During the 1830s, an anecdote regarding Cleopatra re-emerged in Europe : she was said to have offered her admirers a night with her so long as they were willing to die the next day. Forced to sell (themselves) because of the increase in the pressure from the media on the world of the arts, writers had to negotiate a new image for themselves in the literary cum press world : Cleopatra, imperious sovereign and sublime prostitute, is the model they chose for themselves in order to accept the law of supply and demand without losing prestige. These three short stories by Antoine-Édouard Brac de Bourdonnel, Alexandre Pouchkine and Théophile Gautier function along similar lines : rhetorical slippage enables them to pass from the reality of an erotic night, which the reader doesn’t get to see, to a night of a purely textual nature, which refers back to a fictive nocturnal situation of utterance whose purpose is to let us guess at the hovering figure of a framing narrator in the margins of the story.