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Reviewed by:
  • Ce qui ne meurt pas by Barbey D’Aurevilly
  • John West-Sooby
Barbey D’Aurevilly, Ce qui ne meurt pas. Édition par Marie-Françoise Melmoux-Montaubin. (Textes de littérature moderne et contemporaine, 162.) Paris: Honoré Champion, 2015. 600pp.

This is the latest offering in Champion’s re-edition of Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Œuvres romanesques complètes. Initially entitled Germaine, it is thought to have been written in 1834–35 and thus represents the young Barbey’s first novel-length work. It also has the distinction of being the last novel he published during his lifetime, as it was only in 1883 that it saw the light of day. As this fifty-year gap might suggest, Barbey had great difficulty finding a publisher for his manuscript, which he referred to in a letter to his friend and confidant Guillaume-Stanislas Trébutien as his ‘belle au bois dormant’ (in Correspondance générale, 9 vols (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1980–89), iii (1983), 216; 23 June 1853). Ce qui ne meurt pas is not as well known as Barbey’s other novels and has attracted less scholarly attention. It nevertheless features many themes and tropes that will be familiar to readers of his work — its Normandy setting, for example, which the author accentuated as he continued to work on his text over the years. The novel’s marshland topography offers a complementary vision to that of the moors, which provide the setting of L’Ensorcelée (1852). The claustrophobic and gothic atmosphere of this story is likewise reminiscent of many other Barbey texts, as are its psycho-sexual thematics. The novel recounts the obsessive love of the young orphan Allan for his protectress, Yseult de Scudémor (initially named Germaine de Valombre). Allan’s attraction for this older woman is due in large part, and somewhat perversely, to her attitude of indifference, which is the result of her youthful erotic excesses. He eventually marries her daughter, Camille, and it is this relationship that forms the basis for Part Two of the novel. The intertwined stories of these three protagonists allow Barbey to explore themes such as adultery, incest, Sapphic love, matricide, and necrophilia — a heady mix that bears the traces of Chateaubriand’s René and George Sand’s Lélia. This edition of the novel features an extensive critical apparatus: an eighty-two-page Introduction, thirty-four pages of manuscript variations, two appendices reproducing the preface that Barbey wrote in 1835 and contemporary reviews of the novel by Octave Mirbeau and Léon Bloy, a useful bibliography, an index, and numerous footnotes on aspects of the text. This scholarly material is erudite and informative, and will undoubtedly make this an indispensable reference work. The sheer volume of commentary offered here, however, invites reflection on the limits that should be imposed on the critical apparatus in such scholarly editions of texts. The Introduction is especially long, and, when we get to the story itself, the number and volume of the footnotes are often a distraction on the page. The end result is a volume of 600 pages costing €100. This will no doubt prove offputting to interested individuals and even university libraries, subjected these days to tight budgets.

John West-Sooby
University of Adelaide
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