Le Voyage de Mercure et autres satires by Antoine Furetière (review)

Le Voyage de Mercure (1653) was a success of its era, reissued some ten times in twenty-five years. Antoine Furetière, now best known for his Roman bourgeois (1666) and especially his Dictionnaire universel (1690), was in his day also a poet and satirist. Le Voyage de Mercure occupies a middle ground between burlesque reworkings of ancient works, including Furetière’s own Aenéide travestie (1649), and satire in a Lucianic mould. Jean Leclerc, who has authored several studies on mid-seventeenth-century burlesque writing, is the ideal choice to edit this text alongside five short satires taken from Furetière’s Poésies diverses (first published in 1655 but composed earlier), all of which are impeccably presented. Indeed, the edition will be a helpful research tool for anyone interested in the evolution of the French language at this time, not least given variants that show an attenuation of somewhat less polite vocabulary and, above all, the extent to which the Dictionnaire universel contains intertextual references to Furetière’s works (p. 79). The ninety-page glossary, with definitions from the Dictionnaire, is a perfect illustration of this phenomenon. A ‘Répertoire des noms propres’, with information on mythological, ancient, and early modern figures taken mostly from seventeenth-century reference works, is similarly useful to the reader. As for the works themselves, Le Voyage de Mercure is a literary curiosity, beginning with its dedicatory epistle ‘à personne’; indeed, despite making standard excuses for satire (condemning vices etc.), Furetière’s satires are noticeably non-specific and focus almost exclusively on customary targets, including merchants, pedants, lawyers, poets, charlatans, and doctors. Doubtless the most interesting aspect of the work comes in the fifth and final book, in which Mercury reports back to the gods on what he has witnessed on earth, including a tirade against atheists, which is unexpected since such ‘esprits forts’ (p. 188) had not previously been mentioned. Leclerc plausibly proposes that Mercury’s harangue should be read ironically (p. 71), in which case the most paradoxical element of the work is hidden behind a burlesque and satirical veil. More generally, the portrayals of the figures satirized both in the Voyage and in the short pieces that follow bear witness to contemporary attitudes, not least to the book trade and the status of authors, and contain parodies of legal and medical language in particular, of a variety and interest that one would expect of the great lexicographer. This edition will therefore be very helpful to a range of specialists and students, including those interested in the evolution of satire, from its targeted and polemical forms, not least in mid-seventeenth-century Mazarinades, to its much more circumspect, yet nevertheless intriguing, articulation by Furetière.