De son appartement

In the solitude of his apartment, Rousseau reads shorts excerpts from Racine's Bérénice, images of separation; he films in a café, musicians in the street, a dance, domestic intimacy, in a self-portrait that reflects the contradiction between desires and time. "For a long time I have wanted to try and see if I could create a drama with the simplicity of action which the Ancients so favoured. There are those who believe that this very simplicity is a sign of a lack of inventiveness. They do not consider that, on the contrary, all invention is to create something out of nothing." (Racine, preface to Bérénice, 1670.)