“[La] plus jolie [de] toutes celles qui avaient jamais été écrites”: Madame de Thémines’s Letter as Proto-Psychological Fiction in La Princesse de Clèves

This article analyzes Madame de Thémines’s interpolated lettre de rupture to the Vidame de Chartres, a text that appears exactly halfway through Marie de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves. This intercalated letter serves, arguably, as the keystone and model for the rest of the novel’s attempt to rewrite the self. A close reading of the letter’s language sheds light on what I maintain is Lafayette’s larger project, comparable to the Jansenist and La Rochefoucauldian one: an anatomy of the human psyche in its inability, or unwillingness, to know or trust itself.