Abstract EN:

The classic example of the balzacian aristocratic woman is characterized by the double law of opposites and similarities. Her body expresses the tension between nature and culture. The fashionable woman, always acting, symbolizing a precise caste and time, counterpoises the natural woman who partakes of the essential elements: water, earth and fire. So, the angelic and beastly metaphors which characterize her convey this obsession of the "double sided woman" and abolish the differences between a great lady and a prostitute. The presence of the aristocratic woman's body, a paragon of beauty for the other women in la comédie humaine, is asserting itself in the portrait, no longer considered as an autonomous element but open onto the whole fiction. This calling into question of the synchrony of the portrait implies that the language of the body and the functions which structure it should be taken into account. As that classic example is building up, the longing for the sublime and the ironic distanciation are taking shape. The sublime of the sin and the face stresses the genesis of the aristocratic woman who undergoes a series of degradations before vanishing, leaving it to other exceptional characters to embody the last image of the balzacian sublime.