Fables, Les. Collection by La Fontaine, first published in 1668 as Fables choisies, mises en vers. This contained six books, with about 20 fables in each. A second edition, containing 11 books, appeared in 1678-9, and a 12th book in 1694. In the first edition La Fontaine draws on familiar fables of Aesop and Phaedrus such as ‘The Wolf and the Lamb’. Rejecting the purist advice of Patru, who saw brevity as the rule of the genre, he endows his fables with ‘novelty and gaiety’, creating vivid dramas, with evocative rural settings and characters whose animal and human traits are cunningly intermingled. Irregular verse is used with supple mastery; the story-teller plays ironically across all the registers of language, delighting in setting heroic rhetoric against down-to-earth speech. In the second edition he writes with greater freedom, drawing his stories from many sources and developing them at greater length. The pretence that the fables are meant for children is abandoned here. The figure of the poet assumes increasing importance, as he offers personal confidences or meditates on the philosophical implications of his material. In particular, he challenges human arrogance; the ‘Discours à Madame de la Sablière’ in Book 9 is a critique of Descartes's notion of the animal as machine.
The fable is meant to teach a lesson, and La Fontaine accepted this view. Even though his main concern was the creation of beautiful little comedies, his fables are indeed instructive, but do not usually yield a simple lesson. Often no explicit moral is given; if it is, it may well seem to contradict the story. ‘La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure’—the moral of ‘Le Loup et l'agneau’—is like an echo of Pascal's cynical politics, suggesting at most that the weak do well to keep their heads down. What the Fables convey—with great poetic richness and inimitable lightness of touch—is a vision of the world in which the simple desire for happiness is corroded and thwarted by the cruelty of life.
Other French authors have written fables [see Marie de France; La Motte; Aubert; Florian], but La Fontaine remains the unequalled model.
[Peter France]
Bibliography
- O. de Mourgues, La Fontaine: Fables (1960)
