The imaginary of decadence has often inspired brilliant interpreters; here, three of them come to us (Anatole France, Alfred de Vigny and Ernst Jünger), rich in their lost illusions, their tenderness for a world that is already fading, rich also in their errors, their suffering, their rage. Their acute sense of dispossession inspired the pages that this study illuminates, identifying parallels and variations, and restoring to these figures of loss, oblivion and fall the virginity of a first reading. The ideal of an extinct chivalry, the memory of an ancient wisdom or the insurrectionary will of the "clean slate" nourish these historical and literary representations, and find in Giambattista Vico's philosophy constant and profound resonances. Those who recognize themselves in the aphorisms of René Char and the novels of Julien Gracq will undoubtedly find here material to justify Martin Heidegger's equivocal promise: "It is as a poet that Man inhabits the Earth".