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In Mercier’s futuristic novel published in 1771, the author’s alter ego wakes up one day as a sevenhundred-year-old man and he rediscovers the city of Paris in the company of a citizen of the 25th century. Memory and forgetting can be interpreted in different ways in the novel: on the one hand, we can see how the elderly man remembers his own time, what memories he keeps from the 18th century, and also how the people of this new Paris are kept in the memory of future generations. On the other hand, we will examine the author’s point of view, especially the influence of the philosophers of his time. During Mercier’s meditations on the tombs and ruins, it is mainly the impact of Diderot’s thoughts that dominates, and these passages show that the notions of memory and forgetting are closely related to those of imagination and dream.

Abstract: The dog, seen today as the symbol of faith and alertness, has been present in pictorial arts, especially in Flemish and Dutch painting since the 15th century. Over time, this animal has lost its aggressive character in various forms of representation and has become a somewhat indispensable element of genre paintings. Our analysis aims to study the dogs which appear in the sketches and paintings of Jean-Baptiste Greuze. We wish to show the different roles that can be attributed to the dogs in the artist’s works, mainly through the analysis of his paintings in Diderot’s Salons, and also in works of less known art critics, such as Mathon de La Cour and abbé de la Porte.