With our without retouch? Literary “portrait-souvenirs” in the 20th century: the singular case of traveling texts

The genre of the “portrait-souvenir”(Cocteau) seems to be the very example of a text that “returns”. One need only consider the many portraits that Cocteau, Colette, Fargue, or Soupault devote to their peers; all of them reappear after various textual manipulations that have yet to be examined carefully. This article shows how such texts are constantly reworked over the course of several publications, and underlines their surprising plasticity.