Published by Gallimard in January 1992, Annie Ernaux's Passion simple (translation : Simple Passion, Seven Stories Press, 1993) was a dazzling public success: 140,000 copies were sold in six weeks. In this autobiographical work, the unvarnished and unlyrical evocation of the "desentimentalized" affair of a fifty-year-old intellectual with a younger lover, a diplomat with a macho attitude, is mixed with the recurring theme, since her first book published in 1974, of the writer's working-class origins and the effects of her upward displacement in social space. From the moment of its publication, Passion simple has clearly polarised French literary criticism in a gendered differentiated manner, due in particular to the double literary "indignity" of the object of the book: the sexual intimacy written by a mature woman of working-class origins. I propose here to shed sociological light on the modalities, the springs, but also the plural and equivocal stakes of the appropriations of this narrative through which 'the scandal arrives' by French men and womenwho make literary critics their profession.