SOURCE: "Two Short Stories by Barbey d'Aurevilly," in The Modern Language Review, Vol. LX, No. 1, 1965, pp. 516-19.

In the following excerpt, Rogers studies Barbey's uncollected early stories 'Le cachet d'onyx " and 'Lea " as initial attempts to use themes and a style that recur in his subsequent fiction.

More than his early novels, Barbey d'Aurevilly's first two short stories provide us with the key to the fictional world that is epitomized by the Diaboliques. Although they have never been available in the Bernouard edition of his collected fiction, a current edition of his most famous short stories in 1962 reprinted them for the first time since 1919 as 'Deux autres Diaboliques', and both clearly establish a direction leading from the first full-length novel, Ce qui ne meurt pas, to the works of Barbey's maturity. Both fully illustrate the intimate ties between the man and his work; they are the first examples...