Countess Dash: Masks and face

Forgotten in favor of writers like Dumas to whom she lent her pen, Gabrielle du Poilloue de Saint-Mars (1804-1872) was not content to hide behind borrowed identities ; she made the mask a leitmotif of her work. This article intends to show how much, for this author, writing on the mask and under the mask makes it possible to specify a poetics, even more than a simple aesthetic image. The countess shows the human comedy at work, with its vanities, and does not hesitate to refer to La Rochefoucauld to adopt an unexpected auctorial mask : that of the moralist. The motif of the masked ball also provides him with an exemplary romantic and symbolic motif. At the end of Countess Dash's work and life, disillusion seems the same pessimistic conclusion: unmasked faces do not keep their promises, time and death put an end to the carnival.