Les Mamelles de Tirésias (The Breasts of Tiresias) is an opéra bouffe by Francis Poulenc, in a prologue and two acts based on the eponymous play by Guillaume Apollinaire.

For the opera, Poulenc incorporated both the farcical and the serious aspects of the original play, which according to one critic displays a "high-spirited topsy-turveydom" that conceals "a deeper and sadder theme – the need to repopulate and rediscover a France ravaged by war."

[3] In June 1917 the audience for the first performance of Apollinaire's "drame surréaliste", Les Mamelles de Tirésias, at a theatre in Montmartre included Jean Cocteau, Serge Diaghilev, Léonide Massine, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Erik Satie, and the young Poulenc.

[5] During the 1930s he first thought of setting Les mamelles de Tirésias as an opera; in 1935 he adapted the script as a libretto, with the blessing of Apollinaire's widow,[6] and began sketching the music in 1939, with most of the composition done in a burst of creativity between May and October 1944.

The critic Jeremy Sams describes the opera as "high-spirited topsy-turveydom" concealing "a deeper and sadder theme – the need to repopulate and rediscover a France ravaged by war.

Outside France it was seen in Massachusetts in 1953, Basel in 1957, and at Aldeburgh in 1958 in an arrangement by the composer for two pianos (played by Poulenc and Benjamin Britten; Peter Pears sang the role of Thérèse's husband, transposed to suit his range.[9]).

Thérèse marches off to conquer the world as General Tiresias, leaving her captive husband to the attentions of the local gendarme, who is fooled by his female attire.

A visiting Parisian journalist asks how he can afford to feed the brood, but the husband explains that the children have all been very successful in careers in the arts, and have made him a rich man with their earnings.