International audience Inference, ellipsis and parable are three literary devices, especially as far as folktale as a paradoxically privileged genre at school is concerned: laying traps to the apprentice reader, they crystallize many of the reading comprehension difficulties primary school pupils have to face. In this paper dealing with the teaching of literature with young children and teacher training, basing our demonstration upon a primary school experiment using the classic folktale Stone Soup, we explore the clues in the surface of the text that might allow the beginner reader to access the hidden meaning, and analyze how children appropriate the figures of symbolic concealment and unveiling.