Although Claude Simon cited Borges in interviews and lectures from the late 1960s onwards, his name is absent from the Discours de Stockholm. This is a striking omission given that, in this text, Simon refers in condensed form to the majority of the writers, painters and works of high cultural art of which he had spoken throughout his career as writer. Nor has Borges received much attention from critics as precursor or intertext in Simon's oeuvre in general, or in Le Jardin des Plantes in particular. Yet scrutiny of Borges's The Garden of Forking Paths as intertext in Le Jardin des Plantes offers key insights into the control of interwoven narratives that is central to highly self-referential writing. The first part of this essay offers a comparative reading of Borges to suggest a form of ‘réécriture’ which I term an ‘espionage’ of writing. The second part of this essay then explores some of the more general ways in which Le Jardin des Plantes adds to Simon's oeuvre ‘ as a paradigm of intertextuality in its many guises, on large and small scales and including self quotation'. My intention is to consider ways in which intertextual self-consciousness is given new authorial twists in Le Jardin des Plantes. Not only does Simon reincorporate materials which belong to those early works he assured critics he wanted to forget or deprecated as ‘espèces de fourre-tout’; the Author as persona (contra Barthes) is more alive than ever in Le Jardin des Plantes and reveals his hand in this novel in ways which have not been so visible since the incipit of Orion aveugle. Claude Simon's novels are all so many ways of establishing a ‘final’ version from ‘scénarios’ rewritten from novel to novel, like the many drafts which issued from the pens of a Flaubert or a Proust. As Simon said himself, as early as 1967, ‘mes livres sortent les uns des autres comme des tables gigognes. Je n'aurais pu écrire Histoire sans avoir écrit Le Palace, ni Le Palace sans La Route des Flandres. En général, c'est avec ce qui n'a su être dit dans les livres précédents que je commence un nouveau roman.’ ‘La production du texte’ then takes on meanings beyond those intended by Ricardou, not least in that critic's own intertextual inclusion in Le Jardin des Plantes (JP, 356–57).