| Summary: | In the light of Spinoza, le masque de la sagesse by Patrick Rödel and Séraphine de Senlis: de la peinture à la folie by Alain Vircondelet, this article seeks to show how fiction and imagination come to the rescue of reality and history. To address this problem, the diegetic structure and the stylistic specificities of the above-mentioned biographies have been deconstructed. Furthermore, the possible line between real facts and fictional ones has been drawn. This has shed a new light on the still pending debate on the actual diagnosis to pose over the issues and psychological disorders faced by Spinoza and Séraphine respectively, in their lifetime. To this end, narratology, stylistics, biography, psychology and neurosciences have been put to contribution, to explain how, ultimately, through the mediation of fiction, imaginary biographies tend to reshuffle the use and the typology of biography.
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