Abstract: Imposture in the seventeenth century is associated with the libertine fight against religion. However, in the tradition of Montaigne’s skeptical anthropology, it can be the ally of a fabulist imagination that protects man from what he is not able to know. While Fontenelle and Pascal emphasize its social function, La Mothe Le Vayer rehabilitates it psychologically, making it a part of a rhetorical device that turns the Stoic rhetoric of consolation on its head.
