The kinship between Renart and Pathelin has long been noted. Just recently, in the introduction to his fine edition of La Farce de Maître Pierre Pathelin, Jean Dufournet wrote: In the grip of a sort of drunkenness, a victim of his intemperate language, too sure of himself, Pathelin is, like Renart, a figure of the deceiver, the trickster or divine rogue, a down-and-out who confronts others with cunning and the art of speaking, and whose finesse is accompanied by a certain stupidity, sometimes triumphant, sometimes vanquished; hence the need for several adventures and, in Pathelin, three farces in one play. That the author of Pathelin had the figure of the rous de Maupertuis in mind when portraying his character of a potative lawyer seems hardly doubtful. Certainly, the setting has changed: Pathelin no longer runs the moor in search of a bargain, but calmly waits for customers at the tavern or fishes for a fool in the market, a stone's throw from his home. The two deceivers are not of the same stature either: Renart, a rebellious baron, superbly confronted the three orders of feudal society; Pathelin, a low-class clerk, attacks, more modestly, the William within his reach, the bourgeois foolish enough to eat goose at his table. The lawyer's cunning is, moreover, as limited as his clergy: Pathelin will be fooled by a country shepherd, in whom, out of clerical pride, he had wanted to see only a semi-animal, a dressed sheep (an error more worthy of a Renardeau than of a Renart!). Both are, however, of the same 'side': rejected into the limes of the social body, they are marginals whose survival depends only on their skill in slipping through the net, on their promptness in taking advantage of the slightest opportunity. - [Author]

Language: French

DOI: 10.1075/REIN.4.19UHL