Les Apparitions du château de Tarabel, ou Le Protecteur invisible [The Apparitions of Tarabel Castle, or the Invisible Protector], a novel published by Étienne-Léon de Lamothe-Langon (1786–1864) in 1822, tells the story of Count Eugène de Melorenne who, in 1795, in the context of the War in the Vendée, faces not only many difficult political choices but also various complications as far as his love life is concerned. The aim of this article is to analyze the overwhelming influence of politics and history on nearly all the aspects of this novel and to examine whether or not the book fits well into the generic framework of the traditional Gothic novel.

In this essay we intend to emphasize first the subjective way of Victor Hugo in expressing his own thoughts, ideas, visual impressions and feelings within the introductory chapter of this book, entitled “The Archipelago of the Channel”. Then, we intend to show the subjective manner of the narrator in constructing Gilliatt, the main character of the proper novel. In this undertaking, the narrator seems to be objective, while, in fact, he is highly subjective, presenting the hero from an outside view point, and defining his temper and disposition by a collection of gossips and slanders on Gilliatt, from the narrow and xenophobe perspective of his fellow-citizens. The subjectivity of both the author and the narrator is disconcerting for the reader, who should not judge superficially this book, but rather try to find, between the lines, its different values and significations, which are in perfect accord with Victor Hugo’s philosophical and aesthetic conception, based upon the harmony of contraries, upon the coexistence of good and evil, sublime and grotesque, light and darkness.

The article analyzes Mémoires en vrac by Jean Ajalbert, a forgotten poet and writer at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, in the context of the functioning and creation of memory about the fin de siècle era, particularly the decade of Symbolism 1880–1890. In the process of resurrecting of the past, affective memory in Ricoeure’s approach turns out to be important, enabling the author to combine autobiography with a testimony about the era in which he was to play an important role alongside masters (Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Mallarmé…) and (un)famous writers and artists. Thanks to the impressive nature of his writing and discontinuous style, Ajalbert composed a hybrid text in which he included fragments of letters, symbolist poems and his own works. The author’s desire to create a personal myth at the intersection of aesthetics allowed him to show non-obvious connections between symbolism and  naturalism.

The paper argues that the first and second Journaliers, a sort of diary kept by Isabelle Eberhardt (1877–1904), a Suisse writer and traveler of Russian origins, may be considered as autobiogeographical. The term autobiogeography has been coined at the beginning of the 21st century and describes the interactions between the autobiographical self and geography, or space. The autobiogeographical character of two first Journaliers is presented in three parts. The first focuses on the specificity of the text and its relationship with geography. The second talks about the links between particular cities and the Eberhardtian self. The third depicts the relationships between the self and the landscape: not only does it show how geography influences the self, but also what the impact of the self is on the way we look at the space.

Colette and Louis Pergaud differ in style and themes of their writing. However, they unite in their love for animals and the desire to paint them in a truthful way. There is another desire behind the first one, that of bringing a greater understanding of the animal world to the public. In order to achieve this, Colette and Pergaud paint humans behaving towards animals in radically different ways. Indeed, while some of their characters show deep empathy for animals, others are wary of them and even hate them. Jealousy also plays an important role. The present study focuses on all these elements, in order to identify the ways in which Colette and Pergaud use the animal theme to link it to universal and profoundly humanist subjects. The relationship between the human and the non-human is, for these precursors of eco-sensitivity, a measure of their value, and thus they achieve two objectives: awakening the consciences of their contemporaries and shedding a new light on the relations between species.

Francis Poictevin was a French author of decadent and symbolist inspiration. His poetic prose
is diaristic and impressionistic, and draws richly on the natural world, which finds its particular realisation in Paysages (1888). Based on the guidelines of an ecologically engaged literary text as defined by Lawrence Buell, the current research aims to present the author’s vision of the environment and to answer the question of the autonomy of the nature depicted. The human-environmental relationship, the motive of the passage of time and the changeability of the seasons, as well as the eco-sensitivity of the author are taken into account. Poictevin, by giving his work the form of a collage, presents a natural world full of active actors, weighing up the ecosystem full of dependencies.

Convinced that the material world is nothing but a prison, that any escape ends in failure, heroes of the French novels of the late 19th century fall into the trap of powerlessness. Overcome by pessimism, the protagonists do not give up the struggle: they seek salvation in art, neurosis and artifice, inventing subtle subterfuges to deceive their senses with pleasant illusions. In our study we will try to show how the heroes of Huysmans and Gourmont undertake this challenge, with or without success, at the very peril of their physical and mental balance. In defiance of a hostile environment, they transform their imagination into a superior force capable of dominating reality. Forced into a desperate search for the new, the rare, the strange, they attempt to overcome the chimeras of powerlessness.

While he was young, Emile Zola regarded himself as a poet and wrote several thousand lines of poetry. Then, having turned definitely to prose, he judged his poetry poor and undistinguished. Therefore, his poems have never been  edited, except some fragments published by his friend Paul 
Alexis in 1882. The paper analyzes some motives (cyclic structure, the ideal of feminine beauty and of scenery, attitude towards God) appearing in Zola’s poetry in order to prove they recur in the writer’s novels, especially in the Rougon-Macquart cycle. Thus, the poems by young Zola
may be regarded as a prelude to his prose works.