Jules Laforgue makes ample use of his own rewritings in Moralités légendaires (Moral Tales). Their use is very visible with the vocero in “Salomé”, which replaces the usual dance of seduction. Analysing the way this passage developed, which entails pinpointing, in former works by Laforgue, first formulations for the ideas he exposes here, and then bringing to light, at a variety of levels, the different inter-texts built up into a kind of “inter-textual multi-layer cake”, allows for the clarification of the meaning of a highly difficult passage which is often considered to be incoherent. It also enables us to show that the author’s writing, which is said to be fantastical, or even clownish, conceals within its histrionics a fundamental coherence born of the links the author can perceive between the different inter-texts he works up.