The “Moyen de Parvenir” (The Way to Attain) is one of the most unusual and at the same time characteristic late Renaissance works in France. The book is built as a universal dialogue, which involves about 400 adherents of wisdom from different eras, but their chaotic remarks, reasoning and funny stories have nothing to do with the figure of the speaker, and sometimes even with any subject of discussion, appearing as if from nowhere. The conversation develops on the principle of coq-à-l'âne, breaking all the rules of logic, rhetoric and grammar. Béroalde reproduces the ancient model of philosophical table dialogue (talk) in a version which became widespread in France at the end of the 16th century under the influence of the norms of “civile conversation” formulated in Stefano Guazzo's treatise of the same name (1574), and the result of which was a peculiar phenomenon of “bigarrés stories and speeches” (works by Noël du Fail, Nicolas de Cholières, Guillaume Bouchet). The book, likened to fragments of the “philosopher's stone”, emerges literally from nowhere and therefore cannot have an author, publisher or other attributes that fix it in a certain time and space. It overcomes parodically and ridicules at the level of poetics any possibility to draw from it a single doctrine and denies itself as a bearer of higher wisdom, scholarship and practical usefulness.