Jean de La Fontaine

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The French poet and man of letters Jean de La Fontaine (1621-1695) was one of the great French classical authors. He preferred to work in relatively minor and unexploited genres, such as the fable and the verse tale.

While he did not hesitate to borrow freely from other writers, both ancient and modern, Jean de La Fontaine nevertheless created a style and a poetic universe at once personal and universal, peculiarly his own and thus inimitable, but also accessible to all. He is perhaps the greatest lyric poet of the 17th century in France. Though he is best known for the Fables, they are but a small part of his writings. He also wrote a number of licentious tales in verse, many occasional pieces, and a long romance; he tried his hand at elegy and fantasy, at epigram and comedy. Almost everything he wrote is shot through with personal reflections and graceful ironies.

La Fontaine was baptized (and probably born) on July 8, 1621, the first child of Charles de La Fontaine and Françoise Pidoux. Little is known about his youth in Château-Thierry (Aisne); he went to Paris in 1635, was associated briefly with the Oratorians, and then studied law. In 1647 he married Marie Héricart, whose family was related to Jean Racine's. He purchased a post (or sinecure) as master of waters and forests in 1652; his son Charles was born a year later. In 1654 appeared his first publication, an imitation of Terence's Eunuch. An amusing portrait of him was composed about this time by Tallemant des Réaux: "A man of belles lettres and who writes verse. … His wife says that he's such a dreamer he sometimes goes for three weeks without remembering that he's married."

Early Works

In 1658 La Fontaine offered his poem Adonisto Nicolas Fouquet, Louis XIV's superintendent of finances. Fouquet, known for his support of the arts and of artists, soon became La Fontaine's admirer and protector. La Fontaine wrote numerous poems for his patron; among the more interesting are the fragments of Le Songe de Vaux, a dream in verse written to celebrate the many marvels of Fouquet's estate, Vaux-le-Vicomte. During the years of the "poetic pension" at Vaux, La Fontaine met Charles Perrault, Racine, and many other writers and artists. The arrest of Fouquet in September 1661 put an end to the Vaux dream, but La Fontaine remained loyal to his friend. In 1663 the poet - who may have been in trouble because of his obvious sympathy for Fouquet - accompanied his uncle to Limoges; the voyage is recounted in six interesting letters to his wife.

La Fontaine became a gentilhomme servant to the Duchesse d'Orléans in 1664. The post was rather badly paid, but it made few claims on the poet's time. In 1665 he published the collection Contes et Nouvelles en vers; these tales were followed by a second collection a year later. Both volumes were enthusiastically received despite (or perhaps because of) their licentious tone and matter.

His "Fables"

In 1668 La Fontaine published six books of Fables, in verse. Dedicated to the Dauphin, these poems were extraordinarily successful, and La Fontaine's fame was secure at last. The fables cover a vast range of human experience; formally they are remarkably varied and free. In an age of linguistic constraint and purification, he uses all manner of archaic words, colloquialisms, outmoded constructions; in an age of overwhelming concern with the great serious genres (epic and tragedy, for instance), he deliberately chooses to exploit the considerable resources of a minor genre. And if the fables seem at first to be children's literature, a careful examination reveals their sophisticated satire of conventional wisdom and morality.

In 1669 La Fontaine published Les Amours de Psyché et de Cupidon, a long romance in verse and prose, ostensibly a simple version of the Psyche story in The Golden Ass of Apuleius. But La Fontaine's work, despite its bantering tone and its contemporary allusions, is an intensely personal meditation on love and beauty and art - things which, as the work suggests, escape definition and so must be felt if they are to be known at all.

A third collection of Contes appeared in 1671, along with eight new fables. In the same year La Fontaine had to give up his post as master of waters and forests, and the death of the Duchesse d'Orléans in 1672 left him without employment. In 1673, however, he found a new protectress, Madame de La Sablière, at whose salons the poet met many scholars, philosophers, artists, and free-thinkers. In the years 1673-1682 he published a variety of works: a long religious poem for Port-Royal, an epitaph for his friend Molière, some new contes (the most licentious of all, they were promptly banned by the police), five new books of fables, and various other pieces. In 1682 he wrote a long poem in praise of the powers of quinine. As he said, "Diversity is my motto."

Later Years

After many maneuvers La Fontaine was finally elected to the French Academy in 1684. He continued to write and to publish: a volume of miscellaneous writings (1685); the important poem Epistle to Huet (1687), in which he avoided taking sides in the "quarrel of the ancients and the moderns"; the "lyric tragedy" Astrée, which was produced in 1691 but closed after six performances.

Madame de La Sablière died in 1693, and La Fontaine's thoughts turned to the Church. He renounced the Contes and promised to devote the rest of his days to the composition of pious works. The last collection of fables appeared in 1694, and in that year the aging and weary poet wrote to his dearest friend, François de Maucroix, "I would die of boredom if I couldn't keep on writing." Remaining lucid and active almost to the end, La Fontaine died on April 13, 1695.

Further Reading

The best general biography of La Fontaine in English is Monica Sutherland, La Fontaine (1953). An excellent account of La Fontaine before the publication of the first collection of fables is in Philip A. Wadsworth, Young La Fontaine: A study of His Artistic Growth in His Early Poetry and First Fables (1952). Useful chapters on La Fontaine are in Elbert Benton O. Borgerhoff, The Freedom of French Classicism (1950), and Will Grayburn Moore, French Classical Literature (1961). Recommended for general historical background are Albert Guérard, The Life and Death of an Ideal (1928; repr. 1956); Basil Willey, The Seventeenth Century background (1934; repr. 1967); and Warren H. Lewis, The Splendid Century (1953).

La Morlière, Charles‐Jacques‐Louis‐Auguste Rochette de (1701–85), French writer. In addition to several novels and plays, he is attributed with authorship of Angola, histoire indienne, ouvrage sans vraisemblance (Angola, an Indian Story and an Implausible Work, 1746). This work's fairy‐tale plot is used to satirize with considerable viciousness society life, the nobility, and the bourgeoisie of 18th‐century Paris. Its critique of the period's barriers to social mobility are distinctly pre‐Revolutionary in tone.

— Lewis C. Seifert

La Fontaine, Jean de (1621-95). Poet, known above all for his Fables, which have been read, learned, and recited by French children and adults for three centuries. He wrote much else besides, in a variety of genres. Often seen as one of the principal authors of French classicism, he appears rather as an idiosyncratic individualist. His tastes ranged from Plato to Rabelais, from the romances of chivalry to Malherbe, and his writings show a love of experiment as well as a sensitivity to contemporary taste.

The son of a government official, he was born in Château-Thierry, to the east of Paris, and maintained his connection with his provincial home throughout his life. After an education at the local Jesuit college and a brief and apparently unenthusiastic period as a novice with the Oratorians, he obtained a legal qualification in Paris. He was married to Marie Héricart in 1647 and in 1652 bought a post as maître des eaux et des forêts. On his father's death he inherited two more such posts, but these official functions had to be surrendered in 1671. Even before this his finances were precarious, and all his life he depended a good deal on patronage. His first patron was Fouquet, to whom he remained loyal after the surintendant's disgrace. From 1664 to 1672 he had a sinecure as a gentilhomme servant at the Palais du Luxembourg; thereafter he was given lodging in Paris by Madame de la Sablière and by Monsieur d'Hervart. His relation with royal power was an uneasy one, even though he addressed many official poems to the royal family; when he was elected to the Académie Française in 1683, his admission was blocked for a year by the king.

As a writer, he did not belong to any camp. Throughout his life he remained a close friend of Maucroix, and was on good terms with the other poets he met in Paris in the 1640s, including Pellisson and Charles Perrault. The old idea of the ‘quatre amis de Psyché’ (Molière, Racine, Boileau, and La Fontaine) is something of a myth, though La Fontaine admired Molière and was on good terms with Racine. In the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes he took the ancien side, but in an undogmatic, diplomatic way.

His writings are often personal in tone; they helped create an image of the poet in which legend and reality are hard to disentangle. He figures as an easygoing, independent, pleasure-loving person, a lover of women but also of solitude, savouring natural beauties and the melancholy sweetness of passing time. On his own admission, he was an ‘âme inquiète’ and inconstant—he devoted little care to his wife and son. At the same time, though, he was ambitious, and his fables show a tough-minded cynicism which contrasts with the relaxed hedonism of his self-image. At the end of his life he was converted, and publicly condemned the immorality of his Contes.

He began publishing relatively late, in 1654, but once launched he devoted himself to his art. His output is very varied. There are many pieces of occasional verse, ranging from flattering odes to witty epistles and epigrams. Among his most appealing poems are the elegies and discours, in particular the ‘Élégie pour Fouquet’, written shortly after his patron's downfall, the four amorous ‘Élégies’, the ‘Épître à Huet’ of 1687, which offers a subtle profession of poetic faith, and the ‘Discours à Madame de la Sablière’ (written c.1683), a rueful self-portrait which echoes many passages in the Fables.

He also wrote some longer poems: Adonis (1658), much admired by Valéry, is a poetic exercise on a classical theme, showing remarkable mastery of the alexandrine; Clymène, written at about the same time, is even more clearly a piece of poetic display, grouping a series of pastiches around an amorous theme; La Captivité de Saint Malc and Le Quinquina can best be regarded as responses to the challenge of unpromising subjects (the triumph of virginity and quinine respectively). There are also a number of dramatic efforts, ranging from an adaptation of Terence, L'Eunuque (1654), to the unfinished tragedy Achille. La Fontaine had no great gift for the theatre, but was fascinated by its possibilities, in particular the beautiful illusion, magic, and metamorphosis of the opera. His libretto Daphné was rejected by Lully (this provoked some sharp polemic verse, notably the ‘Épître à M. Niert’), and his Astrée (1691), based on the ever-popular novel of d'Urfé, was a failure.

One of his favourite forms was the medley of prose and verse. He uses this in letters, notably an agreeable series addressed to his wife in 1663 when he travelled to the Limousin, in Le Songe de Vaux, a decorative portrayal of Fouquet's château, and in what is perhaps his most ambitious work, Les Amours de Psyché et de Cupidon (1669). This leisurely retelling of the old story from Apuleius is enhanced by being framed in an entertaining conversation between four friends who walk through the still-unfinished gardens of Versailles, praising the monarch and discussing such literary questions as the respective difficulties and merits of tragedy and comedy.

If the Fables are La Fontaine's true claim to fame, his first success came from his Contes et nouvelles, which were much imitated and provided the subject for many comedies. They are poetic versions of old stories from many sources (medieval and Renaissance France, Boccaccio, Rabelais, Ariosto). In the first edition (1664) the reader is offered the choice between two styles, the supple irregular verse of Joconde (praised by Boileau) or short lines in rhyming couplets and archaic language reminiscent of Marot and old French farce. Encouraged by success, La Fontaine kept enlarging his book, in which the two styles continue to mingle. The stories belong to the tedious ‘gaulois’ repertoire of cuckolds, lecherous priests, and wanton young women; they become more scurrilous in later editions, though verbal decency is maintained. The fourth edition (1674) was banned, and after his conversion the author disowned his book. Earlier, he presented the Contes as harmless fun; what mattered was the manner of telling, not the subject. And indeed they do derive their appeal from the ease with which the narrator handles the verse and storyline, digressing freely and engaging his reader in conversation about the work.

La Fontaine is one of France's great poets and a dedicated artist, in spite of his pose of nonchalance. His works show great verbal mastery and a constant taste for experiment and novelty. They also stand out in their time by their personal charm, their evocation of natural beauty and of the pleasures of dream and illusion. He creates his masterpiece in the Fables, where this charm engages with the harsh world of power, cruelty, and failure.

[Peter France]

Bibliography

• M. Guitton, La Fontaine: Poet and Counterpoet (1961)
• M. Gutwirth, Un merveilleux sans éclat: La Fontaine, ou la Poésie exilée (1987)
• M. O. Sweetser, La Fontaine (1987)

La Fontaine, Jean De (1621–1695), French poet and fable writer. Jean de La Fontaine grew up in a bourgeois family in rural France, where his grandfather, father, and finally he himself held the local charge of master of waters and forests. In his youth he quit the study of theology to pursue and obtain a law degree. He married and had a son, but cared little for his family and soon lived separately, in Paris. The poems "Adonis" (1658) and "Elegie aux nymphes de Vaux" (1661; The dream of Vaux) impressed Nicolas Fouquet (1615–1680), Louis XIV's superintendent of finances and a patron of the arts, who granted the poet a pension in 1659. The disgrace and imprisonment of Fouquet (1662) disrupted La Fontaine's life and finances and caused the king to be suspicious of the poet for many years. He entered into the service of the king's widowed aunt, where he again had access, albeit limited, to the rich bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. He began to frequent literary salons and published Contes et nouvelles en vers (1665; Tales and stories in verse), which were shockingly indecorous to precious ladies and followers of classicism because of their bawdy topics, and which were closer in subject and style to medieval fabliaux or the works of François Rabelais (c. 1483–1553).

In 1668 La Fontaine published the first of a collection of Fables choisies mises en vers (Selected fables set in verse; books 1–6), dedicated to the dauphin, which became extremely popular. Fables and other short poetic forms had been practiced in the literary salons for a while by a number of noted writers, but not with the style, wit, or power that La Fontaine displayed. As the guest and protégéof Mme Marguerite de la Sablière (c. 1640–1693) he enjoyed modest personal and financial comfort. He continued to write and publish new Tales, but with less success, and eventually incurred a police ban. He wrote the libretto for an opera (Daphné) by Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–1687), but the two fought and parted. Although actively writing, he only found approbation with a second set of Fables (books 7–11) in 1678–1679. When he was elected to the French Academy in 1683, the king complicated matters for the former client of Fouquet and withheld royal approval until after Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636–1711) had been admitted several months later. Leading a libertine life well into his sixties, La Fontaine did not change his life or renounce his more scandalous works until after he fell gravely ill in 1693. The next year saw a final book of Fables, a year before his death in Paris.

La Fontaine had the nickname of the "butterfly of Parnassus," as he was often considered to be flighty and disorganized. Anecdotes abound related to his naïveté, lack of seriousness, and inability to hold a decent conversation. But more recently this view has been challenged, and he has been seen as a capable courtier possessed of more skills than previously thought. Meanwhile, his superb mastery of poetic technique has never been doubted.

The two hundred and forty or so fables that he wrote can be considered as various overlapping scenes in the drama of human life. This is presented generally by a brief story of animal conflicts, making the poems allegorical. They need to be applied to human behavior (the wolf represents a certain kind of individual, or even a particular person) before instruction can be drawn. The morals, which are often (but not always) stated, can seem contradictory, or at least tied to a certain situation, when the entire body of fables are read, but the didactic purpose frequently lies in citing one fable for a unique real-life case. The fables are appealing to both children and adults and are linked to the seventeenth century by numerous specific details, but they attain universal pertinence by the general character traits and morals revealed.

The first set of Fables was inspired mainly by the Greek writer Aesop and the Roman Phaedrus, while later works were modeled after Bilpay and other non-Western sources. The conflicts between the grasshopper and the ant, the wolf and the lamb, and the tortoise and the hare, among many others, were part of both an oral tradition and a literary one. La Fontaine did not alter the basic stories or outcomes from these sources, but elaborated both the narrative and poetic aspects. A bit of conversation or some detail of clothing or place makes them more dramatic, picturesque, and plausible. As for poetic technique, at a time that valued the alexandrine couplet, La Fontaine displayed great irregularity, as he varied his line lengths and rhyme schemes within each fable, making them less artificial and predictable.

Both Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) and Alphonse Marie Louis de Prat de Lamartine (1790–1869) criticized the Fables as being too violent for children or even for adults, who also might mistakenly follow the vices, rather than the virtues, depicted. It is true that the poems often teach by negative example, but their charm has captivated most critics, teachers, and parents for more than three hundred years.

Bibliography

Calder, Andrew. The Fables of La Fontaine. Geneva, 2001.

Danner, Richard G. Patterns of Irony in the Fables of La Fontaine. Athens, Ohio, 1985.

Lapp, John C. The Esthetics of Negligence: La Fontaine's Contes. Cambridge, U.K., 1971.

Rubin, David Lee. A Pact with Silence: Art and Thought in the Fables of Jean de La Fontaine. Columbus, Ohio, 1991.

Runyon, Randolph Paul. In La Fontaine's Labyrinth: A Thread through the Fables. Charlottesville, Va., 2000.

Slater, Maya. The Craft of La Fontaine. London, 2001.

Sweetser, Marie-Odile. La Fontaine. New York, 1987.

Vincent, Michael. Figures of the Text. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, 1992.

—ALLEN G. WOOD

Flemish alchemist and poet who lived at Valenciennes toward the close of the thirteenth century. Two books are ascribed to him, La Fontaine des Amoureux de Science and La Fontaine Perilleuse, both of which were written in French and published in Paris, the first in 1561 and the second in 1572.

Fontaine's claims to the authorship of the latter work have frequently been disputed, but the former is almost certainly his, and is a curious production. At the outset the author professes himself an expert in hermetic philosophy, and thereafter he proceeds, in poetry of an allegorical style that recalls The Roman of the Rose, to describe the different processes involved in achieving a transmutation. There is little in this metrical treatise that indicates that the writer was an alchemist of any great ability, but he certainly possessed a distinct gift for writing pleasant verse.

Sources:

Fontaine, Jean de la. La Fontaine des Amoureux de Science. Paris, 1561.

——. La Fontaine Perilleuse. Paris, 1572.

Quotes:

"It is twice the pleasure to deceive the deceiver."

"The fastidious are unfortunate; nothing satisfies them."

"Nothing is more dangerous than a friend without discretion; even a prudent enemy is preferable."

"Everyone has his faults which he continually repeats: neither fear nor shame can cure them."

"Every flatterer lives at the expense of him who listens to him."

"Rare as is true love, true friendship is rarer."

See more famous quotes by Jean De La Fontaine

"La Fontaine" redirects here. For other uses, see La Fontaine (disambiguation).

Jean de La Fontaine
Born	8 July 1621(1621-07-08) Château-Thierry, Champagne. 1
Died	13 April 1695 (aged 73) Paris, France
Occupation	Fabulist, Poet

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Jean de La Fontaine (July 8, 1621 – April 13, 1695) was the most famous French fabulist and one of the most widely read French poets of the 17th century.

According to Flaubert, he was the only French poet to understand and master the texture of the French language before Hugo. A set of postage stamps celebrating La Fontaine and the Fables was issued by France in 1995. A film of his life was released in France in April 2007 (Jean de La Fontaine - le défi starring Laurent Deutsch).

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Early years 1.2 Family life 1.3 Literary career in Paris 1.4 The years of fame 1.5 Admission to the Academy and attendant struggles 1.6 Anecdotes 2 La Fontaine's works 3 Further reading 4 External links

Biography

Early years

La Fontaine was born at Château-Thierry in Champagne. His father was Charles de La Fontaine, maître des eaux et forêts - a kind of deputy-ranger - of the duchy of Chateau-Thierry; his mother was Françoise Pidoux. Both sides of his family were of the highest provincial middle class; though they were not noble, his father was fairly wealthy.

Jean, the eldest child, was educated at the collège (grammar school) of Reims, and at the end of his school days he entered the Oratory in May 1641, and the seminary of Saint-Magloire in October of the same year; but a very short sojourn proved to him that he had mistaken his vocation. He then apparently studied law, and is said to have been admitted as avocat (lawyer).

Family life

He was, however, settled in life, or at least might have been so, somewhat early. In 1647 his father resigned his rangership in his favor, and arranged a marriage for him with Marie Héricart, a girl of fourteen, who brought him twenty thousand livres, and expectations. She seems to have been both beautiful and intelligent, but the two did not get along well together. There appears to be absolutely no ground for the vague scandal as to her conduct, which was, for the most part, raised long afterwards by gossips or personal enemies of La Fontaine. All that can be positively said against her is that she was a negligent housewife and an inveterate novel reader; La Fontaine himself was constantly away from home, was certainly not strict in point of conjugal fidelity, and was so bad a man of business that his affairs became involved in hopeless difficulty, and a separation de biens had to take place in 1658. This was a perfectly amicable transaction for the benefit of the family; by degrees, however, the pair, still without any actual quarrel, ceased to live together, and for the greater part of the last forty years of La Fontaine's life he lived in Paris while his wife dwelt at Chateau Thierry, which, however, he frequently visited. One son was born to them in 1653, and was educated and taken care of wholly by his mother.

Literary career in Paris

Even in the earlier years of his marriage La Fontaine seems to have been much in Paris, but it was not until about 1656 that he became a regular visitor to the capital. The duties of his office, which were only occasional, were compatible with this non-residence. It was not until he was past thirty that his literary career began. The reading of Malherbe, it is said, first awoke poetical fancies in him, but for some time he attempted nothing but trifles in the fashion of the time - epigrams, ballades, rondeaux, etc.

His first serious work was a translation or adaptation of the Eunuchus of Terence (1654). At this time the Maecenas of French letters was the Superintendent Fouquet, to whom La Fontaine was introduced by Jacques Jannart, a connection of his wife's. Few people who paid their court to Fouquet went away empty-handed, and La Fontaine soon received a pension of 1000 livres (1659), on the easy terms of a copy of verses for each quarters receipt. He also began a medley of prose and poetry, entitled Le Songe de Vaux, on Fouquet's famous country house.

It was about this time that his wife's property had to be separately secured to her, and he seems by degrees to have had to sell everything that he owned; but, as he never lacked powerful and generous patrons, this was of small importance to him. In the same year he wrote a ballad, Les Rieurs du Beau-Richard, and this was followed by many small pieces of occasional poetry addressed to various personages from the king downwards.

Fouquet soon incurred the royal displeasure, but La Fontaine, like most of his literary proteges, was not unfaithful to him, the well-known elegy Pleurez, Nymphes de Vaux, being by no means the only proof of his devotion. Indeed it is thought not improbable that a journey to Limoges in 1663 in company with Jannart, and of which we have an account written to his wife, was not wholly spontaneous, as it certainly was not on Jannart's part.

Just at this time his affairs did not look promising. His father and he had assumed the title of esquire, to which they were not strictly entitled, and, some old edicts on the subject having been put in force, an informer procured a sentence against the poet fining him 2000 livres. He found, however, a new protector in the duke and still more in the duchess of Bouillon, his feudal superiors at Chateau Thierry, and nothing more is heard of the fine.

Some of La Fontaine's liveliest verses are addressed to the duchess, Marie Anne Mancini, the youngest of Mazarin's nieces, and it is even probable that the taste of the duke and duchess for Ariosto had something to do with the writing of his first work of real importance, the first book of the Contes, which appeared in 1664. He was then forty-three years old, and his previous printed productions had been comparatively trivial, though much of his work was handed about in manuscript long before it was regularly published.

The years of fame

Portrait of La Fontaine attributed to François de Troy

It was about this time that the quartet of the Rue du Vieux Colombier, so famous in French literary history, was formed. It consisted of La Fontaine, Racine, Boileau and Molière, the last of whom was almost of the same age as La Fontaine, the other two considerably younger. Chapelain was also a kind of outsider in the coterie. There are many anecdotes, some pretty obviously apocryphal, about these meetings. The most characteristic is perhaps that which asserts that a copy of Chapelain's unlucky Pucelle always lay on the table, a certain number of lines of which was the appointed punishment for offences against the company. The coterie furnished under feigned names the personages of La Fontaine's version of the Cupid and Psyche story, which, however, with Adonis, was not printed till 1669.

Meanwhile the poet continued to find friends. In 1664 he was regularly commissioned and sworn in as gentleman to the duchess dowager of Orleans, and was installed in the Luxembourg. He still retained his rangership, and in 1666 we have something like a reprimand from Colbert suggesting that he should look into some malpractices at Chateau Thierry. In the same year appeared the second book of the Contes, and in 1668 the first six books of the Fables, with more of both kinds in 1671. In this latter year a curious instance of the docility with which the poet lent himself to any influence was afforded by his officiating, at the instance of the Port-Royalists, as editor of a volume of sacred poetry dedicated to the prince de Conti.

A year afterwards his situation, which had for some time been decidedly flourishing, showed signs of changing very much for the worse. The duchess of Orleans died, and he apparently had to give up his rangership, probably selling it to pay debts. But there was always a providence for La Fontaine. Madame de la Sablière, a woman of great beauty, of considerable intellectual power and of high character, invited him to make his home in her house, where he lived for some twenty years. He seems to have had no trouble whatever about his affairs thenceforward; and could devote himself to his two different lines of poetry, as well as to that of theatrical composition.

Admission to the Academy and attendant struggles

In 1682 he was, at more than sixty years of age, recognized as one of the first men of letters of France. Madame de Sévigné, one of the soundest literary critics of the time, and by no means given to praise mere novelties, had spoken of his second collection of Fables published in the winter of 1678 as divine; and it is pretty certain that this was the general opinion. It was not unreasonable, therefore, that he should present himself to the Académie française, and, though the subjects of his Contes were scarcely calculated to propitiate that decorous assembly, while his attachment to Fouquet and to more than one representative of the old Frondeur party made him suspect to Colbert and the king, most of the members were his personal friends.

He was first proposed in 1682, but was rejected for Marquis de Dangeau. The next year Colbert died and La Fontaine was again nominated. Boileau was also a candidate, but the first ballot gave the fabulist sixteen votes against seven only for the critic. The king, whose assent was necessary, not merely for election but for a second ballot in case of the failure of an absolute majority, was ill-pleased, and the election was left pending. Another vacancy occurred, however, some months later, and to this Boileau was elected. The king hastened to approve the choice effusively, adding, Vous pouvez incessamment recevoir La Fontaine, il a promis d'etre sage.

His admission was indirectly the cause of the only serious literary quarrel of his life. A dispute took place between the Academy and one of its members, Antoine Furetière, on the subject of the latter's French dictionary, which was decided to be a breach of the Academy's corporate privileges. Furetire, a man of no small ability, bitterly assailed those whom he considered to be his enemies, and among them La Fontaine, whose unlucky Contes made him peculiarly vulnerable, his second collection of these tales having been the subject of a police condemnation. The death of the author of the Roman Bourgeois, however, put an end to this quarrel.

Shortly afterwards La Fontaine had a share in a still more famous affair, the celebrated Ancient-and-Modern squabble in which Boileau and Charles Perrault were the chiefs, and in which La Fontaine (though he had been specially singled out by Perrault for favorable comparison with Aesop and Phaedrus) took the Ancient side. About the same time (1685–1687) he made the acquaintance of the last of his many hosts and protectors, Monsieur and Madame d'Hervart, and fell in love with a certain Madame Ulrich, a lady of some position but of doubtful character. This acquaintance was accompanied by a great familiarity with Vendome, Chaulieu and the rest of the libertine coterie of the Temple; but, though Madame de la Sablière had long given herself up almost entirely to good works and religious exercises, La Fontaine continued an inmate of her house until her death in 1693.

What followed is told in one of the best known of the many stories bearing on his childlike nature. Hervart on hearing of the death, had set out at once to find La Fontaine. He met him in the street in great sorrow, and begged him to make his home at his house. J'y allais was La Fontaines answer. He had already undergone the process of conversion during a severe illness the year before. An energetic young priest, M. Poucet, had brought him, not indeed to understand, but to acknowledge the impropriety of the Contes, and it is said that the destruction of a new play of some merit was demanded and submitted to as a proof of repentance.

A pleasant story is told of the young duke of Burgundy, Fenelon's pupil, who was then only eleven years old, sending 50 louis to La Fontaine as a present of his own motion. But, though La Fontaine recovered for the time, he was broken by age and infirmity, and his new hosts had to nurse rather than to entertain him, which they did very carefully and kindly. He did a little more work, completing his Fables among other things; but he did not survive Madame de la Sablière much more than two years, dying on 13 April, 1695, at the age of seventy-three. When the Père Lachaise Cemetery opened in Paris, Lafontaine's remains were moved there. His wife survived him nearly fifteen years.

Anecdotes

The curious personal character of La Fontaine, like that of some other men of letters, has been enshrined in a kind of legend by literary tradition. At an early age his absence of mind and indifference to business gave a subject to Gédéon Tallemant des Réaux. His later contemporaries helped to swell the tale, and the 18th century finally accepted it, including the anecdotes of his meeting his son, being told who he was, and remarking, Ah, yes, I thought I had seen him somewhere!, of his insisting on fighting a duel with a supposed admirer of his wife, and then imploring him to visit at his house just as before; of his going into company with his stockings wrong side out, &c., with, for a contrast, those of his awkwardness and silence, if not positive rudeness in company.

It ought to be remembered, as a comment on the unfavourable description by Jean de La Bruyère, that La Fontaine was a special friend and ally of Benserade, La Bruyere's chief literary enemy. But after all deductions much will remain, especially when it is remembered that one of the chief authorities for these anecdotes is Louis Racine, a man who possessed intelligence and moral worth, and who received them from his father, La Fontaine's attached friend for more than thirty years. Perhaps the best worth recording of all these stories is one of the Vieux Colombier quartet, which tells how Molière, while Racine and Boileau were exercising their wits upon le bonhomme or le bon (by both which titles La Fontaine was familiarly known), remarked to a bystander, Nos beaux esprits ont beau faire, ils n'effaceront pas le bonhomme. They have not.

Also, Turkish pop singer Murat Dalkılıç's third single name is La Fontaine.

La Fontaine's works

The numerous works of La Fontaine fall into three traditional divisions: the Fables, the Contes and the miscellaneous works. Of these the first may be said to be known universally, the second to be known to all lovers of French literature, the third to be with a few exceptions practically forgotten.

18th-century illustration to La Fontaine's fable The Sculptor and the Statue of Jupiter by Charles-Nicolas Cochin

The Fables exhibit the versatility and fecundity of the author's talent more fully than any of his other work. La Fontaine had many predecessors in the fable, especially in the beast fable. The poet took inspiration from Aesop, Horace, Boccaccio and Ariosto and Tasso, Machiavelli's comedies and ancient Indian literature, such as the Panchatantra:

"This is the second book of fables that I present to the public... I must acknowledge that the greatest part is inspired from Pilpay, the Indian sage." ("Je dirai par reconnaissance que j’en dois la plus grande partie à Pilpay sage indien.") — Jean de La Fontaine, Avertissement to the Second Compilation of Fables (1678).

The first collection of 124 Fables Choisies had appeared March 31, 1668, wisely dedicated to "Monseigneur" Louis, le Grand Dauphin, the six-year-old son of Louis XIV of France and his Queen consort Maria Theresa of Spain. In this first issue, comprising what are now called the first six books, La Fontaine adhered to the path of his predecessors with some closeness; but in the later collections he allowed himself far more liberty, and it is in these parts that his genius is most fully manifested.

The boldness of the politics is as much to be considered as the ingenuity of the moralizing, as the intimate knowledge of human nature displayed in the substance of the narratives, or as the artistic mastery shown in their form. It has sometimes been objected that the view of human character which La Fontaine expresses is unduly dark, and resembles too much that of La Rochefoucauld, for whom the poet certainly had a profound admiration. It may only be said that satire (and La Fontaine is eminently a satirist) necessarily concerns itself with the darker rather than with the lighter shades.

Perhaps the best criticism ever passed upon La Fontaine's Fables is that of Silvestre de Sacy, to the effect that they supply delights to three different ages: the child rejoices in the freshness and vividness of the story, the eager student of literature in the consummate art with which it is told, the experienced man of the world in the subtle reflections on character and life which it conveys. Nor has any one, with the exception of a few paradoxers like Rousseau and a few sentimentalists like Lamartine, denied that the moral tone of the whole is as fresh and healthy as its literary interest is vivid. The book has therefore naturally become a standard French reader both at home and abroad. It is no small testimony to its merit that not even this use (or misuse) has interfered with its popularity.

La Fontaine's Fables provided a model for subsequent fabulists, including Poland's Ignacy Krasicki and Russia's Ivan Krylov.

Further reading

• Young La Fontaine: A Study of His Artistic Growth in His Early Poetry and First Fables, by Philip A. Wadsworth. Pub. Northwestern University Press, 1952.
• Oeuvres diverses de Jean de La Fontaine, edited by Pierre Clarac. Pub. Gallimard ("Bibliothèque de la Pléiade"), 1958. The standard, fully annotated edition of LF's prose and minor poetry.
• O Muse, fuyante proie ...: essai sur la poésie de La Fontaine, by Odette de Mourgues. Pub. Corti, 1962. Seminal.
• Le Monde littéraire de La Fontaine, by Jean-Pierre Collinet. Pub. PUF, 1970
• The Esthetics of Negligence: La Fontaine's Contes, by John C. Lapp. Pub. Cambridge University Press, 1971.
• [La Fontaine] l'Esprit Créateur 21.4 (1981); guest-editor: David Lee Rubin.
• Patterns of Irony in the Fables of La Fontaine, by Richard Danner. Pub. Ohio University Press, 1985.
• La Fontaine: Fables, 2 volumes, edited by Marc Fumaroli. Pub. Imprimerie Nationale, 1985. Brilliant introductory essays and notes on texts.
• La Fontaine, by Marie-Odile Sweetser. Pub. G.K. Hall (Twayne World Authors Series 788), 1987.
• Oeuvres complètes de Jean de La Fontaine: Fables et Contes, edited by Jean-Pierre Collinet. Pub. Gallimard ("Bibliothèque de la Pléiade"), 1991. The standard fully annotated edition of these works.
• A Pact with Silence: Art and Thought in the Fables of Jean de La Fontaine, by David Lee Rubin. Pub. Ohio State U Press, 1991.
• La Fabrique des Fables, by Patrick Dandrey. Pub. Klincksieck, 1991.
• Figures of the Text: Reading and Writing (in) La Fontaine, by Michael Vincent. Pub. John Benjamins (Purdue University Monographs in Romance Literatures), 1992.
• La Fontaine's Bawdy: Of Libertines, Louts, and Lechers, selections from the Contes et nouvelles, transl. Norman Shapiro. Pub. Princeton University Press, 1992; repr. Black Widow Press, forthcoming.
• Lectures de La Fontaine, by Jules Brody. Pub. Rookwood Press, 1995.
• Refiguring La Fontaine: Tercentenary Essays, edited by Anne L. Birberick. Pub. Rookwood Press, 1996.
• Reading Under Cover: Audience and Authority in Jean La Fontaine, by Anne L. Birberick. Pub. Bucknell University Press, 1998.
• Cognitive Space and Patterns of Deceit in La Fontaine's Contes, by Catherine M. Grisé. Pub: Rookwood Press, 1998.
• In La Fontaine's Labyrinth: a Thread through the Fables, by Randolph Paul Runyon. Pub. Rookwood Press, 2000.
• Poet and the King: Jean de La Fontaine and His Century, by Marc Fumaroli; Jean Marie Todd (transl.). Pub. U. of Notre Dame, 2002.
• The Shape of Change: Essays on La Fontaine and Early Modern French Literature in Honor of David Lee Rubin, edited by Anne L. Birberick and Russell J. Ganim. Pub. Rodopi, 2002.
• La Fontaine à l'école républicaine: Du poète universel au classique scolaire, by Ralph Albanese, Jr. Pub. Rookwood Press 2003.
• The Complete Fables of Jean de La Fontaine, Norman Shapiro (transl.). Pub. U of Illinois Press, 2007.
• La Fontaine's Complete Tales in Verse, An Illustrated And Annotated Translation, by Randolph Paul Runyon. Pub. McFarland & Company, 2009.

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Jean de La Fontaine

French Wikisource has original text related to this article: Jean de La Fontaine

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Jean de La Fontaine

• http://www.musee-jean-de-la-fontaine.fr : The museum is the native house of the poet in Château-Thierry, France (in French but soon in English)
• Works by Jean de La Fontaine at Project Gutenberg
• http://www.lafontaine.net/ - extensive information and works online
• Biography, Analysis (in French)
• Chocolat Menier - Les Fables de La Fontaine pictures and French language text
• Jean de La Fontaine: text, concordance and frequency list (in Italian)
• Fables from La Fontaine read by a French native speaker
• Biography and Fables in French language
• Eric Ormsby on the La Fontaine's fables from Parnassus: Poetry in Review

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• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

Cultural offices
Preceded by Jean-Baptiste Colbert	Seat 24 Académie française 1684–1695	Succeeded by Jules de Clérambault

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