ABSTRACT
Perhaps Jean de Tinan’s unpublished “Essay on Cléo de Mérode considered as popular symbol” never existed; probably the manuscript has just been lost. But the idea of such an essay figures in Tinan’s novel, Think success! Or, the many and diverse loves of my friend Raoul de Vallonges (1897), in which Vallonges, Tinan’s largely autobiographical protagonist, tries but fails to write an “Essay on Cléo de Mérode considered as popular symbol,” while suggesting much about what such an essay might say, if it could be written. Yet maybe it is the juxtaposition of the essay’s desired success, and mise-en-scène of its failure, that best captures the elusive nature of celebrity, as mass cultural phenomenon, and as object of reflection for the modern intellectual.
