Storytelling in Sixteenth-Century France: Negotiating Shifting Forms

By JoAnn DellaNeva, Sheila ffolliott, Amy Graves Monroe and 7 more

Storytelling in Sixteenth-Century France is an innovative, interdisciplinary examination of parallels between the early modern era and the world in which we live today. Readers are invited to look to the past to see how then, as now, people turned to storytelling to integrate and adapt to rapid social change, to reinforce or restructure community, to sell new ideas, and to refashion the past. This collection explores different modalities of storytelling in sixteenth-century France and emphasizes shared techniques and themes rather than attempting to define narrow kinds of narrative categories. Through studies of storytelling in tapestries, stone, and music as well as distinct genres of historical, professional, and literary writing (addressing both erudite and more common readers), the contributors to this collection evoke a society in transition, wherein traditional techniques and materials were manipulated to express new realities. 

Published by the University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Release date: Jan 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781644532386

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Introduction

EMILY E. THOMPSON

Storytelling appears central to our contemporary preoccupations. Philippe Roussin calls it the grand narrative of the present.¹ Evidence of the resurgence of storytelling as a way of making sense of different realities abounds on both sides of the Atlantic. The denigrating term fake news treats all reporting as just another form of fictional storytelling. In the spheres of business² and medicine,³ the power of storytelling has gained ground in a more positive way as a strategic tool for success. Ted Talks and StoryCorps are examples of different media that embrace storytelling’s ability to relay information in a compelling way, capturing both the uniqueness of each storyteller and the underlying humanity of each individual story. French marketing specialist Philippe Lentschener goes beyond the individual to ask how France can tell its story to the world (se raconter).⁴ A related lexicon peppers commonplaces in both English and French,⁵ while a narrative turn has characterized academic theories across disciplines since roughly the 1980s.⁶ At the same time, storytelling is a basic function of humans, an intrinsic part of most cultures, a practice common to all eras. For historian Hayden White, storytelling remains a human universal.⁷ Its value to society has been debated at least since Plato sought to ban poets from the Republic. Contemporary associations of storytellers propose this atemporal human activity as a way of finding meaning in our global, technological present. Yet storytelling remains firmly entrenched in historical and cultural contexts, determined by changing power dynamics.

One way in which this volume contributes something new to the study of storytelling is to examine it through a specific cross-cultural, historical lens. Carlo Ginzburg reminds us that narratives are amalgams of the true, the false, and the possible, and as such reveal much about the epistemic paradigms of the societies that create them.⁸ During the sixteenth century in France, a period of dramatic social, cultural, technological, and political transformation, people turned to storytelling to define and redefine specific communities and identities and to attempt to negotiate with opposing communities and ideas as well as with prevailing master narratives. The contributors in this volume bring a novel understanding of what can be understood as a story in a twenty-first-century context to bear on analyses of sixteenth-century French stories. As psychologist Jerome Bruner has suggested, Life is not ‘how it was’ but how it is interpreted and reinterpreted, told and retold.⁹ Through our own storytelling, inflected and informed by contemporary concerns, we can uncover new angles on epistemological practices that were evolving in the sixteenth century and thus enhance our understanding of French society in this period.

The correlation between these two periods of history is not arbitrary. The transition between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, during which time technological discoveries revolutionized the way information was shared, gave rise to a concern with processing and evaluating unprecedented amounts of information; the early modern period provided a similar challenge with the explosion of print culture. Confronted with an overwhelming volume of often contradictory narratives, contemporaries (then and now) resorted to storytelling to try to order this information and make sense of their lives. Similarly, globalizing forces in today’s world put pressure on national identities and agendas and question traditional cultural and religious narratives, giving new voice to minorities and dissenters within societies. The globalization of the twenty-first century is hardly the same as that which took place during the sixteenth, but the questioning of geographic and political borders today can make us as readers more sensitive to ways in which stories were used to construct national identity and negotiate power in early modern France.

In that period of French history, storytelling pervaded all domains of knowledge. So to identify common patterns that transcended disciplines and genres, the contributors in this volume explore storytelling as it was linked to different types of knowledge. As Pléiade poetry gave a new life to storytelling by rejuvenating many mythological stories, fictional prose was establishing its legitimacy. Early modern authors discovered the implications of a crucial transformation from collective reading to an increasingly private, individual consumption of books. In their development of a more secular early modern historiography, historians of all types, and in particular writers of memoirs, incorporated the anecdotal to depict personal experience and adapted storytelling techniques to serve their moralizing and political objectives. In the sermons and propaganda literature of this period of religious disruption, preachers and pastors used stories to persuade and convert. Pedagogues, aided by increasingly affordable books, relied on storytelling to pass on wisdom and inspire future generations. Physicians and midwives resorted to storytelling as well to record and justify their empirical discoveries in health care, yet another domain undergoing radical change during this period. Storytelling also flourished in visual arts, such as through tapestries, stained glass panes, architectural designs and decorative features, paintings, and woodcuts, and reflected shifting esthetic standards. Some of these art forms, in addition to demonstrating the unique way of telling stories associated with each medium, also include text, thus suggesting ways in which two systems of signifying (pictorial and textual) can intersect to create still other techniques of narrating.

Perhaps the most daunting challenge in examining sixteenth-century French stories in light of a twenty-first-century understanding of storytelling lies in the very word story itself. It is difficult enough to define this type of narrative in either French or English; centuries of critical literature on storytelling have not led to a concise, accepted definition. The word evokes at once specific genres with their literary rules and parameters and a more general expression that defies such restrictions. Compounding the difficulties is the problem of writing in English about a French phenomenon. The French lexicon related to stories has evolved in strikingly different ways than the English one. The noun storytelling in English facilitates an analysis of the act of narrating itself, since the gerund form directs our attention to a process. No equivalent noun exists in French, and the French verb that describes the process (raconter) more clearly evokes an oral tradition with a particular type of short traditional story (conte) that could be told over and over again. To begin with the word narrative, however, places the emphasis on the decisions inherent in structuring a story and on the perspective from which it is told. Another alternative, récit (meaning the presentation of events), conjures the notion of performance, but not of exchange. The persisting ambiguity in French between the notions of history and story (histoire, in both cases), for its part, lends itself well to a study of the significant overlap between historical narratives and fictional storytelling.

Sixteenth-century French texts reveal yet another shift in storytelling terminology: The terms histoire, conte, compte, nouvelle, discours, exemple, fable, récit, and chronique were sometimes used interchangeably in a linguistic flux that no longer exists today. In other texts of the period, these terms were used to juxtapose different types of stories, their functions, and their reception. In early modern English, historie and storie existed as separate words, but they continued to be used interchangeably as well. Story existed as a verb as well as a noun. The noun relation, expanded the English options for synonyms and privileged the act of relating and the connections it establishes. In both French and English, the terms that referred to stories also retained a connotation of mendacity and frivolity (fable, tale, etc.), inflections that are difficult to gauge from our historical distance. These terms likewise privileged verbal storytelling, although the words history and histoire could also refer, in the sixteenth century, to visual forms. Related terms used to evoke narrative, like framing (le cadre) or narrative thread (le fil conducteur) further orient us toward tangible forms of storytelling, such as those used in painting and tapestry.

To choose a single term or definition of story would inevitably limit a complex and rich subject of inquiry and fail to convey the exploratory and fluid nature of sixteenth-century storytelling, both in the theorization of stories and in the different forms they assumed.¹⁰ By adopting a cross-cultural, cross-linguistic approach, this volume opens up the discussion of storytelling beyond the terms that have defined it in theories from both sides of the Atlantic. The articles included reflect both the polysemy of these terms and the recurrence of particular terms in particular contexts. The refusal to restrict language and definitions from the outset permits both a general analysis of terminology and a theorization of narrative forms at the micro level. More importantly, this approach facilitates the identification of significant patterns in storytelling that transcend those implied by literary terms and generic categories, complicated by layers of literary associations over the centuries.

The essays in this volume adopt a relational approach to storytelling. It is striking, for example, that all of the essays evoke the notion of interaction: between writing and orality, storyteller and audience, past and present readers, different modes of expression, utility and pleasure, art and truth, the common and the exceptional. The volume itself was born out of a form of interactive storytelling—a journée d’étude organized by Colette H. Winn and Emily Thompson at Washington University in April 2016. They invited scholars from different disciplines to look to storytelling for insight into the ways that men and women in sixteenth-century France chose to relate the society around them. Ten scholars came to St. Louis to share their perspectives and to engage in conversation about storytelling choices. What commonalities existed between different expressions, media, and functions of storytelling? Did they share rules, figures, and codes? Did particular storytelling techniques pass from one domain to others? Can we speak of hierarchies of storytelling? And, most importantly, how did key changes during the century (like printing or the confrontation with new religious communities, for example) impact both the practice and the perception of storytelling? At the end of the day of presentations, the scholars gathered for a concluding session during which they identified a series of recurring tensions and storytelling techniques that appeared to hold particular significance in the context of sixteenth-century France.

Focusing on storytelling rather than on the story—on the connections between related stories and between stories and their tellers more than on the internal structure of any single story—brings different techniques to the fore. Most notably, it is not the sequential nature of events that seems central in storytelling; instead, it is the veritable web of interrelated narratives and elements. The type of reading that this web implies, of course, evokes the way the internet is currently modifying the act of reading. The same lexicon, however, also recalls older forms of visual storytelling, like tapestries and other weaving arts that have given us the fil conducteur—the thread of the story, interwoven plot lines, and so on. Likewise, the cutting and pasting of interchangeable parts is not just a virtual exercise but one that was practiced quite literally by compilateurs of the sixteenth century.¹¹ These storytelling techniques draw the attention of the reader to the borders, to the seams that might be located throughout the story and not just to the moments highlighted by chronological sequencing. Another technique heavily used by the storytellers examined in this volume is layering. Palimpsests functioned both intentionally and unintentionally, as storytellers built upon traditional stories and readers recalled multiple preceding versions. What became apparent, too, was the significance of the sheer volume of story versions. Proliferation as a technique emphasized creative possibilities and helped undermine a sense of hierarchy in storytelling. Freed from the physical constraints of an oral storytelling setting, stories in the era of printing assumed a different relationship to notions of authority and origin.

If the wider dissemination of stories also meant that individual storytellers could no longer effectively anticipate the interpretative context in which their stories might be received, it incited them to exploit the emotional dimension of storytelling in order to manipulate readers as best they could without being physically present. The techniques of proliferation, layering, interchanging and reintegrating story elements, and redirecting readerly responses seem to have been common techniques to achieve this effect.

The essays in this volume suggest three axes along which to analyze early modern French storytelling: the transformation of a historical event into a narrative, the negotiation with an implied reader, and the decision to repurpose older story forms. Each of these axes explores tensions that arise around the storytelling seams, where storytellers and readers, past and present versions, and a web of collaborators and overlapping references come together.

Putting the Real into Words

The first of these axes is the most familiar. The transformation of history into story and the choices that this process implies are necessarily affected by the historical era and social context. To wit, the term historier succinctly captures this in an early modern lexicon. Randle Cotgrave defined this French term as to write, to compile Histories, but also to flourish and beautifie … with Histories.¹² He specified that what is thus enhanced can be wainscot or tapiseries. According to the Analyse et traitement informatique de la langue française (ATILF) Dictionnaire du moyen français, the French term could either mean to write, to decorate, or to represent (as in theatrically).¹³ And the Larousse du moyen français defines historier as mettre en récit or broder une histoire.¹⁴ Captured thus in this single term is the process of how to represent history, how to embellish it, and what forms to choose in order to tell it. Four of the contributors focus on this act.

In chapter 1, The Memorialist and the Historian: A Tale of Two Storytellers, Amy Graves Monroe examines the identity and the authority of the storyteller in order to distinguish between types of written history that developed through the early modern era: histories, memoirs, and historical novels. She considers the notion of impartiality as a goal for storytellers in the writing of history, evoking the tensions between loyalty to a specific community or ideology, on the one hand, and the desire to convey broad truths and to respect mimesis, on the other: a tension between the vraisemblable and the vrai. In so doing, she points us toward an alternative neutrality, one closer to an in-betweenness, an ever-adjusting middle position.

While Graves Monroe insists on the significance of the specific social identity of the storyteller in establishing the authority of the story, in chapter 2, " ‘Ceste histoire veritable’: Women’s Narrative and Truth-Telling in the Comptes amoureux and the Angoisses douloureuses," Kathleen Loysen looks at associations with one particular kind of storyteller, coded as feminine. She, too, describes a type of balancing of perspectives in order to attain a shared truth. In the literary examples she analyzes, the Comptes amoureux and the Angoisses douloureuses, the structure of the texts ensures a multiplicity of voices through reenacted storytelling and other forms of reported speech. The tension here is not so much between different generic conventions, but between oral speech and written text. The emphasis on the act of storytelling itself underlines the significance of exchange and transaction in order to create meaning and a recognizable truth. If a common identity and shared ideology are helpful in creating a story that will seem credible, then narrators of the fictional works that Loysen examines are driven to generate more and more stories in order to convince an obstinate reader, who is silent but omnipresent.

In chapter 3, "The Queen’s Quandary: Storytelling in Jeanne d’Albret’s Ample Déclaration, Marian Rothstein evokes another such looming, resistant reader. Although much of this text and the particular story that Rothstein examines seem to address d’Albret’s coreligionists, Rothstein suggests that Catherine de’ Medici is the reader whom d’Albret hopes to sway with her writing. Rothstein reminds us not only of the epistemological and emotional paradigms" necessary to interpret and believe the simplest of stories, but also of the didactic and political intentions behind such stories. Like the other authors in this section, she looks at stories that seek not just to describe, but also to justify events.

Finally, in chapter 4, "Telling the True and the Real in the Canards Sanglants," David LaGuardia turns our attention to a specific genre, the canard, and the different kinds of realities that these violent stories bring to light: social, religious, national, and economic identities. Here again, the exchange of story between storyteller and implied reader is based on a shared understanding of social signifiers and Christian ideology. The canards structure these stories in language that is never neutral but always already part of a fight for domination in establishing the real through storytelling.

Playing with Expectations

The second section of the collection assembles analyses of sixteenth-century authors who deliberately chose a form that seemed incompatible with the message they wished to convey. The narrativization of medical theory (in the case of Girolamo Fracastoro), of diplomatic news (in the case of Lancelot de Carle), of the moralizing of ancient history (in the case of Henri Estienne), or the reorientation of serious stories into comic ones (in the case of Brantôme) all force different generic conventions to intersect. These surprising stylistic choices lend themselves well to equally paradoxical content. Dora Polachek writes of the readers’ cognitive dissonance, while Emily Thompson refers to imposed, alternate readings. The kind of active, critical reading that is triggered by these unexpected narrative forms correlates with the didactic objectives of Fracastoro, Carle, and Estienne, who seek to inform but reject moral and political dogmatism. This kind of pedagogic approach also procures what Brantôme terms un double plaisir for the reader, for whom the literal meaning is at odds with other readings the tension generates. The combination of surprising form and content liberated from a generic reading constitutes a creative catalyst that engenders disruptive readings. All of the texts in question champion a certain kind of literariness that has the power to astonish readers and provoke their curiosity. Despite the association of stories with fiction and artifice, the authors claim to be aiming for a deeper truth, not accessible through conventionally serious genres. They struggle to make sense out of complex materials through their own personalized storytelling as well as by tapping into the emotions of their readers. They tread a fine line between harnessing what Winn refers to as readers’ will to believe and an active skepticism. To rely only on the verisimilar, as Estienne warns his readers, is to miss truths that do not neatly comply with conventions. The astonishing event requires an astonishing form of narration to challenge readers in their understanding of truth.

All four of these sixteenth-century authors (Fracastoro, Carle, Estienne, and Brantôme) likewise targeted a wider readership though the story form. Using eyewitness accounts, dialogue, and direct appeals to emotion, they created an immediacy in their work that defies the apparent timelessness of the story form. Even a recognizably ‘retro’ aesthetic choice, as JoAnn DellaNeva (in chapter 6) calls Carle’s poetic rendering of Anne Boleyn’s story, emphasizes the deliberately subjective and personal approach of this dispatch, thus widening its appeal. With its deceptive familiarity, the story lures more readers but engages them in an uneasy reading experience, wherein their expectations, beliefs, and temporal frameworks are all thrown into question.

In chapter 5, "Urania in Physician’s Robes, or Poetry in the Service of Medicine: Girolamo Fracastoro, Syphilis sive morbus gallicus (1530)," Colette Winn analyzes these dynamics in Fracastoro’s frequently translated, multibook exploration of the causes, cures, and significance of syphilis. Fracastoro integrates mythology, medical case histories, and religious and moral teachings to tell the story of syphilis from several different perspectives. His innovative use of poetic storytelling provides us with one of the first examples of narrative medicine and so belies the uniqueness of today’s popular narrative medicine.

In chapter 6, Storytelling at the Crossroads of Diplomacy, History, and Poetry: ‘The Story of the Death of Anne Boleyn, Queen of England,’ by Lancelot de Carle, JoAnn DellaNeva examines a sixteenth-century account of the death of Anne Boleyn and the significance of the diplomatic secretary Carle’s choice to tell it in verse and through the words of different storytellers. Carle’s narrative makes the shocking events surrounding Anne’s beheading intelligible for a French readership while highlighting his own poetic talents and authority as an eyewitness to parts of the story. The liberties he takes with conveying this event to a French readership recall more recent retellings of the Anne Boleyn story that weave together known facts with imagined motivations, to the delight of curious readers.

In chapter 7, In Defense of Stories: Henri Estienne Reclaims the Story Collection for a New Readership, Emily Thompson focuses on the printer and humanist Henri Estienne and his self-conscious defense of stories used in the Apologie pour Hérodote to prove the relevance of Herodotus to sixteenth-century readers. Estienne’s many self-contradictions reveal a complex strategy to appeal to distinct types of readers and to address several key humanist paradoxes. Like all the modern contributors to this volume, he reflects upon the difficulty of reading stories from the past in light of contemporary preoccupations.

To conclude this section, Dora Polachek (chapter 8) turns our attention to another reader-turned-writer who recognized the potential of the story form in "Recasting the Heptaméron Novellas in Brantôme’s Vie des dames galantes." She demonstrates the way in which Brantôme exploits well-known stories in his Vies des dames galantes and recasts them in a dramatically different frame. She, too, suggests the power of certain readings that can continue to filter a text for readers centuries after publication.

Repurposing Stories through Shifting Forms

The essays in the final section force a reconsideration of the definition of story and the limits not just of genres, but also of material and immaterial forms. In their analyses of stories woven into tapestries, musical contrafacta, and fossils, the contributors reveal many similarities with the written, textual stories explored in the previous sections. These stories also signify with their form alone, separate from the events they recount. They reinforce larger cultural messages and are agents, too, in the production of culture and ideologies. Particularly striking for the interests of this volume, these disparate forms of storytelling often rely on the same reading practices. They are used to explain, inform, remind, and legitimate, and as such can be viewed as part of the proliferation of stories of all forms that signify in part through repetition and compilation. The material and musical stories also share a flexibility with textual stories, consisting of interchangeable parts, physical mobility, and the ability to adapt to different contexts. Context, however, is deeply questioned by all of these stories. Because they adapt to contexts that are sometimes completely contradictory to their initial ones, and because of their surprising longevity, we can wonder, along with Phillip John Usher, whether a focus on narrow historical contexts is the most fruitful way to consider storytelling. The woven, sung, and fossilized versions leave us with stories that, despite their parallels with textual narratives, suggest ways in which stories can no longer, or not yet, be fully intelligible to us. These shifting forms, adapting to contemporary readers, also contain traces of earlier forms that are more difficult for us to access.

In chapter 9, Sex, Salvation, Extermination: Contrafacta and the French Wars of Religion, Cathy Yandell studies the way that secular tunes were refashioned into religious propaganda during the Wars of Religion. Yandell concludes that, beyond the effects of the rhythm and retained words that recall the earlier secular context, the contrafacta provide us with a vital sensory entry into the polemic worlds of the past, despite the diminishing auditory sensitivity of modern readers who privilege other senses.

In chapter 10, Storytelling in Tapestry: Examples for a French Queen, Sheila ffolliott considers various sensory experiences. She details the ways in which a tapestry border or the cartoons used to prepare a tapestry allowed for a single, basic visual story to be repurposed. Other parts of the storytelling process are not so easy to reproduce, however. She describes the rooms and lighting that helped tapestries tell their stories in the sixteenth century, conditions that are rarely recreated today when displaying surviving tapestries. In describing the metallic thread and shiny objects that protrude from the surface of tapestries, ffolliott evokes, too, the interplay of an enlivened surface and a mimetic illusion that today’s observer may find difficult to reconcile.

The fossil stories that Phillip John Usher examines in chapter 11, The Night before Geology: Fossil Stories from Early Modern France, explore an even more radical tension between continuity and rupture in storytelling. His inquiry confronts a culturally determined historical context with the geological now in order to tell a story that includes the material world and its shifting forms. The fossil stories that he asks us to consider hold the promise of new stories, as yet undiscovered within each familiar one, as well as a novel link to the physical environment that can connect us to the lost sixteenth century in yet other ways.

Although this volume examines storytelling through three different lenses, the essays here overlap in multiple meaningful ways. Stories call for the ordering and reordering of narrative elements out of an indiscriminate jumble (described alternatively as tas, ramas, or balayures) in which the contemporary reader might encounter them. Verbs and their synonyms, like astound, legitimate/justify, and proliferate, recur in the study of very different stories. The contributors examine ways in which the structure of stories either produces meaning, as it is appropriated and reappropriated by different storytellers, or resists specific functions. Beyond the material forms that they assume, these early modern stories reflect the deliberate shaping of a distinctly French identity. Although the contributors closely study the structural and literary qualities of specific stories, they do so within a specifically defined social context. Several contributors remind us of material and economic contexts that cast the more familiar biblical and literary stories into a new light. The essays in this volume comment extensively on specific markers of class, gender, and religious identity that can enhance our understanding of a story and its reception.

As older epistemic paradigms were challenged, sixteenth-century storytellers turned to a form of expression that remained intelligible, but that also permitted them the flexibility to transform familiar material to comment on new realities. Beneath the veneer of entertainment, they tackled controversial issues in diverse areas (political, religious, social, scientific). Authors sought to inform, comfort, unsettle, and manipulate readers, and they did so by appealing to their emotions, but also by engaging different senses. The storytellers were cognizant of an ethical dimension to their practice and often sought explicitly to legitimize their stories in moral terms. Hanna Meretoja’s understanding of the ethics of storytelling sheds light on both the sixteenth-century stories examined in this volume and the articles analyzing them: Literature can expand the culturally available repertoire of narrative models in relation to which we can (re)interpret our experiences and lives. It can also function as a form of alternative historiography that provides us with experiential access to the past, thereby helping us imagine both what has been and what could be.¹⁵ This volume attempts to reimagine what was in sixteenth-century France, using narrative models from the twenty-first century. Thinking through early modern stories enables contemporary critics to move beyond constricting master narratives of our own time, offering us alternate elements and perspectives with which to reconstruct the stories of today. As Graves Monroe states in the opening essay, storytelling was and remains a craft with consequences.

Notes

Many thanks to Kathleen Loysen, who provided invaluable help in organizing and editing this introduction.

1. Philippe Roussin, What Is Your Narrative? Lessons from the Narrative Turn, in Emerging Vectors of Narratology, ed. Per Krogh Hansen, John Pier, Philippe Roussin, and Wolf Schmid (Boston: De Gruyter, 2017), 399.

2. Roger Dean Duncan, Tap the Power of Storytelling, Forbes, January 4, 2014, https://www.forbes.com/sites/rodgerdeanduncan/2014/01/04/tap-the-power-of-storytelling/#75f82bad614a; Steve Denning, Telling Tales, Harvard Business Review, May 2004, https://hbr.org/2004/05/telling-tales; Le Storytelling: Raconter une histoire pour valoriser son cabinet, Les Echos, May 10, 2018, https://www.com-experts.fr/le-blog-communication-des-experts/le-storytelling-raconter-une-histoire-pour-valoriser-son-cabinet.

3. Consider, for example, Alexander C. Kafka, Why Storytelling Matters in Fields beyond the Humanities, Chronicle of Higher Education 65, no. 6 (2018): 1; Rita Charon and Sayantani DasGupta, The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

4. Philippe Lentschener, Comment la France peut-elle se raconter au monde, filmed December 14, 2015, in Paris, Tedx Talks video, 8:40, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Re8yzqnadaM.

5. Consider these examples: that’s a likely story, to make a long story short, it’s the same old story, that’s the story of my life, to live to tell the tale, an old wives’ tale, "raconter n’importe quoi (to talk nonsense), raconter des salades (to spin yarns), ne pas raconter des histoires (not to invent stories), en faire une histoire (to make a big deal out of something), and c’est toute une histoire" (it’s a long story).

6. See Roussin, What Is Your Narrative?, or Hanna Meretoja, The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible (Oxford: Oxford University Press,