The Marivaudian satire. The example of The Indigent Philosopher

Abstract

Marivaux has always been presented as a playwright, a novelist, a storyteller, a journalist, a philosopher. These titles do not suffer from the shadow of a doubt among his contemporaries like Voltaire, Diderot or Beaumarchais. Marivaux's work continues to surprise critics. It seems to us that Marivaux, by the turns of his writing also develops a thought which one can bring closer to the satire. This is a blind spot in Marivaux's studies that has hardly been explored by academic critics. When one reads L’Indigent philosophe, one sees the orchestration of motifs that are generally found in Latin satire. Marivaux exploits them to his liking in an offbeat way here and there in his work in general and in L’Indigent philosophe in particular. His improvised writing and the mixture of episodic and capricious structures lead to the conclusion that there could be a secret latinity of the author of L’Epreuve which shows the extent of his culture.