The result of all this is that the meaning of the word ‘draft’ today has a broad margin of uncertainty. For the textual critic, concerned neither with manuscript nor with genetic development, the word continues to mean, according to its usual definition, a vague generic term designating the approximate and negligible domain of all that precedes the finished version of the text: a sort of opaque space in which the structures of signification and style are not yet in place and that remains resistant to interpretative designs upon it. For the literary genticist, on the contrary, whose time is devoted to understanding the pre-textual process, the rough draft is an essential link in the chain of transformations that have led from the project of the work to its definitive text: a crucial moment in the avant-texte stage.