Our research is conducted on a synthetic text collection generated through random sampling from a corpus of French contemporary novels. The foundation for this corpus is a balanced subset from our larger collection of French contemporary popular novels and consists of 320 novels first published during the time period 1980 to 1999. This custom-built corpus maintains equal representation, per decade, across four subgroups: highbrow novels and lowbrow novels with three subgenres (sentimental novels, crime fiction, and science fiction).