In the Library
The Princess of Cleves
Madame de La Fayette, 1678
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 4.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 4
- Length
- Length 62k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
Grandeur and gallantry never appeared with more lustre in France, than in the last years of Henry the Second's reign.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
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About the book
In a country house outside Paris, a wife tells her husband she loves another man, not to end her marriage but to save it: she is asking him to guard her from herself. No heroine before Madame de La Fayette had spoken this plainly about a feeling she had not yet acted on. What follows is the birth of a whole way of writing the mind, a woman watching herself so closely she becomes her own evidence. Duty and desire never soften into each other here, and the book has the nerve to let that cost something real. When her husband dies and nothing stands between her and the man she loves, she will still not marry him, for reasons as exact and unanswerable as everything that came before. Three centuries on, the confession still lands like a held breath let go in the wrong room, too soon, too true, and impossible to take back.