Second text to be published by Mallarmé, in the magazine L’Artiste, then led by Arsène Houssaye, who retints only the first five tercets, Le Guignon places the author’s entrance in the poetic field under the sign of a highly agreed curse, as the apparatus of images which assimilates poetic and social selection is well saturated. The commonality of the words, which is a guarantee for peers that they adhere to the standards to which most of them adhere in the middle of the Second Empire, is, however, quite singular, showing a game with the codes as well as a submission to them. This game involves an intertextual complex combining, in the register of the poetic curse, the contributions of a Nerval, a Gautier, a Baudelaire and a Cladel; it also involves a grotestic and paroxystic tone, reflecting a distance from the collective imagination thus synthesised and a critical externalisation of highly embedded literary structures, at the price of an overall internal and external view taken on these structures. Essentially trivial — in all the meanings of the word — Le Guignon thus derives both from the recitation of a credo and a kind of physiology of post-romantic poets.