Hélène, Euripides, Françoise Frazier, Hélène Monsacré, Henri Grégoire (Les Belles Lettres)

By having Menelaus, who has his hard-won wife by his side, admit that this wife, Helen, is merely a phantom and that the real Helen was waiting for him in Egypt, Euripides composed a tragedy of appearances and the prototype of romance novels, where beauty is a source of misfortune, but where the faithful couple of heroes ultimately triumphs. The games of appearance and literary "lies," an absent Proteus, a duplicated and then absent Helen, create a poetic world nourished as much by negations as by affirmations, lending this singular text a fascinating character.