'Armature mystérieuse' et 'Plastique morale': le portrait littéraire selon Mallarmé

When he wants to make the literary portrait of some artist, Mallarmé, rejecting the historian's trivial details and scrupulous chronology, endeavors to draw the global and integral architecture that gives a shape to the man's fate as well as to his work. He is thus led to focus on a figure both intellectual, æsthetic and moral that, in its own way, synthesizes such commitment in the world as is specific to a man who claims to be first and foremost an artist, that is to say someone whose preoccupation is to reveal the truth of the world by creating it anew. In that figure, Mallarmé sees the artist's duty, honor, hope and despair. (In French) (SM)