This article proposes the view that during the course of the seventeenth century the concept of fortune in the Boethian mode, dominant in French literature during the Middle Ages, yielded to a new manner of conceiving the fortuitous. This new conception, still sometimes called 'fortune' but increasingly known as 'hasard', took the form of what we would call randomness. However, both the older and the newer ways of representing the fortuitous require awareness of individual human desire. In this study Moliere's L'Ecole des femmes and two narratives by Marie-Madeleine de Lafayette, Zayde and La Princesse de Cleves, are considered with regard to the way the texts display chance either directly or indirectly In conclusion, the article proposes the hypothesis that the shift from fortune to randomness in French literature is related to an increasing emphasis on what we call the reader's 'identification' with fictive characters.

In seventeenth-century France, the choice of the person one loves, the object of love, is frequently described as irrational. Blaise Pascal, in one of the best-known passages of his Pensees, set forth this view with the example of the effect of Cleopatra's nose on Mark Anthony. This article considers a number of seventeenth-century works in which the choice of the object of love is shown to be a matter of rational choice, as described in Rene Descartes's Traite des passions de l'ame. First Pierre Corneille's Le Cid, largely considered to be a model of rational choice, is described as conforming to that reputation. Then, Jean Racine's Phedre, often considered to convey an anti-rationalist view of love, is shown to depict the protagonists as choosing their love objects rationally. The third literary example considered is from Madeleine de Scudery's Clelie, in which the rationalist and anti-rationalist views are debated and left in an inconclusive opposition. Finally, the article contends that the rational-choice position leads potentially to much more pessimistic outcomes than the anti-rationalist opposition.