Plays on words and language tell the rosary of an unusual grammar, like the babbling of a child learning to talk. For Jacques Rebotier, this is a way of proposing an imaginary bestiary, a preamble to the major essay on stupidity he is preparing by playing with words like one plays with cubes.

"The dragon is a primitive creature, emotional, not active. It nests in corners, and feeds on scraps of nothing." A quite odd creature, but not silly, coming already armed with incongruities from the pen and notes of writer-songwriter, Jacques Rebotier, absolutely worthy of belonging to the club of the "oulipots".

A scatterbrained, but well-documented scholar passes on to us all its morphological and psychological secrets by taking three days in the life of this extinct animal that "has become part of a golden legend and linked to the ancient ritual of the Rogations". Three days, like waltz time, like the three clarinettists who punctuate the account.

We also learn things which don’t look much, but which are absolutely indispensable for the development of the zygomatic muscles.

Did you know that in springtime the dragon dragones?

That its young is a dragonotte? That there exist masses of unknown proverbs such as this one: "Practice makes prefect!"

In short, a fantasy cock and bull story which juggles with words and notes, assonances and consonances. Captivated by this "naive tale, somewhere between a nature lesson, a music lesson and a darkness lesson", Joël Jouanneau has chosen Christian Drillaud to give us this strange lesson, to brilliantly portray an inspired nimbus whose theorems, axioms and scholarly demonstrations "will make the grown-ups scared and the children smile".