Little lives and outrageous acts The turn of the 1950s in the work of Duras, from Viaducs de la Seine-et-Oise to L’Amante anglaise

Inspired by the case of Amélie Rabilloud, Duras gave voice and visibility to an otherwise gray, insignificant woman, testing the limits of the paradoxical “vérité des ténèbres” (“truth of obscurity”). To do so, she wrote and re-wrote not the fait divers, but the attempt to comprehend the crime. The invention of the “interrogator” in L’Amante anglaise serves to question psychiatric and legal qualifications, and to celebrate the generous, disinterested act of listening that alone allows the speaker to be heard.