Abstract
Charles Sorel is the greatest French writer of the Baroque period but, despite the breadth of his production and the notoriety of his character, his name is often absent from the paratexts of his works. In fact, Sorel often hides behind anonymity or resorts to various forms of authorial nomination consisting of pseudonyms, heteronyms, namesakes, acronyms. The procedure that the writer adopts to distance himself from any declaration of authorship of his texts creates a rift between the claim of authorial authority and the attempt to erase his identity. The process of dissimulating the author’s name tends towards self-censorship of the paternity of the work and induces the novelist to invent authorial substitutes. We examine the cases of onomastic reticence used by Sorel in his two best-known novels: l’Histoire comique de Francion (1623, 1626 and 1633) and Le Berger extravagant (1626-1627 and 1633-1634), which show a complex vicious circle of self-reference and a sought-after rhetoric of authorial identity.