French Literature Reviews - 2026
B. Marchal, Salomé. Entre vers et prose
Novel and Narrative Prose
Bertrand Marchal
Salomé. Entre vers et prose Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Flaubert, Huysmans
Paris, Corti, 2005, 298 p., 22 €
Publisher's overview:
"This woman they call fatal": the witty formula that serves as the subtitle for Mireille Dottin-Orsini's definitive book on literary representations of the fin-de-siècle woman provides the most fitting introduction to the myth of Salome and its countless variations in the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th. The aim of this book—which brings together, after a brief Baudelairean preamble, three successive excursions through the texts and pre-texts of Mallarmé's *Hérodiade*, Flaubert's *Hérodias*, and Huysmans's *À rebours*—is quite different. It is by no means about determining whether "Mallarmé's *Hérodiade*, like Flaubert's *Salammbô*, is an hysterical figure melting away in hieratic indolence," nor about assessing the role of masochism in Jokanaan-Saint John. Rather, through three landmark works, it seeks to demonstrate that the figure whom the Gospels do not even name—she is simply the daughter of Herodias, who danced and pleased Herod—is not merely, whatever her name, the contemporary avatar of the eternal femme fatale, or of perennial misogyny, revealing the castration anxieties of poets and novelists. She is not just a historical-psychiatric symptom, but a distinctly literary and aesthetic stake in the history of forms and representation. Whether her model is real or imaginary, literary or pictorial, whether rendered in verse, in prose, or dreamed of as the resolution of this common division, the figure of Salome haunts creators of both the 19th and 20th centuries.
A leading specialist on Mallarmé, Bertrand Marchal is the editor of his works in the *Bibliothèque de la Pléiade*. He has published with Corti: *La Religion de Mallarmé* (1988) as well as his doctoral thesis on the poet, which is now out of print.
The nineteenth century witnessed a profound fascination with the figure of Salome across various aesthetic domains, making her a recurrent motif in French literature and painting. Authors of the period frequently returned to biblical and historical subjects, reinterpreting them through distinct stylistic lenses to address contemporary concerns about representation, form, and the role of the creator in modern society.
Bertrand Marchal's study examines texts by Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Flaubert, and Huysmans to explore how the figure functions within the history of literary forms. Rather than treating the subject merely through a biographical or psychological framework, the volume focuses on the aesthetic stakes involved in rendering this figure across different genres. Readers interested in nineteenth-century French literature and the evolution of poetic and prose forms may find this volume relevant to their inquiries.