Abstract EN:

Francois du souhait is a man of the early seventeenth century, a period when the french nobility was at a loss and turned to ladies'salons or fashionable circles in order to regain an interest in life. Between 1599 and 1614, due to the patronage of the dukes of lorraine, a considerable number of works were published: poems (les divers souhaits d'amour, 1599), occasionnal works, pamphlets (le pacifique), dramas (tragedie de radegonde), a translation (l'iliade), handbooks of moral values and of piety (le parfait gentilhomme, 1600), comedy and sentimental novels (les amours de poliphile et mellonimphe), chivaleresque tales (the tales of anacrine). In 1614, as a result of seditious writings, he was banished and silence jell on his production. However his influence remained : his iliade was republished, after him the themes of faust and of the lady of vergi underwent literary revival, he inspired sorel, plagiarists appeared. Having made out du souhait's bibliography, in which moral and fiction books are most prominent, our thesis shows how his works, outwardly diverse, fit a consistent design, that of offering the nobility an art of living, loving and thinking. Du souhait humorously uses long drawn-out metaphors to produce recipes for good manners and to favour such themes as the writer being a guide, gentlemanliness in essence or acquired through nobleness, the monarch as the epitome of perfection, love sublimated to a new reason for living, the woman ruling hearts and courts, an ideal companion for virtuous men. Looking on the society and on the writers of the time emphasizes du souhait's design being in keeping with his contemporaries'quest for identity and values. Through the novel whice he conceived multiform, his taste for the metaphor, his exalted vision of the dignitaries, this polygraph creates a world aimed at his fellow countrymen, and orderly world, coherent and civilized.