For Barbey, the value of magnetism lies in the mystery that surrounds its phenomena, a mystery of prodigious fictional and metaphysical profitability: it highlights the intervention of "a foreign principle", which expands the visible world beyond the human, into the invisible. These ideas find an application in Une histoire sans nom (1882), a novel founded on an aesthetic of the secret and the incomprehensible which nourishes a new fantastic, at the same time metaphysical and ironic.
