ABSTRACT
Fabula docet et delectat . The 166 texts in Pierre Bettencourt’s Fables fraîches pour lire à jeun (1988) delight, but do they teach? In one of the fables of this rare and too little known author (1917–2006), an anonymous voice addresses the narrator with a pun: “Vos fables ne riment pas […] et même souvent ne riment à rien.” The reader of these brief prose pieces indeed jousts with the absurd and finds himself, as the pun proclaims, in quest of rhyme and reason.
