This chapter approaches the roman-nouvelle distinction by treating these artifacts as Wittgensteinian “families”: what makes a roman a roman (or a nouvelle a nouvelle) is not one particular shared feature but a pattern of overlapping similarities. Using the criteria of length, linearity, and truth posture to establish a series of different scenarios for determining what might be considered a roman (or a nouvelle), the transition between the two forms can be clearly mapped. Against the commonplaces of traditional French literary history, it reveals that the roman was in decline before the arrival of the nouvelle. It also shows that the roman was in no way a traditional or archaic form, but one with its own relatively short history.

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.