Elisabeth Ladenson THE IMPERIAL SUPERREADER, OR: SEMIOTICS OF INDECENCY ne of the many ironies in the history of literary theory is that Michael ‘Riffaterre remains known for an idea which he abandoned relatively early in his career. Although his name continues to be associated with the con- cept of the archilecteur (supperreader or hyperreader) in manuals and dic- tionaries of literary theory, by the time such popularizing accounts had begun to appear (c. late 70s), the archilecteur no longer had a place in Riffaterre’s work. My focus in this paper is twofold: first, to examine the idea of the archilecteur in the context of Riffaterrean theory in an attempt to understand why this figure was at once so compelling as to achieve a permanent place in the annals of literary analysis, and yet unsatisfactory enough for its author to have climinated it from his writing. Second, { take up the concept of the archilecteur in a context never studied by Riffaterre, that of literary obscenity trials, with a view toward construing the function of the government as reader in such trials as similar to that of the archilecteur. I conclude by proposing a historically inflected reading of the archilecteur. One of the reasons the archilecteur survives in outside accounts of Rif- faterre’s work long after its demise within his own writing—by the time Semi- otics of Poetry was published in 1978 the term had disappeared—is that it is used as a key concept in the essay that brought its author to international prominence: “La description des structures poétiques : deux approches du poéme de Baudelaire, ‘Les Chats’” (1966). This essay, along with the article in response to which it had been written, Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi- Strauss’s 1962 “‘Les Chats’ de Charles Baudelaire,” has frequently been cited and reprinted, the debate around “Les Chats” marking a crucial moment in the dissemination of structuralism and semiotics as major modes of literary analysis. As a result, the archilecteur, a concept Riffaterre had already coined and which he therefore deployed in his essay on “Les Chats” as an existing interpretive tool, became known as a key element of the new way of reading he was proposing, In other words, Riffaterre remains known for the archilecteur because he presented the latter as a given for his method at the very moment when that method was achieving international recognition. However, he continued developing and refining aspects of that method, and the archilecteur fell by the wayside not long after the essay on “Les Chats,” the victim, as it happens, of misreading. The main reason Riffaterre abandoned the archilecteur to its fate as a colorful character in the annals of theory would he Romanic Review Volume 93 Numbers 1-2 © The Trustees of Columbia University82 E.tsaBeTH LADENSON seem to be that the identity of this figure was doomed to be misunderstood. It was the archi, the super or hyper, that got the archilecteur in trouble. But the misleadingly grandiose archilecteur had started out more modestly as the lecteur moyen or “average reader.” In a 1971 commentary on the genesis of the archilecteur appended to the essay “Critéres pour l’analyse du style,” Rif faterre explains how this transformation took place: Larchilecteur, dans la premiére édition, était appelé lecteur moyen, puisqu’il restait & égale distance des insuffisances d'un déchiffre- ment superficiel et des excés de surlectures qui trouvent dans le texte ce qui n’y est pas, en y déversant le contenu de toute une cul- ture, ou Papport de recherches d’érudition, sans poser la question de leur pertinence aux faits du texte.' We see here the shadow of Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss, surlecteurs of Baude- lairean felines. It seems clear that the archilecteur was to suffer from prob- lems of translation, among others, since the superreader, however much he may have been conceived in direct contrast to the overreader, retained in English at least a flavor of interpreting too much. Riffaterre goes on, in the 1971 addition, to specify that the term lecteur moyen or average reader had occasioned misunderstandings on the basis of moyen or average, which had suggested mediocrity and ordinariness. In order to avoid such conno- tations, and after considering the possibility of surlecteur as a term to re- place lecteur moyen, only to abandon it because it implied the very sort of overinterpretation he was to criticize in Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss’s read- ing of Baudelaire, he came up with archilecteur, based on the linguistic model of archiphonéme, an entirely neutral term (at least in principle: its purpose is in fact to figure neutrality) designating a phoneme the function of which is to neutralize the potential phonetic discord resulting from the juxtaposition of adjacent incompatible phonemes. The archilecteur, writes Riffaterre, “ne garde du lecteur ordinaire que sa démarche méme”: that is, it is meant to be a sort of reading machine, the reader purged of all char- acteristics beyond the process of reading itself. “L’archilecteur est une somme de lectures, et non une moyenne,” he adds, explaining the aban- donment of lecteur moyen. “C’est un outil a relever les stimuli d’un texte, ni plus ni moins.”? Despite these and other precisions, the archilecteur was fated to go the way of the lecteur moyen as an interpretive tool, although for opposite reasons. If the lecteur moyen seemed at once fictional and faintly insulting, the 1. Riffaterre, “Critéres pour Panalyse du style,” in Essais de stylistique structurale (Paris: Flammarion, 1971). 46. This essay had originally appeared, minus the addi- tions, as “Criteria for Style Analysis,” in Word (XV, 1960 p. 154-174). 2. Idem.Tre IMpertat SuPERREADER 83 archilecteur proved, all authorial protests notwithstanding, unable to shed the suggestion of heuristic superpowers: the intent of the term as a neutral device meant to figure neutrality proved incapable of surmounting the power of con- notation. In Le Démon de la théorie, for example, Antoine Compagnon char- acterizes the archilecteur as a “lecteur omniscient auquel aucun lecteur réel ne saurait s’identifier en raison de ses facultés interprétatives limitées.”? (167). The archilecteur has thus continued to be cited as an approach more than thirty years after its inception, and Riffaterre’s reiterated insistence that it rep- resented nothing more than a disindividuated sum of individual readings had done little to dislodge the idea its name could not avoid implying, any more than the term lecteur moyen could avoid conjuring up notions of a hypo- thetical, but nonetheless embodied, pipe-smoking, slipper-wearing, armchair-occupying “average reader.” Among other things this would seem to illustrate the resilience of readerly obstinacy in the face of even the most emphatically stated authorial intention. If, as | asserted at the outset, Riffaterre’s continuing association with a con- cept he had abandoned early in his career represents a historical irony, a sec ond layer of irony emerges given the apparent reasons for that abandonment. The term archilecteur (like its predecessor, lecteur moyen, but for different rea- sons) was discarded as a key tool in Riffaterrean theory because it was con- sistently misread, despite the reiterated protestations of its author, This could only, certainly, create problems within a theoretical system posited on the ideas that: 1) authorial intention is irrelevant to the interpretation of a text; and ) texts impose their meaning on the reader. Given these two central dicta of Riffaterrean theory, the fact that a certain meaning has consistently been as- signed by readers of his texts to the figure of the archilecteur, despite his own assertions, might be taken to discredit the theory itself. And yet, for these very reasons, the abandonment of the archilecteur, even as it would seem at first glance to have been the product of an unfortunately compelling glitch in the development of Riffaterre’s theory, can by the same token be construed as sup- porting the validity of that system as a whole and confirming its central tenets. The concept of the archilecteur, apparent keystone of a theory predicated on the “intentional fallacy” and the notion that textual signification takes a cer- tain form regardless of the reader’s as well as the author's specific intentions, had to be discarded because it was consistently construed in ways diverging from the valence its author had explicitly imposed on the term. The archilecteur, at least taken as a trope rather than an interpretive tool, thus can—and perhaps must—be read as a triumph of textual signification over both authorial and readerly positionality. The salient question, then, is whether the archilecteur retains a significance beyond that of resuming a certain number of ironies in the history of literary theory in the late twentieth century, I would suggest that it does, and I came 3. Antoine Compagnon, Le Démon de la Théorie (Paris: Seuil, 1998), 167.84 ELtsaBeTH LADENSON to this conclusion in the course of working on the history of literary censor- ship. Specifically by virtue of the ambiguity or ambivalence inherent in the term, and that was to prove its downfall as a theoretical device, the notion of the archilecteur, I would hazard, is particularly well suited to the peculiar role played by the government in literary obscenity trials. Of course, 1 am aware that this application of the term goes against the ahistoricity, or rather trans- historicity, and the rigorous absence of judgement that are the stated ambi- tions of the archilecteur. “Lélimination du contenu des réactions est essen- tielle,” writes Riffaterre in defining this figure: Elle protége contre les classifications préconcues (comme celle de la rhétorique), elle permet au relevé d’étre transhistorique, trans- idéologique, d’inclure des faits dont linterprétation a changé par- fois du tout au tout et de tenir compte méme des réactions néga- tives ; enfin et surtout, cest elle qui élimine la subjectivité de ces réactions, cette subjectivité (approbation, désapprobation, inter- prétation comme intention, interprétation esthétique, philoso- phigue, etc.), étant uniquement de contenu. Obviously, in this sense the archilecteur has no bearing whatsoever for my pur- poses, since the role of the government prosecutor in literary censorship trials is precisely to interpret a work according to the moral effect it might puta- tively have on its eventual readership, since désapprobation (along with its handmaidens intentionality and esthetic and philosophical interpretation) is the name of the game. But, as I have tried to suggest, one of the most salient traits of the archilecteur is that, like Frankenstein’s monster, once loosed upon the reading public it began to escape the confines of the course its author had set for it. (In fact in this metaphorical context one might cite not only the mon- ster as it eludes its maker’s intentions within Mary Shelley’s novel, but also the fact that the name “Frankenstein” has come to figure the monster itself rather than its author, since one of the unintended byproducts of the archilecteur has been a confusion of that concept with Riffaterre himself.) What I would like to propose is that, if one leaves aside what may well have been its original im- petus as a content-ignoring, judgement-eschewing reading machine, designed purcly to discern the mechanisms by which signification is produced, the archilecteur structurally functions in a way that parallels the workings of the state as reader in literary obscenity trials. In other words, we have seen the archilecteur, and he is Ernest Pinard. 4, Idem, 46~ 5, See, e.g., Robert Scholes on the architecteur in the “Les Chats” essay: The only super reader invoked here is Riffaterre himself.” Scholes, Structuralism in Literature (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1974), 38.THe IMPERIAL SUPERREADER 85 In a sense what this means is an archilecture of the archilecteur, since the reading of that figure as stripped of the careful neutrality that is its most insisted-upon quality is not altogether different from the process it was conceived in order to perform. If we ignore the stated content and concentrate on the structure, the archilecteur is a hypothetical reader-figure situated, once again, “a égale distance des insuffisances @’un déchiffrement superficiel et des exc’s des surlectures qui trouvent dans le texte ce qui n’y est pas, en y déver- sant le contenu de toute une culture,” etc. Moreover, “!archilecteur est une somme de lectures, et non une moyenne.” Structurally, this is closely analo- gous to the unenviable task arrogated to the government prosecutor of a lit- erary work accused (for instance) of outrages a la morale publique et aux bonnes meeurs. In fact, such trials represent one of the very few contexts in which we find reader-response in the wild, as it were: that is, the close read- ing of a literary work performed by someone who is nor a literary critic, not a professional reader. Nor, however, is he reading as an individual. The gov- ernment prosecutor responds precisely to the definition of the archilecteur in that he is neither an unenlightened layman reading superficially, nor is he an expert bringing a recondite erudition to bear, Moreover, he is not in a posi- tion to foreground or privilege either his preconceptions or his personal es- thetic or moral judgement of the text; even if he can be assumed to have such judgements, and even if he makes mention of them, they are explicitly not at issue. Instead, his task is to represent the response of his fellow citizens as po- tential readers, in other words to act as a collective, neutral reading machine: an archilecteur. Neutral, that is, in the sense of impersonal. Obviously, the task of the gov- ernment prosecutor is to present the case for the prosecution, and therefore by definition he can hardly incarnate neutrality. His job is to demonstrate guilt, and as 2 result he must necessarily come to the text with something like what Riffatesre calls a cypher-grid: his reading of the work in question must be en- tirely informed from the outset by his preordained interpretation of the work as immoral. And therefore, as happens whenever a reader reads in order to dis- cover what he already knows, such as when certain critics discern indetermi- nacy and unstable meaning due to the slipperiness of the signifier in any given text, he finds what he is looking for. Still, his status as an officially designated reading-machine, invested by the government with the task of representing the hypothetical average reader and gauging the potential effect of the work in question, acting that is as a sort of textual control sample, makes the govern- ment prosecutor the closest thing we have to a real functioning archilecteur. One might propose the judge or tribunal (collectivity of judges) in such cases as a closer approximation of the role of neutral reader than the government prosecutor. Given his evident, necessary bias, why the prosecution, rather than the defense, with its alternative bias, or perhaps some compromise between the two? Better still, why not the judges, since it is after all their job to decide on the final reading of the text in question? It is true that the juridical tribunal, at least in principle, more closely adheres to the concept of the archilecteur in86 EuisaBeTH LaDENSON terms of preordained neutrality. But the function of the tribunal—also in the pay of the government—is to decide between the readings represented by the prosecution and the defense, and the defense is motivated by the prosecution: the defense does not exist in the absence of the prosecution, on which it is en- tirely predicated. As a result, neither the defense nor the final judgement rep- resents an actual reading. The one puts forth a defensive interpretation, nega- tively determined by the shape of the prosecution's argument, and the other an adjudication between the original governmental reading and the defense which attempts to protect the work, and specifically its author, editor and printer, from the prosecution. I would therefore suggest that the government prosecutor comes closest to a historical actualization of the role of the archilecteur. In this regard I propose to take a brief look at the career of Pinard, who after all carved out a niche in posterity on the basis of his readings of the two foundational works of modern literature, Madame Bovary and Les Fleurs du mal, What I mean by Pinard’s career is not his judicial and political rise in the Second Empire government; nor am I referring to the literary efforts of his later years, when, in addition to publishing his historically inaccurate mem- its, Pinard occasioned Flaubert much amusement by writing a volume of ob- scene verse. Instead, I will give an overview of Pinard’s career as a character in literary history. It seems that the Imperial Prosecutor in one sense fulfills the archilecteur’s characteristic of being transhistorical and transideological, or rather it would be more accurate to say that Pinard functions as a sort of Rorschach test for the zeitgeist. Flaubert understandably, continued to hate Pinard for the rest of his lifes Baudelaire, more opaquely, made sure that he figured on the list of people to whom complimentary copies of his books were sent, including the 1866 Bel- gian edition of Les Epaves which reprinted the six poems suppressed from Les Fleurs du mal in 1857 following Pinard’s successful prosecution (it is not clear in what spirit this was intended, nor do we know how Pinard greeted these gifts). Subsequent characterizations of Pinard follow Flaubert’s lead. Maxime du Camp, who was present at the trial of Madame Bovary, notes of the speech for the prosecution that “Si c’est 1a ce qu’on appelle P’éloquence judiciaire, ’élo- quence judiciaire est peu de chose,” adding : “La cause était mawvaise, en con- viens, mais le réquisitoire fut plus mauvais encore.”* Pierre Loujs referred to the same speech as a “monument de bétise humaine,” and Léon Daudet called Pinard “le dernier mot de l’abrutissement,” while the writer and Flaubert scholar René Dumesnil termed the prosecution of Madame Bovary “un monument de mauvaise foi, qui semble né de la collaboration de Tartuffe et de Homais.”” Through the end of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, opin- ion on the subject of Pinard among right-thinking literary types was divided 6. Du Camp, Souvenirs littéraires (Paris : Hachette, 1962), 245. 7. Quoted in Alexandre Najjar, Le Procureur de l'Empire (Paris : Ballard, 2001), 85.‘The IMPERIAL SUPERREADER 87 only on the matter of whether he was actually stupid or merely acting in bad faith. This is not surprising, since the figure I have been trying to fit into the mold of the archilecteur begins to look like a surlecteur upon careful scrutiny of his speeches against Flaubert and Baudelaire. He does not overread in the erudite sense of Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss, but he predictably reads into the works what is not there, as for instance when he refers to “Delphine et Hip- polyte” as “Les Tribades” rather than “Femmes damnées” in order to em- phasize the lasciviousness of Baudelaire’s portrayal.® In the case of Flaubert, Pinard performs what may well be a deliberate misreading, when he cites the sentence “Emma retrouvait dans l’adultére toutes les platitudes du mariage,” only to conclude: “Platitudes du mariage, poésie de l’adultére ! Tantét c’est la souillure du mariage, tant6t ce sont ses platitudes, mais c’est toujours la poésie de Padultére.”? It seems possible that he knows better, as when, in reference to a related passage, he points out the chiasmic inappropriateness of “les souil- lures du mariage et les désillusions de Padultére” (625). But the point is that, like many or even most readers, Pinard finds what he is looking for, in this case a poetics of adultery which he ends ap dragging forcibly out of a novel from which it is notably absent. Whether this makes him a bad reader or merely the vehicle of imperial bad faith is in the eye of the beholder. As a result it is interesting to find that the portrait of Pinard as reader changes in the late twentieth century. At a certain point, which surely has ev- erything to do with the end of literary trials on the basis of what used to be called outrage 4 la morale publique et religieuse et aux bonnes meeurs (the charges in the cases of both Flaubert and Baudelaire)! Pinard began to be lauded as a good reader. Often in a tone of mild surprise, writers commenting on the trial of Madame Bovary note that Pinard is actually a perspicacious in- terpreter. For the most part this phenomenon applies only to Flaubert’s trial, which has been the object of much more commentary than Baudelaire’s, doubt- less—or at least in part—because the case against the latter was easier. Les Fleurs du mal remains more obviously scandalous, and the state’s case against it has accordingly attracted less critical attention.!! Also, there is the fact that 8. See Baudelaire, Envres completes I (Paris, Gallimard, Bibliotheque de La Pléiade, 1975), 1208. : 9. See Flaubert, Euvres completes | (Paris : Gallimard, Bibliotheque de La Pléiade, 1951), 628. 10. In 1881 a law declaring “complete” freedom of the press in France did away with the first two categories, leaving only outrage aux bonnes moeurs, which roughly cor- responds to “obscenity” in English. 11. Despite du Camp’s remarkable observation that “Rien, absolument rien, dans les poémes de Baudelaire, ne portait atteinte aux bonnes moeurs.” Souvenirs littéraires, 207. It is perhaps not a coincidence that du Camp also found Baudelaire a second-rate poet (see 203).88 ELIsaBETH LADENSON Pinard was relatively successful in his case against Baudelaire (he had argued that at least thirteen of the poems represented various outrages, whereas only six were retained), which makes him less likely as a sympathetic character in terms of that trial. In the case of Madame Bovary, at any rate, Pinard has of late begun to be depicted as a remarkably acute reader, whereas Senard, the defense attorney to whom Flaubert dedicated his novel when it came out in book form following his acquittal, comes across as a dimwitted hypocrite (that is, both stupid and acting in bad faith), The turning point between the exco- riations of Pinard in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and his rehabilitation in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century (roughly the same time lapse, it should be noted, as the one separating Baudelaire’s incul- pation in 1857 and his judicial rehabilitation in 1949) can be seen in the 1970s and 80s. In 1975, for instance, Mario Vargas Llosa, in his study of Madame Bovary, remarks that Pinard’s speech for the prosecution, while absurd, is no more so than Senard’s defense: the defense speech is “humbug,” as Vargas Llosa puts it.!2 Similarly, one of the main points of focus in Dominick La- Capra’s 1982 ‘Madame Bovary’ on Trial is the extent to which the arguments for the prosecution and defense resemble each other, as they are grounded in the same moral system."? Some twenty years later, Pinard is cautiously praised in both academic stud- ies and popular journalism, one of the most recent examples being an article on Madame Bovary published in Le Nouvel observateur in 2001, which pointed out that “Pinard n’est pas au fond un si mauvais lecteur.” Other in- stances include Pierre-Louis Rey’s commentary on Flaubert’s novel, which in- cludes the observation that “Maitre Pinard n’a pas pour mission de défendre T'Art, mais la morale, et il le fait avec talent,” and the latest biography of Flaubert, in which we read that “Ernest Pinard, however ludicrous his official role as the scourge of modern art, deserves some recognition as a singularly discerning early reader of Flaubert.”'® The equivocation that characterizes these pronouncements is due, obviously, to a general reluctance to be caught defending the prosecution of a classic. Why then this trend toward rehabili- tating Pinard, to whom a biography has recently been devoted,” and which would surely have had Flaubert, for one, spinning in his grave? It can only, I think, be because Pinard’s version of literary works that are now squarely canonical, no longer problematic but rather required reading, depicts them as 12. Vargas Llosa, The Perpetual Orgy (New York : Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1975), 25. 13, LaCapra, ‘Madame Bovary’ on Trial (Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 1982). 14. Gilles Anquetil, “1857 Madame Bovary,” in Le Nouvel Observateur, no. 1916, 26 juillet-1 aoa 2001, 69. 15. Pierre-Louis Rey, Madame Bovary, Foliothéque series (Paris : Gallimard, 1996), 73. 16. Geoffrey Wall, Flaubert : a Life (London : Faber and Faber, 2001), 234. 17. Alexandre Najjar, Le Procureur de l'Empire (Paris : Ballard, 2001).Tue IMPERIAL SUPERREADER 89 subversive, and our age is all for subversion, as long as it is subversion of val- ues other than our own. Pinard, I would argue, is an archilecteur for our time because his Flaubert and his Baudelaire are dangerous figures in an age when literature is, for the most part, 20 fonger seen as posing any danger. The use I am making of Rif- faterve’s term is, of course, [am aware, a misuse in the sense that one of the functions of the archilecteur in Riffaterrean theory was precisely to transcend such historical specificities. But, to misquote Horace’s famous line about Na- sure, historiam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret: chase history out with a pitchfork and it comes climbing back in through the window. Like Riffaterre’s archilecteur, the Imperial Prosecutor’s arguments are grounded in an insistence on ahistoricity, in the former case a project of categorizing reading according to a system of signification that would transcend historical as well as individ- ual specificity; in the latter a reliance on “timeless Christian values” invoked to demonstrate that the works in question would be seen as outrageous ac- cording to any standard of decency. In both cases, it is in large part the very attempt to dehistoricize that marks these polemics as products of specific mo- ments in the history of approaches to reading. In Pinard’s case, moreover, fur- ther “ahistorical” readings have come along to judge his reading of Flaubert, deeming it either absolutely ridiculous, only relatively ridiculous, or else not so ridiculous after all: each characterization firmly anchored in the spirit of the moment at which it was put forth. By way of conclusion, though, I would like to propose the following: not only may Riffaterre’s figure of the archilecteur, once rehistoricized, be usefully rehabilitated as a concept in thinking about official readings of the sort en- countered in literary obscenity trials, but it may be fruitfully paired with the concept it supplanted, the lecteur moyen. Pinard, the Second Empire embodi- ment of the archilecteur, actually invokes such a figure in his speeches for the prosecution of Madame Bovary and Les Fleurs du mal. This much is hardly surprising, since the task of the Imperial Prosecutor is to represent a hypo- thetical average reader whose sensibilities he is to gauge and protect. He is not himself the average reader, but he exists, in his capacity as official reader, in direct relation to that figure, whom he accordingly describes in order to make his central point against Flaubert. Pinard’s average reader, it turns out, is not our pipesmoking Prudhomme comfortably ensconced in his armchair; he bears little resemblance to the bourgeois male naratee interpellated, with varying de- grees of irony, in French novels from Le Pére Goriot through Notre-Dame- des-fleurs and beyond. I leave it to the archilecteur himself to describe his lecteur moyen: Qui est-ce qui lit le roman de M, Flaubert ? Sont-ce des hommes qui s’occupent d’économie politique et sociale ? Non ! Les pages légares de Madame Bovary tombent en des mains plus légeres, des mains de jeunes filles, quelquefois des femmes mariées. (Flaubert, Pléiade I, 631-2)90 ELISABETH LADENSON The plot of Madame Bovary itself centrally concerns a subject much discussed at the time of its publication, and which would become the centerpiece of its trial: the dangers posed to young women by the reading of Romantic novels. Exponentially increasing literacy rates among women and the resultant pop- ularity of feuilletons had made this an important political issue in the mid- nineteenth century. As a result, long before feminist theory began to attempt a gendered account of reading, the French government itself was, especially in the person of the Imperial Prosecutor, sketching a theory of reader response with particular attention to the figure of the lectrice moyenne. I bring this up here because it is testimony to the degree to which a category like gender is f- nally inescapable, however much one may try to escape such contingencies, just as a desire for transhistoricity ends up marking an approach to reading as mired in its historical moment. If Riffaterre’s archilecteur fell by the way- side along with the lecteur moyen it was meant to supplant, it is surely not just because the name conjured up pictures of a semiotic superhero, in contrast to the more modest function that construct was designed to fulfill, but also be- cause the gap between the two hypothetical figures—the banal, implicitly male “average reader” and the unavoidably grandiose “superreader” — is filled with a historically inflected category of actual readers. When Riffaterre had aban- doned the archilecteur, the figure that stepped in to replace him was called, with misleading simplicity, le lecteur. The examples of both Ernest Pinard and the lectrices he was charged to protect would seem to suggest that, if history has provided us with archilecteurs, the lecteur is not always to be found where we would look for him, University of VirginiaCopyright © 2003 EBSCO Publishing