INTRODUCTION

JEAN DE LA FONTAINE was born in 1621 at ChâteauThierry in Champagne, and died at Paris in 1695. He studied theology and law, but was always more interested in poetry. Having been persuaded to marry, he remained indifferent to his wife and neglected his son. He was careless in regard to money matters, and in general would not submit to obligations. Such a person needed to be taken care of, and La Fontaine was fortunate in having friends, whose patronage and protection he repaid with verses. For twenty years he lived at the house of Madame de La Sablière, a woman worthy of the filial devotion he bestowed on her. In 1668 appeared the first six books of Fables, dedicated to the Dauphin, the son of Louis XIV. Yet the King never regarded him with favor. In 1683 La Fontaine and Boileau were candidates for the French Academy; La Fontaine was elected, but the King prevented his admission till the next year, when both poets were admitted. They were on intimate terms with each other, and also with Molière and Racine. In 1678-79 five more books of Fables appeared, followed by one more in 1694, the year before the author's death. In 1693 he atoned for his lifelong indifference to religion by being reconciled to the church. Although he wrote many other works, his fame rests chiefly on his twelve books of Fables.

In spite of his easy-going nature, La Fontaine made himself thoroughly acquainted with a wide range of literature, and worked diligently and carefully on his own writings. Never was a literary style more suited to the subject than in his Fables. He allowed himself liberties in language and versification that many critics did not approve; in this respect he anticipates the freedom of later schools of poetry. For instance, according to the effect he desires in rhythm and movement, he mingles freely lines of various lengths with the dignified twelvesyllable alexandrins. Likewise he shows a spirit quite unusual in the seventeenth century, in his sympathy for real life in all degrees, and especially for the weak and oppressed. In spite of his adulation of powerful persons, he makes them appear in an unfavorable light, and constantly shows his hatred of injustice. His purpose is sometimes simply to amuse, sometimes, however, to point a moral by describing typical characters under the disguise of animals, as the king (lion), the unscrupulous courtier (fox), the common people (frogs, mice, etc.). Again, some of the fables are true parables. Thus in various ways we find described the actual conditions of society.1 The descriptions, the style, the poetical elements, are all La Fontaine's own; the stories of his fables, however, were nearly all borrowed. Plagiarism, to his mind, consisted in a servile copying of another writer's style, not in adopting a subject or the outline of a story.

But what is a fable? In general, it is any piece of fiction; but the Aesopic fable, or apologue, is properly a short tale with a moral. The moral is not necessarily a precept to be followed; for instance, the lesson of le Loup et l'Agneau is not that we should imitate either the wolf or the lamb, but that we should condemn the injustice of the 1 See Taine, La Fontaine et ses fables.

one, and sympathize with the weakness of the other.1 The characters in fables are sometimes men, gods, or inanimate objects, but usually animals. Beast-tales, found among all peoples, have been transmitted from one part of the world to another. Thus we find certain fables both in India and in Greece at an early period, and it is a question which country received them from the other. Ever since the fifth century before Christ the Greek fables have been ascribed to Aesop, a slave who came from Phrygia in the sixth century. He probably left no writings; the fables that he may have composed or retold were subsequently collected and written down. Some of the Greek fables were put into Latin verse by Phaedrus, a Roman freedman, in the first century after Christ, and by Avianus in the fourth. Many were current through the Middle Ages in oral tradition, having long been used in teaching both rhetoric and morals; at this time, most of the fable-books were derived from a prose paraphrase of Phaedrus, and the Greek versions were not directly known. But from the beginning of the Renaissance, the Greek collections were among the most frequently printed books (first edition about 1480). Most of the subjects of La Fontaine's first six books came from Phaedrus (first edition 1596) and from Aesop2; he used both the original text and French translations, and for the most part imitated the brevity and simplicity of his models, although even in so doing he showed himself a true poet. He prefixed to the Fables a free translation of the Life of Aesop ascribed to Maximus Planudes, who lived at

1 Disregard of this distinction led Rousseau to condemn the moral teachings of La Fontaine's Fables; see his Émile.

2" Aesop" is used in a general sense to indicate the Greek collections bearing the name; references in the following pages are to the edition of Halm, Fabulae Aesopicae Collectae, Leipzig, Teubner.

Constantinople in the early fourteenth century and wrote in Greek. The life is amusing, but entirely untrustworthy; La Fontaine himself does not accept it as entirely true; but it was printed in many editions of the Greek fables.1

La Fontaine derived some of his fables from French writers like Marot, Rabelais, and Mathurin Regnier; the medieval French collections, and the beast-epic, le Roman de Renart, he did not know directly. Many of the subjects in his last six books he found in a work published in 1644, Le Livre des Lumières, a translation of a fifteenth-century Persian collection of tales. This is one of a large number of versions of a much older collection, originally Indian, ascribed to one Pilpay or Bidpai, and sometimes called Calila and Dimna. While extending the range of his sources, La Fontaine also varied his style, making it more elaborate; on the average, his later fables are longer than the earlier ones. By general consent he is regarded as the supreme master of fable-writing. He had predecessors and followers, he imitated others and had imitators; but he has had no equals.

As already noted, the Fables appeared in three portions in 1668, 1678-79, and 1694; there were several reprints during the author's life, both at Paris and in Holland. The standard edition of La Fontaine's complete works is that of H. Regnier, in the series Les Grands Écrivains de la France, Paris, Hachette, 1883-92, in II volumes; vols. I-III contain the fables, and a life of La Fontaine by P. Mesnard; vols. X, XI, a glossary. Important editions of the Fables alone are those of Nodier, 1818; Robert, Fables inédites et fables de La Fontaine, 2 vols.,

1 See extract in Appendix.

2 Many of the tales in these collections still exist in Sanskrit, — Pantchatantra; Jatakas. Cf. La Fontaine's preface to books VII-XI (see Appendix).

1825; Walckenaer, 1826; Louandre, 1851. The school edition by L. Clément, Paris, Colin, 3o éd., 1898, is convenient and excellent. There are biographies by Walckenaer (1st ed. 1820) and by G. Lafenestre (in the series Les Grands Ecrivains Français, 1895). The standard work of criticism is Taine, La Fontaine et ses fables (first edition in its present form, 1860). See also St.-Marc Girardin, La Fontaine et les Fabulistes, 1867; T. de Banville, Petit Traité de poésie française. For sources and parallels, see the editions of Regnier and Robert, and Delboulle, Les Fables de La Fontaine, 1891; for the history of fables in general: Lessing, Abhandlungen über die Fabel; Hervieux, Les Fabulistes latins, 5 vols.; J. Jacobs, The Fables of Aesop as first printed by Caxton in 1484, London, 1889; Max Müller, On the Migration of Fables (in Chips from a German Workshop, vol. IV, 1875, and in Selected Essays, 1881).