Dialogus

» see dialogus2.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Dialogus went up in 1999, made by Sinclair Dumontais and Paul Laurendeau, the latter working under the pen name René Podular Pibroch. The French Wikipedia describes it as a public forum that purported to offer visitors the chance to communicate with people they could not otherwise reach: dead historical figures, or major characters from world fiction. You wrote a letter. Somebody answered it in that person's voice.

The article calls the whole thing "un projet original et frondeur de pastiche littéraire", which translates roughly as an original and insolent piece of literary pastiche, and insolent is the right word for it. Céline answered mail, and so did Sherlock Holmes. The roster named in the article runs from Sacha Guitry through Tolkien. It ran for twenty years.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the lettre d'acceptation ~

The mechanism that makes this more than a novelty is the lettre d'acceptation. Before a figure started taking correspondence, a letter of acceptance fixed the moment in their life they would be writing from. So the Shakespeare on the other end was Shakespeare at a stated point, with a stated amount of the world available to him, rather than a timeless Shakespeare who had read the internet.

That one rule does an enormous amount of work. The volunteer answering as Céline has to stay inside what Céline could know on the declared date, which turns each letter into a research exercise as much as a performance.

This was not role-play in the gaming sense and it was certainly not a chatbot. It was a literary discipline with a submission process attached, run by people who were not paid for it.

~ five countries of volunteers ~

I found this site in 2026, in a defunct-websites category, written in a language I read slowly and about writers I have mostly met in translation. In 1999 it was invisible to me. What survives the distance intact is the labor arrangement: the French article says plainly that the correspondents were "des animateurs bénévoles de cinq pays francophones", volunteer animators from five French-speaking countries. Twenty years of that, with no company behind it.

Nothing was recorded about scale. The article gives no traffic figures and no letter counts, and it says nothing about how any of it was funded. It does not name a single volunteer either, only the figures they wrote as, which is either good discipline about a pseudonymous project or simply what nobody bothered to write down.

~ the five books ~

Five printed volumes came out of it, with ISBNs, under the name collection Dialogus. One of them is titled Entretiens avec cinq écrivains and collects five writers' correspondence, Céline and Simone de Beauvoir among them. So part of the output moved onto paper and stopped depending on a hosting bill.

The site itself did not survive. Dialogus disappeared in 2019 and the French article gives no reason at all, which for a twenty-year volunteer project is a more ordinary ending than a dramatic one. The original page links are dead, and the article points readers at the Wayback Machine for some of the Georges Brassens pages. dialogus2.org still answers, but it redirects to a games site unconnected to the project, so the only thing reachable at the old address now is somebody else's business.

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