Portrait de groupe avec buste: la galerie Sainte-Beuve

With anecdotal detail and meticulous documentation, Sainte-Beuve builds his literary portraits as a parodic resistance against the literature he himself could not write. Equally fascinated with the existence and the work of his literary subjects, through an elaborate process of collage/montage, he relocates fragments from the donor's texts – in this case, five forgotten literary women from the beginning of the 19th-century – to his own portraits, the receiver's texts. From one text to another, under Sainte-Beuve's authoritarian écriture, the identity of women-authors fades away, blurring the distinction between who signs and who writes, between the models' portraits and the portraitist's self-portrait. (In French) (RMV)