Sainte-Beuve

de Patrick Labarthe

The literary portraits of Sainte-Beuve are a bit like the Dutch interiors of French literature. If we consider the poet he was - that of Vie, poèmes et pensées de Joseph Delorme, des Consolations and des Pensées d'août - the novelist of Volupté, so much appreciated by Baudelaire and Flaubert, the historian of Port -Royal finally, it is around an ontology of intimacy that the whole work can refocus. This book endeavors to follow the experience and the thought of intimacy at Sainte-Beuve, in its psycho-moral, political and stylistic inflections. A first part brings together these "romantic fables of the subject" that are Joseph Delorme, Volupté and, in its extension, the terminus ad quem of the romantic Eros: Dominique de Fromentin. A second part, based on the assumption that he is nothing more creative than literary enmity, he studies the shackled dialogues with Balzac - the contemporary by far the most hated -, Chateaubriand, and Proudhon. A third part explores the poetics of portraiture and in the Lundis and in what is at the same time a counter-epic of the vanquished of History and the elegy of a finishing religion, the inexhaustible Port-Royal.--Tranlation of page 4 of cover by Librairie Droz.