ABSTRACT
La Vie de Marianne's fictive reader resembles the desocupadolector of DonQuixote in having time on her hands, but differs from him in the more serious way she wishes to spend this time—she is, crucially, 'a friend who apparently loves to think'. Marianne herself offers a model of reception composition when she provides an audience for Tervire's interpolation in the last three volumes of the novel. Marianne's private correspondence with her unnamed friend echoes and incorporates the public dialogue taking place between the author and his readers and critics. Ironically, the sense of an ending in La Vie de Marianne is at its strongest in the early part of the novel. The hostility of certain readers towards the 'low' milieu in which Marianne finds herself in the first three parts of the novel is itself a reflection of the kind of narrative and narrator that they feel they are dealing with.
