of the abyss" concept, notes that ocean waters are the vehicles of nomadism in Ulysse, while, in Titanic, the same environment serves as a metaphor of dying. In Cioran's account, Benjamin Fondane lived his final years permanently aware "of a misfortune that was about to happen", and built a "complicity with the unavoidable". The same is noted by German Romanian poet and Cioran exegete Dieter Schlesak, who suggests: "Fondane was a man who wished to bear the absolute uncertainty of the outside; that which exists is an intermittent, not continuous, reality. But [true misfortune] is the boredom of faint unliving, [...] of things implied, these being the ones [Fondane] hated." Fondane's visions about history and the role of poetry were notably outlined in L'Exode, a portion of which is dedicated to the powerlessness of Jews in front of prejudice. According to Oișteanu, this text, where the narrative voice speaks of sufferings and defects common in all humans, was probably inspired by the famous monologue in William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. Another part, called "astonishingly prophetic" and "cynical apocalyptic" by Chitrit, reads: Similar themes were being explored by the Super Flumina Babylonis cycle, described by Sernet as "a terrible foreshadowing of events into which peoples and continents were about to sink, into which the author himself was to be dragged without the possibility of return." Writing about the entirety of Fondane's French poetry (Le Mal des fantômes), poet and language theorist Henri Meschonnic argued that the Romanian author was unique in depicting "the revolt and the flavor of life mixed into the sense of death". Legacy Family and estate After her husband's death (of which she was for long ignorant) and the end of the war, Geneviève Tissier-Fondane, aided by the Maritains, moved into Kolbsheim Castle, tutoring the children of Antoinette and Alexander Grunelius. A devout Catholic, she eventually retreated from public life, becoming a nun in the Congregation of Notre-Dame de Sion (dedicated to Catholic missionary work among the Jews). Relocating to the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, she died, after a long battle with cancer, in March 1954. Fondane was also survived by his mother Adela, who died in June 1953 at age 94, and sister Rodica (d. 1967). The writer was the subject of several visual portrayals by noted artists, some of whom were his personal friends. During his collaboration with Integral and unu, Victor Brauner and Jules Perahim both