Les Costeaux, ou les marquis friands, comédie, by Jean Donneau de Visé.
Edited by Peter William Shoemaker.

MHRA Critical Texts Vol. 31
ISBN 978-1-907322-33-4
Autumn 2012
Pbk £9.99 / $15.99 / EUR11.99

Image of title-page of Les Costeaux

A critical edition of the 1665 one-act gastronomical play Les Costeaux, ou les marquis friands. Les Costeaux has often been attributed to Claude Deschamps Villiers, a minor playwright associated with the Troupe royale of the Hôtel de Bourgogne in Paris. There are good reasons to doubt this attribution, however, and Jean Donneau de Visé is a much more plausible candidate.

The plot of Les Costeaux revolves around the thinnest of pretexts. Having invited the young Lucille and her mother to dine with him in private, Thersandre has a dilemma: what to do about the parasitic noblemen who regularly visit his table in order to obtain a free meal. Instead of immediately dispatching the freeloaders, Thersandre's maître d'hôtel decides to teach them a lesson by forcing them to wait until the dinner hours has passed before sending them on their way. The bulk of the play thus consists of a group of hungry seventeenth-century nobles discussing the art of fine dining while waiting for a dinner that never arrives. There no solid evidence that the play was ever produced, and it may well have been written to read on the page, rather than performed on the stage. While quite amusing and well-written, the text is primarily interesting as a document that sheds light on seventeenth-century manners, specifically the culinary habits of the upper echelons of polite society.

Peter William Shoemaker is Associate Professor of French in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at The Catholic University of America.

Les Costeaux, ou les marquis friands, comédie, by Jean Donneau de Visé. Edited by Peter William Shoemaker.

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Les Costeaux, ou les marquis friands, comédie, by Jean Donneau de Visé.
Edited by Peter William Shoemaker.