La variation plus-que-parfait ∽ passé simple dans les analepses narratives

In narratives, French past perfect (plus-que-parfait) is regularly used to indicate that the situation referred to is located prior to another situation, i.e. before to the current point of the story. When these flashbacks stretch for a long time, and/or gain some autonomy, they form a real ‘narrative within a narrative’ (analepsis). It may happen, then, that the simple past (passé simple) takes over from the plus-que-parfait inside the analepsis. These two tenses are then, in some ways, in a situation of variation. This article examines the environments and the conditions of this tense switching, in a corpus of modern narrative prose of XIXth and XXth c