Beneath the Augustinian model, which structures The Princess of Cleves, it is possible to discern the symbolic inheritance of courtoisie. Although reduced to being a competitive accessory within the panoptical universe of the court, it is nevertheless still alive within the princess’s Eros, with its turn towards the impossible. The courtois model, which can be interpreted in the perspective of the period’s debate about Pur Amour, shapes the poetics of the “romance novel” as genre according to an “optics” of misalignment, which creates a mise en abyme of romance as that which is impossible – whereby the novel produces its proper dynamic.