Le silence des fous chez Zola et Maupassant

It is difficult to define all the meanings and connotations of silence depicted in literary works. In the 19th century, where the Realism and the Naturalism paid much attention to the study of both physical and mental illnesses, silence was considered as one of the distinctive signs of madness. The paper analyzes four examples of this phenomenon in selected Zola’s and Maupassant’s texts (novels and short stories) whose characters, all mad or maniac, embody various aspects of the silence regarded as a pathological condition of a human being.