This paper presents a new research and development project called Papillon. It started as a French- Japanese cooperation between laboratories GET A/CLIPS (Grenoble, France) and NII (Tokyo, Japan). Its goal is to build a multilingual lexical database and to extract from it digital bilingual dictionaries. The database is built with monolingual dictionaries, one for each language of the database, linked to an interlingual dictionary. The pivot architecture of the database is based on Gilles Sérasset' s Ph.D. thesis. The structure of the monolingual dictionaries is based on the lexical work done by Igor Mel'cuk and Alain Polguère. From the lexical database, it is planned to derive user customized bilingual dictionaries in multiple target formats. It will be possible to generate human usage dictionaries as well as specialized dictionaries for machine translation software. These dictionaries will be available under the terms of an open source license. This project, initiated by some computational linguists, aims at being useful and open to all those who are interested in Japanese and French. It is also opened to any other language. Moreover, the pivot architecture of the database will facilitate the addition of new languages and save translation efforts.