The romantic generation of 1830 has a taste for the canard, one of the most popular of the mystifications in vogue during the July monarchy and consisting of a press story relating an event « sometimes true, always exaggerated, often false ». Hesitating between a more or less dissident facetiousness whose aim is to mystify the bourgeois and supplying a substitute for myth in a more or less disenchanted age, the canard builds bridges between the concern for reality, fantasy, and supernaturalism, ending up being, in the final analysis, the locus of a reflexion on the place of the writer and of literature which integrates the deep socio-economic mutations of the period.