Abstract: This work interrogates the place of the facétie in French narrative fiction from the second half of the sixteenth century. Based on the lexical analysis of the word, its satellites, and its editorial uses, the aim is to rethink the thesis of the “missed encounter” (L. Sozzi) by identifying the specificities of the French appropriation of the genre: a distancing from rhetorical and curial traditions and the valorisation of variety, laughter, the gauloiserie, the involuntary, and the rusticitas.
