Finally, Mallarmé's attempt can only be understood in terms of the multiple temptations that pervade it: to the temptation of religion and mystery, which makes Le Livre a literary Absolute, are added the temptations of theater, dance, painting and music, especially the Wagnerian opera, which is also intended to be a total work of art. The utopian Le Livre shows itself to be a moment of "confrontation" between all the arts, a place of "conversation" (these words are Mallarmé's own) between art and philosophy, art and religion, art and art criticism, art and the social, economic and political activities of mankind.

For this reason, the book will take us on a journey from Hérodiade to Coup de dés, including extracts from correspondence and prose poems from Divagations. Here, Mallarmé describes Le Livre and the act of writing in contact with the arts (theater, painting, music and dance), artists (Manet, Banville, Poe, Wagner) and the "great events" (stock market crashes, political attacks, etc.) of the contemporary world. This journey will take us from letters (in the triple sense of letters of the alphabet, epistolary letters, literature) to Le Livre, via verse, for it was the practice and theory of verse that enabled Mallarmé to understand, on the one hand, that the book is "the total expansion of the letter" and, on the other, that "everything in the world exists to lead to a book."