The Memoranda The little epic of a hypochondriac

The Memoranda take the form of a medical diary in which Barbey records, day after day, the symptoms of his ailments and humors. Alternating between the stance of hypochondriac and that of a doctor, the diarist invents a little epic for himself: the diary crosses the boundary of fiction where a heroic struggle against evil is imagined. But very quickly, the clinical observation of his own ills turns into that of a sick century, whose decline is less physiological than moral.