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Writing and painting offer incompatible perspectives. This fact is still widely ignored. Literally or otherwise, they have no acceptable common vocabulary. The present article explores this by comparing a scene by Jean Beraud (1849-1935) with an 'identical' situation at the beginning of Nana. The same topography produces very different messages, diegesis being virtually excluded from painting (except when a specific anecdote or myth is referred to). The latter is in fact a space to be completely filled in with detail whilst literary narrative, naming things and defining their dynamic status in rime, is inevitably full of holes. Painting is passive and immobile, spatially confined, and, beyond the precision of visual detail, inevitably opaque. The spectator must try to fill in the gaps. This is far from literature's approach : never a direct visual equivalent of the original scene. Different forms of theatrality result : Beraud's socially representative group invites us to all sorts of guessing games, whereas Zola's text is full of precise explanation: values and behaviour are meticulously explored, extending beyond the novel's text to the Rougon-Macquart cycle as a whole. (In French) (PMW), Ma these, toute simple, nee de la mefiance qu'inspirent les transpositions, les traductions (jamais source de commentaires fiables) se resume a ceci: que la perspective scripturale est inapte a saisir [...]

'Tensions dynamiques: Le rapport sculpture/poetique en France, 1829-1859' Scott's study is the first of a group of essays in this volume that focus on the translation of sculpture into poetic form. He looks at the tensions between classical and Romantic ideals--stasis and movement, beauty and ugliness, impassibility and expressiveness--that began to manifest themselves in both sculpture and critical writing about sculpture during the transitional period following the Revolution. He argues that the opposition between sculpture/ stasis and poetry/movement that was, thanks to Winckelmann and Lessing, aesthetic doxa at the beginning of the nineteenth century, undergoes a change between 1829-1859 in the works of writers who would set the terms for the movement that would later be called 'Parnassianism.' Sculpture is shown to become more animated in works by David d'Angers, Clesinger, or Pradier, amongst others, and writing to acquire the plastic attributes of sculpture in the poetry of Sainte-Beuve, Gautier, Banville, and Baudelaire. (In French), La periode post-revolutionnaire en France, ou le neo-classicisme de l'ere napoleonienne commencait a s'affronter au romantisme naissant, etait, on le sait, tres marquee par des tensions--politiques, sociales et culturelles. Au [...]