Article
French
ID: <
10670/1.jgyq0a>
Abstract
Through the exemple of Mrs Necker, wife of King Louis XVI's principal minister, mother of Germaine de Staël and founder of an hospital that still wears her name, this text aims at showing how, at the end of the 18th century, a toppling-over from science to fantasy, from medical language to a language to a language of morbid imagination could occur. All along, Mrs Necker imposed stern behaviour on herself, keeping a diary of her misdeeds and duties. She pushes that corporal study to the point of facing in advance with her own death, her own dead body. She organizes with the ceremony of her funerals and the conservation of her body, in every detail, as to postpone, to the point of insanity, the attacks of time on her dead body.