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Page 215
which is not manifested at the level of discoursive structures, but which is taken as actualized as far as the narrative sequence is concerned.
What happens, then, in Drame at the end of chapter 4? Raoul and Marguerite are informed that their own partners will go to the ball in a good mood. First inference: nobody writes an anonymous letter concerning someone's marital partner if not to make a sexual innuendo. Therefore it is suspected that Raoul and Marguerite will meet their respective lovers. If one meets someone else, then this someone else exists. Notice that the text does not say that Raoul and Marguerite will meet anyone at all. At mostand by an inferencethey are supposed to plan to meet someone.
No one has said that the anonymous letters were telling the truth. But at this point the elicited inference is supported by too many intertextual clues: it usually happens like this. Furthermore, when Raoul and Marguerite are telling each other that they will be elsewhere the day of the ball, they do it /dissimulant admirablement leurs desseins/. Now, /dissimuler/ (dissimulate) by semantic disclosure leads one to know that whoever dissimulates does it with respect to a dissimulated object. Since they conceal a project while stating another (nonconcealed) project, this means that the project they utter aloud is false. What is the true one?
The whole universe of intertextuality, from Boccaccio to Shakespeare and further on, is ready to offer us a lot of hints as to satisfactory inferential walks:
When a husband suspects his wife, he will try to catch her in the act (and vice versa). Therefore our characters are planning to attend the ball, each possibly disguised as his/her partner's lover. It does not matter that neither of them can know the disguise of his/her supposed antagonist (since each letter speaks only of the partner's disguise). This is a case of naive identification of the reader's knowledge with the character's knowledge, and the text has so cunningly intertwined these pieces of crossed information that it is not reasonably possible to have (at a first reading) an exact picture of the situation. Allais in fact is also playing with the psychology of reading and with the degree of attention that the Model Reader is supposed to display during a naive reading.
Once the yearning for inferential walks has been stirred up, not only does the reader suppose that Raoul and Marguerite will go to the ball, he makes them go by writing a ghost chapter between chapters 4 and 5, and during chapter 5 he makes them be there. At this point he is unable to distinguish between the possible course of events he has imagined and the events really occurring in the world of the story.
An inferential walk has much to do with a rhetorical entymeme. As such, it starts from a probable premise picked up in the repertory of common opinions, or endoxa, as Aristotle said. The endoxa represent

 
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