La Fontaine au cœur du débat entre tradition et modernité dans Amants, heureux amants… de Valery Larbaud *

Abstract

Our paper aims at showing the place of prime importance and La Fontaine’s reach in the debate on classicism and modernity in the trilogy Amants, heureux amants… Since it’s not by chance, as we go through, that our writer takes a hemistich of the first verse from «Les deux pigeons» (title also given to the second novel AMANTS, HEUREUX AMANTS) to crown the work which lead him to deserve the consecration as an author of the literary vanguard grouped in the Rive Gauche in the twenties. If the metaliterary discourse is a steady feature in larbaldian works, in this case it gets features which need further consideration since it allows to define a mature concept of larbaldian modernity, a tempered and balanced modernity, a notion of modernity which doesn’t exclude the tradition.