A Decadent Woman by Georges de Peyrebrune

(4) And what is one to make of A la recherche du temps perdu, a sometimes parodic, but often seriously moralizing novel where the habit of juxtaposing the names of fictional characters with those of their real-life keys is meant as a play within a play, and a bow to one of Balzac's tics. Le Regne de la bete, by Adolphe Rette, reads as an apology to Edouard Drumont whom Rette had depicted insultingly in other works. (3) A roman a clefs can be a passionate love letter, as is the case for Olivia, a novel by the English writer Dorothy Bussy featuring and addressed to Andre Gide. The 19th century appeared to Drujon to absorb all previous typologies, 'depuis le pamphlet revolutionnaire et la satire antireligieuse jusqu'aux parodies plus ou moins reussies de la vie publique et privee.' (1) Certainly, the great majority of romans a clefs are satirical, representing, as a recent compendium of papers on the subject phrased it, ' litterature souvent vacharde et haute en couleur.' (2) But as certain critics have stressed, the genre is not necessarily tendentious or parodic it is in fact infinitely variable, intimidatingly protean. Most 16th century literature a clefs, for example, consisted of polemical writing on religious and political topics, while in the 17th, the allegorical novel, interminable and more circumspect, brought increased polish to the genre. In his extensive 1888 repertory of the roman a clefs, Fernand Drujon proposed a classification for the genre by century.

A Decadent Woman by Georges de Peyrebrune