Caillois’ poetic epistemology, concerned as it is with linking the mineral world to that of thought and to identifying in the former laws supposed to apply in the second, only rarely deals with the issue of the emergence of life. The idea, recurrent in his models, according to which nature only proceeds in leaps and bounds, without continuity, is not one conducive for this adept of contemplation seduced by mineral serenity to consideration for “such and such a precarious or quivering jelly where chemists are pleased to watch out for the first signs of life.” Nonetheless, a double metaphor – that of the life in stones and that of the stones in life – irradiates his texts, and brief creation tales, inspired by a kind of conjectural biology which is not without connections to the biological science and philosophy of his time, lead Caillois to reflect upon life – but through the melancholy prism of having lived and survived, whose “code” he is given by fossil remains.