La Princesse de Clèves Reading Order

La Princesse de Clèves (1678) by Madame de Lafayette is the first great French novel and the founding document of the tradition of psychological fiction — the story of a young noblewoman at the court of Henri II who falls in love with the Duc de Nemours while married to the Prince de Clèves, analyzes her own desire with extraordinary precision, tells her husband of her feelings (the famous aveu), watches her husband die of grief, and refuses the man she loves because she has decided that the happiness of love cannot survive the anxieties of possession and of suspicion. The novel is remarkable in the French tradition for its refusal of the conventions of the roman précieux that precede it: where earlier court novels are concerned with the social performance of sentiment and with the witty analysis of love's conventions, La Princesse de Clèves is concerned with the psychological reality of desire — what it does to a person's interior, how it conflicts with duty and self-knowledge, and what a rational analysis of its consequences reveals about whether to act on it. The final refusal — the Princess choosing not to marry Nemours even after her husband's death removes the obstacle — is the most debated conclusion in French fiction: an act of philosophical self-knowledge and self-preservation, or a kind of moral cowardice, or a statement that the ideal of love can only be preserved by not submitting it to the test of reality?