L’échec du mentorat dans Les malheurs de l’amour (1747) de Madame de Tencin et dans Les Lettres du marquis de Roselle (1764) de Madame Élie de Beaumont

The novel of the Enlightenment is rich in topoi evoking mentors: Madame de Tencin, in Les Malheurs de l’amour (1747) and Madame Élie de Beaumont in Lettres du marquis de Roselle (1764) are particularly keen to stage this character who has been evolving since Fenelon in quite a dramatic manner: in the texts studied, the mentor, a wise advisor, often a woman, alludes to a message that goes well beyond its ancient symbolism. However, this intellectual guide becomes the disillusioned spokesperson and, at the same time, the victim of the Enlightenment. S/he guides the mentee through the dark forest of deceptive passions, such as the obvious example of love, but also those passions born, above all, of the contradictory game of interests between social classes, the behaviour of a bourgeoisie desperate to be recognized, and the impoverished, decadent and libertine aristocracy. The 18th Century witnesses a transformation of the mentor as s/he was classically portrayed. The latter keeps on fulfilling his/her original role as an advisor, but also becomes a narratological model – particularly in Madame de Tencin’s fictions, for whom Madame de Lafayette, for example, remains the intellectual model to imitate. Moreover, the mentor becomes, during the Enlightenment, a being in the flesh, sensual, passionate, whose ethic is merely anthropological, who surveys and examines the laws through reason. The Age of the “libertine” is also the era of a reconsidered mentorship: a calculating character, the libertine-mentor is often tinged with existential evil, a resurgence of a double-edged “ego” which characterizes human beings, a philosophy inaugurated by Montaigne and echoed by Descartes and Pascal, among others. Evil lingers during the entire Enlightenment despite the optimism conveyed by reason. Although this analysis will focus on the two aforementioned novels, it would also be stimulating to further the study of this topos, by including several other novels which would expand and enrich the SATOR database.

Trois scènes de bal dans le roman français (« La Princesse de Clèves », « Madame Bovary », « Le Ravissement de Lol V Stein »)

"Three Ball Scenes in the French Novel (“La Princesse de Clèves”, “Madame Bovary”, “Le Ravissement de Lol V Stein”). This article aims to analyze – in a comparative manner – three ball scenes from novels belonging to leading authors of French literature (Madame de Lafayette, Gustave Flaubert and Marguerite Duras), highlighting a series of dramatic mechanisms used by novelists in the construction of such a diegetic plot. If La Princesse de Clèves describes a ball that takes place in the royal court, with all the typical scenes of the time (embodied in a real mixture of intrigue and gallantry specific to the living environment of the actors, which make the topos of the novel itself become a collective character), Madame Bovary describes, instead, a ball animated by the high society of the nineteenth century, with all the specifics of the realistic episteme (the ball becomes here an opportunity to evoke the painful contrast between different living environments, which the heroine cannot access and which causes her, consequently, to take refuge in an imaginary universe). Much closer to the spirit of contemporaneity, Le Ravissement de Lol V Stein, the famous “nouveau roman”, relies on an image of the harmful and destructive ball, paying particular attention to the psyche of the characters. These novels lean – starting from this narrative pretext of the ball – on some love stories built through specific strategies of the theatre, which is, in essence, the central object of our analysis. Keywords: ball scenes, French Novel, dramatic mechanisms, narrative pretext, love stories."