This article was inspired by the discovery, in Diloy le chemineau by the Countess of Ségur, of several lines in a dialog and an illustration, both of which evoke a charivari-type ceremony—riding backwards on a donkey (asouade). An ethnocritical analysis makes it possible to understand the fictional reappropriation of this folk practice in children’s literature of the nineteenth century and to understand how, according to the “educational” and “modernizing” goals of this children’s literature, the living ritual has been given a moral and a folk dimension.