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French melody, at the heart of the issues involving poetry and music in the 19th century, constitutes a counter-model, within a critical posture that tends to question the aesthetic of Romantic intentionality (the presence of a subjectivity organising sense and sensibility, historical or divine determinations contaminating the medium). A late arrival in the world of 19th century romance and Lied, it gets rid of this pervasive intentionality: in it, subject and object dissolve in favour of a bringing to consciousness “the mortal character of sensual experience” (Adorno). The finite character of an art concentrated on its own medium answers the infinite upon which the Romantic aesthetic feeds, and thus replaces Romantic elegiac sensibility by the idea of the necessity to mourn mournings and lamentations themselves, mournings through which Romanticism had recovered its expressive powers.