L’« atelier » Balzac : de la « fabrique » Le Poitevin à Charles Rabou

Abstract

From his earliest days in the literary world, Balzac was no stranger to collective writing. Often, these multi-authored texts were signed by only one of the authors, or by a pseudonym used in turn, which caused numerous problems in attributing the texts. Even at the turn of the 1830s, Balzac, who began signing his novels with his own name, did not give up collective writing: he became friends with Philarète Chasles – author of the preface to Balzac’s collection Romans et contes philosophiques (1831) – and Charles Rabou – who, upon Balzac’s death, would be responsible for finding conclusions to the great master’s unfinished novels – and wrote Contes bruns (1831-1832) with them. A few years later, Théophile Gautier secretly participated in the writing of certain Balzac texts, for example by providing poems for Illusions perdues. Finally, in the 1840s, Balzac contributed to so-called “panoramic” works such as Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux, which gave rise to other equally ambiguous collaborations – see the article “Voyage d’un moineau à Paris” for Hetzel’s Animaux, signed by Georges Sand but actually written by Balzac. We propose to retrace these stages of Balzac’s writing, focusing in particular on the lesser-known collaborations of Balzac.