abbé de Bucquoy

Summary

Dominique Pagani speaks of the abbé de Bucquoy almost always in connection with Nerval's Angélique, mainly in the series of sessions devoted to that text in 2017-2018. He presents him as a defrocked abbé who remained a mystic, a subversive who was imprisoned in the Bastille and then escaped, and who wanted to turn the kingdom into a republic1. The book of his adventures, seen in Frankfurt and impossible to find in Paris, serves as a pretext for the narrative and becomes the object of the narrator's quest23. He notes that Nerval has to prove this figure existed in order to escape the amendment on serialized fiction, and that Bucquoy also appears in Les Illuminés. In his view, the abbé's story has no interest in itself: what matters is the staging4. He links Bucquoy to the Valois through his family name, Longueval, and sees the book, finally found, as the equivalent of Ithaca, the end of the journey5. He also mentions that a descendant of the abbé, a comic-book artist, came to speak with him.

1. 1#4.5 Angélique (by Nerval)12 Feb 2018 · 13:24
2. 2#4.2 Angélique (by Nerval)12 Nov 2017 · 37:10
3. 3Introduction to the upcoming workshops23 Mar 2020 · 14:24
4. 4#4.6 Angélique (by Nerval)15 Mar 2018 · 31:08
5. 5#4.7 Angélique (by Nerval)12 Apr 2018 · 53:32

Summary produced automatically from 17 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.