The role of the references to Poussin's painting in the work of Claude Simon is a familiar topic in the critical corpus. Stuart Sykes, Celia Britton and Michel Bertrand have provided penetrating commentaries on the role of Poussin's Landscape with Blind Orion in Simon's fiction and aesthetics, while Jean Rousset, Françoise van Rossum-Guyon, Mária Minich Brewer and Else Jongeneel have all offered subtle interpretations of the role of the description of The Victory of Joshua over the Amorites in La Bataille de Pharsale. My own publications on the topic have focused on the formal and thematic similarities between Simon's oeuvre and that of Poussin and Cézanne and the metafictional and generative functions of the description of certain paintings. The publication of Le Jardin des Plantes in 1997 established a new intriguing link in the Simon–Poussin chain and, of course, posed new interpretative problems. Among other references to Poussin, this novel incorporates a substantial description of his early Plague at Ashdod (JP, 106–07). On the most obvious level of interpretation, the description of The Plague contributes to the development of several themes that Simon shares with Baroque art and literature, most notably, order and disorder, the body and the senses, and death, decay and morbidity. While the tracking of these familiar themes in a new text offers the Simonien the undeniable pleasure of recognition, this article will focus principally on the contribution that the description of Poussin's painting makes to the development and foregrounding of a number of other issues, which are perhaps less striking on an initial reading of the passage, but which constitute important thematic strands running through Le Jardin des Plantes. Thus, the first section of my analysis will suggest, through an examination of the parallels between the subject of Poussin's painting and a number of other sections of the text, that the description of The Plague at Ashdod is part of a much more general meditation upon faith, the history of religion and the revisability of ‘divine truth’. The second section will argue that the relationship between some of the figure groups in the painting not only reflects the communicative gulf between S. and several of the other characters in the novel, but also draws attention to the contrast that is implicitly established, through these social encounters, between various types of functional discourse and écriture.