The author of this article studies the possible relationships, in the French Renaissance, between the travel narrative and the epic genre. First, the author establishes several theoretical oppositions, which allow the two genres to be distinguished – but these oppositions are shown to be insufficient for thinking about actual practice of thee genres. To further explore such questions, the greater part of the study offers a new reading of Marc Lescarbot’s epyllion, La Défaite des Sauvages Armouchiquois (1607), in its relationship (intertextual and perhaps interpaginal) with the same author’s Histoire de la Nouvelle France (1609), in order to show how the epyllion and the travel narrative both prolong and question each other. The article’s author analyzes the presence of certain episodes of Lescarbot’s voyage in both texts, to show the specificity of each (re)presentation and to seize upon the role played by the very concrete relationship that connects the epyllion to the travel narrative, and vice-versa. Such an approach, which takes account of the epic and travel texts as books, identifies a major evolution in the relationship of the two genres which, having for a long time avoided each other in France, start to open up to each other.