Often considered France’s first work of historical fiction, in which the author wove fictional characters into real historical events, The Princess of Cleves by Madame de Lafayette could also be called the first historical romance novel with a duke, a man aptly described as a “masterpiece of Nature.” Dukes star in reams of romance novels in 2024, but this novel, first published in 1678, was a groundbreaker. Especially noteworthy is the author’s use of what modern novelists call deep point of view. The duke, the prince, and the princess despair dramatically inside their own heads, and the reader is left wanting for nothing in this love triangle set in the sixteenth century French court.
The author gives marvelous insights into their thoughts, such as when “the duc was so transported, that he scarce knew what he saw.” The princess reflects on the duke, that, “the seeing him at once gave her grief and pleasure; but when she no longer saw him, and reflected that the charm he carried about him when present, was an introduction to love, she was very near imagining she hated him, out of the excessive grief which that thought gave her.”
I won’t give away the ending, but the girl doesn’t always get the guy in novels that are hundreds of years old. In this instance, how could a girl of sixteen possibly choose between a prince who is “happily turned to excel in bodily exercises,” a seventeenth century synonym for buff, and a duke who is “a masterpiece of Nature,” anyway?
The photograph is of my copy of the 1966 Garnier-Flammarion edition, purchased in the eighties for $4.95, back when we thought books were expensive. It’s not an easy read, even in English, but there is a free English translation, from which I have taken the quotes in this post, at this site: