Abstract: Pierre Jean Jouve’s novels rest upon a relationship in which may be deemed imaginable, in the midst of violence and melancholia, the chance of some reenchantment and a return to the divine. Paulina 1880 is an Italian chronicle that mingles carnal love with mystical love. It allows a hybridisation of novelistic and poetical manners and recovers the secret meaning of a search for the absolute, though it is in sacrifice and death that this paroxystic initiation will come about.
