A “beauty of admirable suffering.” Poetics of pain in Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Memoranda

In Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Memoranda, pain takes on a metaphysical meaning and an important aesthetic value. The gallery of painful portraits and the ekphrases of paintings predominantly featuring the suffering body are an opportunity for the writer to define a poetics of pain that profoundly enriches his romantic imagination, which struggles to rid itself of an equivocal fascination for the “beauty of [the] suffering.”