Noel du Fail: Conteur.

Marie-Claire Bichard-Thomine. Noel du Fail: Conteur.

Paris: Honore Champion Editeur, 2001. 628 pp. index. bibl. 590 FF. ISBN: 2-7453-0527-1.

Noel du Fail (ca. 1520-91) was born into the rural aristocracy of Brittany. He attended the College de Sainte Barbe in Paris, where he studied law while also leading a debauched and rowdy life. He ultimately joined the army as a foot soldier to avoid paying his debts. Ironically, in his later years he became a successful magistrate and member of the Parlement de Rennes, often relaxing from his official duties in the life of a country gentleman. These facts are important in understanding the character of Noel du Fail auteur as well as what Marie-Claude Bichard-Thomine refers to as "la maniere propre de Noel du Fail conteur" (11). There is a playfulness, a roguishness (an "eutrapelie" for Bichard-Thomine) that runs throughout his three collections of tales, Propos rustiques (1547), Baliverneries d'Eutrapel (1548), and the much later Contes et discours d'Eutrapel (1585), as well as a joy in storytelling and dialogue so much in evidence in French Renaissance narrative. One thinks of Rabelais, of course, and of such short story writers as Marguerite de Navarre and Bonaventure des Periers. But du Fail also applies to this "activite ludique et litteraire" (61) a knowledge of legal rhetoric (the Propos and Baliverneries date from his student days and initiation to lawyering) and the experiences and observations of a jurist-legislator (appearing after a silence of thirty-three years, the Contes et discours are the product of a "gentilhomme lettre civil en retraite" (54).

Bichard-Thomine's fine study situates du Fail's three collections of stories in the larger history of the French contes of the sixteenth century, a genre "en mouvance, foisonnante de son langage" (113). The influence of medieval comedy, farces, and fabliaux are clearly felt. The Propos, for example, present (through conversation under an oak) the comedic, often salacious portrait of old villagers, happenings, and customs in a simple rural life. The function of the exempla is not to be excluded, but there is also realism in the vivid comedy of language (to each class its own speech) that allows for du Fail's collections to be considered as documents, even as autobiography, given their reflections of a world which he knew personally. At the same time, these are the collections of a noble gentleman in a game of literary hide-and-seek (the author of the Propos, Leon Ladulfi, is an anagram while the character of Eutrapel is often considered the voice or perspective of du Fail himself). A meeting of cultures, rural and urban, high and low, may be one of the organizing principles of the three volumes, as Bichard-Thomine suggests. At first glance, they appear as disorderly, motley, or "bigarees," in Bichard-Thomine's term. She goes on, however, to describe another kind of organization which functions along the lines of conversation. Du Fail's tales are brief, anecdotal, and realistic, told by tellers within the collections to listeners or other tellers turned listeners within the same collections. And they can be placed at the intersection of orality and literacy. As a genre, what might be called dialogue tales (each of du Fail's titles, even the invented Baliverneries, point to the prominence of a speaker-listener relationship), they exhibit that great structural freedom so integral to the humanist practice of narrative. Along with the device of conversation, storytelling, table talk, etc., the French humanists discovered great license in the handling of language. Not bound by the notions of order, clarity, and sobriety that became the norm in the next century, French (comic) narrative in the Renaissance demonstrates a spontaneity and heterogeneity, a syntax and vocabulary that are still elastic, and a verbal fantasy that permits a mixture of vulgarity and learned turns of phrase. For the reader-listener, all this contributes to the oral joy taken in such a rich and sonorous substance. In her chapters on "Les Langages de Noel du Fail" and the subsequent appendices, Bichard-Thomine provides a thorough analysis of what she calls the "ocean" of imagery deployed by du Fail in his descriptions and frequent verbal quarrels through the use of everyday speech, hand-me-down proverbs, maxims, adages, as well as parodies of legal jargon and literate citation.

Finally, in discussing the "architecture" of each collection and the relationship of chapters to the whole, Bichard-Thomine discerns a youthful fugacity and a structure that is more delineated and closed in the Propos than in the much later Contes et Discours. The material of the last collection appears to be more carefully edited while its structure is "beaucoup plus lache et ouverte" (217). The Baliverneries, as she illustrates, "occupent une position intermediare" (218).

Noel du Fail: Conteur is an excellent, superbly detailed work of scholarship that not only (re)introduces a storyteller read mostly in graduate studies and in the shadow of Rabelais and Marguerite de Navarre, but also provides the reader with a firm grounding in the art of the French Renaissance conte comique.

DONALD PERRET

Emerson College