1 Roger Bowen, «‘Closing the Toybox’: Orientalism and Empire in The Alexandria Quartet», Studies in the Literary Imagination, Atlanta (Georgia), printemps 1991, 9-18.

2 Je renvoie le lecteur à mon article « Saveurs et senteurs de l’Orient dans Le Quatuor d’Alexandrie de Lawrence Durrell », Actes du colloque Saveurs, senteurs : le goût de la Méditerranée, Université de Perpignan, 1997, 425-436.

3 «The crowd was brilliant, spotted with primary colours. The air rippled with tambourines, while here and there in the lags of silences which fell over the shouts and chanting, there came the sudden jabbering of the long drums as their hide was slowly stiffened at the hissing braziers. Horses moaned and the gonfalons bellied like sails in the rain-starred afternoon. A cart filled with the prostitutes of the Arab town in coloured robes went by with shrill screams and shouts, and the singing of painted young men to the gnash of cymbals and scribbling of mandolines: the whole as gorgeous as a tropical animal» Balthazar, 52.

4 «From the throat of a narrow alley, spilled like a widening circle of fire upon the darkness, burst a long tilting gallery of human beings headed by the leaping acrobats and the dwarfs of Alexandria, and followed at a dancing measure by the long grotesque cavalcade of gonfalons, rising and falling in a tide of mystical light, treading the peristaltic measures of the wild music – nibbled out everywhere by the tattling flutes and the pang of drums or the long shivering orgasm of tambourines struck by the dervishes» Balthazar, 130.

5 «This city has been built like a dyke to hold back the flood of African darkness; but the soft-footed blacks have already started leaking into European quarters» Justine, 58.

6 «Swelling like a bruise» Justine, 131.

7 «Clouds of dried blood walk the streets like prophecies», «like the drift of ashes under a volcano» Justine, 131.

8 «A toy theatre» Justine, 88; «the whole toybox of Egyptian life was still there, every figure in place – street-sprinkler, scribe, mourner, harlot, clerk, priest – untouched, it seemed, by time or by war» Clea, 28.

9 «Forgotten Pharaonic frescoes of light and darkness», «His was a Byzanthine face such as one might find among the frescoes of Ravenna» Mountolive, 16.

10 «It was a complete departure from everything he had known to be thus included in the pattern of a family life based in and nourished by the unconscious pageantry of a feudalism which stretched back certainly as far as the Middle Ages, and perhaps beyond. The world of Burton, Beckford, Lady Hester... Did they then still exist? But here, seen from the vantage point of someone inside the canvas his own imagination had painted, he had suddenly found the exotic becoming completely normal. Its poetry was irradiated by the unconsciousness with which it was lived» Mountolive, 21.

11 Platon, Le Sophiste, 236a, 334.

12 «There is another tableau I want you to see... I wanted to sort of recompose the city for you so that you could walk back into the painting from another angle and feel quite at home» Clea, 78.

13 Louis Marin, De la représentation (Paris : Gallimard, Le Seuil : 1994) 23-24.

14 «Are we still beset by the doleful dream of the Arabian nights, fathered on us by three generations of sexually disoriented Victorians whose subconscious reacted wholeheartedly to the thought of more than one legal wife? or the romantic Bedouin-fever of the Bells and Lawrences?» Mountolive, 93.

15 «Egypt – the beloved country to which distance and exile lent a haunting brilliance as of tapestry. Could anything as rich as memory be a cheat?» Mountolive, 62.

16 «you have been painting the city, touch by touch, upon a curved surface» Balthazar, 16.

17 Gilles Deleuze, Différence et répétition, 27.

18 «Distorting mirrors», «their world... is a curved one» Balthazar, 23, 37.

19 Jacques Derrida, «La pharmacie de Platon», Tel Quel, n° 32 (Paris : Seuil, 1968) 37.

20 «I turned over to let the sun fire a million silver drops of prismatic light on to my wet eyelashes» Monsieur, 125.

21 «A whole world passing by in a kaleidoscope of colour, yet always changing, always impermanent» Monsieur, 154.

22 Severo Sarduy, Barocco (Paris : Seuil, 1975) 98, 92.

23 Je renvoie le lecteur à mon article « Copie et simulacre dans The Alexandria Quartet de Lawrence Durrell », Annales de l’Université de Savoie, n° 30, 2002, 33-46.

24 «A full-scale mirage of the city», «a masterpiece painted in fresh dew» Balthazar, 14.

25 «Leila had suddenly left him face to face with a reality which, he supposed, had always lain lurking behind the dusty tapestry of his romantic notions» Mountolive, 255.

26 Gilles Deleuze, Logique du sens (Paris : Les Éditions de Minuit, 1969) 302.

27 «There were small villages giving (so many were the mirages) the illusion of being fictions; their reflections rose in the air or settled into the ground. Purely fictitious lakes with minarets surrounded them, turning them into violet islands. Finally one got to disbelieving one’s own eyesight, and in waiting for the truth to emerge – the sordid truth, for the villages were all decayed and fly-blown» Monsieur, 92.

28 Jacques Lacan, L’éthique de la psychanalyse, 170, 256.

29 «Suddenly Egypt hit us all like a hammer» Monsieur, 94.

30 «The sun was just touching the rim of the horizon and the whole world was saffron and lion-gold» Monsieur, 124.

31 «A great theatrical personage» Constance, 650.

32 «And behind the hum of human voices and the snorting of mules and horses from the dark groves beside the lake we could hear the festive beat of the little drum and the squeak of fifes» Monsieur, 101.

33 «But here were exposed various kinds of meat, fresh and dried fruits, vegetables, herbs, fowls, game, fish in abundance, very fine bread, milk and fresh eggs. (...) We wandered speechlessly about in a daze of admiration for the colours and the scents and the sounds » Monsieur, 102.

34 «Like inanimate objects», «in a tepid vacuum of eternity» Constance, 654.

35 «A strange primeval world» ibid., 658.

36 «In Egypt it seemed dangerously easy to succumb to the folklore of the place» Monsieur, 106.

37 «The crafty gipsy of the oriental fairytale», «the court buffoons of the Middle Ages», «a baroque breakfast» Monsieur, 107, 103, 130.

38 «Our bodies were chafed by the harsh desiccated winds blowing out of the deserts of Africa» Justine, 35.

39 «Melodramatically tasteless as a communion wafer» Balthazar, 60.

40 «And then: the first pure draughts of desert air, and the nakedness of space, pure as a theorem, stretching away into the sky drenched in all its own silence and majesty» Balthazar, 71.

41 «Untenanted except by such figures as the imagination of man has invented to people landscapes which are inimical to his passions and whose purity flays the mind» Balthazar, 71.

42 «Under the spell of its skies and its vistas of many-coloured desert» Monsieur, 91.

43 «All the exciting intellectual enigmas of the place» Monsieur, 149.

44 Je renvoie le lecteur à mon article sur « Les enjeux de l’énigme dans The Alexandria Quartet de Lawrence Durrell », dans L’Enigme (Poitiers : La Licorne, 2003) 297-308.

45 «A labyrinth of notes» Balthazar, 82.

46 «This scribbled paper which I have woven, spider like, from my inner life» Balthazar, 24.

47 «Cross-hatched, crabbed, starred with questions and answers in different coloured inks» Balthazar, 18.

48 «Listening to the heavy tone of her scent», «a dank and resonant smell of hot iron and tar» Justine 169, 181.

49 «Clear octaves of yellow light» Clea, 112; «giant octaves of ochre» Justine, 131.

50 «The country is still here – everything that is heteroclyte, devious, polymorph, anfractuous, equivocal, opaque, ambiguous, many-branched, or just plain dotty» Mountolive, 116.

51 «The spiritual city underlying the temporal one» Justine, 85.

52 « We had some truthful inkling of the original dream-city of the boy Alexander (...) It had gloried in palaces, baths, libraries, temples, and gymnasia without number. But we were latecomers to the place, modern scavengers of history upon a scene which had, it seems, long since exhausted all its historical potentialities » Monsieur, 94.

53 «A tide of meaningless affairs nosing along the dead level of things, entering no climate, leading us nowhere, demanding of us nothing save the impossible – that we should be» Justine, 16.

54 «The gravitational field which Alexandria threw down about those it had chosen as its exemplars» Justine, 16.

55 «(Balthazar) spoke, I remember, of the fons signatus of the psyche and of its ability to perceive an inherent order in the universe which underlay the apparent formlessness and arbitrariness of phenomena. Disciplines of mind could enable people to penetrate behind the veil of reality and to discover harmonies in space and time which corresponded to the inner structure of their own psyches» Justine, 89.

56 «The self which seemed to be only a huge, disorganized and shapeless society of lusts and impulses» Justine, 87.

57 «Streets that run back from the docks with their tattered rotten supercargo of houses, breathing into each others’ mouths, keeling over. Shuttered balconies swarming with rats, and old women whose hair is full of the blood of ticks. Peeling walls leaning drunkenly to east and west of their true centre of gravity. The black ribbon of flies attaching itself to the lips and eyes of the children – the moist beads of summer flies everywhere; the very weight of their bodies snapping off ancient flypapers hanging in the violet doors of booths and cafés. (...) The sores like ponds – the incubation of human misery of such proportions that one is aghast, and all one’s feelings overflow into disgust and terror» Justine, 21.

58 Isabelle Keller, L’anamorphose dans l’œuvre romanesque de Lawrence Durrell (Université de Toulouse le Mirail, 2002).

59 «The sackcloth covering which hides the cloth-of-gold – the meaning of the pattern», Justine, 14.

60 «The city which I now saw as a series of symbols (...) – minarets, pigeons, statues, ships, coins, camels and palms; it lived in a heraldic relation to the exhausted landscapes which enclosed it – the loops of the great lake: as proper to the scene as the Sphinx was to the desert» Balthazar, 190.

61 «Camels and palm-trees and cloaked natives existed only as a brilliantly coloured frieze, a backcloth to a life divided in its origins» Mountolive, 133.

62 «The giant footprints of the historical memory which lies behind the recollections of individual personality, its mentor and its guide: indeed its inventor, since man is only an extension of the spirit of the place» Justine, 156.

63 Pour une définition du terme par l’auteur, voir Lawrence Durrell, Henry Miller, A Private Correspondence. Ed. George Wickes (Londres: Faber and Faber, 1962. 1963) 19, 23. Lawrence Durrell, «Ideas about Poems» I, «The Heraldic Universe», Personal Landscape, An Anthology of Exile, ed. Robin Fedden (Londres: Poetry Limited, 1945) 72.

64 «Strangers and exiles to the Egypt which existed below the glittering surface of their dreams». Mountolive, 132.

65 «We are the children of our landscape; it dictates behaviour and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it». Justine, 36.

66 «A continuum, forsooth, embodying not a temps retrouvé but a temps délivré». Clea, 116.