Gardénias et sécateurs : l’horticulture comme eudémonisme dans Une Désolation de Yasmina Reza

This article is an investigation of the unusual role played by nature in a novel by Yasmina Reza (Une Désolation, 1999) when natural environment doesn't figure much in the rest of the author's dramatic or fictional works. Une Désolation's narrator, a modern misanthropist, finds in gardening an antidote to the world's ills. He contrasts his son's hedonism and his wife's activism with his existential angst and promotes the eudaemonic happiness gained from growing trees and flowers. Contextualising this surprising horticultural philosophy with earlier literary glorification of nature, the article shows the paradoxes and oxymorons of the novel's modern Candid.