Abstract: If, in the nineteenth century, the artistic reference is a topos of the portrait, Balzac innovates with that of Camille Maupin by resorting to what we will call the museum reference. This is a process which contributes to the creation, through the previously unseen solicitation of the imagination it provokes, of a “descriptive augmentation” modelled on the “iconographic augmentation”, a principle of aesthetic totalisation defined by François Dagonet.
