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Avant-propos

Matilde Manara

Un amour « modèle » : faire remonter Albertine du coeur au cerveau

Pauline Mettan
Albertine’s captivity, made real in La Prisonnière, makes her accessible to the narrator. She is available both in his pursuit of pleasure and in his search for truth. This article seeks to show that the narrator constitutes Albertine as an object of knowledge. By living alongside her, he is able not only to call into question forms of knowledge current in his time, but also to develop an analytical model capable of accounting for the conflicts tearing apart French society at the beginning of the twentieth century.

« L’Appel d’Albertine » de Yan Bin, la rectification morale d’un « être de fuite » dans le contexte chinois

Yangjie Zhao
Yan Bin’s short story “L’Appel d’Albertine” (A’erbeidina de huhuan, Beijing, Zuojia, 2024 [2021]) rewrites Albertine’s fate. In Proust’s novel, the narrator keeps the young woman captive and, suspecting her of homosexuality, sees her disappear without ever hearing from her again. In response, the Chinese short story gives Albertine a brother, who brings a defamation suit against the “Mémoires de Marcel”. In his plea, his innocent sister is shown fleeing the perverse Marcel and the corrupt capital in search of redemption. This “transfiction” offers a literary counter-model in the context of debates on women’s emancipation in modern China.

Un modèle féminin ambivalent : la Shéhérazade proustienne

Florence Godeau
This article examines the powerful links between figures of captivity and flight in Proust, especially Albertine, and the character of Scheherazade in The Thousand and One Nights, a major intertext of the Recherche. It successively considers three paradigms embodied by the sultana of the Indies, who is both a double of Proust’s Narrator and a possible “model” for Albertine : that of the captive wife, at her husband’s mercy ; that of the seductress, skilled in the art of captivating tales ; and finally that of the artist of flight.

Capitalisations, héritages et solidarité : économie et femmes de la Recherche

Ludovico Monaci
In light of the elements of continuity and rupture between the French realist tradition and Proust’s work, this article examines the economic patterns associated with several women in the Recherche, in relation to their social background and trajectory. By distinguishing, on the one hand, the modes and models of wealth management and, on the other, the different strata that make up Proustian society, our aim is to show how female figures are exemplary in economic matters, exemplary here in the sense of representative.

Résister aux maîtres : Françoise contre tous pendant la Grande Guerre

Giuseppina Mecchia
In Le Temps retrouvé, Françoise, who has long resisted both her employers and certain characters from her own social class, is confronted with new forms of discursive subjection as the Great War breaks out. As always, her resistance unfolds on an intersectional level, shaped by conflicts tied to her gender, her social position, and the particularities of her use of language. Her verbal struggles with the protagonist-narrator begin with her first appearance in Combray, but during the war they take on an intensity that invites rereading through the lens of a genuine socio-politics of dispute between speaking subjects. Some critics have already drawn attention to this aspect of Françoise’s character. It is nevertheless striking that no study has been devoted to her in Le Temps retrouvé, even though she is the only woman with whom the protagonist shares his home.During the war, Françoise is an older working-class woman whose position as a servant in an upper-bourgeois household gives her access to men in positions of power. Faced both with the terror threatening her family and loved ones and with nationalist propaganda, which she interprets in her own way, she draws on her experience in espionage and in decoding the discourse of her employers. She is in fact steadfastly committed to rescuing the young men she cares about from anonymity and slaughter. At the same time, she must defend herself against the sadistic traps set by the concierge of the Guermantes residence, who exemplifies the pleasure a certain kind of masculinity takes in placing female subjects in a position of epistemic deficit. The narrator, too, takes pleasure in humiliating a woman who keeps an attentive and intelligent eye on him, mocking her mistakes in French and her limited grasp of international politics. And yet he also admires her resistance to the absurdities of indoctrination. As an older woman, socially subordinate and speaking a minority language, the “old servant” thus constructs a genuine counter-discourse that enables her to preserve her epistemic and pragmatic agency.

Le sortilège de la connaissance et la désorientation queer dans À la recherche du temps perdu

Valentina Tibaldo
This article explores the question of knowledge in relation to art and experience through the prism of a spell whose powerful effects are difficult to assess : to what extent are what we live and think the effects of an enchantment ? In my view, Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu can shed light on the fear of disenchantment and its consequences. I draw on the work of Leo Bersani to analyze the spells cast over the novel by certain philosophical and literary models. Jealousy emerges here as a specific form of fear of disenchantment, one that leads to dynamics of possession and violence. Drawing on Sara Ahmed, I examine moments of disorientation to explore their queer potential, especially their capacity to allow Albertine to slip away. As Ahmed emphasizes in Queer Phenomenology, disorientation arises when a familiar object suddenly escapes us : it is not radical in itself, but depends on how we respond to that rupture and to the new directions it makes possible. The article focuses on the figure of Albertine, asking how sexual orientation traces lines and trajectories that may also veer off course. Rather than approaching Albertine’s lesbianism from a historical or biographical perspective, I consider it here as a device of disorientation, with particular attention to readings and forms that preserve its ambiguity. Anne Carson’s The Albertine Workout allows me to reflect on the work of interpreting Proust’s text, as well as on lesbianism as an elusive element that escapes the narrator’s logic of possession.

Albertine au cinéma : étude comparative de deux perspectives féminines

Ariadne Baresch
Proust’s novel cycle has inspired numerous adaptations across a wide range of genres. This article examines the approaches of two women filmmakers, Chantal Akerman (La Captive, 2000) and Nina Companeez (À la recherche du temps perdu, 2011), to trace a conception of the feminine through the character of Albertine. The comparison combines a quantitative analysis of cinematic elements with a study of how the feminine is represented through its relation to art. Each director amplifies certain motifs in continuity with Proustian aesthetics. Both depict a young woman navigating a patriarchal order. Whereas Akerman presents an Ariane who is both static and ambivalent, Companeez portrays a dynamic character whose development follows a linear trajectory.

À propos de la « fonction idéologique » chez Proust. Modèles éthiques contre-hégémoniques dans À la recherche du temps perdu

Nicole Siri
Based on an analysis of the ethical positions and postures embodied, within the fictional world of À la recherche du temps perdu, by secondary characters whose views run counter to those of the narrator-protagonist, this article examines the possibility of reading the Recherche against its own narrator. Beyond the vexata quaestio of the relationship between Marcel Proust and the narrator of his novel, the aim is to foreground another distinction that is just as fundamental, though less consistently emphasized in Proustian criticism : the distinction between the narrator’s voice, as a character situated within the novel’s fictional world, and the fictional world of the Recherche as a whole.

Le spectacle de la nature et ses impacts personnels et artistiques sur André Breton

Sophie Bastien
A city-dweller deeply attached to Paris, André Breton found himself in the midst of nature only in exceptional circumstances, such as on a honeymoon. One chapter of L’Amour fou (1937) recounts the newlyweds’ visit to the Canary Islands, while part of Arcane 17 (1947) relates Breton’s stay in the Gaspé Peninsula with his last wife. On both occasions, communion with nature heightens romantic passion and stimulates artistic creativity. In Arcane 17, moreover, it restores a sensibility shattered by personal trials and by the Second World War.

De la réversibilité entre réel et imaginaire dans les tableaux d’Elstir. Approche phénoménologique de la peinture chez Marcel Proust

Loubna Abahani
In the paintings of Elstir, the only painter in the Recherche, the real and the imaginary stand in a relation of dialogue, exchange, mutual enfolding, and reversibility, much as they do in Merleau-Ponty’s ontology. By treating imagination not simply as the faculty of producing and using images, but as the mode of givenness of the thing itself (the thing in person), Proust grants it a foundational role in the definition of reality. Although reality retains its resistance, it is bound up with an imaginary dimension open to infinity ; it is therefore subject to multiple metamorphoses and defined by instability. Elstir’s pictorial art gives full expression to this through metaphor, which is better able to recreate, on the stylistic and artistic levels, a reality that is both total and plural.

La retraite des maîtresses royales : une clef pour La Princesse de Clèves ?

Jiguang He
Working within the dual framework of the roman à clef and a comparative reading of Mme de Lafayette’s fictional and historical writing – approaches so insightfully developed by Alain Niderst and Patrick Dandrey –, we advance the hypothesis that the figure of Louise de La Vallière, both a historical character and an imaginary heroine, may constitute one of the novel’s keys. Her love affair with the king and her spiritual journey were well known to her contemporaries, among them Mme de Sévigné, a close friend of the presumed author of La Princesse de Clèves, and her conversion was exalted by Bossuet in the sermon delivered when she took the veil. Mme de Clèves would thus appear as a transfigured Louise de La Vallière : refined, idealized, and shaped by that process of “transposition, metamorphosis, and disguise” (Patrick Dandrey) through which the novel transforms its historical sources.

Patrick Thériault : Le tout dernier Baudelaire, Paris, Hermann, 2025

Alain Vaillant

Réponse à Alain Vaillant

Patrick Thériault

Un patrimoine privé en héritage : notes sur le fonds Joseph-Édouard Perrault

Sabrina Vervacke

Lettres de George Sand à sa fille Solange Dudevant

Noëlline Pellerin