregator of typified characters: the picaresque character, conventionally defined by his social mobility and his moral permeability, becomes, by comic transposition, a vagrant and a judge. But these burlesque shifts are also a metaphorical expression of the very function of comic novels, which is to be a social laboratory.

Entre mondanité et libertinage : figures de l’amitié dans les romans de Charles Sorel

BETWEEN WORLDLY FRIENDSHIP AND LIBERTINAGE : FIGURES OF FRIENDSHIP IN CHARLES SOREL’S NOVELSFriendship was an essential ferment in the advent of a new kind of sociability in the seven­teenth-century France. The comic novel — and especially Sorel’s works— with its ambition to accurately portraiting the world, provides a unique vantage point for observing this phenomenon. Whether honest friendship is praised or mocked, Sorel offers various images of a link between the characters that is often tantamount to belonging to the same environment. As a criterion of social dis­crimination, friendship is shown in an ambivalent light: thus, Lysis is mocked by his friends because he does not control gallantry codes Berger extravagant. Yet, the purpose is not to denigrate a virtue regarded as fundamental in the social life. The reason why Neophile and Polyandre are friends yet love rivals Polyandre, just as are Francion and Cléandre Francion, is that narrative techniques shift the painting of friendship towards an aesthetic of varietas meant to make it plausible. Thus the characters embody different variations of the stereotype of worldly friendship, allowing the reader to question its role in the society of the time. This worldly aspect is complemented by Sorel with another one in which the society of friends constitutes a crucible for other values that are capable to transcend the artifice of the most commonly shared social codes to assert a libertine credo Francion.