| Summary: | International audience This paper aims to focus on a recurring image in Xavier Marmier’s work: the saxifrage flower. First a botanical specimen caught by the traveler’s glance during his travel in Southern Iceland (1836), the saxifrage is at once set up as both a traditional and a romantic allegory for poetry. From the travel narrative “Lettres sur l’Islande” (1837) to the collection of essays and memories “En Pays lointains” (1876), without forgetting to mention the novel “Les Fiancés du Spitzberg” (1858), the semantic field generated by this allegory becomes more complex as the number of its occurrences grows. This paper analyses the main aspects of this semantic field and questions its implications. Is the allegorical saxifrage only a constitutive part of Marmier’s poetical ethos, as he finds in Iceland a way to accomplish his literary ambition? Or is it the keystone of the imaginary representation through which Marmier intends to make known Iceland to his French readers? When coupled with another seminal image in “Lettres sur l’Islande”, which is Iceland’s “poetical soil”, Marmier’s saxifrage expresses the writer’s fascination for Icelandic poetry which he passionately relays to France, but it also makes of him one of the main French contributors to the following European Romantic discourse: paraphrasing Voltaire, it is from the North that the flowers of poetry come to us today.
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