Jean de La Fontaine

French writer

• Born: July 8, 1621
• Birthplace: Château-Thierry, Champagne, France
• Died: April 13, 1695
• Place of death: Paris, France

La Fontaine is recognized as one of the major writers of the French classical period. He wrote drama, ballet, popular tales, and various forms of poetry, but he is best known in France and abroad for his verse fables, a genre he developed to perfection.

Early Life

Jean de La Fontaine (zhahn deh lah-fohn-tehn) was born in a small farming town in Champagne located about fifty miles east of Paris. His father, Charles de La Fontaine, was a local administrator of forests and waters. His mother, Françoise Pidoux, belonged to a respected middle-class family from Poitiers. The widow of a wealthy merchant, she had one daughter when she married Charles in 1617.

Although little is known about La Fontaine’s early years, most scholars believe he attended school in Château-Thierry before going to college in Paris. During his school years, he learned Latin rhetoric and grammar and was introduced to ancient works that would provide subjects for his later creative endeavors. He was most likely a sensitive student who liked to daydream and who perhaps found his teachers boring and authoritarian. Several uncomplimentary references to schoolboys and schoolmasters in his fables suggest that his school years were not entirely pleasant.

On April 27, 1641, La Fontaine entered the Oratory, a religious seminary in Paris. By October, his teachers had discovered his preference for popular love stories and wrote that he should be strongly urged to study theology. After eighteen months, La Fontaine withdrew from the seminary and returned to Château-Thierry to read and daydream. Although many writers refer disparagingly to this idle period, La Fontaine was becoming familiar with ancient and modern authors, especially the poets François de Malherbe and Vincent Voiture, François Rabelais, and the Latin writers Horace, Vergil, and Terence.

From 1645 to 1647, La Fontaine studied law in Paris, spending much of his time, however, with aspiring young writers (François Maucroix, Paul Pellisson, and Antoine Furetière) who would influence and support him throughout his career. In this formative period, La Fontaine continued to increase his knowledge of ancient and modern literature.

In 1647, at the age of twenty-six, La Fontaine was married to Marie Héricart, who was fourteen and a half years of age, and who brought him a dowry of thirty thousand livres, a considerable sum. Although amiable at first, the couple drifted apart. Absorbed for weeks in his reading, La Fontaine ignored both his family and his duties as forest warden, a position he obtained in 1652. Although he appeared idle and absentminded, the extent of his voracious reading and keen observation would become evident in his later works.

Life’s Work

During the classical period, which flourished in France from 1660 to about 1685, writers were expected to imitate and to adapt works of ancient authors, not by radically changing the originals but by presenting them in new styles to please contemporary audiences. As his first major work, La Fontaine tried to adapt a racy Latin comedy by Terence to the refined tastes of Parisian high society, but the necessary changes destroyed the flavor and unity of the original. Although L’Eunuque (1654; the eunuch) was never produced, its lively dialogue demonstrates his narrative skills.

For the next few years, La Fontaine was occupied by family affairs. The income from his administrative position and similar positions inherited from his father in 1658 was insufficient to pay family debts, forcing La Fontaine to annul his marriage in order to sell property held jointly with his wife. From this time on, he lived mostly apart from his family, relying on wealthy patrons to support his life’s work.

His first patron was Nicolas Fouquet, a wealthy and ambitious minister of finance whose estate at Vaux-le-Vicomte was being built as a showplace of the arts, and whose eighteen thousand employees included the leading artists, architects, gardeners, musicians, and writers. In addition to occasional verse to entertain the society at Vaux, La Fontaine wrote Adonis (1658), a six-hundred-line love story in rhymed couplets, which merges three distinct genres (heroic, idyllic, and elegiac) in a creative synthesis of earlier sources. La Fontaine was also working on Le Songe de Vaux (1659; the dream of Vaux), a mixture of poetry and prose in which the muses of painting, gardening, architecture, and poetry describe the wonders of Fouquet’s magnificent estate, then under construction. The work reveals La Fontaine’s remarkable ability to communicate visual imagery in verse.

When the young Louis XIV had Fouquet imprisoned for plundering the treasury, La Fontaine demonstrated his uncompromising loyalty to the finance minister in a short poem circulated anonymously among Fouquet’s supporters, deploring the minister’s downfall and asking the nymphs of Vaux to make the king merciful. A year later, in “Ode au Roi” (1663; ode to the king), La Fontaine urged Louis XIV to pardon his disgraced minister.

Forty years of age, without a patron and in disfavor with the young monarch who had taken Fouquet’s role as parton of the arts, La Fontaine traveled to Limoges with his wife’s uncle, Jacques Jannart, who had been exiled for supporting Fouquet. La Fontaine describes this trip, the longest he ever took, in six letters later published as Relation d’un voyage en Limousin (1663; account of a trip to Limoges). Returning to Paris after a few months, La Fontaine found protection with the duke and duchess of Bouillon, perhaps discovering an appreciative audience for his licentious tales inspired by Giovanni Boccaccio, Ludovico Ariosto, and other writers.

Accepting an undemanding post as gentleman servant to the duchess of Orléans in 1664, La Fontaine began his most productive period. His licentious Contes et nouvelles en vers (1664; Tales and Short Stories in Verse , 1735) became immediately popular among sophisticated society, accomplishing his chief goal: to entertain his readers. He published several more collections of tales.

La Fontaine’s method of shaping new works from old sources, artfully departing from established rules of versification to create a studied negligence, and carrying on a dialogue with the reader worked even better in his fables. His first edition of Fables choisies, mises en vers (1668-1694; Fables Written in Verse , 1735), a collection of 124 fables in six books, was an immediate success. In the introduction, La Fontaine declared that his fables presented important truths in amusing stories, adding that they were “portraits in which all of us are depicted.”

In the fables, La Fontaine drew upon all of his previous reading and experience to present an overview of French society that included kings and nobles, lawyers and judges, students and teachers, doctors and philosophers, and the lowliest laborers. His goal, even when his characters were animals or plants, was to portray human nature and, like his friend Molière, to hold vices up to ridicule.

When the duchess of Orléans died in 1672, La Fontaine was taken in by the intelligent and witty Madame de La Sablière, who introduced him to scientists, philosophers, and other intellectuals. Under her influence, La Fontaine published five more books of fables, widening his sources to include fables by the Indian sage Pilpay. He also treated philosophical questions in the 237-line Discours à Mme de La Sablière (1679), refuting René Descartes’s claim that animals were a kind of machine.

Unable to limit himself to a single genre, La Fontaine experimented with a variety of hybrid works. Les Amours de Psyché et de Cupidon (1669; The Loves of Cupid and Psyche , 1744) was a fairy tale in prose and poetry related to three friends during a visit to Versailles. The four friends—traditionally identified as Molière, Jean Racine , Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux , and La Fontaine (because they were constantly together when the piece was composed around 1664)—are now considered composite characters reflecting views discussed at length by La Fontaine and his many friends. Although the work was not popular, it inspired a successful play with music and ballet by Molière, Pierre Corneille , and Jean-Baptiste Lully in 1671.

Other works include a religious poem about the temptation of Saint Malc, a scientific epic about the fashionable drug quinine, an opera rejected by the composer Lully, a ballet with only two acts, a comedy that was performed only four times, and the opera L’Astrèe (1692), which ran for six performances.

In 1683, La Fontaine was elected to the prestigious Académie Française, but Louis XIV refused to accept the vote until Boileau-Despréaux was elected in 1684 and La Fontaine had promised to write no more works such as Tales and Short Stories in Verse. As a member of the Académie, La Fontaine entered the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns with his Épître à Huet (1687; letter to Huet), which praised both ancient and modern writers while discouraging a slavish imitation of earlier works.

With the publication of his last collection of fables in 1694, La Fontaine completed his life’s work. In his last years, he experienced a religious conversion, disavowed Tales and Short Stories in Verse, and destroyed a play he had been writing. La Fontaine died April 13, 1695, in Paris at the age of seventy-three.

Significance

Although he tried his hand at many literary forms, La Fontaine is remembered for his fables, which have survived translation into many languages. Except for Tales and Short Stories in Verse, his other works are relatively unknown outside his own country, even to students of French literature. One exception, his poem Adonis, has received much scholarly attention since its brilliant analysis by the French poet Paul Valéry in 1921.

A careful writer even when trying to appear casual, La Fontaine was totally dedicated to his craft, despite a reputation for idleness and an eagerness to please the audience of his day. Forced to seek patrons to support his work, he firmly but diplomatically maintained his independence as a writer, rejecting suggestions to write the fables in prose or to follow his sources more closely. His fables are a synthesis of his extensive reading, keen observation, and years of poetic experimentation. With his unerring ear for dialogue, his insight into human nature, and his skill as a poet and storyteller, La Fontaine carried the classic art of imitation to its highest extreme by molding the fable into a new poetic genre. More than three centuries later, his accomplishment remains unsurpassed.

La Fontaine’s Major Works

1654

• L Eunuque

1658

• Adonis

1659

• Le Songe de Vaux

1663

• Relation d un voyage en Limousin

1664

• Contes et nouvelles en vers (Tales and Short Stories in Verse, 1735)

1666

• Deuxième partie des Contes et nouvelles en vers (Part Two of Tales and Short Stories in Verse, 1735)

1668-1694

• Fables choisies, mises en vers (Fables Written in Verse, 1735)

1669

• Les Amours de Psyché et de Cupidon (The Loves of Cupid and Psyche, 1744)

1671

• Clymène

1671

• Troisième partie des Contes et nouvelles en vers (Part Three of Tales and Short Stories in Verse, 1735)

1674

• Nouveaux Contes (New Tales, 1735)

1679

• Discours à Mme de La Sablière

1682

• Daphné (libretto)

1682

• Galatée (libretto)

1687

• Épître à Huet

1692

• L Astrée (libretto)

1697

• Poèmes et poésies diverses

Bibliography

Fumaroli, Marc. The Poet and the King: Jean de La Fontaine and His Century. Translated by Jane Marie Todd. Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame Press, 2002. Examines La Fontaine’s struggle to maintain artistic integrity against the oppression of Louis XIV’s regime.

Guiton, Margaret. La Fontaine: Poet and Counterpoet. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1961. Examines La Fontaine’s competing visions of comedy and imaginative poetry, with English translations of his work. Includes chronology of La Fontaine’s life and works.

La Fontaine, Jean de. The Complete Fables of Jean de La Fontaine. Edited and translated by Norman B. Spector. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988. A bilingual edition in clear, crisp rhymed verse. Closer to the original language and imagery than many other versions.

Lapp, John C. The Esthetics of Negligence: La Fontaine’s “Contes.” New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971. Refutes previous disparaging studies by demonstrating how La Fontaine’s wit, eroticism, lyricism, and charm make the Tales and Short Stories in Verse superior to their sources.

Mackay, Agnes Ethel. La Fontaine and His Friends: A Biography. New York: Braziller, 1972. Examination of La Fontaine’s relationship with intimate friends and influential patrons, with French passages translated in chapter endnotes.

Powell, Kirsten. Fables in Frames: La Fontaine and Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century France. New York: Lang, 1997. Powell examines why La Fontaine’s fables became the subject of artists in the nineteenth century and how these artists used the poems to comment on topical issues.

Runyon, Randolph Paul. In La Fontaine’s Labyrinth: A Thread Through the Fables. Charlottesville, Va.: Rockwood Press, 2000. Demonstrates the connections between La Fontaine’s individual fables.

Slater, Maya. Craft of La Fontaine. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001. A detailed analysis of La Fontaine’s fables, examining the humor, representation of animals, literary qualities, and moralistic core of the works.

Sweetser, Marie-Odile. La Fontaine. Boston: Twayne, 1987. A good place to begin a study of La Fontaine, Excellent review of his life, description of his major works, and concise summary of important studies. Lists selected critical articles, many in English.

Wadsworth, Philip A. Young La Fontaine. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1952. A detailed study of La Fontaine’s growth as a poet up to publication of his first fables in 1668.