Abstract
The forces of loss always prevail, and the preservation of a work is always provisional. As a result, the lost manuscript is the object of a veritable " fantasy ", particularly in the history of the novel : from Don Quixote to Walpole, via Laclos and Goethe, many novels claim to be manuscripts found or translated from a mysterious source. This narrative device was a way of legitimizing prose fiction, which, under the belles-lettres regime, suffered from a lack of dignity.
Renaissance humanism was partly founded on the arrival of many forgotten manuscripts, to the point where the manuscript was sometimes mythologized, along with its "discoverer ". The appetite for rediscovered manuscripts has fuelled some real counterfeiting ventures, such as the alleged letter from Vercingétorix, written in Old French, and " retrouvée " or rather invented by one of the great forgers of the 19th century, Denis Vrain-Lucas.
The theme of the manuscript runs throughout literary history, but the 20thcentury saw a " shift from the rhematic to the thematic " : from Paulo Coelho to Alain Nadaud to Umberto Eco, the manuscript is no longer the setting, but becomes the very theme of the novel, the object of its plot. In his short story " Tlön Uqbar Orbis Tertius " (Fictions), Jorge Luis Borges has renewed this topos of the (re)found manuscript, making this object the occasion for a metaphysical experiment, the introduction of a parallel universe provoking the uncertainty typical of fantastic literature. And the Necronomicon, the evil grimoire mentioned in one of Lovecraft's short stories, fascinated so much that in the 1970s, an edition of this imaginary book was published.
