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In 1639, Susan Du Verger translated selections from two of Jean-Pierre Camus’s collections of short stories, Les Euenemens singuliers (1628) and Les Relations morales (1631). She followed this in 1641 with a translation of one of his novels, Diotrephe. Histoire Valentine (1626). Camus, in his prefaces, explained his belief that works of fiction should be based on fact, since they then serve as moral exempla rather than frivolous entertainment, inducing readers to follow the paths of virtue, not vice. By carefully reproducing much of Camus’s metadiscourse, Du Verger communicated his redirection of secular fictional forms to moral and religious ends. This chapter discusses Camus’s concept of blending fact and fiction, and his views on the moral and spiritual worth of ‘truthful’ narratives, and examines the transmission of Camus’s ideas by Du Verger in her English translations and their accompanying paratexts, within the socio-cultural context of the Caroline court.

The chapter contains an exposition of Descartes’s ethics, the keystone of which is the concept of générosité. This incorporates both a cognitive state (the knowledge that nothing belongs to us but the use of our free will, and that nothing but the good or bad use of our free will is worthy of praise or blame) and a disposition of will, a determination always to act in accordance with our judgement of what is best. The concept is discussed in relation both to Aristotle’s conception of magnanimity and to the Stoic ethics of Epictetus, but also in relation to the use of the term in literary texts of the time, the plays of Pierre Corneille, and the stories of Jean-Pierre Camus.

This concluding chapter returns to the question of ethics, using a lyric by Gulhem IX, the first troubadour, to illustrate how courtly texts instantiate an ethics grounded in renunciation. It then offers a survey of selected post-medieval texts that seem to draw on this paradigm.

The ‘Epilogue’ (2.7) picks up the discussion from the ‘Prologue’ (1.1) and extends it across a broader canvas in the history of the book and of reading. It asks how the case studies in previous chapters (including Pierre de L’Estoile), and new ones in this chapter of Bishop Camus, Pierre Charron, and Pierre Bayle, might revise the sketch of the Essais offered in Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis. I argue that the fundamental issue at stake in the early modern making and transmission of the Essais is the issue that is explicitly raised by Marie de Gournay in her preface of 1595, and, in a different style and context, by Charron’s use of Montaigne in De la sagesse (1601, 1604): how best to preserve and regulate the well-born individual’s natural liberté of judgement, their franchise or frankness, through reading and writing, in an age of moral corruption and confessional conflict.