Astrée L'

Novel by Honoré d'Urfé, published 1607-27 and widely seen as the culmination of the pastoral tradition in France. It is set in 5th-c. Gaul and traces Céladon's troubled courtship of Astrée who, at the start of the novel, banishes him from her sight in the mistaken belief that he is unfaithful. Céladon attempts to kill himself in despair, builds a temple in the forest dedicated to his beloved, and is finally persuaded to return to her in the disguise of a girl. Around this classic plot of love, fidelity, and misunderstanding, d'Urfé constructs a network of other tales. Attitudes as varied as obsession and indifference, pride and insecurity, jealousy and timidity are explored in numerous different relationships, taking further the meditations on the nature of love so frequent in earlier pastoral fiction.

D'Urfé's analysis, both in the tales themselves and in the more extensive conversations and debates often inspired by them, is remarkable for its range and subtlety. He gives voice to a moral idealism which sees in love a means of spiritual transformation based on knowledge, respect, and aspiration, but he is clearly conscious too of all that is uncontrollably instinctive, selfish, and sensual in it. The scheming Polémas, the haughtily insecure Galathée, and the trenchantly epicurean Hylas all contrast with and complement the idealizing attitudes of the druid Adamas or the platonizing Silvandre; in the depiction of Céladon's relationship with Astrée we see how chaste admiration may coexist with self-doubt, misjudgement, and barely suppressed physical longing.

An early draft of the text is known to date from the 1590s, but the first volume was not published until 1607; this was followed by two further volumes in 1610 and 1619. Perhaps inevitably, the novel, which explores all that is shifting in human feelings and relationships, was left unfinished. After d'Urfé's death, his secretary Baro completed and published the incomplete fourth part in 1627, and produced in the following year a fifth volume, derived purportedly from the author's notes. Few pastoral novels were written in the wake of this text—by the 1630s a taste for the quasi-historical roman héroïque was already taking hold—but it had a profound influence on the art and sensibility of the age. It continued to be read long into the 18th c.

[Jonathan Mallinson]

Bibliography

• J. Ehrmann, Un paradis désespéré (1963)
• M. Gaume, Les Inspirations et les sources d'Honoré d'Urfé (1977)
• M. Bertaud, L'Astrée et Polexandre (1986)