The education of the reader through Claude Ponti’s use of the figure of speech of metalepsis. A certain number of authors of child literature reconfigurate for their young readers some themes already present in more general literature. This is particularly true of Claude Ponti in whose work various representations of books, readers, reading scenes and experiences of reading are all pervading. This aspect of his work has already been partially studied. What we more specifically analyze here is his use of metalepsis. In his first albums, Ponti chooses to employ metalepsis literally through his characters, Adela and the chicks, who cross the boundaries separating several diegetic levels. The iconic-textual nature of the album makes for this passage from metalepsis as a figure of speech to a figure of fiction while various sophisticated devices invite the young reader, or pre-reader, to interpret metaleptic transgressions as a metaphor of the fiction-reading act. Ponti’s work may then be read as an initiation to the reading of fiction that never falls into the didacticism that sometimes spoils child literature. It thus makes cognitive and psychological processes sensible and accessible to young readers.