In order to re‐evaluate the constraints imposed by literary censorship to writers and painters after the Renaissance until the Restauration and Orleanist monarchy, we offer this comparative analysis of the treatment of hair, hair style, body hair in Balzac’s La Comédie humaine where Balzac has to restrain himself to reach success and in his Contes drôlatiques, which takes place in the medieval period and the Renaissance, and emulates the language and crudity of the time. Balzac’s point of view is particularly interesting first because he is quite knowledgeable of literary and artistic expressions during the medieval age and the Renaissance with Aretino and Rabelais, and second because he lived during the time when the daguerreotype appeared and made possible the representation of the body as it is, attempt that the anatomists of the Renaissance had also played with. However, with their droll stories, neither was Rabelais an anatomist nor was Balzac a common man.

Lisa Bresner (1971‐2007) is a novelist, translator, and sinologist, who has dedicated her entire life to literary creation around China and Asia. Ma tendre ennemie is her second novel, published in 1994 by Gallimard. The themes of Lisa Bresner’s work have to do with body and sensation. As for Ma tendre ennemie, this symbolic role returns to the hair – the support of sexual seduction, of power, of fertility, and more particularly of this novel, of artistic creation. This article aims to analyse, how the notion of hair in the novel goes hand in hand with the ambiguous political and social stake of the wearing of the queue during the first Sino‐Japanese war, the deconstruction of the castration, the aesthetic of cruelty, and the reinterpretation of Asian eroticism.

Prosper Mérimée (1803‐1870), writer and scholar, member of the French Academy, has often evoked in his correspondence, his fictional accounts and his historical studies, the political and cultural past of Poland as well as its conflicting relations with Russia during the 19th century. Unlike many of his romantic contemporaries, he was rather insensitive to the plight of the Poles and made no effort to understand them better. His fear of revolutionary convulsions, his anti‐Catholic prejudices, his too superficial knowledge of local realities and his growing love for Russia throughout his life, probably explain his views. However, we should not forget his friendship with some Poles in exile in France and his support for the Historical and literary library of Paris.

Tannhäuser’s reemergence at Paris Opera’s stage was preceded by the work’s productions in some French provincial theatres: in Lyons (première on April 4th, 1892), in Toulouse (première on April 13th, 1892), in Nice (première on March 14th, 1894) and in Nantes (première on March 27th, 1894). The author of the article discusses various aspects of these performances accentuating the fact that this time the main objects of controversies weren’t the composer and his Tannhäuser, but the soloists observed attentively by the musical critics and the spectators, as one can guess reading the reviews quoted in the article.