Abstract
This article concerns the study of two extreme texts, two epistolary forms which play – deliberately, since it is literature and fiction – with the codes of the letter and the communication situation, correspondences of which we only read one side, or, to use the terminology of Jean Rousset, epistolary of the “monodic genre” (Rousset, 1986, p. 65). This single aspect seems to fall exclusively under the control of the writer: The Marquise, in the case of Letters from the Marquise de M*** to the Comte de R*** by Crébillon fils and Suzanne Simonin in La Religieuse by Diderot. Fiction manages to construct the illusion of the existence of answers and even to thematize and present the recipient within the sole address given to the reader. Fiction acts as a filter and maintains a degree of ambiguity of skillfully orchestrated “absent presence,” another constituent of epistolary communication, which is the recipient and the partner of the exchange. Without a doubt, Diderot gives the most striking example of this through the enterprise of mystification of the Marquis de Croismare, which he elaborates by fabricating from scratch the correspondence between Suzanne Simonin and the latter.