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If, in the natural order, to create life does not necessarily entail beauty, beauty “a contrario” cannot exist without life. Zola forever denounced the hopeless nature of the quest for an ideal beauty. How did Zola approach the redefining of an aesthethic ideal? What is the beauty that he portrays in his works? What is it in its character that by definition finds itself on the fringe, since it manifests itself as the shadow carried by the living. In what way does Zola search for the “new formula that would unveil the particular beauty of its society?” The study of some of Zola's female characters should enable us to answer these questions.
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Balzac consistently connects his characters to important figures of the past, like those that are collected in the biographical catalogues that were so appreciated by the Romantic library (such as the Biographie Michaud). Appositions (“Troubert, l'Alexandre VI de Tours”), antonomasia (“une nouvelle Diane de Poitiers”), exemplary lists and other analogical operators place Balzac's characters in a network of liaisons and affiliations, as if it were a matter of giving them a legitimacy which would be their shortcoming. These stylistic traits reveal something about the character in the novel, about his status, and his fragile legitimacy in relation to the characters of the fable and the inherited figures of tradition. His uncertain presence in our memory is always close to being denounced as usurpation.