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Since the “rhetorical turn” at the end of the twentieth century, the issue of the relationship between rhetoric and French literature has sparked many studies, the main focus of which has understandably been on the classical corpus. While this imbalance is hardly surprising, this article aims to help reduce it by examining the rhetoricity of contemporary narrative prose: whether serious or playful, the return of eloquence gives rise to the composition of paradoxical eulogies that perfectly fit the ancient definition of the category.