Biography of Denise Masson

Denise Masson (1901-1994) lived most of her life in Marrakech. Born into a wealthy family, she spent her adolescence and part of her youth in Algeria, where her father had acquired a property. At the age of twenty, she resolved to become a nun and prepared to do so at the Carmelite convent in Toulouse. A year later, she decided not to embrace the cloistered life and exchanged the nun's attire for that of a nurse. She then went to Paris to train at the Société de Secours des Blessés Militaires (which later became the Red Cross) then under the direction of Inès de Bourgoing (1862-1953), who was the wife of Marshal Lyautey. Masson completed her nursing training in Rabat in 1929 and was soon after appointed director of an anti-tuberculosis centre in Marrakech, where she settled in the early 1930s. Her parents managed to agree on buying her a riad in the Old City where her library and archives can still be found today.

The daughter of an art collector, Masson grew up in an educated environment, but her health problems forced her family to leave France for Algeria​1​, which is why she did not attend a regular school. The photographic albums in her archives in Marrakech reveal that she moved back and forth between France and Algeria, even though she tried to hide this “colonial” past all her life. Reading the memoirs she wrote in her twilight years, it is clear that she constantly refused to be associated with a policy that she never ceased to question.​2​

Through her paternal family, Denise Masson belonged to a trend of Catholicism that was sensitive to the working class and encouraged the education of girls for health and social reasons. Her efforts, from 1936 to 1947, to set up a system of social workers in Morocco under the French protectorate bear witness to this. The project was aborted for a variety of reasons, but it is certain that Masson's demands did not make the undertaking any easier: she wanted the young nurses who arrived from France to learn the Moroccan dialect in one year, in addition to some specialist courses.

Denise Masson and the Qur’an

In the mid-1930s, it was the reading of a polemical work by the seventeenth-century Ludovico Marracci, whose translation of the Qur’an was considered excellent among Latinists, that gave Masson the idea of studying in greater detail the theological and doctrinal relationship between the Qur’an and the Bible​3​. Four centuries of humanist criticism and a succession of archaeological discoveries had dramatically expanded the biblical corpus. Mesopotamian literature had started to be deciphered and the Qumran scrolls and the Gnostic writings of Nag Hammadi were discovered towards the end of the 1940s. In Masson’s view, the study of the Qur’an had to take into account the multiple and sometimes divergent traditions represented by the Masoretic corpus, the Greek Septuagint, the two Talmuds and the Samaritan writings (Jewish tradition), as well as the Syriac Peshitta and the Apocrypha (Christian tradition). In this she emulated the eclecticism of Édouard Dhorme, the author of a translation of the Old Testament that she admired. In addition to the appeal of biblical geography for Christians of the time, Denise Masson researched the doctrinal relationships made obvious by the mention in the Qur’an of prophets who are also attested to in biblical texts. A Catholic scholar and reader of Philo of Alexandria and Flavius Josephus, she readily identifies the Qur’anic allusions to the “biblical subtext”, i.e. the echoes of the edification narratives compiled in the Old Testament and reinterpreted, at least for some of them, in the New Testament. These allusions are most often borrowed from parallel traditions preserved only in the works called “apocryphal” in the Western tradition, but which more often than not belong to the corpus read by the various Orthodox communities of the Levant and by the Copts of Egypt.

Building on the translations of Marracci and Blachère, Masson published in 1958 a truly comparative work, Le Coran et la Révélation judéo-chrétienne. As the disclaimer indicates, she generally quoted Blachère, but sometimes modified him. She was helped during the writing of her book by Louis Gardet, as well as by Benedictine friends from the Toumliline monastery in Morocco, who gave her their comments and proofreading. An enlarged edition, published in 1976 under the title Monothéisme biblique et monothéisme coranique: doctrines comparées (Biblical monotheism and Qur’anic monotheism: comparative doctrines), benefited from her readings on current research in the field of the Books of Enoch and so-called apocryphal literature.​4​

Both for Le Coran et la Révélation judéo-chrétienne and for her translation of the Qur’an, published in 1967, Denise Masson signed her name “D. Masson”, to avoid being attacked by an academic world (for which she was an intruder) that was still largely male, whether in France or in North Africa and the Near East. The reception of her translation was generally positive, enabling her to lift a part of the veil and to publish in 1976 an enlarged reprint of her 1958 work, Monothéisme biblique et monothéisme coranique, under her full name. A summary of her thinking on Abrahamic comparatism, entitled Les Trois Voies de l’Unique, was published later in 1983 and in 1986, still with Desclée de Brouwer as a publishing house, L’Eau, le Feu, la Lumière (Water, Fire, Light), in which she addresses the symbols used in the three great monotheistic religions. Her use of Mircea Eliade’s Encyclopædia of Religions and Ethics, of which she had a copy in Marrakech, enabled her to compare Judeo-Christian and Qur’anic symbolism. Influenced by Eliade, she invited her readers to seek out the spiritual meaning of the gestures and customs common to the different religions, “the symbol [being] a means of expression that uses materials, objects and natural phenomena by giving them a meaning that differs from our usual perceptions, making it possible to evoke spiritual and supernatural realities from concrete elements”.​5​ A few years before her death, Masson seems to have returned to the artistic and literary education she had received, in which the analysis of symbols must have played an essential role.

Translating the Qur’an

While the lexicon and syntax of the Qur’an give difficulties related to its dialect, which is the one of the Hedjaz, it is also the rhythm and the musicality of a text made to be intoned that make the translator’s task particularly arduous. The word qurʾān derives from a root meaning “recitation, reading aloud”, which is also attested in Arabic papyri from the second Hijra century (eighth century CE) with the expression “iqrāʾ lī al-salām...”, which literally means “read/transmit for me the greeting”.​6​ It is true, moreover, that the difficulty of translating a language which in its archaic state no longer has any speakers and whose elliptical style has given rise to an important exegetical and philological literature (particularly on questions of lexicon) mainly composed by commentators geographically distant from the Hedjaz can only confirm the well-known Italian adage “Traduttore, traditore”. Nevertheless, the Qur’an has been translated and interpreted at all times. ​7​

Louis Massignon, who wrote a preface to Hamidullah’s 1959 translation of the Qur’an,​8​ spoke of the “inimitability” of the text,​9​ in accents reminiscent of the caution of Pickthall and Arberry, whose translations are presented as “interpretations”, which in view of the difficulties inherent to the language of the Qur’an should go without saying. The same tendency can be seen in Jacques Berque’s translation, which is titled Le Coran. Essai de traduction. The lengthy study that Berque appends to his translation highlights some of the difficulties encountered: an archaic language that seems to differ from that of the ancient poets (in this Berque is at odds with Blachère, who thought he could detect the existence of a koinè bringing together pre-Islamic poetry and the Qur’anic language), but also the question of the canonical variants (qirāʾāt).

In her memoirs, published in 1989, Masson states that she found the authoritative translation (obviously the one of Blachère) at the time she published her first work (Le Coran et la Révélation judéo-chrétienne, Paris 1958) to be “clumsy and obscure”, and that this encouraged her to offer her own translation.​10​ Like all translations, Denise Masson’s translation is not without its faults​11​ , but it is unanimously recognised as the most elegant in terms of style, while avoiding certain pitfalls (Kazimirski's freedom with the text, Blachère’s, Hamidullah’s and Berque’s linguistic innovations and neologisms). The notes and indexes of her work on Le Coran et la Révélation judéo-chrétienne served her as well for her translation of the Qur’an published in 1967. Up to this day, the highly detailed index of proper names and that of the major Qur’anic themes are of great use to researchers in the history of religions.

Nevertheless, Masson sometimes pays homage to the translations of Blachère and Hamidullah​12​: from the latter, for example, she adopts the translation of ṣalāt by “office” because she considers, as indicated in a note preserved in her archives, that “prayer” should be reserved for duʿāʾ’. ​13​ She also explains in the introduction she gives to her translation that she had sought to "render the Qur'an in a style as close as possible to that of the translation of the Old Testament published by É. Dhorme", that translation being in her view “a model for restoring, in French, the genius proper to Semitic languages”. In this respect, Masson’s literary style respects the archaism of the prophetic texts of the Ancient Near East: alliterations, repetitions, invocations, exhortations, dialogue between the prophet and the divine power.

Édouard Dhorme, a Dominican and Assyriologist who left priesthood when he became agnostic, held the chair of Assyro-Babylonian philology and archaeology at the Collège de France from 1945 to 1951. There he practised a historicising critique of the biblical corpus, which at the time was less successful than the political mysticism of Massignon, who nevertheless held a chair entitled “Sociologie et sociographie musulmane” (Muslim sociology and sociography). Masson reports that she met Louis Massignon in 1932 and asked him for a letter of introduction to the Bibliothèque Nationale, which Massignon refused to give her. In her memoirs, she also claims to have attended one of Massignon’s lectures at the Toumliline monastery shortly before his death in 1962.​14​ Jean Grosjean goes so far as to assert in his preface to Masson’s translation of the Qur’an published in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade that Massignon had followed and encouraged its progress, but the letters in question have never been retrieved.

Like Massignon, and in a context where such an assertion was not the easiest to make, Masson recognises that the god of the Muslims is indeed the one God of the Abrahamic monotheisms: this point is explicitly developed in Les Trois Voies de l'Unique, after having been demonstrated by the texts in the comparative study of 1958 and in its revised edition of 1976. In so doing, Masson was taking a position opposed to that of the heresiographers and missionaries. There was no refutation or polemical intent on her part, she said, because her work “aimed at discovering possible points of encounter between the three monotheistic religions”.​15​ However, she notes in her memoirs that this “sympathy for Islam” (in which we can also detect the influence of the writer and Islamic priest Miguel Asin Palacios) was criticised.

Bilingual edition of the Masson translation

The Bibliothèque de la Pléiade published the translation of the Qur’an by “D. Masson” in 1967. Some time later, the representative of a publishing house based in Beirut visited Gallimard in Paris to ask if he could acquire the rights for a bilingual edition​16​ . Having obtained them, he did not respect the terms of the contract, in so far that the first version did not take into account the list of changes and corrections required by Masson. The publisher, although an Imamite Shiite according to Louis Gardet who had met him in the spring of 1973 at an occasion where he saw the first print, decided to seek the approval of the great Sunni institution of al-Azhar in Egypt for the translation offered.​17​ The negative opinion –by a single reviewer– sent to Hasan al-Zein in Lebanon in September 1973 by Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Rahmān Bayṣār, “Secretary General of the Association of Islamic Studies of al-Azhar”, was without appeal: he recommended to “refuse the translation”. Unfortunately, the first edition was put on the market without the proofs being submitted to Masson, and it is for this reason considered today as semi-pirate. Masson and the editor were unimpressed: Denise Masson answered and noted that the proofreader seemed to know little of the French language, while adding new proposals for changes. The lists of corrections sent by Masson were partially incorporated into the reprint that was published in the Folio paperback library in 1980, but they differ from those offered in the Masson/El-Ṣāliḥ translation, which is here published online for the first time.​18​

While the question of the endorsement of a Muslim religious institution had not arisen at the time of publication in the Pléiade collection in 1967, the idea of a bilingual edition made it necessary. It was not until the opinion of a second reader, Habib Belkhodja, then Dean of the Faculty of Letters in Tunis and future Mufti of Tunisia, was given that the translation was judged to be “solid [and] reliable” ​19​ that a second edition was produced. A Lebanese Sunni figure (and also a future mufti), Ṣubḥī el-Ṣāliḥ, had agreed to proofread and co-sign Masson's translation, which Dār al-kitāb al-lubnanī published under the title Essai d'interprétation du Coran inimitable, reusing the subterfuge of concealing the author’s identity. The first “official” version of the bilingual edition was published in 1977 (still under the name “D. Masson”) with a facsimile of the letter from Dār al-fatwā (the highest Sunni institution in Lebanon) approving it, and it was not until the 1985 edition that two certificates from al-Azhar, dated 1978 and 1985 respectively, were produced. The new Masson/el-Ṣāliḥ translation includes some of the corrections requested by Denise Masson as well as the changes (less than fifteen) made by el-Ṣāliḥ without them being submitted first to Masson. It also includes several important changes to the introductions and notes, which were abridged and corrected at the request of Masson but not entirely according to her will.

Without it being known whether Masson had been informed of this project, Jean Grosjean published his own translation in 1979, with a preface by Jacques Berque. This translation by Grosjean was published by Philippe Lebaud/Club du Livre in a luxurious five-volume box set with the text illustrated with silkscreen prints commissioned from a Franco-Iranian artist, Ch. H. Zenderoudi, accompanied also with a reproduction of the Qur’an attributed to Ibn al-Bawwāb from the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin. The paperback version published in 2001 in the “Points Sagesse” collection of Le Seuil does not include illustrations, but it is enhanced by the mention in an exergue of the improbable agreement of an “al-Azhar office in Tunis”. As this office is in fact in Cairo, this is undoubtedly an appropriation of the recommendations of the report emanating from al-Azhar in Cairo, from which Grosjean could have retained a few suggestions for corrections. Denise Masson, for her part, never seems to have “recognized” the semi-corrected Lebanese edition, and continued to use her 1967 translation in her memoirs published in 1989.​20​

While everyone admits that the language of the Qur’an is difficult (it was already deemed so in medieval times, as evidenced by the multiple lexical interpretations discussed in the Qur’anic commentaries) it is only in the last few decades that the origin of some of the linguistic obscurities have started to be understood. In particular, Marijn van Putten​21​ has brought to light the influence of Nabataean orthography on the “consonantal text of the Qur’an”​22​, i.e. the text of the Qur’an as it appears, still unvocalized, on the oldest surviving parchments.

Translation style

In the first edition of his translation published in 1950, Blachère had followed the numbering of the verses according to the edition of the Qur’an published by Gustav Flügel in 1834 and an eclectic choice among the Qur’anic variants, which sometimes led to discrepancies in the numbering of the verses. For the second edition of 1957 and its reprints, Blachère chose to adopt a double numbering system (Cairo / Flügel). The Cairo edition (1924), which quickly became the most widely distributed (except in North Africa, where Warsh’s reading dominated), is based on the reading of “Ḥafṣ [b. Sulaymān al-Asadi al-Kūfī] from ʿĀṣim [b. Abī al-Najūd]” (Ḥafṣ ʿan ʿĀsim). Denise Masson’s translation was therefore aimed at the French audience and not the French-speaking audience in North Africa, for whom Warsh’s reading would have been selected.

Masson’s method consists of comparing the original text with the translations by Marracci (Latin) and Blachère (French), as any specialist would do when confronted with a classical text already translated by recognised authorities in the field of Arabic. She then produced her own translation, now adapted to the Arabic text of the Vulgate published in Cairo in 1924 that was used also by Blachère in his second version (and while Marracci had used an Ottoman edition).

Distinguishing herself both from Kazimirski’s compact style, which often moves away from the text to focus on the meaning with a certain freedom (a trend in translations of his time), and from Blachère’s stylistic heaviness, Masson aims to preserve both structure and meaning. To translate verse 5 of Sura II, she offers: “Voilà ceux qui suivent une Voie indiquée par leur Seigneur ; voilà ceux qui sont heureux !”, whereas Blachère gives a complicated turn of phrase: “Ceux-là sont selon une Direction [ venue] de leur Seigneur et ceux-là seront les Bienheureux”. Berque, for his part, has a rendering that comes close to Masson’s with the exception of al-mufliḥūn, which is rendered as “triomphants” instead of “heureux”, thereby departing from the meaning of the root *f-l-ḥ, which refers both to the cultivation of the soil and to the prosperity that results from it.

Blachère’s method, which consists of imitating the syntax of the text, requires him to make numerous incisions and sometimes questionable lexical choices. Thus, in II, 130: “Qui donc a en aversion la religion (milla) d’Abraham sinon celui qui est fol en son âme ? Nous avons élu Abraham en la [Vie] immédiate et, en vérité, dans la [Vie] Dernière, il sera parmi les Saints”. Here again, Masson seeks to reconcile elegance of style with fidelity to meaning: “Qui donc éprouve de l’aversion pour la Religion d’Abraham, sinon celui qui est insensé ? Nous avons, en vérité, choisi Abraham en ce monde et, dans l’autre, il sera au nombre des justes”. The two authors differ in particular in the way they render al-ṣāliḥīn, which Blachère translates as “saints”, even though in French the term is connoted as related to Christianity. Masson opts for “justes”, which is more neutral and includes the notion of rectitude carried by the root *ṣ-l-ḥ.

A semantic ambiguity is found in the translation of ḥawāriyyūn, which Blachère and Masson correctly translate as “Apôtres” (those of Jesus, in verses III, 52; V, 111-112; LXI, 14). But both sometimes use the same term to render rasūl and even nabī in relation to the Divine Envoy (for example in III,144 and XXV,7, both rendered as “Apôtre”).

In XXIX, 6, Kazimirski (in his final version of 1852) uses a more condensed turn of phrase than the original and somewhat betrays the common meaning of ʿālamīn (plural of ʿālam, “world”) in the Qur’an: “Quiconque fait des efforts, les fait pour son propre avantage ; car Dieu peut se passer de tout le monde”. Blachère suggests: “Quiconque mène combat, mène seulement combat pour soi-même. En vérité, Allah est certes suffisant à Soi-même vis-à-vis du monde”, while Masson shows a more precise use of the lexicon: “Celui qui lutte, ne lutte que pour son bien. Dieu se suffit à lui-même, il n’a pas besoin de l’univers”. “Univers” here renders more accurately than “monde” the plural meaning of ʿālamīn (genitive of 'ālamūn).

Denise Masson and the dialogue between religions

Over the course of her works, Masson's thinking evolved on some of the most crucial aspects. In 1958, in Le Coran et la Révélation judéo-chrétienne (The Qur’an and Judeo-Christian Revelation), she did not translate Allāh as 'God', nor did she capitalise pronouns referring to him, as she did for divine names: on the contrary, she did so systematically in her translation of the Qur’an and in her last comparative work, Les Trois Voies de l'Unique (The Three Ways of the One). It is true that in 1958, using Blachère's translation, she was obliged like Blachère to adopt "Allāh" instead of the French "Dieu". But this initial choice can also be explained by reasons of prudence: no doubt it seemed preferable at the time not to overemphasise the similarities between the great monotheistic religions. This caution was in vain, however, as she was refused the Catholic Church's imprimatur for Le Coran et la Révélation judéo-chrétienne, on the grounds that it did not "prove the superiority of Christianity".​23​

Ancient translators did not take such detours. André du Ryer, who gave the first French translation in 1647, wrote "Dieu" and the Latin translators wrote "Deus". In the same way, the first Arabic translations of the Old and New Testaments rendered 'God' as Allāh, and the practice is found in part among Arabic-speaking philosophers. Yet until recently, Christians were temporarily forbidden, and then re-authorised, to write 'Allāh' to translate 'God' in works printed in Malaysia.​24​ In Les Trois Voies de l'Unique, Masson correctly points out that Allāh and al-Ilāh are two forms of the same word, meaning "the God". We now know that the use of al-ilāh corresponds particularly to the usage of Arabic-speaking Christians, since the word is attested in several pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions dating from the end of the Ve to the beginning of the VIIe century AD: in the Hedjaz, however, it is the spelling Allāh that takes precedence, through metathesis of the tonic accent and dropping of the initial vowel, resulting in the contraction al-[i]LLāh < Allāh.​25​

André Chouraqui, asked to write the back cover of Monothéisme coranique et monothéisme biblique, noted in 1976: "A synthesis of the relations between Islam, Judaism and Christianity: if a rapprochement is possible between the sons of Abraham, it is at this level that we must begin". Masson explicitly calls for this rapprochement in Les Trois Voies de l'Unique.​26​ For her, questioning the Qur’an means touching on Muslim beliefs, but also on the very heart of Jewish and Christian beliefs: these, which have been transmitted to us through many prisms, can only benefit from confrontation with a history that was far from linear. Nor is Masson unaware of the contradictory debates that animated the Jewish and Christian communities of late antiquity, and on more than one occasion she puts forward hypotheses about the theological currents present in the Arabian Peninsula during the centuries preceding Muhammad: Julianists, Ebonites, Arians, and so on. In so doing, she follows in the footsteps of other specialists whom she reads assiduously: Tor Andrae, Casanova and Corbin in particular.

Masson was also familiar with the work of Dussaud and Lammens on the archaeology of Palestine and Arabia. As a scholar of her time, she used Philo of Alexandria (ca 20 BC-50 AD) and Flavius Josephus (ca 37-100 AD), both of which she had in Greek in her library, to understand early Judaism. As far as Christian sources are concerned, when necessary she cites the different versions of the biblical texts that were known at the time, as well as the Church Fathers and the Acts of the Councils: the latter influence Christian doctrine well beyond the texts whose canonisation is itself complex. Masson also adopts a historical perspective when she explains that she wants to compare the Qur’an with Christianity as it existed in the seventh centurye AD, i.e. before the Masoretes published the Pentateuch and at a time when competing traditions existed within Judaism and Christianity​27​ . As she had no command of Hebrew or Aramaic beyond deciphering and using a dictionary, she sometimes had the texts she found in reference works translated. She also used Saint Jerome's Latin translation of the Old Testament, not only because it predates the Masoretic canon, but also because Jerome relied on manuscripts that are now lost and which are the source of the interpretations proposed by the authors of Late Antiquity. Her over-familiarity with the Latin version also partly explains why she was not always understood by his contemporaries. In a review of Monothéisme coranique et monothéisme biblique, published in 1977, Hervé Bleuchot wrote, for example, that "as a Christian [...] he did not recognise himself [ ...] in a Christianity [that] appeared truncated and outdated​28​ ". Commenting on the same work, André Reix notes​29​ that the title indicates "the fundamentally identical intention of the two traditions" as well as "the difference in the doctrines through which they are expressed", and he adds that "the deity of the Christian God is quite different from what thinkers imagine", stressing finally that "the God of Islam is indeed the God of the Bible", whose "divine uniqueness the Qur’an magnificently exhausts. The one God speaks and what he calls into existence starts to exist, his creation confirming his word".

Yet Masson did not convert to Islam, even though she lived in Marrakech for almost sixty years, until her death in 1994. We know from her writings that she did not identify with the Qur’an's polemic against the Trinity, although she was aware of the anti-Trinitarian doctrines that were common in late Antiquity. Like other Christians who became anti-colonialists in the first half of the twentieth century, she partly lived her faith in Muslim spirituality, but she did so through the Qur’anic text rather than through mysticism.​30​ Although Masson does not seem to have tasted Christian esotericism too closely, the influence of Massignon and Corbin can sometimes be discerned, for example when she states in the introduction to Monothéisme coranique et monothéisme biblique that "Revelation is part of history, but also transcends it", or when she explains that her aim is to show "concordances on a spiritual plane that transcends time and psychological values, according to interferences whose mysterious factors rationalist science is still unaware of​31​ ". These influences would fade a few years later in Les Trois Voies de l'Unique and in L'Eau, le Feu, la Lumière.

In conclusion

Denise Masson's translation of the Qur’an has long been one of the most widely distributed in French-speaking countries, partly because it has been published in the prestigious La Pléiade collection and partly because it has been reissued in pocket format in the Folio collection. Numerous pirate editions (Lebanese, Libyan, Moroccan) are also available from bookshops in North Africa. The literary qualities of Masson's translation and her expert knowledge of the biblical texts make this translation an essential tool for comparative research in the history of religions right up to the present day.

To find out more

Denise Masson wrote the following texts:

Le Coran et la révélation judéo-chrétienne. Études comparées, Paris, A. Maisonneuve, 1958, 829 p. in 2 vols.

Le Coran, Paris, Gallimard, "Bibliothèque de la Pléiade", 1967; reprinted in 1980 in "Folio" (in two volumes), cxv + 1087 p.

"25 Psalms. Traduction œcuménique et Psautier liturgique, Cahiers de la Traduction œcuménique de la Bible, Paris, Cerf, 1968" (review), La Nouvelle Revue Française, 188.2, 1968, p. 843-844.

Monothéisme coranique et monothéisme biblique: doctrines comparées, Paris, Desclée de Brouwer, 1976, 821 p. in 1 vol.

Les Trois Voies de l'unique, Paris, Desclée de Brouwer, "L'Ordinaire", 1986, 230 p.

L'Eau, le Feu, la Lumière, d'après la Bible, le Coran et les traditions, Paris, Desclée de Brouwer, 1er January 1986 (repr. 1991), 185 p.

"La spécificité du Coran", Le Monde, 25 January 1986.

"Louis Gardet: esprit universel en quête de vérité", Horizons maghrébins, 9-10 (1987), p. 29-35 (https://www.persee.fr/doc/horma_0984-2616_1987_num_9_1_1443)

Porte ouverte sur un jardin fermé. Valeurs fondamentales et traditionnelles d'une société en pleine évolution, Marrakech, 1930-1989, Paris, Desclée de Brouwer, "Iles", 1989, 337 p. [repr. 1992; autobiography by Denise Masson].

For more information on her work, see:

Emily Cottrell, "Biography" and "Library", www.maisondenisemasson.ma.

André Durand, "La Dame de Marrakech dans le Riad de Dieu", Horizons maghrébins, 14-15 (1989), p. 258-259, https://www.persee.fr/doc/horma_09842616_1989_num_14_1_1058_t2_0258_0000_1.

M. H. Samrakandi, "Denise Masson, témoin de ce siècle finissant", Horizons maghrébins, 25-26 (1994), p. 311-312, https://www.persee.fr/doc/horma_0984-2616_1994_num_25_1_2463