Poetics of Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la Nuit, Une Main du Diable

Aloysius Bertrand's Gaspard de la Nuit is a collection of prose poems haunted by the devil and all his attributes. In this collection, Satan plays a dual role in human life. Firstly, he exerts an evil force in human life. And secondly, he instructs Bertrand in the art he adopts in order to re-establish a new order in a society already governed by classical reason. In so doing, the poet perverts the reason established by the divine poetry of the classical era, giving rise to the prose poem.