Le livre des êtres imaginaires

We bring a baby to the zoological garden for the first time. This child could be none of us, or conversely, we have been this child and we don't recognize it. In this garden, in this terrible garden, the child sees living animals that he has never seen before; he sees hunters, deer, bison, and, what is even more strange, giraffes. For the first time, he sees the multitude of animals in the wild, and this spectacle, which may alarm or horrify him, pleases him. He likes it so much that going to the zoological garden is, or may seem to be, a child's diversion. How can we explain this common and at the same time mystical fact? Now, let us move from the zoological garden of reality to the zoological garden of mythologies, with its fauna of lions, sphinxes, griffons, and centaurs. Flaubert has assembled, in the last pages of The Temptation, all the monsters of the Middle Ages and the Classics, and he has endeavored, say his commentators, to create them. The total number is not considerable, and there are very few that can act on the imagination of men. The reader of our manual realizes that the zoology of songs is poorer than the zoology of God.