How the Journal d’un curé de campagne is written is intimately linked to the night because of the narrator’s insomnia. We will demonstrate that this night is the expression of an inner night, through the carmelite mysticism of John of the Cross. The writing is purified by the silence and anguish of the priest's mystical night: we will see that his writing becomes a prayer, that is to say, the hosting of divine and human voices in silence, based on Jean-Louis Chrétien’s phenomenological approach of prayer. This idea of writing will allow us to understand the relationship of Bernanos himself to his own writing: this nightly writing listens and gives voice to those who have none.

Night-time, the favorite time of awakening for Marguerite Duras, has an ambivalent status. In a colorful game, the sleepless night changes from white to black, from bright to dark. Rather than a standstill or loss of time, the night without sleep offers a spectacular acceleration and intensification. Since the night acts as a catalyst, insomnia confronts the characters to their inescapable fate. Staying awake becomes an act of resistance, for both, characters and author. Therefore, insomnia emphasizes emptiness and inaction, and transforms loss into creation and fulfillment. Which means that insomnia is more than a physical phenomenon: it acquires a metaphysical dimension in Marguerite Duras’s work.

La Nuit Épuisée (2018), project on the initiative of Antoine d’Agata and Lea Bismuth, comes from a collective writing experience which tooks place during a sleepless night; consequently, it allows us to see the visual and textual marks left by the night on this photoliteracy silkscreened book. By analysing this work and each of his twelve leporelli, we can, like its authors, see what it’s only perceptible into the night. As much as poietic is, according to René Passeron, the science of the dynamic relationship between an artist and its artwork while he is struggling with it, this article analyses the context of creation of this book (a collective insomnia in a nightclub) and how it affects the plasticity and the writing of a book which intends to propose us a reading experience.

The fifth part of the cycle is devoted to the presentation of the main Parisian musical critics’ opinions on the Tannhäuser’s performance at Palais Garnier on May 13th, 1895, conducted by Paul Taffanel and directed by Alexander Lapissida. If these journalists – such as Jacques Weber of Le Temps, Catulle Mendès of La Revue de Paris, Hippolyte Fierens-Gevaert of Journal des débats, Paul Dukas of La Revue hebdomadaire, Ferdinand Le Borne of Le Monde artiste, Henry Gauthier-Villars of L’Écho de Paris, Alfred Bruneau of Gil Blas, and some others that are recalled in the article, were not unanimous on various aspects of this production, all of them considered Ernest Van Dyck, interpreting the title role, as the principle triumphator of the evening.