ABSTRACT
Amongst the images which Virgil’s presence in twentieth-century France has evoked, the most striking and persistent is that of fractured perfection. While the Bucoliasts figured this as an irrecuperable Golden Age, it can also be signified (as in Broch) by the broken circle. The absolute self-sufficiency of Dante’s sphere has metamorphosed into an infinite spiral. Books no longer own final selves, definitive meanings, but spawn a limitless series of new readings through the infinity of intertexts which they each contain.
