Sensibilité à la douleur et compassion chez Robert Challe : de l’expérience et l’attendrissement à une réflexion sur la nature humaine

This paper assumes that the most vivid existential experience that Challe had during the voyage he reported in the Journal d ’un voyage fait aux Indes orientales (The Diary of a Voyage to the East Indies) was the experience of pain and the spectacle of pain. It shows that the lyrical idea of “softening of the heart” endowing sensitivity with the statute of human disposition for virtue par excellence inspires and feeds the writing of the voyage. By a reflection on the various figures of “softening of the heart” described and staged in the Diary it intends to shed some light not only on the anthropological but also on the metaphysical discoveries of a traveller nurtured by operas such as Challe. He can be seen, day after day, outlining a new conception of the idea of nature thanks to accidental experiences always confronted with the learning from books in which his sensitivity to the lyrical art may take a part.