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 recognise 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? (...)passons, maintenant, du jardin zoologique de la réalité au jardin zoologique des mythologies, dont la faune de lions, but de sphinxes et de griffons et de centaures. (...) Flaubert has assembled, in the last pages of The Tentation, all the monsters of the Middle Ages and the Classics and he has endeavoured, say his commentators, to create them.The total number is not considerable and they are very few of those who can act on the imagination of men. The reader of our manual realises that the zoology of songs is more poor than the zoology of God.