36

The young boy who stares with envy at his foster brother represents the birth of sin in Book I of Saint Augustine’s Confessions (around 397-401). It reenacts the original sin, when Adam and Eve fell in love with their own image as reflected by the other, and became subjects of the libido. That is why Lacan, who read Saint Augustin carefully, helped by the work of Melanie Klein, found clinical expressions of envy within this scene of the Confessions. Envy is the elementary and essential moment that allows the subject to enter into subjectivity and, meanwhile, into language. Moreover, the comparison of two translations of this scene, one by Roger Arnauld d’Andilly (1671) and the other by Patrice Cambronne (1998), shows the dialectical path, from envy to jealousy, based on the objet petit a. Chateaubriand, in the writing of his Mémoires, a literary genre influenced by Saint Augustine from the Fronde historical period onward, transforms his envy, as the youngest son of an old aristocratic family, into the jealousy of Chateaubriand the writer, who takes over the rank of the legitimate heir beyond the grave.