This paper focuses on the notion of “ interêt” or interest, a notion constituted at the beginning of the 19th century by the inheritance of two centuries of theatrical and novelistic poetics, and which is at the intersection between poetics and reception: the interest of the reader or the spectator for the characters, in other words, his or her’s vigorous attachment to them, determines the interest of what happens, that is, the tension it creates. Interest thus becomes a criterium for the aesthetic value of the work. But this value is upended during the 19th century: it becomes associated with mediocrity in literature, linked without shame to the excesses of pathos. For novelists, who cannot do without the readers’ interest, emerges a kind of aporia: it will become necessary to negotiate with this form of interest, or renew it.