ABSTRACT
In the French court, as in its Spanish and English counterparts, there existed a fascination with the nation’s exotic colonial Others. Throughout the sixteenth century, a dazzling array of masques and pageants depicting encounters between Frenchmen and the indigenous peoples of Canada were performed both in France and in the New World. As we have seen in the previous chapter, these performances (whether theatrical or textual, as was the case with Fontenelle’s putative dialogue between Montezuma and Cortés) underwent a marked transformation at the end of the seventeenth century, with the locus of discursive (and consequently political and cultural) authority hotly disputed between the Old World and the New. In this chapter, in order to contexualize the emergence
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both by Huguenot writers such as Marc Lescarbot and by the Jesuits to articulate and reinforce the notion of France’s Atlantic empire. I then look at one of the most influential performative texts in New World writing, Baron Lahontan’s Dialogues with Adario, and its construction of the Noble Savage. Finally, I analyse French playwright Louis-François de la Drevetière Deslisle’s drama Harlequin Sauvage, which draws heavily on Lahontan’s ideas and casts the Noble Savage as one of the characters in the genre of the commedia dell’arte.
