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This study offers a new hypothesis about the « fact » upon which Wilkie Collins’s Basil is supposed to be founded and reads this first sensational novel not as an alleged biography but as a meticulous rewriting of an 18th-century newspaper anecdote : « Histoire du désespéré », published by Prévost in his journal Le Pour et contre. It analyses the author’s particular strategy in amplifying this « true story » and tries to explain the more general pertinence of Prévost’s work as a journalist and a « documentary novelist » for the formation of Wilkie Collins’s poetics of fiction. A relation is thus established between Basil and Prévost’s Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut, the relevance of which, more than a century after its publication, can be explained by the current success of another and most recent rewriting of Manon Lescaut : Dumas fils’s La Dame aux camélias...