Les « cinq tentations » de Giraudoux

By examining his portrait of a subject, one can learn much about the portraitist himself. Far from being reducible to a superficial presentation or a fashionable discourse, Giraudoux’s five papers on La Fontaine constitute not only an original and learned study of the life of the poet and the milieus he frequented, but also—indirectly but no less clearly—an avowal of the temptations that Giraudoux himself had undergone and illustrated in his oeuvre.