Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) credited his contemporary Jacques Amyot’s (1513–93) translations of Plutarch (Lives, 1559; Moralia, 1572) with lifting him out of the mire of ignorance and inspiring him to write the Essays.1 Together, Amyot and Montaigne ensured the tremendous cultural importance of Plutarch in France from the late sixteenth century onwards.2 After a decline during the Enlightenment when the Encyclopédistes deemed his ideas obscure, Plutarch again rose to prominence at the close of the eighteenth century thanks to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) and the revolutionaries. A republican Plutarch had replaced Plutarch as the “mirror for princes” whose works the playwright and historiographer Jean Racine (1639–99) had read to an ailing Louis XIV.

In the first decades of printing, medieval romances were edited and printed en masse, sometimes in luxurious in-folio formats. Sixteenth-century works of long prose narrative also drew on Classical epic and the dialogue. Notwithstanding these significant classical and medieval influences, there was no formal theorization of the novel in the sixteenth century—and indeed no single term to designate 'the novel' in this period. This absence of rigorous theorization and terminology contributed to making the period's vernacular prose narrative a privileged medium for literary experimentation: Rabelais's works were of course experimental in the highest sense, but other forms were also forged and promoted: in particular, sentimental and pastoral forms as well as the humanist model of the Greek novel based on Heliodorus. This period also forged new devices such as suspense and serialization, which would become signature features of the novel in the nineteenth century. Through all its incarnations and in the midst of formal experimentation, long prose narrative in this period opened a new horizon for reading: as a hobby, a pleasurable activity to fill the idle moments of life.

This chapter is the first of three that attempt to empirically measure the commonly attested rupture between the roman and the nouvelle around the year 1660. (This rupture is a version of the frequent opposition in English literary history between romance and novel.) According to Du Plaisir’s 1683 Sentiments sur les lettres, the use of inset narratives would appear to be a defining formal characteristic of the roman. After exploring the haphazard spread of this device from the French translation of Heliodorus’s Aethiopica in the 1540s to the opening of the seventeenth century, the chapter details the rise and fall of various sorts of insetting up to 1750.