INTRODUCTION Jean de La Fontaine was born July 8, 1621, at ChâteauThierry, at present a town of about 7000 inhabitants some sixty miles east of Paris. His father was in comfortable circumstances, but does not seem to have paid much attention to the education of his son, whose early training was probably very meager. At the age of twenty years he entered the Seminary at Reims with the intention of preparing for the priesthood, but soon came to the conclusion that he had no vocation. He next studied law, but apparently had no more taste for it than for theology. His father now thought of setting him up in business, and accordingly turned over to him his own position of Commissioner of Waters and Forests. The young man, however, never took his duties seriously; and, as one of his biographers says, "S'il allait dans les bois, c'était pour rêver tout à l'aise sous de frais ombrages, ou pour suivre religieusement l'enterrement d'une fourmi." Nevertheless, his rambles through wood and field furnished him with material that was destined to prove valuable in after years. To assist him in settling down it was proposed that he should take a wife. He was at this time living with his friend Mau'croix, who thought of entering the church and asked La Fontaine's advice on the subject. The latter replied by sending him the sixty-second fable of this collection. Both evidently came to the conclusion that it was "impossible de contenter tout le monde et son père," and accordingly Maucroix became a priest, while La Fontaine, who was now twenty-six years old, 1 married a girl of fifteen. By her he had a son, but he neglected both wife and child, and the pair were later legally separated. La Fontaine's first work, published in 1654, was a free translation of the Eunuchus of Terence. Soon after this some friends introduced him to Fouquet, the Minister of Finance, who was a patron of letters, and who bestowed on La Fontaine a pension of 1000 livres. His living was thus made secure until the downfall of Fouquet in 1661. Owing to his genial disposition no less than to his poetic talent he never lacked friends and protectors, and he now found a patroness in the Duchess of Orleans, who died in 1672. It was during this period, namely, in 1668, that his Fables choisies mises en vers appeared, dedicated to the Dauphin and comprising the first six books of the collection as now found. His next patroness was Madame de la Sablière, in whose house he found a home until her death in 1693. From this time until his death on the 13th of April, 1695, he lived with M. de Hervart. In 1678-1679 appeared Fables choisies, troisième et quatrième parties, containing five additional books, and in 1694 Fables choisies, cinquième partie, containing the twelfth book. He was elected a member of the Academy in 1683, but on account of the king's opposition he was not formally received until the following year. There are current many anecdotes about La Fontaine, all showing his good humor as well as his aversion to taking life seriously; but his kindly disposition, his poetic talent, and the unrivaled brilliancy of his conversation caused his company to be sought for by the leading literary men of the day, including Racine, Boileau, and Molière. But he was never a favorite at the court, and the king did not rate his work very highly. Indeed, as a writer La Fontaine can scarcely be said to belong to the age of Louis XIV. He belongs rather to the preceding century, since he is really the literary child of Rabelais and Montaigne. La Fontaine had many serious defects of character, but they were mostly of an amiable kind, and to his inability or unwillingness to conform to the manners of the times we doubtless owe the chief charm of his fables, the only work of permanent value that he left behind. "To his fondness for being his genuine self is due the high lyric quality of his fables. The main effort of the seventeenth century being to enforce conformity to certain standards, there could be in her literature of that period no such outburst of lyric poetry. The greatest lyric poet his country has produced in a stretch of two hundred years, La Fontaine is also the type and epitome of all that is most French. He is the national poet par excellence. He represents not so much his age as his race." (Professor George McLean Harper.) He frequently violated the accepted rules of versification, and thus acquired a literary style that was eminently suited to the work he had in hand. He often mingles short lines with the stately alexandrine, thus giving to his fables a delicacy and lightness of movement found in no other writer of this or the succeeding century. Unlike most other prominent writers of his age, La Fontaine was in sympathy with all classes and conditions of mankind; and, what was still more rare, he loved both animate and inanimate nature. At a time when distinguished men like Descartes were trying to prove that animals were mere automatons, he studied their habits carefully and made them his friends and companions. His sympathy with dumb animals appears in many of his fables, and it is in attributing to them appropriate characters that his originality largely consists, for the stories of his fables are mostly borrowed. He is original in the same sense that Shakespeare was original. He took a story that was common property, but added to it so many new and beautiful features that it became in a peculiar sense his own. It is difficult to give a comprehensive definition of a fable, but in a general way it may be defined as a didactic story in which animals are usually the characters. La Fontaine's fables, like most other modern ones, are derived from Oriental, Greek, or Roman sources. The Romans received their fables directly from the Greeks, and these again are probably indebted to India for most of theirs, although this point is not definitely settled. Since so many Greek and Oriental fables are similar if not identical in content, they must at least have a common origin. Ever since the fifth century before Christ Greek fables have generally been attributed to Esop, of whom nothing definite is known except that in the early part of the sixth century before Christ he was a slave on the island of Samos, and that he was a native of Phrygia, whence he derived his fables. The standard edition of these fables is that of Halm, published by Teubner of Leipzig, to which reference is made in the present edition. The Æsopic fables were put into metrical form by Babrius, of whom we know as little as we do of Æsop, although it is probable that he lived in Syria in the second century before Christ. In Roman literature the fable first appears incidentally, as in the Satires and Epistles of Horace. As an independent work appear the fables of Phædrus, a native of Macedonia, who was emancipated by Augustus. Only about thirty of the fables of Phædrus have parallels in Greek. Some of the others may be original, as Phædrus claimed; of the rest the Greek original has not come down to us. About the year 400 Avianus translated into Latin verse forty-two of the fables of Babrios. These are all different from those of Phædrus. In the sixteenth century various writers, especially Abstemius and Faerno, wrote fables - which were, however, only revised versions of older fables. In the same century Marot, Régnier, and others who wrote in French, introduced fables into their Satires and Epistles, after the manner of Horace. In 1542 there was published in Paris a collection of one hundred of Æsop's fables in French verse, and in 1547 Guillaume Haudent published a book containing three hundred and sixty-six. These were known to La Fontaine, but he considered them of so little consequence that he could say in the preface to his first collection: "Je me suis flatté de l'espérance que, si je ne courais dans cette carrière avec succès, on me donnerait au moins la gloire de l'avoir ouverte.” La Fontaine's most important works aside from his fables are as follows: Contes et Nouvelles en vers, 1665. Contes et Nouvelles en vers, seconde partie, 1666. Philemon et Baucis, 1685. His complete works may be found in the series Les Grands Écrivains français, edited by H. Régnier, in eleven volumes. Vols. I-III contain the fables with a life by Mesnard. Vols. X-XI contain a glossary. Editions of the fables are very numerous. The following are worthy of mention: Nodier, Paris, 1818; Walckenaer, Paris, 1822-1823; Robert, Paris, 1825; Moland, Paris, 1874 ff. Convenient school editions are those of Thirion, Paris, Hachette; Clément, Paris, Colin; Aubertin, Paris, Belin Frères; and Colincamp, Paris, Delagrave. Also the edition of Lubarsch, already mentioned, published by Weidmann of Berlin. Helpful for the general study of the subject of fables are: Saint-Marc Girardin, La Fontaine et les Fabulistes; first edition, Paris, 1867; second edition, 1876. |