A lucid dream
"I have just reread this book which seemed to me even more masterpiece than the first time." By what charm Baudelaire, and later Proust, did they succumb to the pen of Barbey d'Aurevilly? One enters L'Ensorcelée as one plunges into a dream, in the middle of the "wild and famous" heath of Lessay. The Norman landscape, nourished by legends, calls to the history of the souls who inhabited it. This is how a herbarium tells us about the strange adventures of an abbé chouan having lived "a life of passions and vices". On the menu: redemption, stoning and suicide. Is everything true? The author multiplies the effects of reality and the embedded narratives, until speaking in the language of the soil. "Poetry for me exists only at the bottom of reality and reality speaks patois." But this realism is a mask placed on a dreamlike prose. We advance on a thread stretched between the visible and the invisible, without really knowing what is going on ... As in a dream.
Fantasy reality
Barbey is not scary, he worries. From the start of his story, the author envelops his characters in an evil halo. As the narrator and the herbarium move forward in the dark, the latter's mare is injured. The man is convinced of it, a shepherd has cast a curse on him. Our skepticism prevents us from believing it when bells ring the "terrible and horrible" mass of the abbé chouan. Too late, we have sunk into the supernatural. If the author makes signs to us, you have to be a nyctalope to spot them in this novel governed by shadows. Almost everything goes by looks and the devil hides in the details. Are we really succumbing to succubat? Barbey does not breathe a word. If the story is oral, it is mostly woven with silence, ellipses and occult meanings. This is what makes reading it as disturbing and bewitching as a grimoire.
A symbolic poetry
Barbey d'Aurevilly read, among others, Balzac when writing L'Ensorcelée. We then understand why the author is like a painter in his text. Somewhat aesthetic, he dwells on the study of the characters of his characters to better give them a thickness. Finally, if they are not of paper but of flesh, they never eat ... They have no more heart, which is surprising in a novel which speaks of the violence of passions and impulses. But L'Ensorcelée is less a psychological novel than a book of symbolic poems. His creatures are literally "acts of creation", lyrical schemes. Jeanne is a kind of Ophelia and the ugly and magnificent Abbé chouan, a Byron character. Through their prism takes shape the writer's despair for his time and his taste for the past, divine source of life and poetry.
L'Ensorcelée, De Barbey d'Aurevilly, Folio, 320 p., € 6.90.
