Abstract: Critiquing Paul Van Tieghem’s Précis d’histoire littéraire de l’Europe depuis la Renaissance, Larbaud imagines how to create a perfect work of comparative literature. One must note the chronology of trends in thinking, form, and style, and develop clear and precise descriptions instead of creating portrait-judgments (portraits-jugements). Not only that, it is crucial to produce a sort of “literary geography” and use maps as well as synoptic tables for such a work.
