ABSTRACT
Jules Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly, one of the leading French novelists of the nineteenth century, was born on November 2, 1808, at Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte. Much influenced by Sir Walter Scott and by Lord Byron, his novels are “sombre in tone and often strained and melodramatic” (Gould, 1967). He wrote many novels, including L’Ensorcelée (1854), Le Chevalier des Touches (1864), Un Prêtre marié (1865) which inspired the Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte to the title of one of his paintings in 1950 (Blavier, 1979), and his masterpiece Les Diaboliques (1874). Barbey d’Aurevilly died in Paris on April 23, 1889. You may wonder why we refer to a French nineteenth century writer in a column devoted to the roots of terms used in neurosciences. The reason is to be found in a novel which Barbey d’Aurevilly wrote in the late 1870s: a strange mental disorder, Lasthénie de Ferjol’s syndrome, was named after the heroine of this story titled Une Histoire sans nom. Let us shortly summarize the story of this novel.
