Mortelette, Yann <br/><br/>
Bernard Roukhomovsky, Jessica Desclaux and Élodie Dufour (eds.). Les Cahiers d’Henri de Régnier. Enjeux éditoriaux et perspectives critiques. Paris, Classiques Garnier, coll. “Rencontres”, 2023, 344 pages. 

 -  2025.<br/>							 
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<br/><br/> The similarities between Béatrix and La Muse du département are significant: Balzac’s two novels show female characters struggling with literary creation and construct their representations with reference to the guiding personalities Germaine de Staël and George Sand. The different way they are depicted allows them to be seen as complementary: the situation of women writers is treated from the point of view either of the exception (Camille Maupin in Béatrix) or the rule (Dinah de La Baudraye in La Muse du département). The two novels can be read as a way of challenging the authority of the “Code-Homme”, an expression used in La Muse du département to refer to the language used by men when talking about women. In these novels, Balzac plays with this code and therefore loosens it, by revealing it as a code.