Details, moments, fragments Sketches and miniatures in the Memoranda

Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Memoranda provides a profusion of landscapes which, very often, are only sketched or reduced to the dimension of a miniature. In these brief descriptive phrases, the diarist puts himself on stage, maintains a record of the disappearance of the hours, and sometimes manages, thanks to invisible “prose poems,” to seize and immobilize very temporarily the beauty of nature that is constantly slipping away because it is caught, like the self, in time.