| Summary: | As a fait divers by extension, The Princess of Clèves combines chance and fiction in innovate ways. The curious flatness and extreme brevity of the end of the novel are effects of this fusion. The princess secures a final state of repose for herself by reducing her exposure to the chance events that have tormented her throughout the plot. Once there is no chance of her being disturbed, the narrative goes slack and immediately proceeds to represent her final days and death in less than one sentence. The rapid exhaustion of the formerly vivid portrait of Lafayette’s heroine implies how tightly the text binds chance and mimesis to one another. In the absence of chance, the life of the princess becomes inimitable, in the sense that it no longer constitutes a possible object of fictional representation as the novel previously defined it. This recipe for mimesis resists the scientific takeover of vraisemblance projected in the philosophies of Descartes and others.
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