French Literature Reviews - 2026
B. Marchal, Salomé
Novel and Narrative Prose
Bertrand Marchal, Salomé, éditions José Corti, 2005, 304 p., 22 euros.
"This woman whom they call fatal:" the witty formula that serves as the title of Mireille Dottin-Orsini's definitive study on the literary representations of the fin-de-siècle woman provides the most fitting introduction to the myth of Salome and its countless variations from the second half of the 19th century into the early 20th.
The aim of this book—which brings together, after a brief Baudelairean preamble, three successive explorations into the texts and pre-texts of Mallarmé's Hérodiade, Flaubert's Hérodias, and Huysmans's À rebours—will be entirely different. It is by no means about determining whether "Mallarmé's Hérodiade, like Flaubert's Salammbô, is a hysterical woman melting away in a hieratic indolence," nor about assessing the degree of masochism in Jokanaan-Saint John. Rather, through three privileged works, the book demonstrates that she whom the Gospels do not even name—she is simply the daughter of Herodias, who danced and pleased Herod—is not merely, whatever her name, the contemporary avatar of the eternal femme fatale or of eternal misogyny, revealing the castration anxieties of poets and novelists; she is not merely a historical-psychiatric symptom, but also a strictly literary and aesthetic stake in the history of forms and representations.
Whether her model is real or imaginary, literary or pictorial, whether she appears in verse, prose, or dreamed as the resolution of this common division, the figure of Salome haunts the creators of both the 19th and 20th centuries.
A renowned specialist on Mallarmé, he is the editor of his works in the prestigious Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. He has published La Religion de Mallarmé (1988) with Corti, as well as his doctoral thesis on the poet, which is now out of print.Foreword 7
As a Baudelairean Preamble
FROM THE FLOWERS OF EVIL TO THE
ORIENTAL DANCER 15
HÉRODIADE
or Modern Beauty 29
From tragedy to poem and from poem to mystery 29
"this word dark and red like an open
pomegranate, Hérodiade" 40
The ghost of Hérodiade:
"Don du poème" and "Sainte" 58
Hérodiade and dance 74
From the Nuptials of Hérodiade to the Nuptials of the Book 81
HÉRODIAS
From oriental dance to complete poetry 101
An Egyptian Salome:
Salome, daughter of Kuchuk-Hanem 111
Kuchuk-Hanem: a Flaubertian character 117
Kuchuk-Hanem, daughter of Salome? 127
Variation on a scenario 147
From tale to myth (and back) 153
Kuchuk-Hanem, Hérodias, and the grand synthesis 162
À REBOURS,
or Salome beyond Baudelaire and Flaubert 167
The novel of Salome 172
Huysmans and Flaubert:
The temptation of rewriting, rewriting the temptation 183
From Degas to Moreau 193
À rebours and Hérodias 197
Beyond À rebours 208
Conclusion 217
Appendices 227
I. Mallarmé's Hérodiade 227
1. The so-called "ancient" Opening 227
2. "Fragment of an early scenic study
of a poem by Hérodiade" 230
3. Nuptials of Hérodiade. Mystery 237
II. Flaubert's Hérodias (excerpt) 238
The figure of the femme fatale holds a prominent place in nineteenth-century literature and art, often reflecting broader cultural anxieties and aesthetic preoccupations of the fin-de-siècle period. Bertrand Marchal's study examines the myth of Salome through close readings of works by Mallarmé, Flaubert, and Huysmans. Readers interested in nineteenth-century French literature and the evolution of literary representations may find this work relevant to their studies.