Une critique d’empathie La Fontaine, un héros giralducien

As well as displaying an elegant and circumspect academic erudition, the critical account given in Giraudoux’s Cinq Tentations de La Fontaine takes the form of effervescent conference papers animated by a virtuosic empathy with his subject. Between the author and his subject there emerges a relation of fruitful and dynamic emulation. The relation between them is reciprocal, Giraudoux-the-critic projecting himself into the legendary life of his model, while the latter is assimilated into Giraudoux’s own novelistic oeuvre.