Le « souverain remède » : esquisse d’une érotique libertine dans Le Gascon extravagant

Le Gascon extravagant can be defined as a libertine novel in the measure in which it narrates the erotic education of its hero. This account of his education follows a negative movement, which, from deception to disappointment, leads the character to renounce all idealized images of love and to confine himself to the search for pleasure. In so doing, he comes to discover Lucrèce's Epicurean lesson, which invites to distinguish pure desire, wich promises pleasure, and love, wich often brings suffering. Transposed in the ideological framework of the comic novel, of Gauloise tradition, this ethic appears to be more cynical than liberating. The novel, however, is not a mere illustration of philosophy. By means of its narrative structure and its own language, it is able to question the misogynous morale of the narrator-hero and to propose, beyond any doctrine, an exploration of bodily experience that is, up to this point, undiscovered. It is in such a way that the comic novel fulfills its goal, in a truly libertine manner, of freeing the reader of the sexual biases of his/her time and society