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Charles de Vivray's Three Concerts Music is a keystone in the entire work of Marie Krysinska, who was first and foremost a musician. Guided by the rule of universal harmony, the perfect realisations of which are musical compositions, she applies it in her poems as well as in her narrative texts. Krysinska's novel, La Force du désir [The Force of Desire], was read in its time primarily as a roman à clef. Behind the literary characters are real people: poets, writers, actresses, singers, journalists, composers. One of the portraits is particularly touching, that of de Vivray whose real-life prototype was Charles-Erhardt de Sivry. A musician, conductor, poet and music theorist, de Sivry charmed listeners with his compositions. In the diegesis, all his professional activities are mentioned, more or less revealed. Thanks to Charles de Vivray's three concerts, the novelistic space transforms into a musical space.

The Distorting Mirror of Literature: Character Portraits in "La Force du Désir" by Marie Krysinska A roman à clef, where the presence of fictional and nonfictional elements is obvious, is a powerful framework for literary portraits of the author’s contemporaries. The degree of deformation, be it glamorizing or devaluing, depends on several factors, among which the pleasure of playing hide and seek is not the least. Each reference, even a demeaning one, brings out of the shadow of the past both prominent and background characters, as well as important events, all from the author’s point of view. Through this display, an image of a very complex environment emerges, where the worst rubs shoulders with the best, and where the constraints of daily life or loyalty to ideals impose difficult choices with very serious consequences. The author observes the sociological phenomena that affect her environment and, while making sharp criticisms, seeks to find a remedy for the wound that destroys Art and the Artist.

Literature is filled with silence, which, being polysemic, is a medium much harder to decipher than a word, whose semantic bearing capacity is more limited. To explore silence is to try to gain access to something most intimate, something that does not want to – or cannot – appear in verbal form. In Krysinska’s selected texts one observes silence on two levels, the narrative level and the story level. In most cases, we are dealing with a communicative silence. On the story level, characters use silence as an efficient way of achieving their goals or they are forced into silence by external factors. In many cases silence is imposed on the characters, it is not their choice, for in the given situation they could not utter even a single word. On the narrative level it is the narrator who condemns characters to the role of quasi-mutes, for any statements from characters are relatively rare. The narrator does not allow them to speak freely, he uses reported speech. He exercises active control over the reader, skilfully directing their reception and forcing them to accept his point of view.