SOREL, Charles - Le Berger extravagant, où parmy des Fantais - Lot 440

SOREL, Charles - Le Berger extravagant, où parmy des Fantaisies amoureuses on void les impertinences des Romans & de la Poësie. Rouen, Jean Osmont, 1646. 4 parts in two vol. in-8, front, (6) ff. 447 pp. 2 fig. h. t. ; (4) ff. 428 pp. ; (6) ff. 119 pp. ; (1) f., 569 pp. (last one 563), each part with separate title, abrasion on front board resulting in the loss of a small part of the engraving, some light angular spotting, contemporary soft vellum. LEVER 92. 3rd ed. cited after the 2nd published under the title L'Anti-roman. The frontispiece and 2 fig. are engraved by Crispin de Passe. One of them is a portrait of La Belle Charité, drawn on Sorel's instructions and intended to ridicule the hyperbolic metaphors of precious literature. From Héliodore and Longus to Olenix du Montsacré and Vital d'Audiguier, this satire is first and foremost an enormous catalog of all the pastoral novels, adventure stories, allegorical tales, sentimental or heroic romances that romance has produced. In Sorel's novel, narration is constantly quotation: hardly an episode, a character, a situation, even a sentence, that doesn't refer to an episode, a character, a situation, a sentence already imagined by some other novelist, near or far, famous or obscure. A kind of universal novel, the Extravagant Shepherd wants to contain all novelistic literature, to suffocate it under buffoonish parody and burlesque fantasy.'' (J. Serroy, Roman et réalité, p. 297). ''Le Berger extravagant recounts the misadventures of a young Parisian bourgeois so intoxicated by reading bucolic fictions that he dreams of living for real the adventures of the shepherds of the Astrée. He dropped out of law school, changed his first name from Louis to Lysis, dressed up as a shepherd, equipped himself with a hoe and a bread-basket, bought a few sheep ("rejects from the butchers of Poissy") and set off to wander the hills of Saint-Cloud, then the plains of Brie, trying to lead the same existence as Honoré d'Urfé's heroes. The local squires amuse themselves at his expense, keeping him in his delusion by pretending to play along. (M. Lever, Le Roman français au XVIIe s., p. 94).