Joie de vivre in French Literature and Culture Essays in Honour of Michael Freeman FAUX TITRE 331 Etudes de langue et littérature françaises publiées sous la direction de Keith Busby, M.J. Freeman, Sjef Houppermans et Paul Pelckmans Joie de vivre in French Literature and Culture Essays in Honour of Michael Freeman Edited by Susan Harrow and Timothy Unwin AMSTERDAM - NEW YORK, NY 2009 Cover design / maquette couverture: Pier Post. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence’. Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents - Prescriptions pour la permanence’. ISBN: 978-90-420-2579-0 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009 Printed in The Netherlands Contents Notes on contributors 7 Michael Freeman: joie de vivre, joies du livre 13 I Introduction Susan Harrow and TimothyUnwin 17 II The joys of Romance Rodney Sampson 35 III ‘Balades & Rondeaux nouueaux fort ioyeulx’: joie de vivrein a Renaissance miscellany Jane H.M. Taylor 51 IV Joie de vivre in Des Périers’sNouvelles Récréations etjoyeux devis John Parkin 65 V Comic interludes in French Renaissance prose romance: Aldéno’s amours in Gerard d’Euphrate(1549) Richard Cooper 81 VI Melons and wine: Montaigne and joie de vivrein Renaissance France Stephen Bamforth 99 VII ‘Une vie douce, heureuse et amiable’: a Christian joie de vivrein Saint François de Sales Richard Parish 129 VIII ‘Le carnaval autorise cela’: cruelty and joie de vivre in the dénouementsof the comédie-ballet Edward Forman 141 IX ‘I told you I was ill’: joie de vivreand joie de mourir in Le Malade imaginaire Noël Peacock 155 6 X The state of happiness?Ancient Sparta and the French Enlightenment Haydn Mason 177 XI Poetry and the discourse of happiness in nineteenth-century France: the case of Vigny Patrick O’Donovan 193 XII ‘Baisez-moi, belle Juju!’: Victor Hugo and the joy of Juliette Bradley Stephens 211 XIII Mallarmé etBachelard: la rêverie des mots Hélène Stafford 225 XIV Ensor’s hyperbolic joie de vivre Richard Hobbs 239 XV Joie de vivreand the will to winin the literature of cycling Edward Nye 255 XVI The joy of specs: the power of the gaze in the novels of Sébastien Japrisot Martin Hurcombe 269 XVII Rejoicing in the Other: France, England and the case of Major Thompson Gino Raymond 283 XVIII Joie de vivre:the afterlife of a phrase Alison Finch 299 Michael Freeman: list of major publications 313 Index of names 317 Notes on contributors Stephen Bamforth is Professor of Renaissance Studies in the Depart- ment of French at the University of Nottingham. In collaboration with Jean Céard, he is shortly to publish the first critical edition of the Histoires prodigieuses of Pierre Boaistuau (Droz, Geneva). He has written extensively on Béroalde de Verville, Renaissance court festi- val and Renaissance medicine (most recently on Nicolas Abraham de la Framboisière). His next major research project examines the con- cept of the ‘merveilleux’before and after the Scientific Revolution. Richard Cooper is Professor of French at Oxford University and Vice-Principal of Brasenose College. He specialises in Franco-Italian relations in the sixteenth century, as well as in Renaissance interest in antiquities and court festivals. Earlier publications include a book on Rabelais et l’Italie (1991), and on the literature of the Italian wars, Litterae in tempore belli (1997), as well as an edition of Scève’s album for the 1548 entry of Henri II to Lyon (1997). He recently published editions of Marguerite de Navarre’s unpublished poems (2007) and, with Geneviève Demerson, of Jean Du Bellay’s neo-latin verse (2007). He is preparing a book on Renaissance interest in anti- quities, an edition of Montaigne’s correspondence and Journal de voyage, an edition of the 1549 prose romance, Gerard d’Euphrate, and a further volume of Marguerite de Navarre’s writings. Alison Finch is Senior Research Fellow in French at Churchill College, Cambridge, and an Honorary Professor of the University of Cambridge. She holds the Palmes Académiques at the Officier level, has been a co-editor of French Studies (2002-05) and is the editor of a new Modern Humanities Research Association Translation Series. Her previous appointments include a University Lectureship in the Department of French, Cambridge (1978-93) and Fellowships at Jesus and Merton Colleges, Oxford (1993-2003). She is the author of Proust’s Additions (1977), Stendhal: La Chartreuse de Parme (1984), Concordance de Stendhal (1991), and Women’s Writing in 8 Notes on contributors Nineteenth-Century France (2000). She is currently completing A Cultural History of French Literaturefor Polity Press. Edward Forman is Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Bristol where he is Deputy Head for Teaching and Learning in the School of Modern Languages. He completed his Oxford doctorate on the comédies-ballets of Molière and his contemporaries under Jacques Scherer before his appointment to Bristol in 1978. Since then he has taught extensively and published widely on French drama, both classical and modern, with a continuing special interest in the use of music on the non-operatic stage. This musical interest has led him to topics as widely varied as Racine’s Esther, Cocteau’s Œdipus Rexand Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. Susan Harrow is Professor of French at the University of Bristol. Her research interests lie in modern poetry and narrative with a particular focus on the interrelation of literary modernism and visual culture. She is the author of The Material, the Real and the Fractured Self (2004) and of a short study of Zola’s L’Assommoir (1998). Her study of Zola, The Body Modern: Pressures and Prospects of Represent- ation will appear in 2009. She is currently editing Sublimely Visual: The Art of the Text. She served as Joint Editor of Romance Studies (1999-2008) and is currently President of the Society of Dix- Neuviémistes. Richard Hobbs is a Senior Research Fellow in French at the University of Bristol, specialising in word and image studies. He was a founder and subsequently Director of the Bristol Research Centre for Visual and Literary Cultures in France. He wrote the first English- language monograph on Odilon Redon (1977) and has since published widely on French Symbolism. His research interests include contem- porary art (Christian Boltanski), but lie chiefly in nineteenth-century studies; he was editor of From Balzac to Zola: Selected Short Stories (1992) and Impressions of French Modernity (1998). The topic of his current research is the writings of nineteenth-century French artists, on whom he has published case studies (Thomas Couture, Jules Breton, Paul Gauguin). He is completing a book entitled Artists’ Writings in Nineteenth-Century France. Notes on contributors 9 Martin Hurcombe is Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Bristol. He specialises in French cultural representations of war in the early twentieth century. He is the author of Novelists in Conflict: Ideology and the Absurd in the French Combat Novel of the Great War (2004), the first English-language study of this popular genre, and has also published articles and book chapters on French cultural memory of the First World War as well as on political commitment and French writers of the inter-war years. He is currently writing a book on French cultural representations of the Spanish Civil War,and recently co-edited a volume on the French author of crime fiction, Sébastien Japrisot. He is an editor of the Journal of War and Culture Studies. Haydn Mason is Emeritus Professor of the University of Bristol and was inaugural holder of the Ashley Watkins Chair of French. He has written extensively on the French Enlightenment, particularly on Voltaire (including a biography of the philosophe) and his links with other writers and thinkers of the period, not only in France but also in England, Scotland and Italy. He has also studied the relationship between literary and socio-economic trends in the eighteenth century, paying special attention to the growth in trade and wealth and its cultural consequences. A former President of the International Society for Eighteenth-CenturyStudies, he was alsoGeneral Editor of Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century (1977-95) and Editor of Les Œuvres complètes de Voltaire (1998-2001). Edward Nye is Lecturer in French at Oxford University, and a Fellow of Lincoln College. His research is mostly in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French literature and history of ideas, particularly the theory and practice of aesthetics. His publications include Literary and Linguistic Theories in Eighteenth-century France (2000), (ed.) A Bicyclette(2000), and (ed.) Sur quel pied danser? Danse et littérature (2005). He is at present preparing a book on the eighteenth-century ballet-pantomime in England, France and Italy. Patrick O’Donovan is Professor of French at University College Cork. He previously worked in a number of British universities and, from 1989 to 1994, was a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. With Michael Freeman, he was for ten years an editor of French Studies.