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How can the paradox that French language has lost its prestige in the world but that it continues to attract foreign writers who leave their own mother tongues be explained? This question in most cases hides another one: why do the writers who are faced with exile massively opt for France ? Separation from the mother tongue is always preceded by severing ties with the motherland where life, for some reason, has become unbearable. That is why the linguistic exile is probably never a choice but necessity, consequence of which is the inevitable change of identity. That is how Beckett and Cioran by transferring to the French language in the middle of the last century, were primarily running away from themselves. Cioran wanted to cast aside not only his past as an anti-Semite but also the young man blinded by a totalitarian ideology who he was at the time but who has in the meantime become incomprehensible to him and distant. Beckett's undertaking is of a personal nature; unlike Cioran, he was able to go back to his mother tongue, thus creating a bilingual work. Those two originals of the same work, if we follow through the logic of a tight connection between language and identity - coincide with simultaneous existence of two identities in Beckett… [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]