Abstract EN:

Victor Segalen's René Leys remained uncompleted after a second recast in 1916 and it never proved possible to establish whether the novelist actually meant to leave it as it was then, or work at it again - hadn't death prevented him doing so in 1919. A main feature of Segalen's method as a writer consisted in passing rapidly from one draft to another, trusting in the underground working of time and germination. A first version had been strenuously conducted within a few months between 1913 and 1914 in Tientsin and Peking. Based upon preliminary marginal notes, it most probably followed a ten-odd pages outline written at the beginning of 1913. In Segalen's hand, on what was meant to be a frontpage of the manuscript bound in book-form, could be read "novel founded on fact". This foreword pointed to the real adventure at the root of the novel which - initially and for some other purpose - had been put down in writing as mere notes under the title of Annales secrètes d'après MR, that is to say Maurice Roy whose pekinese and imperial narratives initiated the novel. Content with this first draft, Victor Segalen was satisfied with amending his manuscript until the need of a thorough rewriting eventually dawned upon him. Between these two stages the work was reread, annotated, sized up and judged. Our study aims at tracing back the writing of the novel through, on the one hand, a minute analysis of the two manuscripts, their notes, the rough drafts kept in the manuscript department of the French national Library and, on the other hand, the textual transcription of the first manuscript which supplements this doctoral dissertation.