This article examines the place of Maryse Condé's children's literature in her general bibliography, and in the critical reception. The relative marginalization of these works appears to be due to factors specific to the editorial sector as a whole, and to other factors specific to Francophone women's literature, such as the lack of specialists in the field and the lack of legitimization bodies. In the same corpus, Maryse Condé most often deploys a writing of failure, which could be interpreted as an echo of the low institutional visibility of the works concerned. In any case, these failures in fiction are certainly to be blamed on the realistic intentions of an author who keeps referring to the harshness of a post-colonial world to which his readers will thus be prepared.