French literature is too vast, too rich, for us to designate a few novels as the most worthy of appearing in this list. Here is a non-exhaustive anthology of works whose style caught our attention.
The style of Madame de La Fayette gives the story its finesse and relevance, frequently using gallant vocabulary. A seemingly ordinary sentence, a word, even a comma, sometimes says much more about the human heart, provided we know how to read between the lines. The polyphony of the different letters reflects a perfect mastery of the language. Each character has their own style, which not only defines a way of speaking but also reveals a way. of thinking, a character, even feelings. A Machiavellian couple if there ever was one, the Marquise de Merteuil and the Viscount de Valmont gave the epistolary genre its finest letters of style, if not nobility. Lost Illusions, 1837 - Balzac, Lucien de Rubemé, takes him to Paris.