ABSTRACT
Philippe Lejeune has defined the genre of autobiography as a pact between writer and reader which assumes that author, narrator and protagonist are the same person, and that the story the text tells is true. An autobiographer's explicit statements about his text, whether inside or outside it, must always be complemented by the implicit message which emerges from the way he has chosen to depict himself. ' The autobiographical pact, the explicit preface to the text, often includes an undertaking to tell the truth, although not necessarily the whole truth, and not always the truth in strict chronological order. One of the oddest features of George Sand's autobiography is the way the first $00 pages are taken up by an account of her ancestors and particularly by the quotation of her father's letters to his mother and wife when he was away in Paris and in the army.
