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Custom, that is to say the rules of collective life, often has no other purpose than to avoid the bad encounter, the bad alliance, for young men and especially for young women. Let no misfortune happen to those who don't fuss … Misfortune, when it happens, is then transformed into fate. We propose here the ethnocritical hypothesis that the realist novel of the 19th century, which makes these “misfortunes” one of its most tried and tested themes, also explores and reveals their individual, but above all social and cultural logics: there is no chance in unhappiness; even less so in sexual unhappiness. This study concerns the paths and “profiles” of the raped woman. It is based upon the case of Renée Béraud Du Châtel, the upper-bourgeoisie heroine of Zola's La Curée, whose aggression is hardly “enromanced” however, and who is not one of those, a priori, that naturalism “destines” for such a fate.
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This article analyses the importance of the artist's studio in some nineteenth-century French novels. In these texts, the studio comprises many typical motifs, repeated from one novel to the next: the difficulty of its access, the particular quality of its lighting, and specific pieces of furniture – mirror, folding screen, stove and divan. Besides these descriptive aspects, the studio also contributes to secure the artist in his creative role. These invariables participate in the construction of the artist's identity in setting out the different levels of his interactions – the relations to the self, to the other, and to the group – all of them subsumed in the sole motif of the stove, emblematic condenser of these multiple relationships. This analysis also reveals that, for these writers, the studio can also be instituted as the real portrait of the artist by evoking an aesthetic, as well as by staging the social conditions of its occupant. When the artist becomes an important protagonist in his “milieu,” the studio is not a mere “architectural container,” but the real psychological mirror of the hero. In order to explain the metonymic and metaphoric aspects of the studio, this study examines in more depth Jules and Edmond de Goncourt's novel, Manette Salomon (1867), because of the particular status that the authors have given it.