The Princess of Montpensier (novella)

[3] Set in France during the Wars of Religion, it tells the story of a young noblewoman, married without affection and loved platonically by her husband's best friend, who cannot refuse her former fiancé's impetuous brother and collapses under the emotional stress.

When the princess hears the news, she dies unable to overcome the grief of having lost the respect of her husband, the heart of her lover, and the best friend there ever was.

Her fate reflects the danger of uncontrolled emotion in a strictly regulated society, where a woman's reputation is destroyed by perceived imprudence.

[2] Compared with the floweriness and pomposity of much preceding French fiction, Madame de La Fayette writes in a pared-down prose which almost has the air of a dispassionate observer.

The principal character is based on a real French woman in named places at a specific time in history, with her emotional trajectory described and analysed.

[3] Breaking away from the improbabilities of heroic and pastoral romances, believable characters live through the actual dramatic events of the period, recreated with accuracy, and it is their internal conflicts which are the subject of the novel.

[4] Handwritten copies of the work had been circulating for some time before, leading the author to complain that the novella 'is racing all over the place, but happily not under my name'.

An adaptation for cinema was the 2010 film The Princess of Montpensier,[2] directed by Bertrand Tavernier and scripted by him and Jean Cosmos from a treatment by François-Olivier Rousseau, which starred Mélanie Thierry as the conflicted heroine.