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IVERSITY OF MIC.
THE UNI
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MICHIGAN'S
1817
IL·LIBRARIES ·
Foreign Classics for English Readers
EDITED BY
MRS OLIPHANT
PROSPECTUS.
THE cordial reception given by the public to the Series
of "Ancient Classics for English Readers has
confirmed the intention of the Publishers to carry out a
kindred Series, which it is believed will not be less
useful or less welcome, and in which an attempt will be
made to introduce the great writers of Europe in a similar
manner to the many readers who probably have a perfect
acquaintance with their names, without much knowledge
of their works, or their place in the literature of the
modern world. The Classics of Italy, France, Germany,
and Spain are nearer to us in time, and less separated in
sentiment, than the still more famous Classics of anti-
quity; and if foreign travel is, as everybody allows, a
great means of enlarging the mind, and dispersing its
prejudices, an acquaintance with those works in which
the great nations who are our neighbours have expressed
their highest life, and by which their manners of thinking
have been formed, cannot but possess equal advantages.
A man who would profess to know England without
knowing something of Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, and
the great writers who have followed them, could form but
an imperfect idea of the national mind and its capabili-
ties: and so no amount of travel can make us acquainted
""
3
with Italy, while Dante, Tasso, and her great historians
remain unknown to us; nor can the upheavings of French
Society and the mental characteristics of the nation be
comprehended without Voltaire, Molière, Rousseau, and
other great names beside. Neither is Germany herself
without Goethe and Schiller: nor Spain recognisable
deprived of that noble figure of Cervantes, in whom lives
the very genius of the nation. This great band it is our
design to give such an account of as may bring them
within the acquaintance of the English reader, whose zeal
may not carry him the length of the often thankless study
of translations, and whose readings in a foreign language
are not easy enough to be pleasant. We are aware that
there are difficulties in our way in this attempt which did
not lie in the path of the former Series, since in the
section of the world for which we write there are many
more readers of French and German than of Greek and
Latin; but, on the other hand, there is no educated class
supremely devoted to the study of Continental Classics,
as is the case in respect to the Ancient; and even the
greatest authority in the learned matter of a Greek text
might be puzzled by Jean Paul Richter, or lose himself
in the mysteries of Dante's 'Paradiso.' The audience to
which we aspire is, therefore, at once wider and narrower
than that to which the great treasures of Hellenic and
Roman literature are unfamiliar; and our effort will be
to present the great Italian, the great Frenchman, the
famous German, to the reader, so as to make it plain to
him what and how they wrote, something of how they
lived, and more or less of their position and influence
upon the literature of their country.
The Volumes published of this Series contain-
DANTE,
VOLTAIRE,
PASCAL,
PETRARCH,
GOETHE,
MOLIÈRE, .
MONTAIGNE,
RABELAIS,
CALDERON,
SAINT SIMON,
By the EDITOR.
By Major-General Sir E. B. HAMLEY, K.C.M.G.
By Principal TULLOCH.
BY HENRY REEVE, C. B.
By A. HAYWARD, Q.C.
By Mrs OLIPHANT and F. TARVER, M.A.
By Rev. W. LUCAS COLLINS, M.A.
By WALTER BESANT.
By E. J. HASELL.
By CLIFTON W. COLLINS, M. A.
By the EDITor.
By HENRY M. TROLLOPE.
By Miss THACKERAY
(Mrs RICHMOND RITCHIE).
By Rev. W. LUCAS Collins, M. A.
CERVANTES,
CORNEILLE AND RACINE,
MADAME DE SÉVIGNÉ,
LA FONTAINE, AND OTHER
FRENCH FABULISTS,
SCHILLER,
ROUSSEAU,
Volumes in preparation-
By JAMES SIME, Author of 'Life of Lessing.'
By HENRY GRAHAM.
JM
Foreign Classics for English Renders
EDITED BY
MRS OLIPHANT
LA FONTAINE
AND OTHER FRENCH FABULISTS
LA FONTAINE
AND
1871
OTHER FRENCH FABULISTS.
BY THE
LIBRARY
GENERAL
University of
MICHIGAN

REV. W. LUCAS COLLINS, M. A.
PHILADELPHIA
J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO.
1882
CHAP.
CONTENTS.
I. INTRODUCTORY,
II. LA FONTAINE'S ORIGINALS,
III. LIFE OF LA FONTAINE,
IV. THE FABLES,
V. LATER FABLE-WRITERS: HOUDARD DE LA
MOTTE,
VI. RICHER - DESBILLONS- AUBERT-LE MON-
NIER,
VII. FLORIAN,
VIII. LE BAILLY,
PAGE
1
15
38
78
133
142
152
167
LA FONTAINE
AND OTHER FRENCH FABULISTS.
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY.
APOLLONIUS, the mystic philosopher of Tyana, was de-
fending Æsop's fables against the criticism of a friend
who had characterised them as "fit only for old women
to tell to children." "I will tell you," said he, "a story
about Æsop that was told to me by my mother." Esop
was in his early life a shepherd, who fed his flocks near
a temple of Mercury. He longed earnestly for wisdom,
and prayed the god to give it him. So did many other
suppliants, who all brought rich offerings to the temple,
each according to his means: one offered gold, another
silver, a third an ivory caduceus. The shepherd Æsop
brought only from time to time a libation of milk from
his flock, a handful of honeycomb, or bunches of myrtle
with a few roses and violets intermixed. He did not
even stay to make these latter into wreaths-the god, he
F.C.-XIV.
A
2
LA FONTAINE.
said, would surely not have him neglect his flock to be
weaving garlands. At last the day came when Mercury
was to distribute the gift of wisdom, in its various kinds,
to his expectant votaries. To the most liberal of the
petitioners he assigned the gift of philosophy; to the
second, the power of oratory; to a third, astronomy;
to a fourth, music; and excellence in the various kinds.
of verse to others respectively. When he had come to
the end of his gifts, he found that he had passed over
Æsop by mistake,-a curious oversight, as the biographer
of Apollonius sceptically remarks, on the part of so keen
a deity as Mercury. Then he bethought himself of the
Art of Fable-"as the only branch of the family of
wisdom left at his disposal." In his own precocious
childhood, the Hours had kept him quiet in his cradle
by telling him fables. "Take, as my gift to thee," said
the god to Æsop, "the art which I learned first my-
self." 1
—
This story of Apollonius, or whoever was the inventor
of it, describes the origin of Fable very gracefully, and
perhaps with as near an approach to truth as has been
attained by more learned speculations: while it seems to
assign to this kind of literature its true place in the
scale of intellectual creation. It can rank neither with
philosophy nor with poetry of the highest kind; it has
not the pretensions of rhetoric or of eloquence; yet, in
its finished form, it contains much of the philosopher's
ethics, it enlists in its service some of the most graceful
of the poet's gifts, and carries in its application a terse
and pointed force of which the orator and the rhetorician
have often been glad to avail themselves.
1 Philostratus, Vit. Apoll., v. 15.
:.'
:
3
Nor was the author wrong in representing it as the
earliest gift of the Muses. There is no need here to
discuss the question how far the form of apologue
which we call fable is Eastern in its origin-a mere
development of that figurative diction of which the
Hebrew Scriptures give us the earliest and most perfect
existing example: or how far the adoption of the animal
world to represent the various characters in the drama
(a feature common to all European fables) may be taken
as evidence of a connection with the Indian doctrine of
metempsychosis- the outward form of beast or bird
containing for a time the human spirit with its special
virtues or vices. Both theories may be true so far as
this, that in the East and in India, Fable early found
a congenial home, and developed itself rapidly. But it
is hardly to be limited geographically as to birthplace.
Rather it is one of the natural productions of the human
mind,—the common property, so far as its invention is
concerned, of various nations at some stage of their civi-
lisation, second perhaps in antiquity only to language
itself, and one of its earliest and most natural develop-
ments. Unwritten fables, like unwritten poetry and
unwritten law, must have been current long before
the art of writing had been discovered, and were pro-
bably handed on in many cases by oral tradition from
one nation to another, as was the case with myths and
legends. Jotham's fable of the Trees who had to choose
their King, and Jehoash's of the Thistle and the Cedar,
recorded in Old Testament history, are only the sur-
vivors, we may be sure, of many such apologues in
which lessons of practical wisdom were taught to a rude
¹ Judges ix. 7; 2 Kings xiv. 9.
1
ORIGIN OF FABLE.
4
LA FONTAINE.
m
and simple people. Nathan's pathetic story of the poor
man's single lamb was not the only instance in which
the seers of ancient times made use of fable to teach
moderation to irresponsible kings. The fable of "The
Two Pots," which La Fontaine translates from Esop,
is to be found with its shrewd moral in the book of the
"Wisdom of the Son of Sirach' "Have no fellowship
with one that is mightier and richer than thyself; for
how agree the kettle and the earthen pot together?
for if the one be smitten against the other, it shall
be broken." 1 It is indeed needless to point out to
readers of the Hebrew Scriptures how this form of
teaching pervades the whole of the prophetic books,
and how much of their spirit and beauty is derived
from that language of apologue which is nothing more
or less than undeveloped fable. Rabbinical literature
abounds with fables, often of remarkable force and
beauty; and the parables which form one of the most
striking and interesting features of Christ's teaching
in the Gospels were only the adaptation by the great
Teacher, who drew "out of his treasure things both new
and old," of a style of instruction already popular, and
suited both to the tastes and the comprehension of his
hearers. It is not only that we have so many parables
of His recorded-seven of them following each other,
with a rapidity and compression which is almost abrupt,
in one chapter of St Matthew-and these probably only
a selection from His utterances, but the whole of the
Gospels are a storehouse of parable, or fable, call it
which we will. The blind leading the blind, the mote
and the beam (which is, in effect, the fable of "The
1 Ecclesiasticus xiii. 2.
""
CLASSICAL FABLES.
10
5
Double Wallet"), the new wine in the old bottles, the
broad and the narrow gate,-all these and many similar
illustrations might serve, so to speak, as the headings of
fables of which we have simply the outlines and the appli-
cation in the sacred text, but only needing to be clothed
with the ordinary details of narrative and dialogue to
make them fables in form as well as in essence. So it
is with proverbs,-a mode of compressing practical truths
of which no one particular nation can claim the inven
tion, because we find that every nation possesses, in
addition to those which seem to have a common origin,
peculiar proverbs of its own: these too, when examined,
are found at once, in most instances, to be fables in a
skeleton shape.
The literature of fables is not to be traced to any
great extent in the classical writers of Greece or Rome.
They might have been, and probably were, current
amongst both these nations; but the works of such
writers of the most brilliant period of both Greece and
Rome as have reached us are, with few exceptions, of a
more finished and a severer type. Homer has nothing
which can properly come under the denomination of
fable; and the earliest Greek fable that we know is the
solitary specimen to be found in Hesiod,-"The Lark and
the Nightingale." But this is remarkable as having the
characteristic which is wanting alike in the fables of the
Hebrew writers and in the earliest fable which remains
to us in Roman literature, that which Livy relates as
having been spoken by Menenius Agrippa to the com-
mons of Rome, known to us in its modern version as
"The Belly and the Members."2 The fable of Hesiod
1 La Fontaine, i. 7.
2 Ibid., iii. 2.
6
LA FONTAINE.
introduces animals as holding conversation, an idea so
largely developed by the later fabulists. It is the
original of La Fontaine's "Kite and Nightingale,"
though he certainly did not borrow it directly from
the Greek poet. Hesiod's text runs thus (it may be
well to give it in a literal version):—
"Thus spake the Hawk to the speckled Nightingale, as he
bore her aloft in the clouds after he had seized her in his
claws,- -now she was crying pitifully, pierced by his curved
talous, when he taunted her besides with insulting words,-
'Wretch why dost thou shriek? One far stronger than
thee now holds thee in his grasp; and thou must needs go
wherever I shall carry thee, songstress though thou be; and
I shall make a meal of thee, or let thee go, as I choose.
Foolish is he who will fain contend with the stronger: he
hath no chance of victory, and brings grief upon himself be-
sides disgrace.' Works and Days,' 201.
})
It comes to us in a highly polished form from La Fon-
taine's hands, though it is by no means one of his
best efforts, and the moral is still one of unredeemed
brutality-
"A villain Kite, whose robber-life had spread
His fame around, and still the mischief grew,
Till all the neighbours heard his cry with dread,
And village children hooted as he flew,
Had seized at last a hapless Nightingale :
The herald of the spring, with piteons wail,
Begged hard for life. Oh, gentle robber, spare me !
I'm a poor meal for choice-
6
A wretched bird with little else but voice!
Don't tear me,
But rather hear me :
I'll sing of Tereus.'- Tereus? what was he?
Something to make a dainty dish for me?'
MORALITY OF EARLY FABLE.
'Nay,' said the bird, 'he was a cruel king,
Whose evil love was my undoing:
List to the tuneful lay that I shall sing
Of his unholy wooing,
So sadly sweet, it charms each listening ear;
You too will be delighted, when you hear.'
(
(
Truly,' the Kite replied, ' a likely thing!
A charming proposition!
I want a meal just now, not a musician.'
'Yet kings have heard me gladly.'—' When a king
Has caught you,' said the Kite, then you can squall
For his amusement: I'm a Kite, you see;
Your music is ridiculous to me;
A hungry stomach has no ears at all."
7
The moral, as has been said, is that of the most unfeel-
ing cynicism ;-common, as we shall find, to many of the
fables of antiquity, but of which this is perhaps the most
striking as it is among the earliest examples. The rule
of the strongest; the futility of argument in the presence
of force; the still greater folly of resistance on the part
of the weaker; the policy of evasion, if possible, and sub-
mission as the alternative, this is the teaching of ancient.
fable on the whole, and must not be laid to the charge of
the moderns who have reproduced or imitated it. Such
ethics have all the flavour of those far-off days in the
history of nations when the only law prevailing was the
law of the strongest-the "simple plan,"-
"That he should take who has the power,
And he should keep who can." 1
1 It is certainly possible to draw a less brutal and more humorous
moral from this version of the fable-not to expect to find in a
hungry man a very patient listener. When Henry IV. of France
was entering a town during one of his campaigns, the magistrates met
him at the gates prepared with a long address. "Sire," they began,
8
LA FONTAINE.
It has been conjectured that fable was a happy inven-
tion to enable wise men to speak the truth to despots
without peril to themselves under the veil of fiction;
and the use made of it by Nathan in his rebuke of David
has been naturally adduced in support of the theory;
though David, with all his faults, can hardly be termed
a despot, and Nathan is plain-spoken enough in his ap-
plication. The fables which survive in classical literature
are, as has been said, very few; but one of the earliest is
that which Herodotus makes Cyrus quote to the Ionians,
who offered their submission too late-the story of "The
Fish and the Flute-player." 1 Another is that employed
(according to Justin) to induce King Comanus to destroy
the growing colony at Marseilles before it became too
powerful for its neighbours-that of "The Bitch and her
Litter," as we have it in Æsop and in La Fontaine.2
These cannot certainly be said to contain any lesson for
princes, any more than the fable by which Josephus, the
Jewish historian, makes Tiberius explain his dislike to
change his governors of provinces-"The Wounded Tra-
veller and the Flies." 3 But, indeed, the lesson commonly
"when Hannibal was setting out from Carthage-
"Ventre St
Gris! gentlemen," said the impatient monarch, "before Hannibal
left Carthage I feel quite sure he had dined-and I want my dinner."
There is a story told of Malherbe that, dining on one occasion with
the Abbé Desportez, he arrived rather late, when the soup was being
served. His host met him in the anteroom, and finding that Mal-
herbe had not read his new translation of the Psalms, wanted to
fetch a copy at once and to read some extracts. Malherbe begged to
be allowed to have his dinner first, telling Desportez he was sure
that his soup must be better than his Psalms."
1 Herod., i. c. 141. La Font., x. 11. A version also appears in
M. P Lacroix's 'Nouvelles Œuvres Inédites de J. la F.,' p. 7.
11
2 Justin, xliii. c. 4.
3 Jos. Ant., xviii. c. 6. § 5. The fable, however, in a somewhat
j
9
conveyed in this kind of allegory is not addressed to
rulers so much as to their subjects. It rarely impresses
upon irresponsible power unless by way of satirical
inference the duties of justice and moderation; it
rather assumes the supreme authority of the monarch as
matter, if not of divine right, yet of recognised law, and
teaches obedience in the subject, if not as a duty, still as
the only safe and expedient line of conduct. We have
the wisdom and the experience of the sage; but the wis-
dom is worldly, and the experience cynical. If early
fable preserves in its character the traces of a state of
society under the pressure of despotism, the point which
comes out most sharply of all is the difficulty experienced
under such circumstances of keeping one's head safely
on one's shoulders. The sage who speaks under the shelter
of fable gives counsels of prudence rather than of perfec-
tion. As one brief example out of many, we may take
the well-known fable attributed to sop, whose original
MORALITY OF EARLY FABLE.
different shape, is much older than Tiberius. Aristotle (Rhet., ii.
20) quotes it as from Æsop, and La Fontaine has versified it, from
that or some other source, as "The Fox and the Flies" (xii. 13).
A shorter version appears amongst his 'Fables Inédites' collected
by M. Lacroix; and in this case the first draft has not gained by
expansion -
Sick in a ditch, one sultry day,
Devoured by flies, poor Reynard lay,
And loud complained of Fortune's spite,
That left him in such grievous plight.
A Hedgehog, passing by that way
(IIis first appearance in my play),
Proposed, with neighbourly attention,
To rid him of the pests I mention.
The Fox-a beast of prudent mind-
At once, with many thanks, declined;
'I dread,' said he, with more alarm,
A fresh and therefore hungrier swarm,
These have well fed; and, though not pleasant,
Will bite less keenly for the present." "
C
10
LA FONTAINE.
is certainly neither Greek nor Roman, but oriental in
the
character, from whatever early source derived
hunting-party of the Lion, the Ass, and the Fox, where
the Lion requests the Ass to make a fair distribution of
the game.
That innocent and honest animal divides
the whole into three perfectly equal shares, upon which
his royal partner does instant execution upon him, and
then requests the Fox to make a new and more appropri-
ate allotment. The Fox, with courtier-like discretion,
assigns nearly the whole to the Lion, reserving a very
inconsiderable share for himself. When the gratified
potentate asks what had taught him this admirable skill
in division, the Fox replies, "the fate of the Ass." And
the brief and pointed moral-if moral it may be called--
is, that "the wise take a lesson from the misfortunes of
their neighbours." The wisdom of proverbs is pretty
nearly the same. It will be found to a great extent in
the Proverbs of Solomon, though tempered and restrained
by a higher morality. The leaven of Eastern despotism
still pervaded the Hebrew monarchy. "The wrath of a
king is as messengers of death, but a wise man will pacify
it." "When thou sittest at meat with a ruler, consider
diligently what is before thee; and put a knife to thy
throat, if thou be a man given to appetite." (Have we
not here, veiled under the strong metaphor of proverb,
the very moral of the fable just mentioned a warning
as to "the lion's share"?) "A prudent man foreseeth
the evil, and hideth himself; but the simple pass on, and
are punished." "By long forbearing is a prince per-
suaded, and a soft tongue breaketh the bone." These are
only a few of the many forms in which we find repeated
the warning of the Preacher-"Where the word of a
M
BEAST-STORIES.
11
king is, there is power; and who may say unto him,
What doest thou?"1 It is true, and must be carefully
borne in mind in noticing this feature of Hebrew phil-
osophy, which represents the power and the anger of the
irresponsible monarch as what the wise man will rather
deprecate than brave, that there is another side of its
teaching, presented with even greater force and emphasis.
The lesson for princes is enforced as plainly as the lesson
for subjects that it is only the king who gives faithful
judgment to the poor, whose "throne shall be established
for ever," and that it is the prince "that wanteth under-
standing" that is commonly the "great oppressor."2
But Grimm is no doubt right in his view that the
motive of fable was originally not moral instruction, but
simply entertainment. There is very little moral of any
sort (except that they generally inculcate kindness to the
lower animals) in the Indian fables which are known to
us, and which are probably of at least as early date as the
oriental apologues which have just been noticed. The
former may indeed be more properly called beast-stories,
if the word fable is to be understood as implying, as La
Fontaine explains it, a combination of body and soul-
the first being the story, and the second its application.
Such beast-stories seem to be a phase of narrative fiction
common to the infancy of nations, when the natures and
habits of the animal world are more intimately under-
stood, and when man himself does not hold a position so
high above that of the beasts in the scale of creation.
We find these kind of stories almost as common among
the peoples of the new world of the West as among the
primitive races of the East. The North American chief
1 Ecclesiastes viii. 4.
2 Prov. xxix. 14; xxviii. 16.
12
LA FONTAINE.
who calls himself the "Great Serpent," or the "Little
Bear," indicates the same sympathy with the lower ani-
mal natures, and is only reversing the process which
ascribed to them the moral qualities and attributes of
man. The composition of real fables containing a moral
would almost certainly be later in date than these more
simple and childlike stories, which supplied the place
of literature to a primitive generation. Such an order
of precedence corresponds with our own experience in
modern times: the novel "with a purpose," now so per-
sistently forced upon us, is quite a recent development of
the earlier work of pure fiction, which assumed to do no
more than entertain. But when the fable-teller began to
aspire to add a moral to his tale, he found ready to his
hand these stock characters of the popular animal drama.
Their several habits and characteristics had already been
noted, and were accepted as the current coin of story; they
had already been made to talk, and he made them talk
didactically. This explains the adoption of animals as
the personages of the fabulist's drama more naturally
than the ingenious suggestion of Lessing, that they were
chosen because their natures and propensities, unlike
those of their human fellow-creatures, were known and
fixed; whereas, "if Nero and Britannicus had been
adopted as representative figures instead of the Wolf and
the Lamb, not half mankind would have recognised their
character."
The use of apologue was largely recognised by the
early Christian preachers. St Cyril (Constantin), known
as "the apostle of the Sclaves," published in the ninth
century a collection of "Moral Apologues," to serve as
illustrations, which now survive only in a Latin transla-
FABLE IN THE PULPIT.
13
tion. Two or three of them appear in another form in
La Fontaine.¹ Vincent de Beauvais, a Dominican friar,
about 1200, turned some of the fables of Phædrus, and
others from old collections, into very indifferent Latin
prose, for the use of preachers, under the title of 'Spec-
trum Doctrinale,' and of this there are French translations
which possibly La Fontaine might have seen.2 John of
Bromyard, two centuries later, put forth a large volume
of Fables specially for the use of preachers; and while
the romances and fabliaux of the middle ages abound
with satirical stories directed, though possibly without
any malicious or irreverent purpose, against the Church,
its claims and its ordinances, the medieval pulpit was
not slow to employ fable of the most lively and humor-
ous kind to enforce its teaching. S. Vincent Ferrier,
the great Spanish Dominican preacher, drew original
morals from some of the early fables; employing, for
instance, Æsop's fable of the Man and his two Wives 3
as an argument against marriage generally, inasmuch as
a young wife would pillage her husband in order to spend
upon her own pleasures, while an old one would rob
him of all his pleasures to indulge her own ill-humour.
Vieyra, who may be classed either with the medieval
or the modern churchmen, is remarkable for his use of
this kind of illustration. Our own Bede is even more
Great French preachers like Oliver Maillard and
Michael Menot used it with striking, if sometimes grot-
esque, effect; and the same was the case with some of
our English Puritans. Rowland Hill's stories too often
came very near buffoonery. Even now, a pithy and well-
told story, with its application, will arrest the flagging
2 i. 4, 6, 10.
So.
1 vii. 12; ix. 4.
3 i. 17.
14
LA FONTAINE.
attention of a modern audience when graver appeals fail.
So wide and universal is that "Power of Fables,” which
La Fontaine has made the subject of one of his pieces
(fable it can hardly in itself be called), dedicated to
M. Barillon, then French ambassador to England, in
which he apologises for offering so slight a thing to one
in such dignified position. He has there versified the
anecdote recorded of the Athenian orator, Demades, who,
when he found all his impassioned rhetoric fail to rouse
his audience to a due sense of the peril which was threat-
ening them from Philip, suddenly stopped, and said he
would tell them a story: "Ceres was once travelling in
company with a swallow and a serpent. The party came
to a river; the swallow flew across, and the serpent
swam." Here he paused. "And what did Ceres do?"
shouted the eager Athenians. "What did Ceres do,
indeed!" replied the orator, with bitter contempt; "why
do you not rather ask what Philip is doing?" But the
author, in his concluding application, does not altogether
endorse the indignation of Demades.
"Tried by this test, we are Athenians all;
Even I, who here can moralise sedately,
If a good story in my way should fall,
I must confess I should enjoy it greatly.
The world is old, you say? Well,-as you will;
But, like a child, it needs amusing still."
1 viii. 4
15
CHAPTER II.
LA FONTAINE'S ORIGINALS.
Ir is with La Fontaine and his Fables that we are
chiefly to deal in these pages. He is the representative-
fable-writer not only of France but of modern litera-
ture. He had predecessors in his own line, in France
as well as elsewhere, who have become best known to
modern readers through his pages, and he has had suc-
cessors of whom the most successful have been those
who imitated him the most closely.
But La Fontaine has no claim to originality so far as
his subject-matter is concerned. Very few indeed of
his fables are original in that sense, and those few are
among the weakest. He borrowed his subjects and his
characters wherever he could find them: it was by the
charm of his style, and his mode of presenting them,
that he made them virtually his own. They were very
seldom the children of his own brain, but after their
adoption he had bestowed upon them, with much pains
and with the happiest result, such charms of dress,
manner, accomplishment, and language, that they owed
much more to him than to their actual parents.
He would have been himself the first to disclaim the
16
LA FONTAINE.
right of inventive genius. The first words with which
he introduces his Fables are--
"I sing the heroes of whom Æsop was the father."
1
Who this Esop was we do not very well know, and La
Fontaine knew even less. His very existence has been
doubted. He was a slave, we are told, an Asiatic-
black and humpbacked, more than doubtful tradition
adds who received his freedom from his master in
reward for his gift of story-telling, and (if we are still
to follow the same doubtful authority) met his death at
the hands of the citizens of Delphi, in return for reciting
to them a fable, more apposite than complimentary, to
express his extreme disappointment with them and their
city, which he had travelled so far to see. His fables
were current at Athens in her greatest days:
(C some-
thing good out of sop" is what an Athenian voter in
the comedy asks of a candidate as the price of his vote;
and Socrates is represented by Plato as amusing himself
in his last hours by turning into verse "such as he
could remember" of these fables. But this makes it very
doubtful whether at that date any of them had been
committed to writing. They made their appearance,
however, more than once at a later period in a Greek
poetical dress, and such fragments of any authentic ver-
sion as remain to us are probably to be found in Bab
rius (Gabrias, La Fontaine calls him), a Greek poet
probably living about the first century, whose works
(excepting a few fragments) are comparatively a recent
1 The fable was the same as that given by La Fontaine, Book iv.
10-a somewhat poor one-of the pieces of "flotsam" in the sea,
which at a distance may be mistaken for boats.
ESOPIC FABLES.
17
1
discovery. The "Esop" which La Fontaine speaks
of, and which he might have seen, is a spurious collec-
tion bearing Æsop's name, formed by an Eastern monk,
Planudes, in the fourteenth century, which became very
popular, and was translated or paraphrased in various
shapes by later writers. Gabriel Faërne put them into
Latin iambics of considerable elegance, published in
1564, after his death; and these were subsequently
translated again into French verse by Charles Perrault,
in 1699. Benserade, whom La Fontaine mentions, had
also compressed some of Æsop's fables into French qua-
trains, which were graven on the pedestals of a series
of groups representing the subjects of each fable, once
standing in what was called the labyrinth at Versailles.2
The Latin version of these Æsopic fables attributed to
Phædrus had also been published in France by Pithou,
in 1596, and was probably well known. There is also
a collection of ancient fables by Isaac Nevelet, published
in 1610, in which are included those of Avienus and
of Abstemius of Urbino, who to a selection of Esop's
fables translated from the Greek had added many of
his own, several of which reappear in La Fontaine's
pages. It is, therefore, most probable that Nevelet's
book had come into his hands.
He is hardly justified in claiming in his preface "the
CC
1 By M. Minoide Minas, in a monastery at Mount Athos, in 1843.
2 Dr Martin Lister, in his 'Journey to Paris,' 1698, has a quaint
notice of these figures: In the groves on the left hand you have
Æsop's Fables in so many pieces of water-works here and there in
winding alleys. This might be said to have been done in usum
Delphini.' 'Tis pretty to see the Owle washt by the birds; the
Munkie hugging his little one, till it spouts out water with a full
throat and open mouth."
C
F.C.-XIV.
B
18
LA FONTAINE.
glory of having opened this path" in literature to the
moderns. There were at least three or four of his
countrymen, besides those just mentioned, who had
made the attempt before him with more or less success,
and whose fables he might have seen. Gilles Corro-
zet, "reader" to Charles IX. of France, had put into
French verse certain "fables of Esop the Phrygian,"
early in the sixteenth century. These were more than
once reprinted, but possibly had been nearly forgotten.
Yet Corrozet's versions of the well-known fables of "The
Old Man and Death," "The Ox and the Frog," and "The
Stag and the Oxen" (reproduced by La Fontaine under
the title of "The Master's Eye," one of his very best),
though brief and simple in form, are terse and spirited.
It appears certain that La Fontaine must have seen
Corrozet's work, for he has borrowed from him several
turns of expression, and at least in one case, a whole
line. Guillaume Haudent, Master of the Choristers at
Rouen, published about the same time Three hundred
and thirty-six Apologues of sop,'-a much larger collec-
tion than Corrozet's, but not so good. For some of them
he was certainly not indebted to Æsop in any shape.
One of the best is plainly medieval; M. Robert thinks
he got it out of the Latin fables of Philelphus. Jean
Raulin, a preacher of the fifteenth century, has intro-
duced it with but little alteration into one of his ser-
mons on l'enitence. Haudent calls it "The Confession
of the Ass, the Fox, and the Wolf," and it is the
same which appears in La Fontaine's version as
"The
Animals sick of the Pestilence." In Haudent's fable,
the three animals are travelling together on a pil-
1 'Itinerarium Paradisi,' Sermon xiv.
✓ 244
HAUDENT
•
19
grimage to Rome, to get absolution from the Pope.
Seeing the crowds on the road bent upon the same
errand, they fear lest they may be overlooked by
his Holiness, and fail to get absolution; so they
The
agree to make mutual confession to each other.
Wolf first goes on his knees. IIe had one day scen a
fine fat sow, and had eaten her up-" as a cruel and
detestable mother, who must have left her little ones in
the sty to die of hunger." Next day, considering that
the orphans must starve now, at any rate, he had eaten
them too-"for the pity that he had of them, to see
them suffer." But, if he had done wrong, he was very
penitent-what should be his penance, so that he might
get absolution? The Fox assigns him one Paternoster
-to be said standing. Then comes the turn of the Fox.
He had killed and eaten a cock-but solely because he
was so fierce and overbearing, attacking all other cocks,
and tormenting all quiet people (especially those who
had headaches), night and day, with his perpetual crow-
ings. Then, the Fox admitted, he had eaten the hens as
well, but only because they kept perpetually reproaching
him with the death of their lord and master.
ance enjoined upon him by the Wolf is to eat no flesh
for three whole Fridays-that is to say, if he can get
none. Lastly, the Ass has to tell his tale.
He repre-
sents what a hard life he always leads; how he is con-
tinually beaten and half-starved. One day he was
carrying sacks to the mill; he had had no breakfast;
he saw some bits of straw sticking out of the wooden
shoes of the man who was leading him. He pulled out
a few straws and ate them; he was very hungry; and he
did not know that any harm had come of it. But he
The pen-
20
LA FONTAINE.
was willing to submit to any penance. "Thief and
murderer!” cried Wolf and Fox both at once; "you
stole the straw the poor man had stuffed into his shoes
to keep his feet warm; and he perished miserably of
cold, very likely, in consequence!" For such an act,
death could be the only fitting punishment. And they
fell upon the Ass and devoured him there and then,
"so that not a morsel of him was left."
The same fable appears in another form in the ‘Livre
d'Emblêmes' of Guillaume Gueroult, which contains
some five or six fables, all good. In his version the
Lion takes the place of the Fox, and when he confesses
his peccadilloes in the matter of herds and flocks, the
Wolf hastens to assure him that as monarch of the
beasts he has the right to make his own laws,—the king
can do no wrong. His majesty, in turn, absolves the
Wolf for acts of the like kind; it is "his custom so to
do," he believes-and probably hunger compelled him.
In neither case is there any mention of penance. The
Ass makes much the same confession as in Haudent's
version, but there is an amusing variation in the Wolf's
denouncement of his guilt. "What! eat the straw in
your master's shoe? and if his foot had been in it, no
doubt you would have eaten that too!"
The culprit
meets, of course, with the same fate. Here are two
predecessors, at least, who trod the same ground as La
Fontaine and, admirable as his version is, it owes any
superiority it may have entirely to the charm of his
style; in point of humour, Haudent's has the advantage.
La Fontaine will lose much in any translation; but the
following may at least serve to show his variations on
the theme:-
****
LA FONTAINE.
THE ANIMALS IN THE PLAGUE—(vii. 1).
"One of those scourges which Heaven's righteous wrath
Invented for the crimes of earth-
The Plague, if one must call
The visitation by its hideous name-
Down on the animal world in fury came-
Death day by day to some, sore pains to all.
The love of life no more had power to move :
Food lost its relish: wolf nor fox
Prowled round the innocent flocks;
The turtle-dove
Fled from her sickening mate: there was no love,
And therefore no more joy.
The Lion held a council, and spake out :
6
'My friends,' said he, this pest the gods employ
To punish our misdeeds, I make no doubt;
Wherefore it seems to me
'Twere fit the greatest sinner of us all
Should sacrifice himself in expiation,
So to avert Heaven's wrath, and save the nation.
You that read history know that, in such case,
These acts of self-devotion find their place.
Let each examine then, as truth compels,
21
Without equivocation,
The tale his several conscience tells,
And so make revelation.
As for myself, I candidly confess
To satisfy my greediness
I have devoured sheep not a few,
Who never did me harm; nay, now and then
I ate the shepherd too.
I will devote myself, I say again,
If needful; but I think the rest are bound
To make a clean confession first, all round.
Our earnest wish, I hope and trust, is
The guiltiest should pay this debt of justice.'
22
LA FONTAINE.
'Sire,' said the Fox, 'you have too good a heart—
Such scruples show it;
But as for eating sheep,-why, for my part,
I see no sin in that—the stupid brutes !
You do them too much honour, if they know it.
As for the shepherd, if your taste he suits,
Why, I can safely say, by nature's laws,
He well deserves to reap the righteous fruits.
Of man's preposterous claim to hold dominion
Over us free-born beasts. That's my opinion.'
So spake the Fox; and flatterers hummed applause.
It was not safe to probe too close the offences
Of the great nobles there,
Tiger, or bear,
Against whose life there might have been complaints:
All for their deeds found very fair pretences,
Down to the very dogs that chased a hare,—
To hear them talk, they were four-footed saints.
The Ass in turn advanced to make confession :
'I mind me once,' said he,
'When that the devil of hunger took possession
Of poor unhappy me,
I passed a grassy mead
Belonging to some monks, and in my need
(It was so tempting) I just took one bite-
A mouthful-I confess it was not right.'
All with one voice cried out upon the thief;
A Wolf, who had some smattering of law,
Against the prisoner straight took up his brief:
'A mangy, thick-skinned brute as e'er I saw !
From him, my lords, no doubt,
Has all this public misery come about:
Rank felony! to eat another's grass!'
Plainly, the righteous victim was the Ass:
No expiation short of death! And straight
The wretch went to his fate.
As you have power or weakness at your back,
The court whitewashes you or brands you black."
MARIE DE FRANCE.
23
One point introduced in this version is characteristic
of the author he alone satirically enhances the guilt of
the unfortunate victim by making him eat the monks'
grass he seldom let pass an opportunity of a sneer at
the cloister.
Some of these previous attempts to give the old Greek
and Latin fables a French dress must therefore have
been known to La Fontaine; but he passes them over
in his preface with the brief remark that though it is
true that "some of his countrymen have worked in that
direction, our language was then so different from what
it is now, that one can only regard them as foreigners."
It is curious that an author who speaks in terms of such
high admiration of Greek and Roman literature, should
have showed so little appreciation of the early literature
of his own country.
The sixteenth century produced no other French fable-
writers of any mark, though some clever versions from
the Latin appeared from time to time; as in Clement
Marot's pretty rendering of "The Lion and the Mouse,”
which he sent from his prison in the Châtelet in a letter
to a friend, as a hint to him that a good turn done to the
humblest in time of need might not be without its re-
ward. La Fontaine's version of the same fable (ii. 11)
is by no means so good as his "master's."
There is one author of a much earlier date than these,
who may perhaps be called French, and to whom La
Fontaine has by some been thought to be indebted. A
lady of whom we know little but what she tells us of
herself—“ Marie is my name, and I am of France
(she was probably of Norman parentage), and who had
already written some "Lays" of chivalry, early in the
thirteenth century translated into eight-syllabled verse,

24
LA FONTAINE,
6
in the "Romance" language, rather more than a hundred
fables. She calls her collection Fables d'Ysopez,' and
it is commonly known as the 'Dit d'Ysopet;' but only
some thirty are to be found under Æsop's name, and
many of them can be traced to no known author. In
these we find allusions to the Mass, to the keeping of
Lent, to monastic life, and to many other things quite
unknown to Æsop. She undertook this work, she tells
us, "for the love of the earl William "--who is thought
to be William " Longsword;" and it was almost cer-
tainly written in England. La Fontaine's fables of
"The Drowning Woman," "The Wishes," "The Fox and
the Cat," and one or two others not derived from Æsop,
are to be found in this collection.
There are at least four other collections of fables of
the thirteenth century bearing the name of "Ysopet,"
two of which have been printed by M. Robert.¹ To-
gether with a large proportion of the Esopic fables in a
varied form, they contain several which are purely medi-
eval in their character, and many of these are highly
characteristic and entertaining. They are full of that
satirical spirit by which the monkish writers appear
so often to have relieved their minds under the severe
discipline of the cloister. The way in which the story
of the Wolf keeping Lent is told in one of these
"Ysopets," in the old French eight-syllabled verse, is
as lively and humorous as anything in La Fontaine.
The Wolf (who is here called Isengrin, as in the "Rey-
nard" romances) was ill of the glanders, and made a
vow to heaven that if he should but recover he would
forswear the eating of flesh, and become one of the
1 Fables Inédites.'
"YSOPET
"
C
COLLECTIONS.
25
1
brethren of the Chartreuse. He soon got well, and on
first taking his walks abroad he met a fine fat sheep.
His mouth watered at the sight-but he remembered his
VOW. "Heaven bless you, Master Salmon!" quoth the
Wolf, by way of greeting. The other assured him that
he was no fish-would not venture into the water for
his life; he was the son of a sheep, of very honest
parentage-nothing more. "That is no matter to me,"
said the Wolf; "you have all the look of a salmon to
my eyes, by St Siquat! and as a salmon I shall treat
you." And so he ate him up on the spot. There is an
equally good story, in the same collection, of a country-
woman who had commended her cow, which went out
daily with others to the public pasture, to the special
attention of every saint she could find in the calendar,
and to each of whom she duly paid her devotions accord-
ingly. One day the cow failed to come home as usual,
and was nowhere to be heard of. The unfortunate
owner took it very hard that all her guardians should
thus have failed her, and expressed her grief and sur-
prise, when next she went to her devotions, in terms of
bitter remonstrance. Upon which St Peter appeared
to her, and explained that if she had left the care of the
cow to him solely-or indeed to any other of his frater-
nity-the animal would have been quite safe; but that
in her case she had intrusted her business to so many,
that each particular saint had probably considered himself
justified in thinking that the others were looking after
the cow.
It must be allowed that this is a very impres-
sive way of enforcing the moral that "what is every-
body's business is nobody's."
1 Robert, Fables Inédites,' ii. 487.
26
LA FONTAINE.
CC
But it is more than probable that of Marie de France
(as she is commonly called), or of these less-known
Ysopets," or of any other collection of fables in the
old Romance language, La Fontaine knew nothing. They
had not yet been printed; and he was far too indolent
to be suspected of making researches amongst old manu-
scripts which he would have found it very difficult to
read. If he knew anything of their contents at all, it
must have been from extracts, or from later versions of
the same stories.
>>
But besides these collections of Greek and Latin and
early French fables, from which La Fontaine borrowed
the skeletons and the characters of so many of his own,
another source was at least open to him whence he
may have drawn more or less-the poem or
66 romance
of "
Reynard the Fox;" or rather the family of composi-
tions in prose and verse which cluster round and almost
conceal the original of that remarkable epic. Whether
this original were French, German, or Flemish, it is not
necessary here to discuss; but versions of it were current
in France at least as early as the twelfth century, and
allusions to it are frequent in early French writers. It
occupies its distinct place in the genealogy, if one may so
call it, of popular literature.
It succeeded the romances
of chivalry, which had so long formed almost exclusively
the literary entertainment of a society which had few
readers but very patient listeners, and it presented quite
another view of social life and social questions.
It was
the product of the civilian and plebeian mind, as con-
trasted with the knightly and the military. In the
romances of chivalry, the cycle of story in which Charle-
magne or Arthur are the heroes, we have the glorification
REYNARD THE FOX.
27
of the knight and the noble: they live and move in a
world quite above and distinct from the useful and peace-
ful occupations of life. The "churl" and the "villain,"
when they appear at all upon the scene, are merely the
slaves and the tools, when they are not the prey and the
sport, of the dominant class who are the sole actors in
the drama. As to the animal world, excepting so far as
beasts of chase are concerned, its life and habits are
wholly ignored. In this remarkable epic of "Reynard"
the whole is changed. The hero is no longer the king or
the knight it is the Fox-no very high type of character,
it is true, but the representative of mind as opposed to
matter; of cunning, the armour of the weak, as opposed
to physical strength; the triumph of diplomacy over
arms. It is, from one point of view, the meaner side of
human life; from another, the more real and practical.
But what is chiefly to be noticed here in connection with
the fables of La Fontaine, is that fantastic hierarchy, so
to speak, introduced as recognised amongst animals. We-
have partial traces of this, no doubt, in classical fable;
but in this romance is the very foundation of the story.
We have King Noble, the Lion, with the members of his
Court; Isengrin the Wolf; Bruin the Bear, and his
wife; Belin the Ram, and Timers the Ass (who figure.
as the high priests of this imaginary realm), and a whole
subject-community of lower characters. It is hardly
possible but that La Fontaine should have been familiar
with some of the French versions of the romance, though
there is no distinct reference to it in his writings. It is
from this source too, perhaps, rather than from the Indian
fables ascribed to Pilpay, that he took the idea of link-
ing his own fables together in a kind of unity which
28
LA FONTAINE,
(C
does not exist in those of Æsop or Phædrus. These clas-
sical fables are isolated stories; La Fontaine's are part
of a continuous whole, in which the same characters con-
stantly reappear. They form, as he himself expresses it,
a drama in a hundred acts." The persons of this drama
are nearly the same as those in "Reynard," and present
the same type of character. The fabulist had too much
respect for monarchy to follow the romance in making
the royal Lion the dupe of Reynard's artifices; but in
spite of the Lion's strength and majesty, the Fox is still
very much the hero of the whole chain of fable, so far as
success is in question. If the royal beast is not exactly
his dupe, yet the Fox is a match for him, and retains his
favour where others fail; and the successful stratagem,
the quick wit, the ready tongue, give him a supremacy
over other animals far more striking than the mere brute
force residing in the king. The Bear and the Wolf, too,
maintain the same relative position in La Fontaine's
fables as in "Reynard the Fox." The Bear is strong but
stupid, an easy victim to his weaker but wilier fellow-
courtier. The Wolf is a more formidable rival, but he,
too, finds his master in the Fox. There are other feat-
ures of characteristic resemblance between the story and
the fables. In the romances of chivalry, woman is
almost worshipped; in "Reynard the Fox," she has be-
come the object for raillery and satire. In one of the
French versions of "Reynard," we have an account of the
creation of the lower animals. Adam and Eve are given
a rod with which they are to strike the earth when they
have need of anything. Adam strikes first, and forth
springs a sheep; Eve strikes-"roughly "—and a wolf
comes forth and devours it. And so the pair go on, till
REYNARD THE FOX.
29
the earth is filled with animal life; but all the creatures
whom woman calls into being are more or less savage
and harmful, while the man's productions are gentle and
useful. This satire on woman, and especially upon mar-
ried life, is very distinct, if not very frequent, in the
pages of La Fontaine. So it is also with the spirit in
which the Church and the monastic orders are treated.
In the romances of chivalry both are spoken of with the
highest respect. Though the Archbishop of Canterbury,
in the Arthurian legend, is placed in very strange com-
pany, that of Queen Morgiana la Fay-one of the many
traces of paganism surviving in the midst of Christianity
-yet the offices of the Church are mentioned with rever-
ence whenever they are mentioned at all, and the penit-
ent knight is shrived by the pious hermit or retires into the
cloister, without a hint of satire upon such a proceeding.
In the tale of "The Fox," all this is changed. A tone of
audacious rationalism prevails throughout, which shows
how strongly the "protestant" spirit was working long
before the Reformation was thought of, and how the
lay intellect, even in those early days, revolted against
the usurpations and corruptions of the Roman Church.
Reynard's wickedness, whenever it takes the form of
contempt of ecclesiastical authority, is plainly expected
by the author to have an especial relish for his readers.
When Reynard eats his confessor, the Hawk, our sym-
pathy is evidently not asked for the bird of prey. When
he requires the skin from the feet of his uncle the Wolf,
and his aunt Hersinde the She-Bear, to make him strong
shoes to go on his pilgrimage, and ironically promises.
them a share in the indulgences he shall thus procure,
we have a blow aimed at the whole system of indulg-
30
LA FONTAINE.
ences, which shows how the way had been already paved
for Luther. When Belin the Ram, who is the king's
chaplain, hesitates to give Reynard the usual blessing
before he sets off as a pilgrim, even at the king's order,
because he has been excommunicated by the Pope, we
have a double stroke of satire, aimed at the Church
generally, and at the papal supremacy in particular.
Belin says that in matters ecclesiastical he never con-
siders whether a thing be right or wrong, but only what
his ecclesiastical superiors may say to him; but the king
insists, and the priest confers his blessing on the pilgrim,
in defiance of the Pope. When Reynard offers to take
the cross, and join the crusade, "No," says the king,
"he will come back worse than he went-they always
do." When he is excommunicated by the arch-priest.
(Timers, the Ass, who "has an excellent strong voice"),
there is a bitter contempt discernible under the amusing
burlesque of the ecclesiastical sentence, and the manner
in which the culprit receives it :—
"Unhappy wretch that I shall be,
Since the Church excommunicates me!
I shall never more eat bread—
Unless I be an hungered;
Boil my pot shall never more—
Unless it be set the fire afore.”
The monastic orders are the subject of even more con-
temptuous sarcasm. So popular and powerful (in spite
of his excommunication) does Reynard become, that the
various religious bodies are all anxious to enrol him
amongst their members. First the Jacobins solicit him;
but he gives them, by way of substitute, his eldest son,
who speedily becomes general of the Order. The Cordel-
SATIRE ON MONASTICISM.
31
iers make proposals to him; to them he gives his second
son, whose promotion is equally rapid. Then he will
himself turn hermit, as the most perfect form of religious
self-abnegation. But it appears that he had entirely mis-
taken the conditions of hermit-life. He had always
thought that these good men enjoyed the fat of the land;
but he finds, to his astonishment and disgust, that they
live upon herbs, and wild honey, and water. A hermitage
on such conditions will not suit him at all. The Knights
Hospitallers and Templars are both anxious to elect him
as their general; and the contention between the two
Orders becomes so keen, that it is carried before the Pope
and the College of Cardinals, who at last propose to cut
Reynard in two and assign half of him to each Order.
This settlement of the question Reynard by no means.
approves of, and succeeds in effecting a compromise more
agreeable to himself. He will wear a robe of two colours
parti per pale, as the heralds term it-and he will
shave half his beard and let the other half grow; so will
he be Templar on one side and Hospitaller on the other,
and accept the generalship of both Orders, and govern
them both excellently well. And so he does, the story
assures us—“so long as the revenues are good."
A very similar vein of satire runs through the fables
of La Fontaine. The Church is touched lightly, and,
upon the whole, with good-humour; but against the
monks he shows a real animosity. The moral of "The
Rat who turned Hermit" is as caustic as anything in
Reynard the Fox."
CC
THE RAT TURNED HERMIT-(vii. 3).
"A certain Rat, weary of this world's strife,
(So the Levantines in their legend say),
32
LA FONTAINE.
Into a large Dutch cheese, one day,
Retired from public life:
The solitude was most profound,
Extending over the whole cheese's round.
Within, our hermit fixed his cell,
And worked with teeth and claws so hard and well,
He quickly had provided ample store
Of food, safe shelter-what could rat want more?
He soon grew sleek and fat;
When one turns hermit, Heaven takes care of that.
He had not long embraced his new vocation,
When one fine day,
From the Rat people came a deputation,
Entreating of the saint, to help them on their way,
Some small donation:
For they were journeying forth in search of aid
Against a fierce attack the Cats had made;
Ratopolis was under strict blockade ;
And, what was worse,
So low their treasury was, they had to start
Without a penny in their purse.
Some very small assistance on his part
Was all they asked; for, he must understand,
In a few days, allies would be at hand.
'My friends,' the Solitary said,
'To this world's interests I have long been dead;
Nay, of what use
Could I be in such strait-a poor recluse?
Except my prayers-they're yours, of course, you
know-
May Heaven preserve you from those Cats! and so
Pray take my blessing, friends, and go.'
Not a word more,
But shut his door.
Who does the Reader think I had in mind,
In telling how this Rat, in terms unkind,
And na 9.
↓
La Fontaine can see in the monk or the hermit little
He represents him in other
The Rabbit and the Weasel, when
they fall out, agree to carry their dispute before their
neighbour, Raminagrobis. "This was a Cat, who led the
life of a devout hermit-in fact, a Cat turned Chattemite
a saint of a cat, well-furred, sleek and fat; an ex-
perienced arbitrator in all difficult cases." And Puss-
"like a good apostle," without waiting to hear the case,
sets the litigants at one again by devouring the pair of
: them.1 So in another fable, when the Cat, going out
very early in the morning on one of her usual predatory
excursions, gets caught in a net which has been set at
the foot of the hollow tree where she lives, she tells
her fellow - lodger the Rat (who has a hole there too)
that she was on her way to early prayers-"as every
devout cat uses to do in the morning.'
F
اه سیده است . دها
Nak
SATIRE ON MONASTICISM.
Bade his poor brethren unassisted go?
A monk? Excuse me, no-not in the least;
I mean a Dervish of the East:
A monk is always liberal, we know."
more than a hypocrite.
fables by the Cat.
F.C.- XIV.
33
The fables for which, in their medieval form, he might
have been indebted to the different branches of the
"Reynard" romance- -or which are at least to be found
there are the Man and the Snake; the Wolf and the
Crane; the Fox and the Crow; the Lion's Hunting-party;
the Jackdaw and the Peacocks; the Eagle and the Owl;
Unjust Complaints against Fortune (vii. 14); the Wolf
and the Fox; the Fox, Wolf, and Horse; the Town and
Country Mouse; the Ass and the Lapdog; the Oak and
the Rush; and the Man, the Horse, and the Stag.
1 vii. 16.
C
34
LA FONTAINE.
There are two or three others in the romance which do
not appear in La Fontaine.
The first six books of his Fables contain not more
than one or two of distinctly oriental origin, though
several of them are derived from a common stock; as,
for instance, "The Ass and the Lapdog," which the Esop
collection and the Reynard romances have in common,
is found also in Indian fable as "The Screech-Owl and
Parroquet." But in the interval between the publica-
tion of these and the latter half of his work, he had evi-
dently made acquaintance with some French version of
the fables known as those of Pilpay-or more properly
Bidpai. This Indian sage is as shadowy a personage as
Esop. The conjectural date assigned to him varies.
from two thousand to two hundred and fifty years before
our era. His popular name is said to be really no name
at all, but only a descriptive appellation meaning "the
beloved physician," who was a Brahmin called Vishnu-
Sarma-if that name be not also a mere nom de plume.
His fables are contained in a kind of allegorical romance
in the Sanscrit language-Pancha-Tantra,' 'Five Collec-
tions of Tales,' of which there is a later form called the
'Hitopadesa.' It consists of fables loosely connected by
narrative. Portions of it were translated into Latin
about the end of the fifteenth century, and thence into
French by Gilbert Gaulmin (assuming the style of David
Sahid of Ispahan); and this, or some of the more recent
translations, La Fontaine was almost certainly acquainted
with, as several of his later fables appear to come direct
from this source.1
1 The Animals dying of the Plague; the Cat, the Weasel, and the
Rabbit (vii. 16); the Bear and the Gardener (viii. 10); the Two
INDIAN FABLES.
35
The moral of these fables is such as we might have
expected if their origin be really Indian. It is no moral
at all, according to our ideas of morality. The lesson
suggested is more or less a selfish one: it is the glorifi-
'cation of cunning. Unsuspecting benevolence is pre-
sented to us only in the character of a dupe. We
have a fair example of this character in a story which is
"The
found, as one of a series, in the Pancha-Tantra '-
Brahmin, the Crocodile, the Tree, the Cow, and the Fox"
—and which reappears in La Fontaine as the "The Man
and the Snake." It has evidently a common origin with
the better-known fable ascribed to Esop, and also
adapted by La Fontaine-"The Countryman and the
Serpent."
A certain Brahmin was making a pilgrimage to bathe
in the sacred waters of the Ganges. On his road he
had to pass near a river, and stopped to make his usual
ablutions. While thus engaged, a Crocodile approached
him, and asked whence he came and whither he was
going? When told that the Brahmin was on his way to
the Ganges, the Crocodile begged that he would take
him with him, as there was too little room for him in
the stream where he now was. The Brahmin consented,
and stowed away the reptile in his travelling - bag.
When they arrived on the banks of the Ganges, the
Brahmin opened the bag, and showed the Crocodile the
sacred river. The creature begged him to complete his
kind action by carrying him a little way into the stream,
Friends (viii. 11); the Falcon and the Capon; the Wolf and the
Hunter; the Faithless Trustee (ix. 1); the Two Pigeons; the Hus-
band, the Wife, and the Thief; the Tortoise and the Ducks; the Fish
and the Cormorant, and at least half the subjects of the tenth book,
are traced by M. Robert to Bidpai.
36
LA FONTAINE.
and, when once more in his natural element, seized the
Brahmin by the leg. The good man expostulated, and
charged the Crocodile with base ingratitude; upon which
the reptile retorted that gratitude, as practised in those
days, consisted in devouring one's benefactors, and that
man was a notorious instance of it. It was at last
agreed that the question should be referred to three
arbitrators in succession, and if they decided against the
Brahmin, he should submit to his fate. The first to
whom they appealed was a Mango-tree, who at once gave
judgment against the man: he ate of its fruits, enjoyed
its shade, and then, when it grew old and past bearing,
lopped its branches, and at last cut it down, and even
rooted it up.
The second to whom the parties submitted
their case was a Cow, old and lean, who was lying un-
tended by the bank of the river. She without hesita-
tion pronounced to the same effect. "Man uses me,"
said she, "to till his fields, he feeds on my milk, I give
him calves; and lo, when I am old and no longer ser-
viceable to him, he leaves me here to be the prey of
wild beasts." One more such verdict only was re-
quired to seal the fate of the Brahmin. The next whom
they met was a Fox, to whom the same query was put―
Was it permissible to requite a benefactor with evil?
The Fox showed himself a most upright and painstaking
judge. He was apparently impressed by the Crocodile's
arguments; but before he would give any opinion, he
must understand exactly all the circumstances of the case,
and especially in what fashion the fellow-travellers had
made the journey. The Crocodile, by way of illustra
tion, got into the bag again, and the Brahmin lifted it
on his back. The Fox beckoned him to follow, and when
37
they were a little way from the bank, bade him set his
burden down, took up a great stone, and smashed the
Crocodile's head as he lay. "Fool!" then said he to the
Brahmin, "learn from your present escape to have no
friendly relations with rascals." Then-concludes the
story, with a charming completeness of detail-the Fox
summoned his family, and they made an excellent meal
of the Crocodile.
INDIAN FABLES.
We are spared any moral in the original apologue.
In La Fontaine's version,-"The Man and the Snake,
-the Man entices the Serpent into the sack with the
fixed intention of killing him, "guilty or not guilty,"
and it is the Snake who contends that man is of all liv-
ing things the most notoriously ungrateful, and appeals
successively to the Cow, the Ox, and the Tree, who all, as
in the Eastern original, give judgment against the Man.
Whereupon he cuts the matter short by beating sack
and Snake against a wall till the Snake is killed; and
the moral is—that it is of no use to argue with those in-
power, unless at a very safe distance. It is the moral
that repeats itself over and over again in La Fontaine's
pages, a far more cynical view of human nature, as it
is a more hopeless view of the fruitless struggle of jus-
tice against force, than any which we find in Eastern
apologue.
>>
38
CHAPTER III.
LIFE OF LA FONTAINE.
JEAN DE LA FONTAINE was born in 1621, in the little
town of Château - Thierry in Champagne. His father
held what might be called the rangership of the district
("master of waters and forests "), which brought him in
some moderate income. The La Fontaines had even
some pretensions to nobility, as the form of their name
would imply, and in certain family documents the son
had been styled "esquire," an assumption for which he
incurred the penalty of 2000 livres under a commission
issued by Colbert for proceeding against unlicensed
bearers of such titles. He seems to have got off, how-
ever, by the influence of the Duc de Bouillon, seigneur
of Château-Thierry, with whose family he was always
on intimate terms. His education was somewhat irreg-
ular, carried on at country schools, latterly at Rheims,
where he acquired a fair knowledge of Latin; and of
this city he always retained a pleasant recollection.
Some religious books which fell in his way seem to
have turned his thoughts towards the Church, and at
twenty years of age he entered the Oratory as a student,
and was thence transferred in a few months to the semin-
EARLY YEARS,
39
ary of St Magloire.
But he found the life utterly unsuit-
ed to his habits or his taste, and before he was twenty-
two he left it, and got himself married, entirely to the
satisfaction of his father, who resigned his rangership in
his favour. But the young wife was not quite sixteen,
and though irreproachable in character, little fitted to
manage either her household or her husband; and young
La Fontaine had as little vocation for matrimony as for
the Church-or, indeed, for the management of woods.
and forests, for even of the ordinary terms of wood-
craft he always professed his ignorance.
The young
pair never seem to have quarrelled, but there was
an "incompatibility" of some kind, and the hus-
band led a very independent and erratic existence, a
state of things which the wife bore with great equa-
nimity. An utter incapacity for the ordinary business
of life, an indifference to its obligations and restraints,
and a want of self-control of any kind, belonged to his
character from his earliest years to his latest, and all
kinds of stories were told of his strange behaviour.
When he was in Paris on some urgent family business,
his father intrusted him with an important errand in the
matter, and awaited his return; but Jean had met some
old companions, went with them to the theatre, and for-
got all about the business until the next morning. On
another occasion he was riding from Paris to Château-
Thierry with a packet of important papers secured to his
saddle-bow; the fastening gave way without his know-
ledge, and the packet was picked up by a traveller who
followed him on the road, and who rode up and asked
him if he had lost anything. La Fontaine assured him
that he had not, and was only convinced by the produc-
40
LA FONTAINE.
tion of the papers. It may be easily conceived how he
would acquit himself as the master of a household.
The poetic gifts which were to compensate, in the
eyes of society, for so many defects of character, are said
to have been first awakened by his hearing an ode of
Malherbe read aloud, which would imply that very
little general literature had previously come in his way.
From that moment Malherbe's somewhat affected verse
became a passion with him, until a wise friend directed
his attention to Horace. He had gained a competent
knowledge of Latin at school and at the Oratory, and
Horace charmed him upon better acquaintance even
more than Malherbe. From Horace he passed to Virgil:
he gratefully acknowledges both as his masters and
teachers, and their thoughts and diction are constantly
reproduced in his own verse. He soon carried his
reading still further in the same direction; and though
he knew nothing of Greek, he had read Plato and Plu-
tarch carefully in translations. The Abbé d'Olivet says
he had seen La Fontaine's copies of those authors, largely
underscored and covered with manuscript notes, embody-
ing, in many cases, the moral and political maxims set
forth in his fables. "Where, among all the sages and
the geniuses of our own age," he says in a letter
to Huet, "shall I find a single one that approaches
Plato?" In his wide acquaintance with the old clas-
sical writers, and in his love for them, no Frenchman
of his times surpassed him except Fénelon.
"We can-
not go beyond the ancients," he says; "they have left
us nothing for our share, but the glory of following
them worthily." His general reading was also exten-
1 Note to Fable 15, Book i.
1
FAVOURITE AUTHORS.
41
sive for those days: Tasso, Ariosto, Boccacio, and
Machiavel; Descartes, Rabelais, Voiture, Villon, Marot,
—with all these, we know from himself, he was familiar,
and probably they were only the representative names of
a larger company of literary acquaintances. His admira-
tion of the ancients did not prevent his full appreciation
of his favourite French writers, to whom he is always
ready to acknowledge his obligations: he calls himself,
in a letter to M. de St Evremond, "the scholar of
Rabelais, Voiture, and Clement Marot." His enthusi-
asm for some one particular author upon first introduc-
tion was, like so much else in his character, amusingly
childlike. It was so, in his early life, in the case of
Malherbe and Horace; it was the same in later days,
when he had got hold for the first time of the
'Book of Baruch,' which his friend Racine had put into
his hands one day to keep him quiet in church.
"What
a genius Baruch was!" he said to his friend; and for
some days afterwards he kept earnestly inquiring of any
one he happened to meet in the street-sometimes, one
may conceive, rather to their embarrassment—whether
they had read Baruch?
He began to write verses-chiefly love-songs-before
his marriage, and soon became known in private circles
as a successful author of vers de société, which were
handed about in manuscript, after the fashion of the
day, and won for the young poet a considerable reputa-
tion. It would appear, from some of the letters which
passed between Racine and himself, that a kind of small
literary club (Académie, he calls it) had been formed at
Château-Thierry, of which De Maucroix, Pintrel, and
himself were the chief members. A letter from Racine
42
LA FONTAINE,
in 1662 sends a little poem, with a request to know
what the "Academy" thinks of it. His first publica-
tion, which was not until he was thirty-three, was a
translation into French verse of Terence's comedy of
"The Eunuch," but it has no particular merit, and pro-
bably attracted little attention. At any rate, it does
not seem to have encouraged him to venture hastily
into print again, for more than ten years elapsed before
his next public appearance as an author.
The year before he gave his first literary offspring to
the world, his wife had presented him with a son; an
event which does not seem to have added to his hap-
piness, or to have drawn closer their very independent
conjugal relations. The father appears to have taken
very little interest in the boy, except so far as to provide
him with a fair education; and he was left to the care
of his mother and her family until he was fourteen,
when M. de Harlay, Procureur-general, undertook the
father's duty (as some good friend always did), and took
charge of the lad. A story was current among La
Fontaine's friends, that when on one occasion he met his
son in society after he was grown up, and was asked if
he knew the young man, he replied that he "thought
he had seen him somewhere before." Another version
is, that La Fontaine showed himself much pleased with
the young stranger's bearing and conversation, and when
told it was his son, remarked cordially that "he was
very glad to hear it." That he should have wholly
ignored the duties of the father of a family is no more
than we should have expected from his general character.
"I have never envied any man such a position," he says
Spatule might be th
43
tt
himself, in pointing the moral of one of his fables;¹ but
one is rather surprised to find apparently wanting, in a
man of his kind feelings, easy good-humour, and gentle
disposition, the love of children which generally accom-
panies such a temperament. But several expressions in
the fables tend to show that the great fable-writer, for
whom the nature and habits of the whole world of lower
animals had such a strong interest, regarded children
rather on their troublesome and mischievous side, and
that for him they had little attraction. It is " a little
rascal of a child," with its sling, that nearly kills, out of
pure mischief, one of the "Two Pigeons" in his fable;
"that age of life," says the author, "knows nothing of
pity;" an observation not the less cynical because it
contains a certain amount of truth. "Childhood loves
nothing," he says in another fable; an assertion which
assuredly finds less excuse in fact. But the easy good-
nature of La Fontaine was too much that of a selfish
bachelor; and although, as we shall see, he was capable
of strong and even romantic attachments, he could not
submit to the demands made upon his time and patience
by wife or children.
REMOVAL TO PARIS.
Whether the sudden intrusion of an infant (probably
unexpected, after a married life of ten years) increased
his repugnance to anything like domestic life, or whether
the coincidence of events was accidental, he deserted his
home at Château-Thierry, about this time, almost entirely
for Paris. Thither, indeed, his wife accompanied him at
the first; but she soon returned alone to the little pro-
vincial town. The husband, meanwhile, was making a
1 xi. 3.
14
LA FONTAINE.
powerful friend. He had been introduced by one of his
wife's family (Jacques Jannart, who had married her
aunt) to Fouquet, the magnificent and unscrupulous
Minister of Finance, who took a fancy to the poet and
his verses, and gave him a pension of a thousand livres,
the sole consideration for which was that he should fur-
nish his patron with an ode or ballad once in every
quarter. This obligation he seems to have punctually
discharged; but he also dedicated to Fouquet, a few
years later, the longest and most ambitious of his poems,
on the classical subject of "Adonis." The work was as
yet only in manuscript, and was not printed till 1669,-
eleven years after its production. It may be dismissed
at once in very few words, as cold, monotonous, and
artificial, and as adding nothing to the permanent repu
tation of its author. At the time of its publication, how-
ever, it had considerable success in spite of its faults:
the reproduction of classical subjects, and the imitation.
of classical imagery and diction, were the fashion of the
day, and the "Adonis" was the only work deserving
the name of poem which had as yet been published in
France. Its author was encouraged to follow it up, in
the next year, with another piece in the same style, but
shorter, entitled "Psyche,"-being a poor imitation of
the work of the same name by the Greek writer Apu-
leius. But the date of publication, in the case of both
poems (and probably of composition also in the case of
"Psyche") was, as has been said, at a much later period
of the author's life.
Long before that time, the powerful patron, to whom
the manuscript "Adonis" had been dedicated, had fallen.
into disgrace. Fouquet had offended his young master,
HIS PATRON FOUQUET.
Louis XIV., by his ambition, his lavish display of a
wealth whose sources were questionable, and probably in
other matters with which we have here nothing to do.
He had built and embellished with almost regal magni-
ficence at Vaux-le-Vicompte on the Seine, some ten
leagues from Paris, a palace surpassing in splendour the
royal residences at St Germains and at Fontainebleau,
and which probably gave Louis the first impulse to his
future great works at Versailles. La Fontaine had set
himself the task of describing the attractions of Fouquet's
new mansion and pleasure-grounds in a poem, to which
he gave the name of "Songe de Vaux." He took three
years in its composition, and never got beyond some frag-
ments (afterwards published) when the fall of his patron
put a stop to the work. It is chiefly remarkable as con-
taining what was possibly his first fable-a very poor
one. In a letter to Fouquet, accompanying a presenta-
tion copy of his Fables, he says, "It was you that first
made me a fable-teller, in bidding me compose the
Songe de Vaux.”
45
(C
It was immediately after a grand entertainment given
by the Minister there in 1662 in honour of the king, and
at which Louis was present, that the host was suddenly
arrested, charged with corrupt practices, of which there
seem to have been proofs in abundance (indeed, in his
high office, such conduct was the rule rather than the
exception), and imprisoned in the castle of Amboise.
His ruin was complete, and involved many of his sub-
ordinates and friends; and it is to the lasting credit of
La Fontaine that he adhered, closely and boldly, in this
day of adversity, to the man whose bounty he had en-
joyed, and whose hand had been the first held out to
46
LA FONTAINE.
encourage him. He wrote at once to his dear friend
Francois de Maucroix, canon of Rheims (where they had
probably been schoolfellows), in the following words,
admirable both in simplicity and in expression:-
"I can say nothing to you, my dear friend, as to what you
wrote about my own affairs; they do not touch me so nearly
as what has just befallen the Minister. He has been arrested,
and the king is violent against him, going so far as to declare
that he has in his hands documentary evidence sufficient to
hang him.
Ah! if he does, he will be far more cruel than
his enemies, inasmuch as he has no interest, as they have, in
being unjust."
La Fontaine did also what little he could in defence
of his patron. He wrote an elegy addressed to the
"Nymphes de Vaux," the guardians of those pleasant
shades from which their master had been torn-in which
he charged them, if King Louis should ever visit their
haunts, to plead with him on behalf of the unhappy
Orontes-the poetical alias which he gives to the ex-
Minister; and he took care that this should come under
the notice of the king. He subsequently composed an
ode addressed to Louis personally, in which he begged
him to spare the life of Fouquet. But the prisoner him-
self, to whom he had sent a copy of the ode in man-
uscript, wrote to request his friend not to make an appeal
on his behalf, the language of which seemed to admit his
guilt. La Fontaine's reply is gracefully worded:-
“... You say that I am asking, in too humiliating
terms, a boon which one ought to despise. Such a senti-
ment, sir, well becomes you; and assuredly one who regards
life with such indifference can in no way deserve death. But
perhaps you have not taken into consideration the fact that
it is I who speak,-I who am asking a favour which is of
FIDELITY TO FOUQUET.
47
more value in my eyes than in yours. There are no termis
too humble, too apologetic, too pathetic, or too earnest,
for me to feel bound to employ in this appeal. When
I have to introduce you in person on the scene, I will
take care to put into your mouth language corresponding
to the magnanimity of your spirit. But allow me to say
that you do not show sufficient anxiety for a life so valuable
as yours."
One of the sub-intendants who found himself involved
in the disgrace and ruin of his chief was Jacques Jan-
nart, already mentioned as connected with the young
poet by marriage. The affectionate intercourse which
appears to have always existed between them (La Fon-
taine addresses him as "my dear uncle") seems to show
that Madame La Fontaine's family did not consider that
the young husband was very much to blame for the
existing state of things. Jannart was banished for a
while to Limoges; and thither La Fontaine, who had
always found a friend in him, followed with a view of
cheering his exile. On the way, he had to pass the castle
of Amboise, where Fouquet was now confined, and treated
with a cruel severity, every window of his prison cham-
ber being blocked up, and light admitted only at the
roof. La Fontaine had hoped for an interview; but the
sentry to whom he applied "had not the key,"—or at
least made that excuse. He declares in a letter to his
wife, that he stood a long time in meditation at the door,
imagining to himself all the miseries of his friend's
condition; and that he "could not tear himself from the
spot until nightfall." There is no good reason to doubt
the literal truth of the statement: such a manifestation
of feeling was very French, and therefore very like La
Fontaine possibly, too, in his case, his well-known
48
LA FONTAINE.
absence of mind might have had something to do with
this long and melancholy reverie.
He wrote frequent and kindly letters to his wife dur
ing his journey and his stay at Limoges, entering into
pleasant gossiping details of his daily life and proceed-
ings. These letters are interspersed, as his letters usually
were, with light and graceful verses.
He appears to
make her quite the recipient of his confidences, describ-
ing to her, in almost every letter, the impressions made
upon his very susceptible feelings by the various pretty
women whom he had the pleasure of meeting by the way.
He is accused of showing throughout this correspondence.
a want of affection for his wife; and certainly the letters
are not such as would be written by any husband to an
absent wife where there existed a deep and mutual at-
tachment. But it must be remembered that such attach-
ment rarely did exist, and was rarely looked for, in a
French marriage of the seventeenth century. The curious
feature in the correspondence is the proof it affords of
the very good terms the young couple were on, in spite of
the remarkable elasticity of the tie that connected them.
La Fontaine writes to his wife very much as he might
have written to any other lady who he knew would take
an interest in his movements, and in whom he took an
interest himself. He tells her, in one of the earlier letters,
that it was really very good in one of his indolent
nature to write to her at all; more especially when he
who was so fond of sleep, as she knew-was sitting up
till one o'clock to do it, and had to continue his journey
early in the morning. "Who will talk to me," he says,
"after this, of husbands who sacrifice themselves to their
wives? I claim to surpass them all.”
49
The opening of the first letter supplies a hint of some
deficiencies in the young wife which may perhaps explain
her having failed to attach her husband more closely :-
LETTERS TO HIS WIFE.
"You never would read any travels but those of the
'Knights of the Round Table;' but my travels well deserve
that you should read them. For all that, you will find in
them matter hardly suited to your taste; it will be my busi-
ness to dress it up so as to give you pleasure, and yours to
praise my good intentions in the matter, even if they be not
attended with success. It may possibly even come to pass
that if you can enjoy this narrative of mine, you may after-
wards learn to appreciate more serious reading. You neither
play, nor work, nor busy yourself about your household;
and except the hours which your good friends and neigh-
bours bestow on you out of charity, you find amusement in
nothing but romances. Consider, I pray you, what
a good thing it will be if even in this light and jocular
fashion of mine I accustom you to read history, either of
places or of persons; it will be something to preserve you
from ennui all your life."
•
The terms in which the writer reminds his wife of
her love for novels and gossip have been considered
somewhat harsh: possibly her indolent habits had given
him some annoyance-for those who are indolent them-
selves are naturally intolerant of that fault in those about
them; but no expressions in this or other letters leave
the impression that he wrote in an unkindly spirit. At
the close of this letter he sends his love to the little
"marmot" (the child was now ten years old), and bids
the mother tell him that, if he is good, he will perhaps
bring him home a little girl to play with. In another
letter he explains that he will leave the description of
the castle of Richelieu till another time, because it will
F.C.-XIV.
D
50
LA FONTAINE.
give him the opportunity of asking more frequently for
news of his wife, and of economising a source of amuse-
ment in his letters, which may, he hopes, enable her to
pass the days of his "exile" from her less wearily. It
is true that he does not seem to find, or profess to find,
this exile very wearisome to himself, or dream for a
moment that his wife should expect him to find it so:
'I walk, I sleep, and pass my time with the ladies who
call upon us:" and he describes the attractions of some
among them with a frankness which we must hope was
appreciated by a French wife of those days more than
it would probably be by an English one of the present.
He remained in this "exile" at Limoges something,
less than a year, when he returned to Château-Thierry.
But it was not to lead a very domestic life.
The seign-
eur of the place, the Duc de Bouillon, was then absent
on a campaign against the Turks; and his young duchess,
a niece of Cardinal Mazarin, a clever and lively woman,
found La Fontaine's company a great relief to her country
solitude. He spent much of his time at the chateau,
and when the Duchess removed to Paris on the follow-
ing spring to await her accouchement, it did not require
much persuasion to induce La Fontaine to take up his
quarters there also. His wife accompanied him, and
there appears to have been no scandal as to his relations
with the Duchess. But the capital had not so much
attraction for Madame La Fontaine as for her husband,
and it cannot be supposed that she enjoyed there very
much of his society. She soon went back to the retire-
ment of Château-Thierry; and he never returned again
to his home there except on flying visits, made generally
for the purpose of selling some portion of the little family.
F
HIS FRIENDS IN PARIS.
51
property to meet his current expenses. At last he sold
the old house itself, and his wife lived from that time
in a house in the town, lent to her by the Duc de
Bouillon.
In the capital, besides the general society to which
his friendship with the Duchess would give him ready
introduction, he formed one of a little circle of intimate
friends who were to make themselves great names in
literature, though most of them were as yet comparatively
unknown. These were Molière, who, though a year
younger than La Fontaine, had already written and acted
in some of his best plays; Racine and Boileau, both
considerably younger, though with the former, once a
clerical student like himself, he had a long previous
acquaintance; and Claude Chapelle, a man of wealth
and leisure, who preferred the unrestrained and pleasant
companionship (it would be scarcely fair to call it Bo-
hemianism) of his literary friends to the greater and
gayer world, to which he had easy access. He is said
to have supplied Molière with some of the
in his comedies; and he enjoyed reading his account of
his own travels, which he soon afterwards published,
such an appreciative audience. Here is La Fontaine's
description of their meetings, which were usually held
in Boileau's apartments :
best scenes
1
"Four friends, whose acquaintance had begun upon Mount
Parnassus, held a kind of club, which I might call an academy
had their number been larger, and had they regarded learn-
ing as much as enjoyment. The first thing they did was to
banish from among them all formal conversation, and every-
thing that smacked of academic discussion. When they were
met together, and had talked enough about their amuse-
ments, if chance led them to touch on any question of science
i
52
LA FONTAINE.
or of literature, they took advantage of the occasion; but at
the same time without dwelling too long on one subject, but
flying off purposely to another, like bees who meet with
divers kinds of flowers on their way. Envy, malice, or party
spirit, found no voice among them. They adored the works
of the ancients, yet did not refuse to those of the moderns
such praise as was their due. They spoke of their own per-
formances with modesty, and gave each other honest advice,
whenever one of them happened to be seized with the malady
of the age, and wrote a book-which happened but seldom."1
He goes on to say that Polyphile ("the man of many
friends," or perhaps rather "of many tastes,"-under
which name he not inaptly introduces himself) was the
greatest offender among them in this respect. Neither
the great dramatist, nor the future critic and satirist,
was as yet so well known upon "Mount Parnassus" as
the young poet of society, though he was content for the
present to be known chiefly in manuscript. But it is
curious that within two years the four friends-Racine,
Boileau, Chapelle, and La Fontaine-all made their first
serious appearance in print. They must have formed a
very pleasant literary brotherhood, and the friendship
Which could stand the test of free mutual criticism must
have been of no ordinary complexion. It went even fur-
ther than this: the friends extended this corrective disci-
pline to each other's moral habits. Chapelle, with money
always at his command, and with a wider circle of ac-
quaintance outside this little band of writers, was much
too fond of wine; and Boileau took him to task upon
the subject. Once, when these remonstrances had been
pressed earnestly during a walk, Chapelle persuaded his
friend to enter a wine-shop with him, and to continue
1 Introd. to 'Les Amours de Psyche.'
RELATIONS WITH HIS WIFE.
53
the argument there. It grew more spirited on both sides.
over a first and second bottle, and Chapelle was very
careful to replenish his friend's glass. The result was
that the moral lecturer (whose head was probably not so
well seasoned as his pupil's), before he left the place,
furnished an example in awkward contrast with his pre-
cepts. It is said that from that time he wisely discon-
tinued his attempts to reclaim Chapelle; but afterwards
he and Racine took upon themselves the proverbially
hopeless office of trying to set right La Fontaine's rela-
tions with his wife, which appear to have now become
more distant than ever. She had retired, as has been
said, to their house in the country, and there had been a
formal separation of goods and chattels. The two friends
persuaded the husband to make a purpose journey to
Château-Thierry to see her, and to effect, if possible,
some kind of reconciliation. He went, and was told that
his wife had gone to attend evening prayers; whereupon
he proceeded at once to sup with friend in the neigh-
bourhood. The visit extended to two days, at the end of
which he returned to Paris without any further attempt
at an interview with Madame La Fontaine.
The pro
bability is that, as on other occasions, he had entirely
forgotten the object of his journey,—though he did not
give this explanation to his friends. There is, however,
another version of this story, which has the authority
of one of La Fontaine's granddaughters. Her account
was that on this occasion there was a conspiracy on the
part of his friends in the neighbourhood, who handed.
the too facile guest on from one house to another, and
so delayed the intended interview with his wife; that
several days of very bad weather followed, which still
54
LA FONTAINE.
kept him from going to see her; and that then he had
to return to Paris to attend a meeting of the Academy.
She also maintained that the relations between her
grandparents had always been more kindly than was
generally supposed; that he frequently paid his wife
long visits at Château-Thierry; and that Racine and
Despreaux (Boileau) sometimes accompanied him.¹ The
husband and wife met at least once again some years.
after the misadventure just mentioned, when some kind
of formal reconciliation seems to have taken place. She
survived him thirteen years.
Ca
-"
In the little circle of congenial friends which sur-
rounded him in Paris, La Fontaine was always the
spoilt and petted child, as he was throughout his life,
in whatever society he found himself. He took no
care of his own affairs, and other people felt bound to
take care of him. He had odd ways of his own, to
which others accommodated themselves. There must
have been some gream about him, which carried
away men and women alike; for, as is so seldom the
I was as privileged a favourite with one sex as
with the other. Racine and the other friends who have
been named were accustomed to speak of him among
themselves as "le bonhomme,' -a term but imperfectly
Englished by "the good fellow." They made all sorts
of jokes upon his continual absence of mind: he would
sit sometimes in a fit of perfect abstraction, looking, it
was said, like an idiot. Racine and Boileau were on one
occasion inclined to carry their jests on this subject
rather far. "Those two gentlemen," said Molière to
another of the company,
may plume themselves as
1 Lacroix.
CC
SOCIAL ECCENTRICITIES.
55
66
much as they please, but they will never throw our good
fellow there into the shade." It is more easy to under-
stand the appreciation by a few intimate friends of a
character such as La Fontaine's, than his ready accept-
ance and great popularity in general society. Most ac-
counts represent him as having no conversational powers,
making a bungle of such stories as he told, blurting out
the most awkward speeches, and much given to fits
of silence which were no less awkward for his enter-
tainers. "He would either not talk at all," says one of
his contemporaries, or would talk about Plato.". The
various stories that were currently told of his social
eccentricities could not all have been inventions. When
one of his many acquaintances had invited two or three
friends specially to meet him and enjoy his conversation,
he remained utterly dumb during the whole time of din-
ner (though he "ate and drank like any four," says one
of the party), and afterwards went quietly to sleep.
When he awoke late in the evening, he began to apolo-
gise, which the company politely assured him was quite
unnecessary, after which he was silent again. "He
might possibly in imagination be animating a frog, or
a fox, or a grasshopper," continues the narrator, "but
to all appearance he was a mere machine without a soul.
At last we pitched him into a fucre, and bade him
adieu for ever." At a supper given by Boileau, whose
brother, a doctor of the Sorbonne, was present, the con-
versation turned upon St Augustine, on whom the divine
pronounced an elaborate eulogy. La Fontaine had been
meanwhile lost in one of his deep reveries, but did not
wish it to be supposed that he had been inattentive. He
roused himself, and asked Dr Boileau, "Did he really
56
LA FONTAINE.
|
h
+
think Augustine was cleverer than Rabelais?" The Sor-
bonnist looked at him for a few moments from head to
foot: "Take care, M. La Fontaine," said he, "you have
put on one of your stockings inside out," as in fact he
had. Getting tired of his company at an entertainment
given by an ostentatious host, who had invited the
popular author chiefly as a "lion," he took his departure
early on the plea that he had to attend a meeting of the
Academy. When a too matter-of-fact friend looked at his
watch, and assured him that he would find himself there
much too soon- "Ah," said La Fontaine, "but I shall
take the longest way."
A certain amount of awkwardness in general society is
not uncommon to men of genius, and by no means in-
compatible with the power of gaining the warmest affec-
tion of personal friends. La Bruyère is well understood.
to have had La Fontaine in his mind when he drew the
following sketch :—
"A man appears heavy, dull, and stupid: he does not
know how to talk, or to relate what he has just seen. But
let him set to work to write, and we have a model of good
narrative he can make beasts speak, and trees, and even
stones, and all things that have no voice. There is in his
writings nothing but ease and elegance, and the most natural
grace and delicacy.'
"1
The sketch might almost equally well have been meant
for Goldsmith
"Who wrote like an angel, and talked like poor Poll,"
and whose character had very much in common with the
Frenchman's. But there was another light in which La
1Jugements,' 55.
BEHAVIOUR IN SOCIETY.
57
Fontaine appeared to those who knew him well, and
the remarks attributed to his friend the Marquis de
Sable are no doubt as true, from that point of view, as
those of La Bruyère from the other:
"He was like one of those plain vases without ornament
which contain treasures of infinite value within. He took
no pains with his person, he was always very simply
dressed; he had a heavy look about the face. Yet, when
one looked at him a little more attentively, one found expres-
sion in his eyes; and a certain liveliness which even age had
not been able to extinguish, made one see that he was any-
thing but what he appeared to be. It is also true that
among those who did not know him or did not suit him.
he was gloomy and absent, and that even with those who
pleased him he was sometimes cold at the beginning of the
conversation. But when he began to be interested, and
took his part in the discussion, it was no longer the absent
dreamer; it was a man who spoke much and well, who in
quoting the ancients gave them a new charm; it was a
philosopher, but whose philosophy was that of a man of
the world; in a word, it was La Fontaine, and the La
Fontaine of the Fables.” 1'
The Abbé Barthélemy calls him "a poetical Brutus,
who put on the appearance of a simpleton (le bonhomme)
in order to conceal his good sense."
Yet, in spite of all these sins against the laws and
habits of good society (or was it, in some degree, because
of them?), he made for himself friends in no ordinary
sense of the word; friends who really loved him for
himself, furthered his interests, supplied his wants, and
made a home in their houses for the man to whom a
1 "Portrait par M. X-," prefixed to Mad. Ulrich's 'Euvres
Posthumes de La Fontaine.'
58
LA FONTAINE.
home of his own was so unnecessary and embarrassing a
possession.
It was in the second year of his residence in Paris,
when he was already forty-four years of age, that he
published the first portion of his Tales and Novels ;'
a volume of stories in familiar verse, drawn chiefly from
Italian sources. Many of these had been already pub-
lished separately at earlier dates, and had been suffi-
ciently popular. Their licentious character is well
known, and was unhappily no bar whatever to their
popularity even in the highest and most refined circles,
although here and there a voice was raised in reprehen-
sion, and the king himself professed to be offended by
their publication. A new instalment of these 'Tales,'
published by their author at a later date, was actually laid
under interdict by the police consorship, as having been
I
inted without privilege or permission, and as dangerous
to public morals. But we have to deal with La Fontaine,
in these pages, simply as the great French fable-writer;
and in that character he is entirely free from the stain
of immorality which rests on the author of the 'Contes
et Nouvelles,' which it is necessary only thus briefly to
notice. His first volume of Fables made its appearance
three years later, in 1668, and met with great success,
though his work was yet not so thoroughly appreciated
as it has been by later generations of readers. This first
series contains six books only, and the fables consist, for
the most part, of happy versions and adaptations from
Æsop and Phædrus. He claims for them nothing more;
for in his dedication to the little Dauphin, then between
six and seven years old, he says, "I sing the heroes of
whom Esop is the father." Many of these fables had
F
MADAME DE LA SABLIÈRE.
already circulated privately amongst his friends, and were
now valued none the less as being old acquaintances.
It was soon after this that the author lost his earliest
and most influential patrons. The Duchess-dowager of
Orleans, to whom he had been appointed gentleman of the
chamber, died: the Duc de Bouillon was exiled. But
new protectors arose for him, now as always. The great
Condé supplied him with money, and Madame de
la Sablière gave him a home, which continued open to
him for twenty years. Young, pretty, rich, and accom-
plished-clever without any affectation of learning (she
is said to have been a fair mathematician and Greek
scholar), she delighted in opening her house, and the
refined circle in which she moved, to the men of genius
who needed such encouragement. François Bernier,
"the handsome philosopher" (of the Epicurean sort),
but better known for his travels in India, was her guest
at the same time as La Fontaine. With Madame de la
Sablière and her friends our author spent his time in the
careless leisure of which he was so fond, and to which
he had become accustomed, working leisurely, when so
disposed, at the composition and repolishing of his
fables, the second instalment of which was not published
until ten years after the first. In this second volume,
which contained Books vii. to xi., the subjects were
chiefly taken from the collection of Eastern fables bear-
ing the names of Bidpai or Pilpay. The author himself
considered this portion as his best, and it completely
established his reputation. It was dedicated to Madame
de Montespan, the royal favourite of the day, and closed
with a poetical "epilogue," in which he complimented
the monarch himself upon his recent success, as the
59
60
LA FONTAINE.
conqueror who had "subdued Europe," while the writer's
humble muse had been pursuing her innocent labours,
and whose victories would supply far more glorious sub-
jects to future poets than any apologue or fable. He
had obtained leave to present a copy of his new book to
the king in person, and learnt the epilogue by heart in
order to recite it before his Majesty. This he did very
fluently—he is said to have been an excellent reader and
reciter of his own verses ¹-but when it came to the pre-
sentation of the volume, it turned out that, with his usual
carelessness, he had left it behind him. Louis was prob-
ably more amused than displeased; at all events, he pre-
sented La Fontaine with a purse of gold. To complete the
misadventure, he left this too behind him in the carriage
which had conveyed him to Versailles, and it was found,
upon inquiry, carefully stowed away under the cushions.
It has been remarked that the great monarch, in spite of
his graciousness to the poet on this and some other oc-
casions, never conferred upon him any of those substan-
tial marks of his favour which many other men of letters
enjoyed. The reason is probably to be found, not in
moral scruples on the part of Louis, but in the unfriendly
feeling of Colbert, who had succeeded Fouquet as fin-
ance minister, and who could not forgive the loyal at-
tachment which La Fontaine had shown to the rival
whom Colbert had helped to ruin.
He was already sixty-three years of age when he was
1 On the other hand, M. Titon de Tillet, in his 'Parnasse François,'
says that La Fontaine never could (or, at least, never would) recite
one of his fables all through: but that he had a friend named Gaches
who frequently accompanied him, to whom he used to refer those
who asked for a recital. "I cannot," he would say; "but Gaches
there can "—and the latter used to do it with great success.
61
proposed as a member of the Academy. There was a
strong opposition to his election. Rose, the president,
threw down on the table a copy of the unfortunate
'Tales,' and asked indignantly whether the members
would disgrace themselves by electing into their body at
man whose works had been branded by a police censure.
The king, too, had been very anxious that Boileau, who
had just published some of his best works, should be
elected to the vacancy; and when La Fontaine was
found to have the majority of votes, Louis refused to
confirm the election. In this state of dead-lock things
continued for some months, when another vacancy oc-
curred, to which Boileau was elected; and then, and not
till then, the previous election of La Fontaine was con-
firmed by the king, and his admission into the Academy
took place. At the meeting held for his reception he
read his new fable of "The Fox, the Wolf, and the
Horse" so charmingly, that he was begged to read it
again. On the same occasion he also read a complimen-
tary epistle in verse to his benefactress, Madame de la
Sablière. A disappointed amour had changed her by
this time from the gay leader of society into the devout
penitent; and she spent much of her time in ministering
in the Hospital of Incurables. The poet did not much
like the change, and the effect upon him was to drive
him into much more dangerous company. Sometimes
he would now receive his friends in his own quasi
bachelor apartment, fitted up, he tells us, with some
taste he had there a harpsichord, and busts of the great
ancient philosophers in terra cotta; but he was far from
being a philosopher in his moral habits.
At this time of his life he was under some temptation
ELECTED INTO THE ACADEMY.
62
LA FONTAINE.
to take up his residence in England. The predilections.
of the Second Charles Stuart, a Roman Catholic at heart,
and a Frenchman in many of his tastes, had drawn to
the English Court a little colony of French who had one
good reason or another for leaving their own country.
Most of these were persons of good birth and position ;
and among the best known of them were Madame de
Mazarin (a niece of the great Cardinal, and sister to the
poet's early patroness, the Duchess de Bouillon), and her
friend and favourite, Charles de St Evremond, who had
fled from France from fear of being compromised in the
ruin of Fouquet, to whom he had remained, like La
Fontaine, loyal in the hour of his adversity. The lady
had her own reasons for wishing to put the Channel be-
tween herself and her husband; and she probably thought
that La Fontaine would be a more amusing companion.
than the insensate Englishmen to whose society she was
often condemned. When her sister, the Duchess de
Bouillon, joined her in her exile, they both tried to per-
suade La Fontaine to come to England, and make one of
a circle whose very unrestrained ease and freedom was
likely to suit him exactly. M. de Bonrepaux, then
French ambassador in London, joined in the invitation.
It was a flattering offer, and he had heard that the
English ladies were "good to look at.'
"good to look at." But he was now
growing somewhat too old (he was in his sixty-sixth year,
and suffering from rheumatism) to uproot himself from
French soil: he was thoroughly a Frenchman. Madame de
la Sablière, though he saw but little of her since the change.
in her mode of life, was still his kind hostess and bene-
factress; and he had lately formed a new and pleasant
friendship with M. d'Hervart and his young and pretty
INVITED TO ENGLAND.
63
wife, at whose house he had become a constant guest.
So he made excuses, as amiably as he could, and began
a clever gossiping correspondence, which he kept up for
some time, with St Evremond and Bonrepaux, while he
addressed to the ladies poetical epistles in his most grace-
ful style of compliment. A previous attempt had been
made, three years before, to draw the pleasant French-
man over to the English Court by a lady who declared that
he was not sufficiently appreciated at that of the French
king. This was Lady Harvey, sister of Lord Montague,
at that time English ambassador in France, to whom she
was paying a visit. He did not allow himself to be per-
suaded, but he repaid the compliment by writing and
dedicating to her a fable (or rather apologue) of very
inferior merit—"Le Renard Anglais "¹--in which he ex-
pressed great admiration for the English character-
their depth of thought, their attainments in science, their
great penetration, and even their lively wit (esqrit)—
which must have been straining very far the language
of compliment, as coming from a Frenchman, to his
fair correspondent. Even their dogs, he declared, had a
keener scent than those of his own country, and their
foxes were more clever. The one point in which he found
the English deficient was in their love of life was it
a polite way of saying that life in England must be very
dull? At any rate, to England he did not go, nor does
he seem to have entertained on either occasion any seri-
ous idea of such a step. There were two things (besides
the good looks of the ladies) which, he confessed, almost
tempted him at least to make the voyage. One attrac-
tion we can very well understand: he would have liked
1 xii. 23.
64
LA FONTAINE.
to meet the poet Waller, still apparently a gay old cour-
tier, and scattering his well-turned verses amongst his
fair friends, like La Fontaine, though he was at that
date nearly eighty-two. La Fontaine tells the Duchess
de Bouillon, in one of his poctical epistles, how Anacreon,
Waller, St Evremond, and himself would have formed,
he conceives, a very pleasant quartette. Anacreon, alas!
was gone, and he and Waller, as well as St Evremond,
were growing very old: "But where," he asks, " on all
the banks of Hippocrene, will you find any who show
so few of the wrinkles of age in their verse?"
Waller died in that year, and when his brother poet
heard the news from St Evremond, he remarked upon
the happiness of living to such a green old age,-"a
favour which he never expects of Heaven for him-
self."
The other wish which he expresses in regard to Eng-
land seems strange enough now to us: he longed to pay
his respects to James II.
"One thing which I should wish, above all others, is that
an opportunity could be procured for me of paying my re-
spects to his Majesty. He is a prince who well deserves
that one should cross the seas to see him, he has so many
of the qualities which become a sovereign, and a true passion
for glory. There are not many who address themselves in
that direction, though all men in those high positions ought
to do so."
The last Stuart king has so few admirers, that it is but
fair to give him all the advantage of this compliment.
from La Fontaine.
Between Madame d'Hervart and himself there seems to
have existed the innocent and half-romantic attachment
MADAME D'HERVART.
He
that sometimes attracts a young and fascinating woman
to a man of twice her own age. She was so charming,
he says, that it would have been possible, in her case, to
get over the great objection of her being one's wife.
sang her praises, in his letters to Bonrepaux, as "Silvia,"
proclaiming that she was to be known by that name (for-
getting that he had in earlier days assigned it to Madame.
Fouquet) "throughout all the domains that he possessed
on Mount Parnassus ;" and Silvia and her pretty young
friends, married and unmarried, petted and caressed the
old poet to his great satisfaction, and admired the verses
he still threw off occasionally, in which each fair one's
charms were chanted in turn. He even fell desperately
in love with one of them, Mille. de Beaulieu. When he
parted from her on one occasion at the D'Hervarts' coun-
try-house, instead of taking the route to Paris, as he had
intended, he found himself toward evening at Louvres,
quite on a different road, so entirely occupied was he
with thoughts of the young lady. The tale (so the hero
of it wrote) would make quite a little Iliad. "Everybody
laughed at the story," wrote the Abbé Vergier in reply,-
"and no one was surprised." What could be expected from
a man who got up in the morning not knowing what
he was going to do, and went to bed without the least
idea of what he had been doing all day"? The only
wonder, the Abbé added, with French gallantry, was
that from a reverie on such a subject he should have
awoke soon. But his adventures, the writer thought,
resembled the Odyssey rather than the Iliad; in fact,
La Fontaine's wanderings put him very much in mind
of those of Ulysses,-with this difference, that the Greek
hero roamed the seas in the hope of revisiting his wife,
(C
F.C. -XIV.
E
65
66
LA FONTAINE.
while La Fontaine seemed willing to encounter any peril
to escape from his one.
In these later years of his life he wrote several small
pieces for the stage, some of which were acted with
moderate success, as the name of their author would of
itself insure, but there is nothing else to preserve them
from oblivion. Molière is said to have assisted him in
the composition of some of these pieces; but there are
no traces of the great dramatist's hand. One piece
called "Astrea," a kind of lyric tragedy, had a narrow
escape of being hissed, and was only played some half-
dozen times. He had, in fact, some difficulty in getting
it played at all. At the first representation he was
present, and sat behind some ladies who did not know
him. Every now and then he exclaimed aloud-"The
piece is detestable!" "Nay, Monsieur," said one of
the ladies, turning round, "it is not so bad; the author
is very clever--M. de la Fontaine." Ladies," he re-
plied, "the thing is worthless: that M. de la Fontaine of
whom you speak is a very stupid fellow-and I am he."
One of his earliest attempts in this direction was made
at the request of the composer Lulli, who obtained
from him a promise to write the words of an operetta.
Lulli tried to bind him down to the production of
the work by a particular day,-a condition totally re-
pugnant to La Fontaine's habits and slow method of
working. Then, when the piece was nearly finished,
the composer wanted alterations of all kinds made in
it, until both parties grew thoroughly weary of the bus-
iness, and Lulli accepted an opera from another author
instead. La Fontaine, however, got his "Daphne" put
upon the stage in another way, and revenged himself
67
by a poetical satire on Lulli, under the name of 'Le
Florentin,' the composer being a native of Florence.
In this effusion he speaks of himself as having been
among others the dupe of this foreigner; he, "the nurs-
ling of the Muses, a grey-haired child, who ought never
to have been a dupe in any shape, but who always was,
and always would be." There is one fairly good scene
in it; but the satire is not very bitter, and therefore
not very amusing. The worst the poet wishes his
enemy is, that he were in "Abraham's bosom."
conclusion runs somewhat in these terms:-
The
HIS FEUD WITH LULLI.
"And ever, as morning and evening come,
His wife and children pray at home,
And all mankind, both great and small,
Pray with one voice, if they pray at all,
<
Of your singular goodness, powers divine,
Deliver us of this Florentine!"
"
The feud between poet and composer was of very short
duration; and though La Fontaine wisely forbore mak-
ing any more engagements to write operas, he furnished
Lulli with some prologues, which were much more in
his line. He also at one time began a tragedy on the
subject of "Achilles," and got as far as two acts in
manuscript. Tragedy has always been a favourite field
of enterprise with both authors and actors to whose
powers it was least suited; and La Fontaine seems to
have been wise enough to discover for himself that
there was this incongruity in his own case. His friend
the Duchess de Bouillon persuaded him at one time to
write a poem on "Le Quinquina" (quinine), a remedy
which was then coming into fashionable use—“le remède
Anglais," as it was called-and which was said to have
68
LA FONTAINE.
cured no less a personage than the minister Colbert. It
will remind an English reader of Cowper taking "The
Sofa" as his subject, at the request of his dear friend
Lady Austen; but "Quinquina" was even less successful.
66
The too facile versatility of aims rather than of powers,
which led him thus to attempt so many various styles,
did not pass without reprehension from some of his most
sincere admirers. Madame de Sévigné, who thought his
Fables all that was charming, remarks upon this with
some impatience in a letter to one of her friends.
"" I
should very much like to write a fable on purpose for
him to make him understand how wretched it is for
him to try to force his genius out of its proper sphere,
and how this foolish attempt to sing in all keys makes
bad music. He ought not to step beyond the power he
has of telling a story well."
It is of this later period of his life that an anecdote is
told which shows that his absence of mind and utterly
unpractical habits had not changed as he grew older.
He had a lawsuit going on about some property, of
which he took no heed whatever. A friend of his, hap-
pening to hear that the cause was fixed for trial in
Paris on a certain day, wrote to him at the country-
house where he was staying, and even took the precau-
tion to send him a horse for his journey. La Fontaine
duly set out, and got within a league of Paris, when he
turned aside to call on a friend. There he staid all
night, and forgot all about his lawsuit until next day,
when it was too late to put in an appearance, and the
cause was decided against him in his absence. When
he heard the result, he declared he was glad of it-he
"always hated business." He was like Montaigne's
-
69
young friend, who told him one day with great glee that
his mother "had lost her suit," which had been dragging
on for some time past-" he was as pleased," says Mon-
taigne, as if it had been a cough, or a fever, or some-
thing very disagreeable to keep."
،،
ness.
In 1692 La Fontaine was attacked with serious ill-
Notwithstanding his irregular life, he had never
lost his early religious impressions, and would probably
have always professed himself a good Catholic, so far as
theory went. Madame de la Sablière, when she heard of
his danger, came from her retreat purposely to exhort
him to think of his soul. His friend Racine added his
affectionate entreaties. The Curé of St Roch, having
discovered that a clever and earnest young Abbé of his
acquaintance, namel Pouget, was the son of an old friend
of the poet, sent him to make such impression as he
could by religious conversation. La Fontaine was
pleased with his young visitor, and talked to him freely
and openly. He had for some time, he said, taken to
reading the New Testament. It had impressed him,
apparently, even more than the prophecy of Baruch.
"It is a very good book, I assure you," he remarked
quite innocently to the young priest - an excellent
book." One doctrine only had not commanded his
assent he could not reconcile the idea of eternal pun-
ishment with the goodness of God. The discussion be-
tween them on this and other subjects continued for ten
or twelve days, Pouget visiting the sick man twice.
daily. There is no reason to doubt either the honesty or
accuracy of the view he took of La Fontaine's character.
He found him, he says, very frank and outspoken - "as
simple in evil as in good;" very ready to admit the
CC
SERIOUS ILLNESS.
70
LA FONTAINE,
truth when brought before him, and utterly free from
hypocrisy or double-dealing. This corresponds with the
testimony of his dear friend De Maucroix-"I do not
think he ever told a lie in all his life." A very touching
evidence of the warm affection which the gentleness of his
nature inspired in all those who were brought into close
relations with him, is the anxiety of the old woman who
attended him in his illness. She feared that the fre-
quent visits of the zealous young priest fatigued the
invalid. "Don't torment him so, M. l'Abbé; he is
more stupid than wicked." And once, when she had
heard Pouget dwelling on the terrors of the divine
wrath, she called him aside and said earnestly—“ Sir,
God will never have the heart to damn him!"
▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬
<
The exhortations of the Abbé were not without
effect. The sufferer had persisted throughout their in-
terviews, that if he confessed it should be to no other
priest but him. Pouget pleaded his youth and inexperi-
ence he was only twenty-six. But La Fontaine was
firm, and Pouget began to prepare him for confession.
The young Abbé was no speaker of smooth things.
The authorship of the Contes' was the great scandal of
which the sick man had been guilty against society: the
reparation must be as public as the offence. He must
not only ask pardon of God and of the Church—he must
not only promise to sanction no future edition, but he
must abjure the work either in presence of chosen wit-
nesses, before he received the last sacraments of the
Church, or before the Academy, should he recover his
health sufficiently to attend another meeting. The terms
were stringent, and La Fontaine naturally winced at
them. IIe protested, with a kind of moral ignorance
PENITENCE.
71
which almost justified the verdict of his nurse, that he
could not see how the 'Contes' were so dangerous to mor-
ality-"they had never done him any harm." And he
had already tried to do something, he said, in the way
of expiation; he had made an offer to another confessor,
not long before, to give the profits of a new edition in
alms to the poor and the Church; and that good man,
not feeling capable of deciding so nice a case of con-
science, had replied cautiously that he "would take
higher advice."
But the honest expostulations of the good priest found
their reward. The poet not only consented to the public
abjuration of his objectionable Tales, but also to another
demand of his confessor, less justifiable in modern opin-
ion, that he should commit to the flames a comedy which
he had just written,-because the theatrical profession
lay under the ban of the Church. He grew so much
worse, that it was thought necessary for him to receive
the viaticum, and preparations were made for this sol-
emn ceremony. It must have been a striking and al-
most singular spectacle. A deputation of Academici-
ans accompanied the Host as it was borne in procession
to the sick man's house. The chamber which he occu-
pied was crowded with men of high rank and with well-
known authors; but we miss-unhappily without sur-
prise the presence, in what was believed to be the
closing scene of his life, of either wife or son. There,
reclining in an arm-chair, with a table forming a tempo-
rary altar in front of him, La Fontaine made before that
distinguished company a formal expression of repentance
for his offence against the morals of society. The
Abbé, after reciting the prayers of the Church, addressed
72
LA FONTAINE,
an exhortation to the penitent, and recommended him
earnestly to the prayers of those assembled. Then all
fell on their knees while the solemn rite was adminis-
tered. Such was the impression made by this remark-
able scene, that young Pouget shortly afterwards found
himself pressed by applications from persons of high
rank to become their confessor also.
After a long illness, however, La Fontaine so far re-
covered as to live two years longer in a somewhat feeble
state, unfitted for much conversation or enjoyment. In
1694 he gave to the press the twelfth and last book of
the Fables. Few of these were new, most of them hav-
ing been published before in company with some pieces.
by his friend De Maueroix, in a volume called 'Works
in Prose and Poetry;' and some of them were not fables
at all. About this time also he employed himself in
versifying some of the Psalms, and read before the
Academy a paraphrase in prose of the hymn "Dies
Iræ." He had indeed before this date appeared as a
sacred poet; for he had been prevailed upon by Henry,
Count of Brienne, who had become a brother of the
Oratory, to contribute to a little volume of religious
miscellanies a long paraphrase of the 17th Psalm, and
an epistle dedicatory, signed with his name, to the
Prince de Conti. During his long illness Madame de
la Sablière had died; but other friends did not fail him.
As he was leaving the door of that lady's house, where
he had been paying a last melancholy visit, M. d'Hervart
met him. "My dear La Fontaine," said he, "I was
1
1 Recueil de Poésies Chrétiennes et Diverses.'
(
The volume was
published under the auspices of the brotherhood of Port-Royal, and
in the selection any allusion to love was carefully excluded.
PARTIAL RECOVERY.
73
looking for you, to ask you to make your home with
me."
"I was just on my way to you," replied the poet.
The good Madame d'Hervart treated the elderly child
(much older than herself) like a careful mother. He
had always been somewhat careless of his person, and
this carelessness grew upon him in his later years. He
had worn one suit of clothes so long, that at last Madame
d'Hervart quietly had them removed from his chamber,
and new ones substituted. He wore them for two days,
quite unconscious of any change, until a friend met him
in the street, and remarked upon his unusual spruceness.
Little is told of him between this and his death in
1695, in his seventy-fourth year. In the previous year
he had collected together the fables which form the
twelfth and last book, most of which had already either
appeared in print or had circulated in manuscript. He
did not relapse in any way after his act of repentance;
it is said that he was asked to add to the Tales' for
a new edition, and steadily refused. He also renounced
all share of the profits of an edition printed in Holland,
on hearing of which the young Duke of Burgundy sent
him a present of a large sum of money, in order that he
might be no loser by the refusal. At his death it was
found that he was wearing a hair-shirt next his body.
His last letter to his old and valued friend De Maucroix
is simple and affecting:-
"You are assuredly mistaken, my dear friend, if it be
true, as the Bishop of Soissons told me, that you think I am
more ill in mind than in body. He said so to me, to keep
up my courage; but it is not that which fails me. I assure
you that your best friend can hardly count on fifteen days
of life. For these two last months I have never stirred out,
74
LA FONTAINE,
ļ
except now and then to go to the Academy, because that
amuses me. Yesterday, as I was coming away from there,
I was seized with such weakness in the middle of the Rue
du Chantre, that I thought I was surely going to die. Oh,
my dear friend, to die is nothing; but do you consider that
I must appear before God? You know how I have lived.
Before you receive this note, the gates of eternity will per-
haps have opened for me."
Little more than a month afterwards he died at the
house of his good friends the D'Hervarts, on April 13,
1695, in his seventy-fourth year. He was buried in the
cemetery of St Joseph, in the parish of St Eustache, near
his friend Molière. A characteristic epitaph, much more
truthful than such compositions usually are, was found
after his death in his own handwriting :
"Poor Jean is gone; as he came, he went;
He ate up his lands as well as his rent;
For silver or gold his care was small:
For his time a fair division he found,
Spending one half in slumber sound,
And the rest in doing nothing at all."
Many have been La Fontaine's eulogists; but we may
content ourselves with the words of Fénelon. All the
moral aberrations of the poet and these cannot be
ignored by his most charitable apologist, however they
may be redeemed by the penitence of his later years
did not prevent the excellent archbishop from bearing
record in the strongest terms to the place which he held
in French literature, and the loss which the whole world
of letters, and the closer-drawn circle of private friends,
had alike sustained. His eulogy took the shape of a kind
of Latin essay, which he gave to his pupil, the young
Duke of Burgundy, to translate-not a very easy task.
FÉNELON'S EULOGY.
75
"Ah! a charming man he was! a second Æsop; in his
light and playful handling of his themes, superior to Phæd-
rus. Through him dumb animals found a voice, and taught
wisdom to men. Alas! La Fontaine is gone! O sorrow!
with him we have lost those saucy jests, that joyous laugh-
ter, that charming grace of diction, and the real learning
that lay beneath it all. Mourn for him, all ye who could
appreciate ingenious wit, a natural and unaffected style, an
elegance neither studied nor artificial! To him, and to him
alone among men of letters, was given a licence to be care-
less without detriment to his excellence. How far superior
is this carelessness of his to a more finished style! How
great a loss have we all sustained in his dear person! Mourn,
all ye votaries of the Muses! But there live still, and shall
always live, the beauties which he embodied in his sportive
verse; that charming trifling, that Attic wit, that sweet and
winning attraction. And we rank La Fontaine, in right of
his delightful talent, not amongst the writers of modern
date, but among the great names of antiquity. If you hesi-
tate to admit this, reader, open the book-what think you?
It is Anacreon whose sportive genius is there. It is Horace,
whether fancy-free or in the ardour of passion, who strikes
the lyre. Like Terence, he paints to the very life, in his
stories, the character and the dispositions of men. There
breathes throughout his work the exquisite taste and polish
of Virgil. Ah! when will the cleverest of the human race
match the admirable talk he puts into the mouth of his
animals?"
There is one writer from whom we might have ex-
pected an appreciative notice of La Fontaine, both as a
personal friend and as a literary critic. It has been re-
marked with surprise that Boileau, in his 'Art Poétique,'
has omitted fable altogether, as though it were unworthy
to be classed as one of the divisions of poetry; whereas
the acknowledged excellence which La Fontaine had
76
LA FONTAINE.
attained in that particular branch should alone have en-
titled it to a place in any comprehensive view of the
subject, especially by a French writer; and Boileau, it
might be naturally thought, would gladly have done so
much justice to his old friend. But the fact remains,
and remains without adequate explanation, that in
Boileau's pages there is no recognition either of fable or
of La Fontaine. It is true that their early friendship
appears soon to have been broken up, but neither jeal-
ousy nor disagreement is alleged to have been the cause.
Their paths ran separate: Boileau's morals became strict-
er, and La Fontaine's grew more lax; and this is one
reason assigned, surely quite insufficient, for this omission
of his name. Boileau is said by some to have made the
excuse that La Fontaine was only an imitator, and not
an original writer. It must be remembered also that
Aristotle had treated fable as a branch of rhetoric, and
not of poetry; and it is possible that Boileau may have
shared to some extent the opinion of Patru, who held
that the domains of poetry and of fable were quite dis-
tinct that the perfection of the latter lay in a terse
brevity, which was overlaid rather than embellished by
the graces of verse. He had given this opinion when
La Fontaine consulted him as to his design of versifying
Æsop and it will appear from the poet's own preface
that it was not without some misgiving that he had dis-
regarded the advice. Fables had been put into verse
long before La Fontaine's day, and he professed to con-
sider his own work inferior to the Latin iambics of
Phædrus; but that, as Fontenelle is said to have re-
marked, was only "his own stupidity." He was the
first who adorned fable with the true graces of poetry;

77
and Boileau was perhaps slow to recognise the fact that
his contemporary had thus created a new branch of
poetical literature. He did not foresee how much the
reputation of La Fontaine, among future generations of
readers, would outgrow his own.
Another distinguished fellow-countryman is said to
have rendered him an unwilling homage, all the more
remarkable because it was extorted in spite of his pre-
judice. But in this case the character of the critic ex-
plains the ungracious form of the recognition. Frederick
the Second of Prussia, at one of his informal levées, at
which Voltaire was present, praised the Fables with some
enthusiasm. Voltaire sneeringly remarked that if they
were examined impartially, not one of them could stand
the test of criticism. The king defied him to prove his
assertion. Voltaire was ashamed to retreat, and ac-
cepted the challenge. At the next meeting, he found a
magnificent copy of the work laid on the table at which
he generally sat. He took it up, and said he would
choose a fable at random. He read a first, a second, a
third, and a fourth-turning the pages here and there.
At last he pitched the volume across the room in dis-
gust, and exclaimed-" Why, the book is nothing but
a collection of masterpieces!"
VOLTAIRE.
78
CHAPTER IV.
THE FABLES.
THE living personality with which La Fontaine has con-
trived to invest the various characters in his fables has
been attributed in some degree to his close observation
of the habits and characteristics of animal life. He was
a warm lover of nature in all her aspects, though the
attractions of society made him prefer Paris as a resi-
dence. In this he resembled his favourite Virgil, in
whom some modern critics profess to see a rural Words-
worth spoilt by court patronage. His love of scenery
shows itself from time to time in his letters: as to trees,
"he respected them," says St Mare Girardin, "almost
as much as an Englishman does."1 He loved the un-
trimmed luxuriance of nature; he cannot bear that man
should "mutilate the innocent forest; who but must
grieve that its pleasant shade shall be exposed to such
outrages?" His habit was, he tells us, to compose in the
open air. The verse which flows so smoothly, and with
such natural case and grace, was the product of much
mental labour-elaborated, as he tells us, "by dint of
time and pains," polished and repolished both in thought
1 'La Fontaine et les Fabulistes,' i. 298.

79
and in writing. He would spend whole days in the
woods, watching, as it would appear, the habits of their
occupants. A kind of grotto is still shown in the wood
of Ferté-Milon, near Château-Thierry, called "Le Cabinet
de Fabuliste," in which it is said he sometimes passed
the night in composition. He was once missing for
twenty-four hours in the forest of Vassy, and a regular
party of beaters was organised to go out to look for him.
At another time, when he was a guest of Lady Harvey,
he was absent from dinner, and did not make his appear-
ance until nightfall. His excuse was that he had been
attending an ant's funeral-he had followed the corpse
to the place of burial, and afterwards accompanied the
mourners home.2 The numberless little touches with
HABITS OF COMPOSITION.
1
1 Book xii., fable 9. Compare the original draft of 'The Fox and
the Flies' (p. 9) with the fable as published, xii. 13.
2 It seems probable that he was led to make this particular obser-
vation by what he had read in Plutarch (one of his favourite authors)
"On the Cleverness of Animals," where it is said that the philosopher
Cleanthes "saw certain ants coming out of their hill, bearing the
body of a dead ant in the direction of another ant-hill, out of which
issued a party of other ants to meet them, as if for a parley. After
they had been together a while, the first party returned (to consult,
one may suppose, with their fellow-citizens), and so made two or
three journeys, owing to the difficulty of coming to terms. At last
the second party brought to the first a worm out of their burrow, as
if by way of ransom for the corpse and this worm the first party took
upon their backs and carried off home, leaving with the others the
body of the dead ant, who had doubtless been an intrader." Montaigne
quotes the story in his 'Apology for Sebonde.' A modern naturalist
observed a similar instance of the care of the ants for their dead : .،
A
number of ants which had attacked a little boy had been killed, about
twenty of them lying dead upon the ground. After a while, a pro-
cession of ants came from the nest and marched two by two towards
their dead companions. Four were told off to each corpse, two car y-
ing it and the other two walking behind. When the bearers were
tired, they transferred their burden to the second pair, and walked
behind the others in their turn. A body of two hundred or so brought
4
80
LA FONTAINE.
which he paints the idiosyncrasies of his dumb friends.
show not only a close observation of their habits and
an appreciative distinction of their several characters,
but a kindly sympathy with the creatures themselves.
We do not hear of his having any pets; but we can
gather that, like many men of easy disposition, he was
fonder of animals than of children. His knowledge of
birds and beasts, however, was sympathetic, not scien-
tific; and it did not keep him from making the mistakes
about them which were common to his age.
He con-
founds the camel with the dromedary, he thought that
moles were blind, and that the venom of the serpent lay
in its tail. M. Taine, in his charming volume,¹ compares
Florian unfavourably with his predecessor in his present-
ment of animal life; and undoubtedly La Fontaine's
animals are far more lifelike, and, if one may so speak,
more human. Florian's rabbit is, as the French critic
observes, too sentimental; a tender friendship, such as
Florian imagines between him and the teal, is not at all
in his line; the volatile "Jean Lapin" of La Fontaine
is much more like the rabbit that we know. But when
La Fontaine makes him take refuge in the beetle's hole,
he certainly takes greater liberties with nature than
Florian. Possibly, as a fable-writer, he had in his mind.
that wonderful beetle immortalised by Aristophanes in his
comedy of Peace," on whose back the Athenian vine-
dresser rides up to the court of Jupiter; for the dramatist
(C
up the rear.
On reaching a sandy hillock, about half of
them set to work at digging graves for their comrades, one grave for
each ant, and the other half laid the bodies in the graves and filled
them up with the soil."-Rev. J. G. Wood in Sunday Magazine,'
Sept. 1880.
↓
1 'La Fontaine et ses Fables,' p. 201.
•
•
HIS ANIMALS.
evidently borrowed his beetle from sop, who makes
him take revenge upon his enemy the eagle by flying up
to Jupiter's throne, and startling the god so as to make
him drop the eggs which his pet bird had persuaded him
to nurse in his lap for safety.
But though we must not go to La Fontaine for our
natural history, his animals-his quadrupeds especially-
are all charmingly real in one sense, and that the most
essential to his readers' enjoyment. They are no longer
the cold and formal impersonations of Esop and Pha--
drus. In their fables, it is true, each animal is to a
certain extent the representative of some special moral.
quality the lion is domineering, the wolf and the kite
are cruel, the fox cunning, the ass dull, the sheep help-
less; but beyond these generalities of character we find
very little individuality of type. But the actors in La
Fontaine's stories are not merely the regular stage repre-
sentatives of the several virtues and vices, but have a
distinct personality of their own. The dog, the fox, and
the rabbit are not only made to talk as we might imagine
them to talk, but, as one may say, to think as we might
conceive them to think. Probably La Fontaine would
have maintained that they did think, in their degree.
In the (C discourse" addressed to his dear friend Madame
de la Sablière (a student of the then fashionable philo-
sophy of Descartes), in which he has embedded the first
fable of his tenth book, he gives us his creed as to the
reasoning powers of animals. He accuses Descartes,
somewhat unfairly, of regarding beasts in the light of
mere machines,-a judgment which, in the face of so
many evidences of a high amount of intelligence in their
behaviour (he instances the beaver), he will not for a
F.C.-XIV.
F


LA FONTAINE,
22
the
99533/
moment admit. But, as a matter of fact, his own views
were more in accordance with those of Descartes than
he here allows. "I would assign reason to animals,"
he says, (6
very much as I would to children."
This is
nearly what Descartes had said, when his arguments
against the intelligence of brutes were met by the objec-
tion that they would apply equally to infants-that he
would not have believed these latter had souls, but for
the fact of their development in the adult. He saw the
difficulty which had presented itself, two thousand years
before, to Aristotle. "To look at man in his infancy,"
says the Greek physiologist, "his soul differs not at all, so
to speak, from that of the beast.”1 Leibnitz confesses
that he saw so little distinction even between some
grown-up men and some beasts, that he found a diffi-
culty in drawing any sharp line of demarcation, in point
of intellect, between man and brute. Montaigne said
much the same-that he found a much wider interval
between individual men than between the lowest type
of men and an intelligent brute. La Fontaine main-
tains-it may be half in jest-that we have really two
kinds of souls (if that word may be used to express the
French ame), the one common to us and the brutes, the
other an endowment which we share with the angels.
Brutes, according to him, have a kind of reason, but
lack reflection and conscience, Some modern "dog-
stories," which have been vouched for on credible au-
thority, seem to imply even the presence of conscience
in a lower degree.
Some of the best fables are to be found, as we might
Grantes
1 'Hist. Animal,' viii. So, in his Ethics, he assigns to man a share
in the nature both of the god and the brute.
THE GRASSHOPPER AND THE ANT.
83
naturally expect, in the earlier books; the first Book,
especially, preserves more of the distinct character of
fable than the rest. "The Grasshopper and the Ant,”
which stands first of all, is, indeed, one of his weakest,
and Chamfort is not far wrong in his surmise that it
owes such reputation as it has chiefly to the accident of
its position; partly also, no doubt, to the general popu-
larity of the ant-dating from at least the time of Solo-
mon-as an example of industry and forethought. The
moral may be called selfish, and more than one writer
has humorously contended that the grasshoppers of
society are the more amiable characters of the two.
Lenoble, in his version of this fable, feeling probably
that the moral was weak as it stood, makes his grass-
hopper laugh at the ant's industry, and so in some
degree deserve the repulse she meets with afterwards.
Modern naturalists express more than a doubt as to the
ant's being an example of providence at all.
11
"The Fox and the Crow," "The Frog and the Ox,"
"The Dog and the Wolf," "The Wolf and the Lamb,"
are all charming, but so generally familiar in the French
and other versions as to need little more than mention.
The first of these, however, has received a good many
additions and variations. Lessing, by way of improving
the moral, represents the Crow as holding a piece of meat
which has been poisoned; and the Fox, who eats
when she has dropped it, becomes the victim of his own
cunning. Richer, in his second fable, gives the Crow
her revenge.
The Fox in his turn has carried off a bit
of bacon: the Crow comes up and talks to him, and
points suggestively to some ducks and fowls not far off.
The Fox goes after them, but in vain; and on his re-
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turn finds that the Crow has eaten the bacon, and is
safe on a tree. "You remember the cheese, my friend?"
is all she remarks. The Empress Catherine of Russia
composed for her private theatre a little comedy on the
subject-"Des Flatteurs et des Flattés "-in which the
characters are Monsieur and Madame de Corbec and
Monsieur Renard.
Rousseau has chosen this fable as an illustration of his
remarkable argument (an argument which would certainly
never have occurred to any other than a theoretical edu-
cationist) that fables are unsuited for children. He not
only objects to the inverted order in which the words are
occasionally placed (an objection applying to poetry in
general, and not to fables in particular), and to the use
of the forms "Master Crow" and "Master Fox," but he
is shocked at the improbability of the fox and the crow
using the same language, or indeed at their being made
to talk at all forgetting that a child's imagination is one
of its strongest faculties, and that to its inexperience no
marvel is improbable. The child who may never have
heard a fable told will make her doll talk; and if ani-
mals are to talk at all, a child would certainly expect
them all to talk in its own language. They speak,
says the poet, with a far more true appreciation of his
art, "the language of the gods "a tongue under-
stood by all nature. The critic takes stronger ground
when he questions the value of the morality which the
fables may teach. From the Fox and the Crow, he
says, the child will learn the power of flattery; from
the conduct of the Ant to the Grasshopper he will
learn selfishness; from the division of the game at
1 Fables, ix. 1.
THE WOLF AND THE HOUSE-DOG.
85
the Lion's Hunting-party, a lesson of injustice; from
the Wolf and the House - dog, a lesson of indepen-
dence. He remarks, with more appreciation of the
nature of children than he shows elsewhere, that they
are very apt, in their own private application of such
fables, to run somewhat counter to the author's inten-
tions. He tells an amusing story of one small friend
of his own, to which most readers could find a parallel
in their own experience. "In the fable of the lean
Wolf and the well-fed House-dog, instead of the lesson
of good behaviour which is sought to be inculcated, the
child sees the attraction of licence. I shall never forget
having found a little girl weeping bitterly, who had been
made miserable by this fable, which had been quoted
to impress upon her the virtue of docility. There was
some trouble to find out the cause of her tears at last
it was discovered. The poor child was weary of being
chained up-she felt her neck galled; she was crying
because she was not a wolf." 1 It was certainly a very in-
judicious use of the fable; and it may be doubted whether
the child was not quite right, according to the view of
the old fabulist from whom La Fontaine borrowed it.
La Fontaine, at any rate, would surely have sympathised
with the child; for there was no one whom the fetters
of social law and order would have galled more un-
comfortably than the man who declares, in one of his
letters, that he "cared to do nothing, from morning till
night, but follow his own will and fancy."
The educational theorist might have objected that such
fables as La Fontaine's are scarcely adapted for children,
on another ground,- that they can have no appreciation
1 Emile, Book ii.
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at all of the finer points of the satire, and perfect turns
of expression, which form their charm to older readers.
The same may be said of those delightful stories of Hans
Andersen, and of some other clever "nursery" books by
modern writers: such finer fancies meet with their most
appreciative readers in children of a larger growth, while
those for whom they were intended go back, if permitted,
with unfailing content to the old tales which charmed
their grandfathers and grandmothers in their infancy.
The author's own favourite is said to have been "The
Oak and the Rush." The apologue itself is as old as
Esop, and Haudent had already given it a French
dress.
THE OAK AND THE RUSH.
"The Oak said to the Rush (when oaks could talk)—
'Nature has dealt but hardly with you, friend;
The wren's light weight sits heavy on your stalk;
The lightest breeze that for a moment's space
Ruffles the water's face
Will make you bend :
While my grand crest like Caucasus upsoars,
Baffles the high sun's scorching heat,
Braves every wind that roars:
All blasts to you are storms-to me are zephyrs sweet.
Yet still, had you been born
Within the circle of these branches vast,
Which round my trunk their sheltering shadows cast,
Your lot had not been so forlorn-
I should have screened you from the sweeping blast.
But you are wont to grow
Down in the marshes low,
The bleak dominions of the tyrant Wind:
Nature to you has been indeed unkind.'
Then the Rush spake―
'Your pity shows a generous heart, 'tis true;
THE OAK AND THE RUSH.
But pray be not uneasy for my sake:
Stormus are less dangerous to me than you-
I bend, but do not break.
You to this hour have held their force in check,
Nor ever bowed your neck
To any wind that blows-yet wait the end.'
As the Rush spoke,
Forth o'er the horizon's verge the tempest broke-
The fiercest of his sons the North could send.
The Oak bore stoutly up-the Rush bent low.
Fiercer and fiercer raged the storm,
Nor would its wrath forego,
Till all uprooted lay the giant form
Whose topmost branch had seemed to touch the sky,
Whose roots pierced down to where the dead men lie."
87
The moral does not breathe a high tone; but that we
must not look for in La Fontaine. This bending to
circumstances may be worldly-wise, but it is not heroic.
There is a fine fable in the German of Lessing, said to
have been composed by him as an intentional contrast
to the Frenchman's.1 He represents a mighty Oak as
having been thrown down by the wind during a tem-
pestuous night. A Fox, who has long lived under its
roots, comes out of his earth in the morning, and sees the
1 We have not here to deal with the German fables: but some of
Lessing's are quite as perfect in their way as any of La Fontaine's.
The following (somewhat abridged) may be quoted as a good speci-
men:
Pluto, finding that his Furies were growing old and slack in their
duties, sent Mercury into the upper world to procure him three new
ones, who should possess the needful qualifications. About the same
time Juno was anxious to disprove the boast of Venus that no woman
was insensible to her power, and had sent Iris down to earth to find
for her three women of severe virtue, who had never smiled on man
nor dreamt of love. Iris found them, after long and weary seeking,
but too late-Mercury had already engaged them as Furies.
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Oak prostrate on the ground. "What a grand tree!"
he exclaims; "I never knew he was so great!" It is
a striking apologue: the lesson which it teaches, more
refined and less obvious than the moral of ordinary
fables, is exemplified from time to time in human life.
Too often it is not until the great and good are taken
from us that we, who have lived under their shadow,
realise how noble they were.
Walkenaer, whose careful study of La Fontaine's life
and works gives to his opinion no ordinary weight, pre-
fers to any of the others the fable of "Death and the
Dying Man," the original of which is to be found in
the Latin of Abstemius. It has been cleverly para-
phrased in English by Mrs Thrale in her "Three Warn-
ings"-a picce little known, perhaps, to the modern
generation of readers, but whose merit fully justifies
the high opinion entertained by Johnson of her ability.
The opening of La Fontaine's fable may be omitted as
rather too sermon-like (he is fond of sermonising now
and then); its story runs as follows:
THE DYING MAN AND DEATH-(viii. 1).
"A patriarch who could count a hundred years
Complained of Death's approach with groans and tears-
At such short notice, too!
His will not made, and sundry things to do!
'What! must one die straight off, and die to-day?
Nay, wait a while, I pray:
You must not go without me, cries my spouse
I must leave something to my grandchild there;
I've a new wing just building to my house ;-
O cruel Power, forbear!'
'Old man,' said Death,
You cannot say I take you by surprise;
THE DYING MAN AND DEATII.
Chide not with hasty breath
What seems impatience in your selfish eyes:
You've lived a hundred years; show me the man
Old as yourself in Paris, if you can ;
In all wide France not ten have reached that span.
I should, you say, have given you warning fair,
That so for this last call you night prepare,
And I might find
Your will all duly signed,
Your grandchild's interests safe, your building done.
What can you make pretence
You had no warning, when your every sense
Grew dull and torpid; taste and hearing gone,
Limbs weak, mind failing, and the very sun
Too chill to warm your blood?
Life, in your case, had little left of good.
The comrades of your youth
I had already shown you dead or dying—
Were not these warnings loud enough, forsooth?
Come-no replying:
As to your will, the State will care no jot
Whether 'tis made or not.'
Sure, Death was right; 'twere well that at ripe years
One should quit life without regrets or fears,
Rise from its banquet like a well-fed guest,¹
And pack one's baggage up, and thank the host,
Then take the road; for brief the time at most
The unwilling foot can lag behind the rest.
You murmur, aged traveller? see, the young
89
Die with light heart-yea, rush on death in view;
Deaths such as fame's ennobling voice hath sung,
Glorious and bright, yet sharp and painful too.-
I waste my words: I lay my moral by ;
The old, half dead, are yet most loath to die."
1 The author has borrowed this Fpicurean simile from his favourite
Horace's "conviva satur" (Sat. I. i. 119).
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Mrs Thrale has put her moral first, and it is, if pos-
sible, even more happily turned than the original:-
"The tree of deepest root is found
Least willing still to quit the ground.”
This natural shrinking from death, even when life
would seem no longer worth living, is illustrated re-
peatedly in these fables. We have it in the epigram
(for such it is rather than a fable) in which the poor
wretch who calls for Death to end his misery shrinks.
from the awful visitor when he appears (i. 15). The
author there takes occasion to introduce, as it were
with a kind of sneer, "that most abject protestation
of Mæcenas," as he calls it, that he would be content to
bear every conceivable infirmity of age, and even the
most torturing pain, so that only life was left to him.¹
So it is in the fable which follows this Æsop's
"Death and the Woodcutter." The old man, tired
out with the hardships of his daily life, the claims
of "wife, children, taxes, creditors, and Government
forced labour," throws down the fagot that is break-
ing his back, and invokes Death to relieve him at once
from all his burdens. Death appears, and asks what
is wanted of him. The old woodcutter replies, with
happy promptness, that if he would just be good enough
to help his load up again-"it would hardly delay
him a moment." La Fontaine concludes that " 'any
suffering rather than death" is the real motto of most
men. It is hard to say whether he himself claimed in
this to be superior to the vulgar majority: whether we
are to take this as a reproof of their weakness, or a con-
1 See Seneca's Epistles, 101.
M

THE BAT AND THE WEASELS.
fession of his own. Most of his French critics consider
that he intended, in the fine lines which close the other
fable, to express his own conviction that a man ought,
at least if he be spared to a good old age, to quit the
world cheerfully, as having enjoyed his full share of it.
But we must remember that he had considered the Eng-
lish deficient in their "love of life," which they seemed
scarcely to appreciate like his own gayer countrymen.
Louis Racine remarks upon Mæcenas's words, as quoted
by La Fontaine, that the Roman was quite right, and that
those who disagreed with him were either insincere or
mistaken.
91
"The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse," which
conveys the same moral as "The Wolf and the House-
dog," is far more cleverly and amusingly given both by
Horace and in Pope's admirable "imitation." But the
following is in the author's best style, and its philosophy
(in spite of his partial disclaimer) is very much that
which governed his own life:
THE BAT AND THE TWO WEASELS—(ii. 5).
"A Bat in his blind flight
Rushed headlong into an old Weasel's hole,
Who hated mice with all his heart and soul,
And straight made at him, furious at the sight.
"What! have you dared to show your hateful face
Inside my house—
One of your mischievous accursed race?
As sure as I'm a weasel, you're a mouse!'
'Excuse me,' said the trembling refugee,
'That really is not my vocation;
Some wretched slanderer, I plainly see,
Has wronged me in your estimation.
A mouse?-oh dear, no! What! with wings, like me?
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I
I am a bird, I say.
Long live the feathered race that skims the air !'
Such reasoning sounded fair;
Proof positive, it seemed, was there,
And the Bat went bis way.
Some two days afterwards, the stupid creature
Into a second Weasel's lodgings flew,
Who was at feud with all the feathered crew:
Again, by reason of his doubtful feature,
He found himself in peril of his life:
Rushing to meet him,
The Weasel's long-nosed wife
Thought him a bird, and was prepared to eat him.
Again he made his piteous protest heard:
6
Oh, madam, you're mistaken! I a bird!
Why, you can't see !
What makes a bird? Feathers-not fur, like me!
No-I'm a mouse: long live the mice and rats!
And Jove confound all cats!'
So, by his twofold plea,
The trimmer kept his life and liberty."
The moral which the author attaches to this fable is
not of a high order, if we are to take it as a moral at
all. There are many, he says, who in dangerous times
show the prudence of the Bat-who consult their per-
sonal safety by changing their colours. "According to
these gentlemen, the wise man's watchword is, Long
live the King! Long live the League!'"-just as the
fortunes of Henry III. or the Guises happened to be in
the ascendant. La Fontaine's critics tell us that this
kind of worldly wisdom is in fact the teaching of his
fables generally-that the real secret of a safe and easy
life, as this world goes, is not to have too much principle.
He has certainly treated the Bat, in his double character
THE BAT.
of beast and bird, in a different spirit from that of some
earlier fabulists. In the well-known fable attributed to
Æsop, "The Battle of the Birds and Beasts," the Bat is
made to take advantage of his epicene nature to watch
the turn of events, and to range himself on the side of
the beasts so soon as they appear to have the best of it;
but when in the end the birds are victorious, he finds
that all he has gained by his policy is the hate and con-
tempt of both parties, and has to hide himself ever after
from the daylight, and appear only at dusk. And the
moral, as the Latin version gives it, strikes a much nobler
chord than La Fontaine's-
K
"He who would sell himself to either name,
Hated by both, shall lead a life of shame." 1
93
The Chinese fable, or rather story (probably the old-
est of the many in which the Bat figures), does not let
him off much more easily. In that story the Phoenix,
as king of the birds, celebrates his birthday, when all
his subjects flock dutifully to pay their homage. The
Bat is not among them. "I have four feet," he explains,
"and therefore rank among the quadrupeds; why should
I appear on the occasion?" Shortly afterwards, the
king of the beasts would keep his birthday too, and hist
loyal subjects are not less ready with their compliments.
Again the Bat holds back-he has wings, and plainly
owes no allegiance in that quarter. But the result is
that he is repudiated both by beasts and birds, and we
are warned in the application that there are in the world
a good many characters like the Bat, who are neither
1 "Qui se duabus venditabit partibus,
Utrisque ingratus, vitam deget turpiter."
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one thing nor the other, and consequently
not what to do with them." 1
(C
one knows
The next has always been a favourite, and its good-
humoured moral is of universal application.
THE MILK-WOMAN AND HER PAIL-(vii. 10).
"With milk-pail deftly cushioned on her head,
High-kilted petticoat, shoes stout and strong,
The good Perrette
Fast towards the neighbouring town to market sped.
Dreaming no ill, lightly she stepped along,
Counted the price that she would surely get
For that fine pail of milk, and cast about
How she should lay it out.
First, she would buy a hundred eggs, from which
Three broods at least would hatch; she should get rich,
By care and pains, no doubt.
'So very easy it will be,' she thought,
'To raise the chickens by my cottage door ;
And Master Fox-he must be sharp indeed,
If he don't leave enough of my fine breed
To buy one pig at least-it may be more.
My pig will soon get fat, at no expense-
He must be pretty forward when he's bought-
And if I sell him fairly, as I ought,
My gains will be immense.
Then what should hinder me from being able
(Things are so cheap just now)
To put a cow and calf into my stable?
Then, when they join the village herd,
How nice to see them skip-my calf and cow!'
And, at the word,
She gave three skips herself—the milk-pail fell-
And so at once farewell
To cow and calf, and pig, and chickens that would sell!
1 Stanislas Julien, 'Les Avadânes,' ii. 154.
THE MILK-PAIL.
The mistress of this visionary store
Cast one sad glance around
To where her ruined fortunes soaked the ground,
Then turned, and bore
Her empty pail back to her husband's door :
He would meet all excuses with a curse,
And very probably with something worse.
1
Who does not weave such dreams at fancy's call?
Who does not build his castles in the air?
Picrochole, Pyrrhus,2 and the milkmaid-all,
Wise men and fools alike, are builders there.
All have our waking dreams, our visions sweet,
Some fond illusion all our souls beguiles;
All that the world can give lies at our feet-
Honours unbounded, beauty's warmest smiles.
In fancy's hour, no man can stand before me;
I dethrone sultans, and I reign instead;
Elected king, my subjects all adore me,
And diadems come raining on my head:
A chance recalls me to myself once more-
And I am poor Tom Noddy, as before.”
95
It is a moral which has been variously illustrated in
almost all languages. The Eastern apologue of the rev-
erie of Alnaschar (or El-Feshshár, as Mr Lane prefers to
call him), who kicks down the basket of glass which
is to make his future fortune while he dreams that he is
spurning the vizier's daughter, is more widely known,
perhaps, through the 'Arabian Nights,' 3 than even this
fable of La Fontaine.
1 The ambitious and visionary king of Lerna, to whom his officers
promised a long career of chimerical victories.-Rabelais, Garg. i. 33.
2 When Pyrrhus was planning the conquest of Rome, Sicily, Africa,
and Greece in succession, his minister Cineas checked him with the
repeated question, "And what next?"
3 Story of the Barber's fifth brother.
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}
One or two more of his best may be given without
comment. The following has always been a special
favourite with French readers :-
THE COCK, THE CAT, AND THE YOUNG MOUSE-(vi. 5).
"A pert young Mouse, to whom the world was new,
Had once a near escape, if all be true.
He told his mother, as I now tell you:
'I crossed the mountains that beyond us rise,
And, journeying onwards, bore me
As one who had a great career before me,
When lo! two creatures met my wondering eyes,—
The one of gracious mien, benign and mild ;
The other fierce and wild,
With high-pitched voice that filled me with alarm;
A lump of sanguine flesh grew on his head,
And with a kind of arm
He raised himself in air,
As if to hover there ;
His tail was like a horseman's plume outspread.'
(It was a farmyard Cock, you understand,
That our young friend described in terms so grand,
As 'twere some marvel come from foreign land.)
'With arms raised high
He beat his sides, and made such hideous cry,
That even I,
Brave as I am, thank Heaven! had wellnigh fainted:
Straightway I took to flight,
And cursed him left and right.
Ah! but for him, I might have got acquainted
With that sweet creature,
Who bore attractiveness in every feature:
A velvet skin he had, like yours and mine,
A tail so long and fine,
A sweet, meek countenance, a modest air-
Yet what an eye was there!
THE MUSICIAN AND THE FISHES.
I feel that, on the whole,
He must have strong affinities of soul
With our great race-our ears are shaped the same.
I should have made my bow, and asked his name,
But at the fearful cry
Raised by that monster, I was forced to fly.'
'My child,' replied his mother, 'you have seen
That demure hypocrite we call a Cat :
Under that sleek and inoffensive mien
He bears a deadly hate of Mouse and Rat.
The other, whom you feared, is harmless-quite;
Nay, perhaps may serve us for a meal some night.
As for your friend, for all his innocent air,
We form the staple of his bill of fare.'
Take, while you live, this warning as your guide—
Don't judge by the outside."
THE MUSICIAN AND THE FISHES-(x. 11). 1
Young Thyrsis had a lute and voice
So deftly tuned that, when he sang
To woo the maiden of his choice,
So sweet th' harmonious music rang,
The dead might wake to hear.
One day, down in a flowery glade
He sat and sang, while zephyrs played
Along the streamlet clear;
Annette was fishing by his side,
But all in vain her art she tried,
For never fish came near.
The shepherd, whose enchanting song
Might move the hardest breast,
Thought he could charm-but he was wrong-
The fishes like the rest :
So he began,
And thus it ran :-
1 For the use of this fable by Cyrus, see p. 8.
G
F.C.-XIV.
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LA FONTAINE.
'Ye citizens of these fair waves,
Leave your cold Naiads in their caves,
And come to upper air,
The far-surpassing charms to see
Of her I love, nor fear to be
The prisoners of my fair.
She will not use you cruelly;
She is not cruel-save to me.
No fatal ambush need you fear;
A tank of water, crystal-clear,
Awaits you here on land;
And, if she eats one now and then,
It were a boon for fish or men
To die by her sweet hand.'
It was most moving eloquence, no doubt;
But not a fish came out.
His audience were as deaf as they were mute;
All his melodious suit
Was urged in vain-his failure was complete.
He got a net, and set it in the place,
And in brief space
The fish lay flopping at the damsel's feet."
THE COBBLER AND THE BANKER-(viii. 2).
"There was a Cobbler once who chirped and sang
From morn till eve: so loud his clear voice rang,
'Twas marvellous to hear him :
Not one of all the seven wise men of old,
In point of happiness, came near him.
His neighbour, meanwhile, had large store of gold
(He was a stockbroker), but as for singing,
He could not sing, nor even sleep, and when
Towards dawn he got a nap, he woke again,
So loud the merry Cobbler's voice was ringing;
Till he began to think
Kind Providence might well have taken care
THE COBBLER AND THE BANKER.
That in the market, amongst other ware,
Men could buy sleep, as they can food and drink.
So to his house he asked this tuneful soul,
And questioned him-Tell me, my honest friend,
What do you make a-year, now, on the whole?'
'Ha, ha!' (the man quite grinned)———
'Make in a year, your honour? By the powers,
Such ways of reckoning suit your trade, not ours;
I never save,―
I live from hand to mouth on what I have;
I do but scrape along from day to day,
And reach the year's end somehow, in a way.'
6
Come, then,-your daily earnings you can tell?'
'Well, more or less-if days were all alike,
One might do pretty well;
Trade's good enough for me,
GENERAL LIBRARY
Univ�dalty of
MICHIGAN

But for these fête-days, when one has to strike;
They ruin us in holidays, you see—
That's my complaint :
And then for each new saint
That gets into the Calendar, our Curé
He charges for a sermon, I assure ye.'
Pleased with his simple talk, the merchant said,
'I'll make you rich for once, my honest friend ;
Here, take these hundred crowns: if times don't mend,
They'll stand you in good stead.'
The Cobbler eyed the gold—
'Twas more than he had thought the earth could hold:
Then hied him home, and in his cobbler's cell
Buried the money-and his mirth as well.
Now no more songs for him; he lost his voice,
Soon as he gained this poisoner of his joys:
Sleep left his bed,
Cares came instead,
Suspicion, false alarms, and dreams appalling :
All day, though he sat cobbling as before,
He kept one eye still fixed upon his door,
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LA FONTAINE.
And if at night he heard a caterwauling-
That cat had smelt the gold, and came to fetch it.
At last he grew so wretched,
He sought his friend, whose slumbers now were deep
(No cheery voice disturbed him as of old),
'Give me again my carols and my sleep,-
Take back your cursèd gold.'"
The form of this story is borrowed from Bonaventure
Despériers, the unfortunate secretary of Queen Margaret
of Navarre; but the catastrophe is somewhat altered
from the original, in which the cobbler finds a crock of
gold, which causes him so much anxiety, and makes his
life so miserable, that at last he throws it into the sea,
and so
"drowns all his melancholy with that pot." But
the apologue, which teaches that a sudden advancement
from poverty to wealth does not necessarily bring happi-
ness, is at least as old as Horace, whose version of it
La Fontaine has indeed followed more closely in some
points than Bonaventure's. Horace introduces his story
not as a fable, but as an anecdote of the great Roman
pleader Lucius Philippus, who, oppressed with the pro-
fessional duties which have brought him so much fame
and money, envies the careless cheerfulness which he
sees in a humble shopkeeper: he invites the man to
dinner, and to amuse himself with the experiment (not
without a cynical prevision of what the effect on the man
will be), gives him a sum of money and persuades him
to buy a farm. The result is much the same as told in
the French fable.1
1 Horace's Epist., i 7.
THE COURT OF THE LION.
THE COURT OF THE LION-(vii. 7).
"His majesty the Lion fain would know
How far the gods had given him rule below:
To east, west, south, and north,
To his obedient vassals in each land,
He sent his heralds forth,
With proclamation under his own hand,
And sealed with his own seal. The purport told
That for one month's space would his highness hold
A royal court, for all to come who would;
To open with a banquet in high state,
And with a Punch and Judy to conclude;
For a munificence so truly great
Through the whole world would spread his reputation.
So all the beasts of high and low estate
Came to the Royal Den by invitation.
But what a den! a charnel-house, in fact,
Whose odour shocked the senses as one entered;
The grim old Bear, who was the first that ventured,
Straight stopped his nose-an act
Which he would much more wisely have omitted:
For the gross breach of manners thus committed
The angry king despatched him straight, to go
And turn his nose up in the shades below.
The Ape, base flatterer, said the king did well :
Praised the stern justice that he saw,
The force of the imperial paw—
'Such grand apartments, and—that charming smell!
Amber and spikenard, and all flowers that bloom,
Were garlic, as compared with such perfume!'
This was too gross to meet with approbation;
The Ape received his sentence too :
The lion-king loved flattery, 'twas true,
But, like Caligula, in moderation.
The Fox stood near.
'Sir Reynard, there!
101
'Ho!' said the royal brute,
speak out!—what say you to't?'
102
LA FONTAINE.
JJ
Reynard made much excuse; he could not smell-
He had a wretched cold, and slight congestion-
It was impossible for him to tell;
In short, he shirked the question.
Here is a lesson, gentlemen, for you,
Which a good courtier still should keep in view:
Gross adulation palls; plain-speaking shocks:
Best give a diplomatic answer, like the Fox."
The original of this (though with a different moral)
is to be found in the old Latin collection known as the
'Fables of Romulus.' The Wolf, pending the Lion's
temporary absence, has been elected viceroy by the
animals. The Lion doubts the wisdom of the choice,
and by his advice they exact an oath from their new
ruler not to injure or devour any of his subjects. This
oath the Wolf has no mind to keep, and casts about for
some way of evading it. He asks the Goat to give an
opinion as to his breath-is it at all disagreeable? and
the Goat, with more honesty than wit, pronounces its
odour insupportable. An appeal is made to the beasts
in council as to the fitting punishment for insulting
language to their king: sentence of death is at once
pronounced, and the Goat is killed and divided among
them—the Wolf, of course, receiving the royal share.
When next he is hungry, he asks the same question of
the Hind, who thinks to save herself by declaring the
scent to be charming. She is convicted for untruth, and
shares the fate of the Goat. Next the Wolf casts his eye
on a fine fat young Ape, and feigning illness, procures
from his medical attendants an opinion that in order to
get well his appetite must be humoured. He declares he
103
can think of nothing he could eat unless it were a bit of
ape's flesh-but he had rather die than break his oath.
His "barons" unanimously absolve him for the nonce;
but from that time forth, says the old fabulist, he held
himself free to eat any of them.¹
THE HARE'S EARS.
The insecurity of life and liberty under the reign of
an irresponsible power is, in fact, rather a favourite com-
monplace of the author's. His majesty the Lion is any-
thing but a model of justice, and does not enjoy the con
fidence of his subjects, however he may command their
allegiance. The fable of "The Hare's Ears" (v. 4) is
Eastern in its origin, as might be guessed from its tone
(M. Robert ascribes it to Saadi), but La Fontaine prob-
ably took it from the Latin of Faërne.
"It chanced that some unruly hornèd beast
Had gored the Lion-king;
Who, hot with wrath at such a monstrous thing,
Vowed to secure himself henceforth at least,
And issued strict command,
All creatures that wore horns should quit his land.
Goats, rams, and bulls decamped that very day;
The stags sought change of air;
Of all his long- and short-horned subjects there,
None lost an hour in getting safe away.
The Hare, a timid creature,
Caught sight in shadow of his poor long ears,
And grew distraught with fears
Lest some might construe into horns that feature.
He sought the Grasshopper, his country neighbour:
'Adieu,' said he, 'my friend—
I'm off at once: I feel that, in the end,
Under some false impeachment I shall labour:
My ears will count as horns, you may depend.
1 Robert, Fables Inedites,' ii. 561.
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LA FONTAINE
Nay, even if I displayed 'em
Short as an ostrich, 'twould be all the same;
Horns is their name.'
'Horns!' quoth his friend,-'they're ears, as Heaven
made 'em ;'
D'ye take me for a fool?'
'Horns they will be, for all that,' said the Hare,
'Plain as a unicorn's, by this new rule;
Protest nor prayer,
If I'm clapt up in jail, will serve me there.""
We are left in this case to gather for ourselves the
moral, which Faërne, however, subjoins, lest we might
miss it—“He who has to live under a tyranny, though
he be innocent, will often suffer as guilty." His version
is perhaps even more amusing and more piquant, because
it is the cunning Fox that is suspicious of the possible.
interpretation of the edict, and not the timid Hare. The
Lion, out of mere caprice, banishes from his dominions
all animals who lack the dignified appendage of a tail.
The Ape, of course, has to leave the kingdom at once;
and as he is going off, he comes upon the Fox, who is
packing up his baggage. The Ape remarks to him that
at any rate he is safe enough; if any fault could be
found with him, it would be that he had rather too much
tail. The Fox replies that what his friend says may be
true, but that it is impossible to say what view the Lion
may be pleased to take of the matter. Aubert has a
different version still. The Lion has lost an eye by the
claw of a tiger, and he orders the condign punishment
of all animals who have curved claws. The whole feline
tribe quit the kingdom. The unfortunate Ass considers
himself safe enough; but the king's emissaries, deter-
mined to find a victim, discover that his hoofs are claws,
and he is made to suffer accordingly.
105
La Fontaine understood too well his own powers of
narrative to submit himself implicitly to the recognised
canons of fable. Patru "the Quintilian of France".
had laid it down as an axiom in literature that verse
was altogether an inappropriate vehicle for fable, whose
chief ornament he held to be "the having no ornament
at all;" and the idea that brevity and conciseness were
the very soul of this kind of writing maintained its
ground long after the appearance of this collection in
print. Lessing admires the severe and unadorned terse-
ness of Æsop, and no doubt this has its charm. But it
is suited, as M. Taine has observed, rather to the age of
gnomic " poetry than to our modern taste. Such fables,
like proverbs, were the natural expressions of thought in
primitive times, when poetry and philosophy alike had
to be promulgated by oral tradition, and not by the
printing-press. La Fontaine, in his preface, thinks it
becoming to make a kind of apology for venturing to
contravene the axiom of so great a critic as Patru, but
hopes that "the graces of Spartan brevity will not be
found so wholly incompatible with those of French poetry,
but that they may often be induced to travel in harmon-
ious companionship." The result, in his own hands,
proved that he estimated rightly his own talents and the
public taste.
(C
He could be brief on occasion, and charining still.
The fable of "The Mule who boasted of his Family,"
which he has altered from Æsop, is full of point as
well as of playfulness, and occupies in the French only
the same number of lines as in the subjoined transla-
tion :-
BREVITY IN FABLE.
A bishop's mule made boast of his high birth ;
Would talk for ever of his mother's worth-
106
LA FONTAINE,
'My mother, who was once my lady's mare.'
Much in her praise he told-
'She could do this, and she had travelled there.'
He almost thought that he deserved a place,
By virtue of his race,
Among the great historic steeds of old,
And took it somewhat ill
That for a doctor's servant he was sold.
Grown old and poor, he had to turn a mill:
Then he remembered that, with all his pride,
He was a donkey by the father's side."
Even shorter in the original (for there it is comprised in
twelve lines, moral included), and certainly not less
perfect, is—
THE ASS WHO BORE THE RELIQUES-(v. 14).
"A certain ass, with reliques charged, received
Much homage-to himself, as he conceived:
Pleased at the thought, he graciously curvetted,
Deeming that he
For all this incense and sweet psalmody
To his own special merits was indebted.
A bystander, to whom the case was plain,
Said
Master Ass, drive from your foolish brain
Such flattering view:
It is the sacred burden that you bear
To which men pay their reverence, and there
Is all the glory due.'
Learn from the foolish brute,
Vainglorious magistrate, that men salute
Th' official robe, not you."
There is no evidence that the fabulist was a reader
of Montaigne; but we find the latter remarking, a cen-
tury before, that "he was never able to teach great
THE ASS AND HIS BURDEN.
people to distinguish between the cappings and bowings
which were meant for themselves personally, and those
which were really meant for their office, or their suite,
or their mule." There is a story told of Piron, who
enjoyed, somewhat unfairly, the reputation of being
the worst poet of his day, on which La Fontaine might
have been thought to have founded his fable, but that it
took place a generation later. Piron was sitting, one
summer's day, on a bench outside the Barrier de la Con-
ference. Nearly every one as they passed him took off
their hats or bowed. "Really," thought the poet com-
placently to himself, "I am better known than I ima-
gined." At last an old woman stopped and knelt before
him. Following the direction of her eyes, he looked up
and saw, in a niche over his head, an image of the
Madonna.
107
Père Desbillons, the Jesuit, whose fables will come
under notice hereafter, has a different version of the
Ass's mistake.
"Home from the town there plodded an Ass,
With good rich dung in his panniers stowed ;
All moved aside to let him pass,
Loath to come near the unsavoury load :
'Men pay me,' said he, 'the respect that is owed!'
From the village to town the Ass was sent,
Laden with butter and flowers to sell,
Choice flowers and sweet-and all, as he went,
Pressed close to enjoy the charming smell :
'Aha!' said he, men love me well!'"
(
La Fontaine, in these and others of his fables, is
sufficiently severe upon the vanity which is said to be
108
LA FONTAINE.
the foible of his countrymen. In his version of Æsop's
well-known fable of "The Ass in the Lion's Skin," he
says by way of moral that there are a great many people
in France who may serve as a familiar illustration of it
"three-fourths of whose valour lies in a warlike
outside."
The following, with its cynical moral, has always been
a favourite from the days of Phædrus :-
THE BITCH AND HER HOSTESS—(ii. 7).
"A Bitch, who felt sore puzzled where to lay
The litter she expected day by day,
Begged of a female friend,
For this occasion only, she would lend
Her kennel as a nursery: she consented,
And both were well contented.
After a while, the friend, in terms polite,
Proposed to reassume an owner's right:
Still for a fortnight's grace the mother pleaded-
A little longer is so greatly needed
To help us all :
Look at these darlings-they can hardly crawl.'
Well, she succeeded.
The time soon passed, and still there was no sign
Of turning out: more plainly than before,
The owner asked her lodger to resign
The borrowed quarters she could need no more:
This time the creature showed her teeth, and said—
'I'm quite prepared to give up house and bed—
If you can turn me out.' Her whelps, you see,
Had grown by this time quite as strong as she."
Weiss, a German Protestant minister who Latinised
his name into Pantales Candidus, and published a col-
lection of Latin fables in the sixteenth century, has a
FABLE OF KRILOFF.
version of this in which the sufferer lays her complaint
before the judge, who listens, but not caring to get him-
self into trouble by raising up a whole family of enemies.
against himself, gives the complainant full authority to
eject the intruder-if she can: and the moral is, not to
trust too much to fair promises, for the law will often
give you very little remedy against their breach. The
same lesson, in a more satirical form, is conveyed by
one of the Russian fables of Kriloff:
THE SHEEP'S PETITION.
"The Sheep before the Lion came, and prayed
Protection from the Wolves, that havoc made
Among the flocks. Compassion moved his breast;
Thrice having roared, he thus his will exprest :—
'We Leo, King, and so forth,-having heard
The sore indictment by the Sheep preferred
Against the Wolves, and touched with sympathy
For their most sad condition, thus decree-
If any Wolf shall any Sheep offend,
Said Sheep hath leave said Wolf to apprehend,
And carry him before the nearest Bear
In the commission of the Peace-and there
Such order as the matter may invite
Be duly made-and Heaven defend the right!'
So 'twas decreed. "Tis a most curious fact,
No Sheep hath ever yet enforced the act:
'Tis probable they are no more attacked:
The Wolves now graze, it is to be inferred
(How this agrees with them I have not heard).
If rogues defraud, or men in power oppress-
Go to law instantly, and get redress." 1
109
M
Many pieces included in La Fontaine's collection are
not fables at all, in any strict sense of the word. Some of
1 Dublin Univ. Mag., Dec. 1879.
110
LA FONTAINE,
the best are nothing more than humorous stories—ad-
mirably told. Such, for instance, is "The Faithless
Trustee," with which his ninth book opens.
It is one
of those many Eastern stories (adapted from Bidpai) in
which cunning is met by cunning, and the only "moral"
conveyed by it is that "all men are liars," and that suc-
cess consists in lying cleverly. A Persian merchant has
deposited a hundred-weight of iron, during his absence
on a commercial journey, in the custody of a friend. On
his coming back and demanding it, he is told that a rat
has eaten the whole. He does not express any incred-
ulity, but proceeds to carry off and conceal his friend's
young son. The father is inconsolable, and is not at
all disposed to give credit to the merchant's statement
that he had seen an owl carry the boy off: his boy, he
observes, was more likely to have carried off the owl.
The merchant says he sees nothing so strange in the
circumstance: in a country where a rat eats a hundred-
weight of sound metal, the owls may well be strong
enough to carry off a child of half that weight. The
biter is bit, and the iron restored.
Now and then La Fontaine even drops the lighter tone,
which he employs so delightfully, and surprises us with a
serious pathos, for which we should be quite unprepared
in the author of the 'Tales and Novels,' but that we have
seen something of it here and there in his private letters.
Of this character is "The Peasant of the Danube” (xi.
7), which presents a great contrast to his lighter pieces.
It is not original; he has borrowed the sketch from
"Marcus Aurelius"-meaning thereby the Spanish.
bishop Guevara's 'Dial of Princes,' or 'Golden Book of
Marcus Aurelius'-a kind of modern Cyropædia, which
THE PEASANT OF THE DANUBE.
111
supplied Montaigne also with some of his stories, but
a mere literary forgery so far as the Roman emperor's
name was concerned.¹ But though the idea of the pic-
ture is another's, the charm of the execution is La Fon-
taine's own.
Much of this would be lost in any trans-
lation; the eloquence of the declamation, fine as it is, is
rather French than English, and the piece is somewhat
long. The peasant has come from the banks of the Dan-
ube to plead the cause of his oppressed countrymen at
Rome. His appearance is heavy and repulsive in the ex-
treme; he has a hideous cast in the eye, a misshapen nose,
coarse thick lips, a tangled beard, and his whole person
looks not much more human than that of an ill-kept
bear. But when he speaks, the original author compares
him to Cicero, which La Fontaine has the better taste
to omit a more apt comparison would have been to
Ulysses warming into eloquence before the chiefs of
Troy. He launches his bitter invectives against the
rapacity of Roman governors, the abuse of all law and
justice, the corrupting influence of Roman morals. Why
had the Romans come to disturb a simple and happy
people? Who gave them rights over free Germans?
Let them withdraw their garrisons from a land which
they were making desolate, lest Heaven in its righteous.
wrath should deal retribution upon Rome, and make its
people in their turn the slaves of others. Then, with
dramatic effect, he stops short in the full current of his
remonstrance. He knows, he says, he has said enough.
to anger his audience. "I have done : punish my plain-
1 La Fontaine probably got it out of some of the more recent col-
lections—' Les Parallèles Historiques' of Cassander, or P. Boiaslau's
'Histoires Prodigieuses.'
م.
112
LA FONTAINE.
speaking with death"--and he casts himself on the
ground before them. The Senate is indeed moved,
but not as the speaker had expected. They created
him, says the story, a patrician on the spot; they
changed their provincial officers; and they kept a re-
cord of the German peasant's speech as a model for
future pleaders. La Fontaine has turned all this into a
kind of fable by prefixing a "moral" to it-that “
are not to judge by appearances;" but this is only tacked
on awkwardly to the narrative, which would be better
without it.
"
We
Although the prevailing tone of these fables is a
light-hearted cynicism-for which neither the author
himself, nor yet the national French temperament so
thoroughly represented in his person, must be held en-
tirely responsible, but which belongs in great measure to
fable generally—yet here and there, especially in the later
books, we find passages of much earnestness and pathos.
As he went on with his work, and grew more confident
of carrying his readers with him, he seems to have
gradually released himself from the rules of art as a
fable-writer, and to have thrown more of himself, his
views of men and things generally, his private opinions.
and tastes, into the charming pieces which he found it
convenient still to put into the form of fables.
"The
Two Pigeons" (ix. 2), the original of which is to be
found in Bidpai and Lokman, is not so much a fable as
a graceful and tender idyl. It is too long for transla-
tion here, and would not perhaps very well bear trans-
lating. The peaceful and loving life which the pigeons.
have hitherto led together is interrupted by the resolve
of one of the pair to see more of the world. In spite
THE TWO PIGEONS.
of the dissuasion of his friend (it is curious that La
Fontaine makes them "brothers" and not mates) he sets
out upon his travels. It will be for their mutual ad-
vantage, he assures his friend; he shall have so much
to tell him when he comes back, "for one who sees
nothing has nothing to talk about." (The author had
suffered probably from the conversation of his country
neighbours.) The traveller is successively drenched in
a storm, caught in a net from which he escapes with
damage, and grievously hurt by a stone from the sling
of a mischievous urchin; and he is glad to return to
his home, to be welcomed and comforted by his less
adventurous partner. The author would have all friends
(and lovers) "find in each other a world ever beautiful,
ever varied, ever new "be to yourselves everything;
count all else as nothing." It is the moral so gracefully
expressed in one of Lord Houghton's poems :-
>>
"A man's best things are nearest him,-
Lie close about his feet;
It is the distant and the dim
That we are sick to greet.”
F.C.--XIV.
113
The same note had been touched in one of the earlier
books, in the contrast between the success of "The man
who ran after Fortune," and "The man who lay in bed
and waited for her."1 Here again we find two friends, of
whom the one, who has always been sighing after Fortune,
at last sets forth in pursuit of her. He seeks her at
Court, but though he sees her go in and out every day,
and though she seems to have her favourites there, he
cannot get her to smile upon him. He voyages in
1 vii. 12.
H
114
LA FONTAINE.
search of her first to India and thence to Japan, and
returns disappointed, after a weary round, to find the
capricious goddess sitting patiently on the doorstep of
his stay-at-home friend, who is in bed and fast asleep.
The moral which La Fontaine prefixes to his story is
only half serious-"Seek not this goddess, and she will
seek you; such is the habit of her sex. But this lies
merely on the surface; he lets us see throughout that
he is conscious of the deeper lesson beneath.
>>
The claims of friendship are a favourite subject. We
find it illustrated by the two friends of Monotapa, (did
he mean that one must go far out of France to find such
an instance?) one of whom is disturbed at night by a
dream in which the other appears with a distressed
countenance, and rushes off to his house to inquire if
anything is wrong: the other, roused from his sleep, and
conceiving that his friend must have some urgent need
of assistance, at once places his purse and his sword at
his disposal. The possible value of the humblest friend-
ship is dwelt upon repeatedly, as in the mutual good
offices of the four curiously assorted neighbours, the
Crow, the Gazelle, the Rat, and the Tortoise (xii. 15—
dedicated to his dear friend Madame de la Sablière-
which, like the last, is taken from an Eastern source;
and in the better-known "Lion and Mouse," and "The
Ant and the Dove," which he has adapted from Æsop.
The author's own character, as displayed especially in
his relations with Fouquet, leads to the belief that the
sentiment was sincere.
In more than one instance he has availed himself of
some current anecdote of the day as the foundation for
his story. A singular accident had happened at the
THE CURE AND THE CORPSE.
funeral of M. Boufflers, grandfather of the great mar-
shal. Madame de Sévigné says, in a letter to her
daughter (Feb. 26, 1672), "Boufflers has killed a man
after he was dead himself; he was in his coffin on the
funeral-car, and they were carrying him a league out of
Boufflers to bury him. His parish priest was with the
corpse; the car upset, and the coffin broke the neck of
the poor Curé.” La Fontaine (vii. 11) describes the
unfortunate priest as accompanying the corpse, chanting
the usual psalms and litanies, taking care to give his de-
ceased patron good measure, and calculating as he goes
how much his dues will amount to on this lucrative
occasion—“so much in hard cash, so much in wax, so
much in other perquisites;" and planning in his mind
how he shall lay them out-some good wine for himself,
new gowns for his niece and his housekeeper-" eyeing
his corpse all the time as jealously as though he thought
some one might steal it from him;" when suddenly the
car breaks down, and his "parishioner in lead" crushes
him to death. Such is the folly of castle - building:
"all our lives long," says the moralist,
CC we are like
Chouart the Curé reckoning up the proceeds of his
corpse, or Perrette investing the profits that are to come
from her pail of milk. The name which he here gives
to the priest-Jean Chouart-he borrows, as usual, from
his favourite Rabelais. There seems no foundation what-
ever for the circumstantial story which some authorities
give, as to its having been the real name of the parish
priest of St Germain-le-Vieux, against whom the author
had a private grudge, which he sought to gratify by
gibbeting him in this fashion. The story of the two
Fortune-tellers (vii. 15), in which a woman happening
115
116
LA FONTAINE.
to succeed to the garret of another (whose gains by
her profession have enabled her to move into a higher
position), is made to tell fortunes against her will, and
becomes a fashionable oracle, is no doubt a real story of
Paris life.
So, again, perhaps the most bitterly satirical of all
his fables, "The Dog and his Master's Dinner " (viii.
7), is said to have been founded on a circumstance
actually witnessed in the city of Strasburg, or, as a
letter from Claude Brossette to Boileau states, in Lon-
don. The behaviour of the dog is not so unnatural but
that it may possibly have happened more than once.
The animal is carrying from the cookshop his master's
dinner, tied round his neck. He is far too well trained
to think of eating it on the way.
"We can teach self-
restraint to dogs," says the poet; "how strange that we
cannot teach it to men!" He is attacked in the street
by other dogs, who try to steal his tempting burden;
for some time he defends it faithfully, but overpowered
by numbers, and seeing that the dinner is sure in any
case to be devoured there and then, he seizes the largest
share of it for himself. La Fontaine sees in this a pic-
ture of municipal government, where every official-
mayor, aldermen, and councillors alike-makes prey of
the public moneys; and if any one is at first more scrup-
ulous than his fellows, they laugh at him for a fool, so
that he often ends by being foremost in the plunder.
The rapacity of princes and nobles was less offensive to
La Fontaine's mind than the peculations of plebeians.
He founded another of those short satirical pieces
which appear in this collection, though they can hardly
be called fables, on a story then current in England as
THE ANIMAL IN THE MOON.
117
It
to the discovery of a strange animal in the moon.
was said that Sir Paul Neal, one of the Fellows of the
Royal Society, had been startled, in the course of his
observations with the telescope, by the appearance on
the moon's disc of a creature something like an elephant
-which turned out to be a mouse which had got be-
tween the lenses. Such a mistake is so flagrantly im-
possible, that there can be no doubt it was the invention
of some malicious wit in order to raise a laugh at the
expense of the astronomers. Samuel Butler, the author
of 'Hudibras,' has left us a fragmentary effusion in verse
upon the subject; and it is not impossible that he was
the inventor of the story. La Fontaine, in his handling
of it, far from sneering at the possible mistakes of science,
takes occasion to congratulate his neighbours of England
who could find leisure for such pursuits. For England
was then (1677) at peace with all the great Powers,
while Louis of France was carrying on war with Hol-
land, Spain, and Germany. We detect in the writer's
playful verse the weariness which the subjects of the
great king had begun to feel of the military glories
which cost them all so dear. "No doubt," says the
poet, who had much of the courtier in his composition,
"the goddess Victory, who had a personal affection
for Louis, would still follow his steps, go where he
would; but if Charles of England could only see his
way to mediate between the belligerents"—as just then
all were hoping that he would-"what a genuine tri-
umph, worthy of a great monarch, that would be for
him! Was the peaceful career of Augustus less glo-
rious than the famots campaigns of the first Cæsar?
Happy-too happy-people of England! When would
118
LA FONTAINE.
peace come, to leave his own countrymen free, like them,
to devote themselves to the fair pursuits of art and
science!"
1
One fable, the motive of which was personal, has been
discovered amongst his unpublished pieces: it is another
instance of his grateful feeling towards his early patron
Fouquet, and is said to have been suppressed in order
not to risk incurring the displeasure of Colbert, who
had probably seen it when circulated in manuscript (as
was the case with many of the author's pieces), and who
would have been impatient of any expression of sym-
pathy with the discarded Minister. It is called "The
Fox and the Squirrel:" it is by no means one of his
best, and is scarcely worth translating entire, but its
subject gives it an interest, if the account of its origin
and suppression be true. Fouquet's heraldic device, it
should be said, was a squirrel. The Fox, in this fable,
mocks at the Squirrel, who is vainly trying to shelter
himself from a thunderstorm by rolling himself up after
his fashion. You are too fond," says the Fox,
climbing into lofty places, too near the thunder: I, who
am content with a hole, shall be safe, while I see you
beaten to powder." He was eating a stolen pullet with
much enjoyment as he spoke. At length"the wrath of
Heaven pardoned the Squirrel;" the storm ceased, and
the victim escaped with a drenching. But meanwhile
a hunter had tracked the Fox to his hole, and by the
help of his dogs soon unearthed him. The Squirrel saw
him flying before his enemies, and speedily overtaken
and killed. "He saw-but he did not laugh, schooled
by his own misfortunes." Unless Colbert had been con-
1 ¹ Lacroix, 'Œuvres Ined. de J. de la Fontaine,' p. 6.
"of
THE BEAR AND THE TRAVELLERS.
119
scious that he himself was the Fox, it is hard to conceive
his taking offence at so innocent a fable.
1
"The Bear and the Two Companions" (v. 20) has
an historical interest, as having been employed by the
Emperor Frederick the Third in reply to the ambassador
sent by Louis XI. of France to ask him to join that king
against the Duke of Burgundy. The story is told by
Philip de Commines. The French proposal was that
Frederick should at once seize all the fiefs which the
duke held of the Empire, while Louis should enter
upon those which were held of France.
The emperor
replied by quoting, with some variations, the old Æsopic
fable. Three travellers (sop and La Fontaine have
only two) being without money to pay their tavern
score, induced their host to buy from them the skin.
of a notoriously savage bear which infested the neigh-
bourhood, and which they undertook to kill. They met
the bear, who showed no inclination to part with his
skin. Instead of attacking him, one of the companions
ran back to the town, one got up into a tree, and the
third lay down and feigned to be dead. The bear came
and smelt him very closely; but in accordance with the
prejudice which beasts of prey are supposed to entertain
against devouring a dead body, left him unharmed, and
went back into the forest. The man in the tree got
down, and asked his companion what the bear had said
to him, as he appeared to whisper very close in his ear.
"He told me," replied the other, “ never to sell a bear's
skin before he was killed." "With this fable," says the
old historian, "did the emperor pay off our king, with-
out any other word of reply to his envoy." The fable
1 Memoirs, iv. ch. 3.
120
LA FONTAINE.
will also be remembered by the epigram in the 'Anti-
Jacobin' on the Paris Loan, called the "Loan upon
England," proposed to be raised in 1797-
"The Paris cits, a patriotic band,
Advance their cash on British freehold land :
But let the speculating rogues beware;
They've bought the skin-but who's to kill the bear?"
The twelfth and last book of the Fables is dedicated
to the young Duke of Burgundy, grandson of the king,
then about twelve years old. This prince, who died in
his thirtieth year, was the pupil of Fénelon, a good
classical scholar, and altogether a youth of more promise.
than most of the Bourbon princes. There was, as has
been said, a lapse of fifteen years between the publication
of the eleventh and this last book, which is a collection
of pieces thrown off occasionally during the interval, and
of unequal merit. It would appear, indeed, from the
"epilogue" to Book XI., that the author did not at that
time contemplate any addition to his work. In both
these latter books, indeed, we often miss the charming
ease and grace of his earlier compositions, and the
author was perhaps himself conscious that his hand
had lost something of its cunning.
The fable (if we are so to call it) with which this final
series opens, is interesting as an amusing comparison of
the author's special friends, the animals which we call
irrational, with his human fellow-creatures-of course to
the advantage of the former. It is called "The Compan-
ions of Ulysses;" and it rests upon the well-known story
told in the Odyssey of their transformation into beasts
by the spells of Circe. But the moral is by no means
THE COMPANIONS OF ULYSSES.
121
what we must conceive to have been the moral intended
by Homer-that man may degrade himself into the beast
by yielding to sensuality. The good-humoured satire of
this apologue points in a different direction: that man,
if judged from the beasts' point of view, is not so much
better than they. Ulysses has obtained from the en-
chantress permission for his transformed companions to
resume their original shapes. But they one and all re-
fuse. He who has been changed into a lion prefers to
remain a king among brutes to going back to be a simple
citizen of Ithaca; he who has taken the shape of a bear
is highly offended at Ulysses' remarks upon the ungain-
liness of his present appearance--he "who had once been
so handsome!" His shape, he replies, is what a bear's
ought to be; and who made Ulysses a judge of the com-
parative beauty of bears and men? At any rate, the
lady-bears find no fault with him. The hero next
addresses himself to his comrade who has become a
wolf, and tries to shame him out of his carnivorous
propensities, which make him a terror to the fair shep-
herdesses of the neighbourhood; but the wolf retorts
that man kills and eats as many sheep as wolves do,-
nay, more, that men prey upon each other; in short, that,
'culprit for culprit, one had better be a wolf than a
man." All, in fine, when appealed to, decline the offer
to have their human form restored to them.
(C
The humour of the French author in this fable is,
however, by no means original. Giambattista Gelli, an
Italian, had some few years previously published a sa-
tirical effusion called "La Circe," which had been trans-
lated into French, and with which La Fontaine was not
probably acquainted. Gelli's treatment of the subject
122
LA FONTAINE.
is indeed the more humorous of the two. He makes
Ulysses address himself in the first instance to one
of his companions whom the enchantress has turned
into an oyster, but who is quite contented with his
stationary life. He has not the power of locomotion,-
true: but all desire for change of place, he argues, pro-
ceeds from the consciousness of some want which he for
his part never feels, having within his immediate reach
all that he needs. The mole, to whom Ulysses next
appeals, will not be persuaded that his lack of sight is
any real imperfection: his senses are complete, so far as
they are suited to his species. If other moles saw, he
would like to see; but indeed what use would sight be
to him, who passes his life underground? Has Ulysses
himself any particular desire to have the quality of bril-
liancy, like a star, or wings like a bird? The serpent,
the lion, the hare, and the buck, all make somewhat
similar replies. The dog, with a kindly sympathy for
man, even expresses his regret that Ulysses should have
missed the advantage of a like transformation: the bitch
can find only one thing that would tempt her to become
a woman—that then she should be able to talk. Only
the elephant, sagacious animal that he always is, accepts
the offer to have his human shape restored to him, be-
cause so "he shall have universal ideas, instead of those
particular ones to which an animal's knowledge is
limited."
Fénelon has worked upon the same idea in one of his
"Dialogues of the Dead," in the scene between Ulysses
and Gryllus—one of his comrades who has been changed
into a swine. Gryllus is quite content with his present
state of existence, and has no desire to become a man
POLITICAL FABLES.
again. If his figure is ugly, as Ulysses assures him, it
is of little consequence to one who never looks into a
glass; and Ulysses, in his wanderings, would have been
very glad of a thick tough hide like his to supply the
place of clothes. He needs neither tailor, nor barber,
nor cook, nor architect: as for the pleasures of elo-
quence and poetry, for his part he had rather grunt.
Ulysses asks him if he has become so brutalised as to
despise wisdom, which lifts men almost to a level with
the gods? On the contrary, Gryllus replies, it is wisdom
which has taught him to despise men. Let Ulysses go
back to his beloved Ithaca; "a pig finds his country
wherever acorns grow," says Gryllus, in amusing travesty
of the classical boast that "to the brave man every land
becomes his native soil." 1 Both Gelli and Fénelon have
carried out the satire with even more humour, though
certainly at much greater length, than La Fontaine, who
has but lightly touched it.
123
In some of these last fables he has availed himself
of the privilege of an old public favourite to speak his
mind more freely than before upon the foreign policy of
France. Though he carried his loyalty as a subject to a
point which we should now call obsequiousness, we have
seen that he had no sympathy with the royal thirst for
military glory. There is no mistaking the good-humoured
satire upon the rival potentates of Europe conveyed in
the following:-
THE ELEPHANT AND JUPITER'S APE.
"The Elephant and the Rhinoceros
Once for the empire of the beasts contended:
i “Omue solum forti patria.”
124
LA FONTAINE.
So high the quarrel rose,
By single fight alone it could be ended.
The day was fixed, the lists prepared; when, lo!
News came that in the sky
Jupiter's Ape (whose name historians know
As Gille) was drawing nigh.
'Ha!' thought the Elephant, no doubt
His master Jupiter has sent him out
On special embassy to my dominions.'
Quite proud, he now awaited Master Gille,
Still hovering on his pinions,
And took it rather ill
He was so slow. But down he came at last,
Landed, and bowed politely as he passed.
'Now for the audience,' said the monarch-'Eh!'-
The Ape, it seemed, had not a word to say!
Among the gods, this duel to be fought
Had scarce aroused the interest that it ought:
"Twixt elephants and flies
Is small distinction to heaven's larger eyes.
His majesty had therefore to begin:
My cousin Jupiter,' said he,
From his high throne in heaven will shortly see
A combat of high mark; whichever win,
"Twill be right royal sport
For the spectators of the Olympian court.'
What combat?' asked the envoy, with a frown.
'What?' said the Elephant; 'have you not heard
How the Rhinoceros disputes my crown,
And Elephantis is all stirred
(You know our kingdom and its high renown?)
Resolved to put Rhinoceropolis down?'
'Sire,' said the Ape, 'your information flatters—
I'm charmed to hear the names; but really we
Can't much concern ourselves, you see,
In our vast line of business, with such matters.'
Surprised, abashed, the monarch stammered out—
THE TWO GOATS.
'Indeed! then pray what have you come about?'
'Just to decide a claim
Between some ants, about a bit of straw-
That's why I came.
We have to look to all things; your affair
Has not yet come before our council there;
Under Olympian law
The claims of great and small rank just the same.'"
125
A writer of fables is not bound to be consistent, so
long as his stories are pointed and amusing; and cer-
tainly no one would expect consistency from Jean de la
Fontaine. In an earlier fable he has taken a very different
view of this doctrine of equality. The Rat had under-
taken to apply it to the case of himself and the Elephant.
He was astonished people should admire the Elephant so
much a vast bulk only adapted to frighten children!
"We Rats," says he, "don't think a grain less of ourselves
than of the Elephants." He might have gone on in this
free and independent strain some time, but suddenly the
Cat made a leap upon him, "and made him understand
in a moment that a Rat was not an Elephant."
Another good-humoured burlesque on the question of
royal precedence may be found in the fourth fable of
this last book-"The Two Goats." The French readers
of the time would well remember the ceremonious meet-
ing which took place between the ambassadors of France
and Spain in 1659 on the Isle of Pheasants, in the river
Bidassoa, which formed the boundary of the two countries
(because neither would compromise his royal master's
dignity by going a step on either side), where the treaty
of the Pyrenees was concluded. The introduction to this
lively fable premises that lady-goats, like others of their
126
LA FONTAINE.
sex, are fond of "airing their caprices" in very dangerous.
places. And this is what follows:-
"Two lady-goats, bent on emancipation.
(Whose fair white feet won rival admiration),
Left the low pastures, each by separate ways;
But met by chance upon a river's bank
Spanned by a single plank-
Two weasels scarce could pass, the story says.
The torrent's rushing flow,
The depth that yawned below,
Might well have daunted e'en these Amazons ;
But, spite of danger, both stepped on at once,
Fronting each other on the giddy track,
Disdaining to turn back.
Methought I saw Great Louis once again
Step on the Isle of Conference, to meet
Philip of Spain:
So moved with cautious feet
Those rivals fair,
So, step by step, advanced upon the plank
That seemed to hang in air,
Too proud to yield an inch of place or rank
For both claimed high descent :
One from that peerless goat
That Polyphemus to his mistress sent ;
One from an ancestress of no less note-
White Amalthea, name renowned,
Who suckled Jove, as classic legends tell.
Neither would budge; so both together fell,
And both were drowned.”
One fable, however, in this book reads almost like a
recantation. In one of the earlier books we have a short
and rather commonplace version of the old apologue to
be found in Phædrus and Æsop, called "The Sun and
the Frogs." His majesty the Sun was about to take a
THE SUN AND THE FROGS.
127
wife. Such illustrious marriages are commonly the occa-
sion of much public rejoicing. But the Frogs in the fable
think otherwise. "Suppose he has children," they argue:
CC
we find it hard enough to live under one Sun some-
times; half-a-dozen Suns will dry up ditches and marshes
everywhere, and we poor wretches shall find no water-
unless it be in the Styx." "And for my part," says the
author by way of moral, "I think the Frogs were right.”
He is careful to throw the burden of this protest upon
Æsop; still, we may suppose that he did not altogether.
disagree with his original as to the multiplication of
ruling families being a very doubtful good to the subject
classes. But in this last book we have a fable bearing
the same title, but conceived in quite a different spirit.
The Sun still represents the "Great Monarch" (Louis
XIV. bore the sun as his device); the Frogs-"the
Aquatic Republic "—are the Dutch, who had seen with
dismay the conquests of the French king in Flanders,
and, in alarm for their own independence, had now joined.
Spain against France. The national pride of Louis and
his subjects was aroused against the little republic, whose
change of side they regarded as not only insolent but
ungrateful; and the war with Holland that followed
was as popular (and as impolitic) as our own war with
America. La Fontaine was carried away by the national
feeling. This second fable of "The Sun and the Frogs"
was translated, or rather adapted, from the Latin orig-
inal of the Jesuit father Commire. There
There is very little
point in it; such interest as it has is historical rather
than literary. The citizens of the Aquatic Republic,
according to the writers, had long enjoyed the protection
of the Sun; war and disaster, thanks to him, had been
128
LA FONTAINE.
unknown to them. Suddenly these "daughters of t
marsh" cabal against their great benefactor, and ser
envoys to all quarters to urge them to resist the increas
ing power of the great luminary who threatens to con-
sume them all. The moral warns them to hold their
peace; for if once the Sun's wrath is roused, the Frogs,
in their exhausted marshes, will be the first to repent it.
We find a political warning of the same kind in the
next fable, "The League of the Rats." Here a Mouse,
who goes in deadly fear of the great cat Raminagrobis,
appeals for help against the common enemy to her neigh-
bours the Rats. It is their concern as well as hers, the
petitioner assures them; for when this terrible Cat has
finished up the Mice, he will unquestionably begin upon
the Rats. So the Rats form a league, and march out
against Raminagrobis, "taking each a bit of cheese in their
knapsacks," possibly a contemptuous allusion to the
Dutch. But Raminagrobis has meanwhile got hold of
the Mouse, and shows no disposition to let it go. He
only growls when the allies show themselves, and makes
a few steps to meet them, upon which the Rats make
their retreat in good time. Plainly, to interfere with
the designs of the great conqueror is a dangerous policy.
→
La Fontaine was, as we have seen, an enthusiastic
adınirer of Rabelais, though the genius of the two writers
was essentially different; and he seems to have expected
his readers to have been as familiar with the works of
that grand buffoon as he was himself. The Rabelaisian
names occur continually amongst his characters, and he
evidently assumes that we shall recognise them as old
acquaintances. Perrin Dandin the lawyer, Jean Chouart
the parish priest (though in Rabelais he is a gold-beater),
+
RABELAIS.
129
1 hdenaut the sheep-seller, Martin Baton the donkey-
an-all come upon his stage expecting a welcome, and
is though no introduction were required. It is tacitly
assumed that the visionary campaigns of King Picrochole
of Lerna are as well known to us as those of Pyrrhus of
Epirus. The names given to his animals, when he gives
them a name at all, are taken from the same source:
Robin-Mouton the Sheep, Grippemenaud the Cat, Robi-
lard the Rat. It is from Rabelais that he has learnt
to introduce the Crow as Maître Corbeau, the Wolf
as Messire Loup, the Lion as Monsieur du Lion, the
Bear as Monsieur L'Ours, the Pig as Dom Porceau.
The announcement that Gille, the learned ape, has arrived
in the city "in three boats," is the old jest of the voyage
of Gargantua's great mare on which he rode to Paris, and
which came by sea "in three carraques and a brigantine."
He has taken from the same pages, in several cases,
if not the subject of his fables, yet some characteristic
points in their treatment. The story of the pedantic
schoolmaster, who harangues the drowning boy at some.
length before he drags him out of the Seine (i. 19),
though a form of it may be found in the Indian
fables, is probably borrowed directly from the scene in
which Gargantua sees the monk hanging in a tree by his
head, "like Absalom," and preaches to him a long sermon
before he will help him down.2 So in the version which
1 Rabelais, i. 15. La Font., ix. 3.
2 Rabelais, Garg. i. 42. The fable occurs in a somewhat different
form in the Commentaries of St Augustin. A man having fallen into
a well, a passer-by stops to inquire of him very particularly how he
met with the accident. The other begs him to spare his questions,
and to help him out. Augustin founds upon it the moral, that we
had far better study how to get rid of sin, than busy ourselves with
the inquiry how original sin came to exist.
F.C.-XIV.
I
130
LA FONTAINE.
we find here of the old Roman fable, the personage to
whose support all the various members have to contrib-
ute becomes the "Master Gaster" whom we find in Rab-
elais "the first Master of Arts in the world." "The
Three Wishes" (vii. 6), which so charmingly recom-
mends moderation in our desires, is drawn, no doubt,
from the same source, rather than from Marie de France.
So also in the amusing fable (if so it can be called) of
"Mercury and the Woodcutters," which forms the pro-
logue to Book V., dedicated to his patron the Duke de
Bouillon, La Fontaine had evidently before him the ex-
panded version given by Rabelais, and not the older
and simpler form attributed to Asop. A woodman has
dropped his axe into the river, and appeals to Jupi-
ter, with many tears and lamentations, to restore to him
the tool on which his daily bread depends. Mercury
is despatchel to his aid, and makes trial of the man's
honesty by producing from the water first a golden axe
and then a silver one, and asking him if either of these
were what he had lost. The wood-cutter rejects them
both, as having no claim to either, upon which Mercury
makes a third dive and brings up the real article, which
the owner thankfully recognises; and the god, in reward
for his simple honesty, presents him with the other two.
So far our author is in accord with sop, but in the
sequel he has followed Rabelais. In the older fable, a
second wood-cutter, who has heard of his comrade's good
fortune, drops his axe into the same stream, appeals in
like manner to the gods, and is at once offered a golden
axe, which he eagerly clutches; but Mercury not only
withholds this from him, but refuses to fish him out his
In the modern story, a whole gang of wood-cutters
own.
MORALITY OF THE FABLES.
131
6
determine to take advantage of the opportunity all lose
their axes, and besiege Jupiter so loudly all at once with
prayers and lamentations, that he "does not know which
to listen to first," but sends down Mercury again to put
a stop to their complaints. Each of them in succession
receives the offer of the golden axe, and unhesitatingly
claims it as his own; but the god only makes use of
it, in La Fontaine's version, to give each of them a
good knock on the head; in Rabelais, to cut off all
their heads in succession.¹ It is from this story in
Rabelais that he has taken the idea of the Council of
Gods, introduced into his fable of "The Ape and the
Elephant," as being called upon to settle most the trifling
disputes amongst the inhabitants of earth-even “be-
tween two parties of ants about a blade of grass." "Pest
on it!" Jupiter is made to say to his council in Rabe-
lais,—“have we not plenty to do without looking after
lost hatchets?" It should be said that the Curé of
Meudon has disfigured the story with much of his usual
grossness, which entirely disappears in La Fontaine's
page. Whatever objection may lie against his Tales,'
the Fables' are irreproachable on this point.
(
Enough has been already said to show that for the
moral teaching of these Fables the author is no more
responsible than he is, except in a very few cases, for
the invention of them. He adopted the morality as
he found it. No doubt it suited, on the whole, his own
ideas of we cannot say the duties, for to him duty
was a word of no significance, but-the necessary re-
lations of life. He lived in the days of a great mon-
archy which was in many of its features a despotism.
1 Rabelais, Garg. i. 33.
十
​132
LA FONTAINE.
He quite understood what was meant by obedience to
a king; but the liberties of subjects were hardly dreamt
of in his philosophy. He is monarchist to the back-
bone. Kings are his favourite heroes,-though under
the mask of beasts of prey; and he takes a sort of
pride in their royal caprices. For the middle-class-
the merchants, the lawyers, and the farmers-he has
very little sympathy indeed. He does not care if the
Ass suffers, he is a stupid beast, and deserves no
better fate. He retains very much of the old feudal
contempt for honest money-making. The Banker's gold
will only cause him restless nights he had rather
sing with the independent Cobbler; and when he
gives us a lesson of prudence in the Ant, we cannot
help feeling that, had he not been bound by the old
Æsopic moral, he had rather have sided with the
Bohemian Grasshopper.
133
CHAPTER V.
LATER FABLE-WRITERS: HOUDARD DE LA MOTTE.
LA FONTAINE stands almost alone amongst his contem-
poraries as a writer of Fables in his own language. A
few specimens are to be found here and there in the
literary correspondence of the time, as Boileau's "Death
and the Woodman" and "The Oyster and the Lawyers,"
which latter was inserted in a letter to the king, ten years
earlier than the publication of La Fontaine's on the same
subject. The witty and versatile Menage-a promising
lawyer metamorphosed into a very unclerical abbé-had
composed several in Latin. The best is his paraphrase of
Phædrus's fable of "The Old Lion," which is in some
points more graphic than La Fontaine's (iii. 14). In
Latin also, with an elegance that showed a perfect com-
mand of the language, the Jesuit Commire threw off
those versions from the old fable-writers with which he
relieved his labours as a theological professor. The prose
apologues which Fénelón wrote for the instruction of his
pupil, the young Duke of Burgundy, though ingenious,
are lengthy, and are more to be praised for their high
tone of morality than for their point.
Eustace Lenoble, Baron de St George, a political
134
LA FONTAINE.
pamphleteer and somewhat voluminous writer, whose
careless and self-indulgent life much resembled La
Fontaine's, has in his fables perhaps approached him
most closely, here and there, in felicity of expression.
He often made use of the same originals; as, for in-
stance, in "The Wolf and the House-dog," which latter
animal he represents as English.¹ The speech with which
the Wolf closes the interview is a bolder defence of his
own Bohemian life than La Fontaine ventured upon.
"As for me, who decline to sell myself, I have no wish
at all to follow you: I much prefer to wander in the
woods, and to enjoy a vagabond liberty, than to go and
live in London as a citizen-slave." But Lenoble's fables
are too diffuse for translation. The most severely satir-
ical is "The Court Friend," a variation of the old
favourite already noticed as "The Boy and the School-
master." 2
In Lenoble's version the Fox has fallen into
a well, where the Wolf, his courtier-friend, discovers
him, and is much interested to know how he got there.
The Fox naturally begs him to spare his questions and
help him out, as he is drowning. But the Wolf pro-
ceeds leisurely to remind him that life is a thing of very
little value, a mere tissue of disappointments and vexa-
tion; that a happy life is a blessing it is vain to hope
for; and ends by going his way with the parting words
"Adieu! may Heaven console you!" Probably we
have here not only a satire upon worldly friendships,
but also, as in Gargantua's sermon in Rabelais, a sneer
at the consolations of the Church. Lenoble fell gradu-
ally from bad to worse, and was imprisoned on a charge
of forgery. It was in prison that he wrote most of his
1 See p. 85.
2 La Font., i. 19: see p. 129.
•
ETIENNE PAVILLON.
135
fables. After obtaining his liberty, he died in obscurity,
a mere bookseller's hack.
One of the prettiest fables of this date is by Etienne
Pavillon, a member of the French Academy a few years
later than La Fontaine. He calls it "Honour, Fire, and
Water." It has been remarked that, in the later Fabu-
lists, abstractions such as the Virtues and the Vices, the
elements and properties of matter, begin to take the
place of the birds and beasts who figure almost exclu-
sively in the earlier drama of apologue. A brief sum-
mary of Pavillon's fable will give its point sufficiently.
"Once upon a time, Honour, Fire, and Water set out
to travel in company. As it was to be an expedition of
pleasure and discovery, they foresaw the possibility of
their getting separated on the road, and made arrange-
ments by which, in such case, they might be sure of
meeting again. Fire explained, that although in general
he was visible enough, yet sometimes he was concealed
from view. 'But even if you miss my light,' said he,
'wherever you see smoke you will be sure to find me.'
Water also instructed his friends as to certain marks by
which his whereabouts could be readily ascertained,-
where the herbage was greenest, and the evening mists
rose in the air. It remained for Honour to give his
companions some clue of the same kind. But he con-
fessed, with a sigh, that the only charge he could give
them was to keep him constantly in view, and never to
lose sight of him at all. 'Watch me,' said he, with
the eyes of Argus; for if once you lose me, you will
never find me more.""
(
The supremacy of La Fontaine in his own province of
literature was freely admitted by almost all who followed
136
LA FONTAINE.
him. His reputation grew more rapidly in the next
generation than in his own. "La Fontaine," says the
Abbé Le Monnier, speaking for himself and his fellow-
authors, “is our rector, but we may perhaps be per-
mitted to rank among his curates." Yet there are some
of these less celebrated labourers in the same field whose
work, here and there, scarcely suffers by comparison
with his.
Foremost among these successors, at an interval of
nearly half a century, stands Antoine Houdard de la
Motte. Like La Fontaine, he had at one time been led
to think that he had a vocation for a religious life. He
had first of all tried the law: disappointed at the failure
of a tragedy which he had written for the stage, and
mistaking mortified ambition for penitence, he entered
La Trappe. He soon found its discipline ill-suited to
his temperament, and returned to the world to write
both tragedies and comedies with greater success. In
1710 he was elected into the Academy; soon afterwards
he lost his sight, but not his good spirits or good.
humour. He was a man of paradoxes. Though a suc-
cessful poet, he wrote a diatribe against poetry as an
unnatural and artificial abuse of language. Without any
knowledge of Greek, he undertook an abridgment of
Homer's Iliad,' reducing the twenty-four books into
twelve. He admits that he had taken considerable liber-
ties with his original; but the Greeks, he remarks, must
have been great talkers, and he considered that he had
improved his author by cutting him down. Rousseau
(who had been his unsuccessful rival at the Academy
election) did not miss the opportunity, and wrote a good
many epigrams on La Motte and his Homer.
"The
137
abridgment," he said, "was really much longer to read
than the original; but the public would easily make it
shorter by not reading it at all." This literary vagary
of La Motte's led also to an amusing battle on paper
between Madame Dacier and himself. He compared
her violent terms of abuse to "those charming Greek
particles in Homer-of no particular meaning or value,
but useful to emphasise and ornament the verse."
But it is as a writer of Fables that we have to deal
with him here. Though a sincere admirer of his great
predecessor, he does not hesitate to criticise him freely.
His strictures are often judicious and acute.
He objects,
on principles of literary taste, to La Fontaine's frequent
practice (borrowed, it should be said, from some of his
most eminent predecessors) of prefixing to his fable the
moral lesson which he means to convey. "Fable," La
Motte argues, "ought to make the moral truth which it
inculcates arise spontaneously in the minds of those to
whom it is narrated; otherwise the teaching becomes.
direct and undisguised, and this is fatal to the interest
of allegory, which professes to veil it." It is only the
want of intelligence in the public, he goes on to say,
which requires the moral to be stated in words at all,
even at the end if placed at the beginning, it destroys
all the reader's pleasure in the story, and does not leave
him the satisfaction of working out the lesson for him-
self. And he gives as an instance of this mistake in art,
La Fontaine's fable of "The Lark and her Young Ones."
He considers that in some cases La Fontaine has grouped
his characters unnaturally; as, for instance, in the strange
association of the Lion with the Goat, Heifer, and Sheep
as a hunting-party. His criticism of the "Two Pigeons,”
:
HOUDARD DE LA MOTTE.
138
LA FONTAINE.
usually considered one of the author's best pieces, is not
without plausibility. There is, he observes, a confusion
of ideas which leaves it doubtful what is the moral really
implied,-whether it is the dangers of travel, the un-
rest of friendship, or the pleasure of return after long
absence. The Pigeon who is weary of the peaceful
monotony of his home life, and leaves his companion
with a resolve to see the world, only returns because in
his travels he meets with rough weather and dangers
from vultures and boys. To point the moral which we
must presume the author to have intended, says the
critic, the restless Pigeon should not have been driven
back to his home and his friend by adverse fortune, but
should have found all the pleasures of the wider world
vapid and unsatisfying, and so have returned to seek his
true happiness in the simpler charms of domestic life.
La Motte claims for his own fables, which he dedi-
cates to the young king Louis XIV., the Regent Orleans,
and the Queen of Prussia, the merit of originality. But
in this he is scarcely honest, as many of them are
palpably borrowed from the Arabian stories assigned
to the sage Lokman, and from Marie de France-col-
lections very little known in France at that time. The
following are some of his best, and the first is probably
original:-
THE CLOCK AND THE SUN-DIAL (iii. 2).
"A pert young Clock began to shout
(He was just set up) to the Dial below-
'Well, what's the hour? I can't find out
From you;' the Dial said-'I don't know.'
'Then what's the use of your Dial-ship, pray,
If you can't tell folks the time of day ?'
HOUDARD DE LA MOTTE.
'I wait,' said he, 'for the Sun to shine;
Knowledge of time is his,-not mine.'
'Wait if you will,' said the Clock, but I
Have nothing to do with the Sun;
Just a turn of the hand, some once a-week,
Is all the help that ever I seek
To keep me going-so perfectly
My hands their courses run.
Hark! I'm going to strike-now listen to me—
One-two-three-four! that's just the time;'
And, as the Clock beat out his chime,
The Sun came forth in his brilliancy;
The clouds and shadows dispersed apace,
And the light shone full on the Dial's face.
It marked the time-'twas nearly five;
C
My child,' said the Dial, 'you want repair;
You've always an answer ready to give,
But those who trust you will badly fare :
Take pattern from me, good youth;
When I don't see clear, I say I don't know;
I speak but little-you call me slow-
But what I speak is truth."
THE PARROT (i. 3).
"A mourning husband, who had lost his spouse,
Resolved, by way of consolation,
To cheer his lonely house,
To buy a parrot of some education ;
So it could talk, the sense was not much matter-
It would at least remind him of her chatter.
So to a bird-seller's he took his way,
Who of such wares displayed a varied store;
Songsters of plumage gay,
Nightingales, starlings, jays, and ravens hoar,
And parrots by the score.
The very worst of them, the man protested,
139
140
LA FONTAINE.
Was a most clever bird,
Could call Another bottle!' if requested;
And here was one
Could mimic all the street-cries he had heard ;
Another screamed for 'Breakfast!' in shrill tone,
And bade the scullion 'put the kettle on.'
Our friend, embarrassed with so wide a choice,
Kept cheapening such as had the clearest voice;
At last he spied
One in a corner crouched, with head aside.
So, Mr Sulky! you sit there alone—
What is the reason, pray,
You have no word to say?'
The parrot winked, and said in solemn tone—
I think the more.'
This struck his fancy more than all before :
'Wise bird!' he thought. 'Prythee, my friend,' he said
How much for him?' Agreed-the bargain's made.'
The man was quite content with what he heard:
Surely so wise a bird
Must have unusual powers of conversation!
He took him home, and listened day by day
To hear what Poll would say;
But, to his consternation,
In spite of teaching, petting, threats, or praise,
Nothing came out but that eternal phrase—
'I think the more.'
(
At last the owner cursed him for a bore:
'You prating fool !-yet greater fool was I,
To judge of merit by one cuckoo-cry !'”
THE SPECTACLES (iii. 3).
"Great Jove one day
With nectar primed, incontinently gay,
Would make a present to mankind:
So Momus, charged his bounty to convey,
Sped down on wings of wind.
HOUDARD DE LA MOTTE.
'Come hither, happy mortals!' cried the god :
'Jove, from his blest abode,
Pitying your purblind eyes,
Of his free gift this remedy supplies.'
He oped his wallet, and there tumbled out
Spectacles, new and bright,
Enough for all at once, with vast delight,
Each seized a pair, and with a joyous shout
Thanked Jove for this new aid to sight.
But, with this gift though all were so contented,
Each wearer saw,
Not in accordance with great Nature's law,
But as his own new optics represented.
These glasses made things blue: with those 'twas red:
These others made them green :
In short, the world was seen
In very various colours: still, 'twas said,
Each man was charmed with his own special pair,
Whate'er their hue:
Each vowed he saw the clearest of all there,
And tasted in the false the pleasure of the true.”
141
It may be noticed that in these fables the author has
not only observed his own rule of not forestalling the
moral, but has even omitted putting it into words at all,
leaving it to the reader's intelligence to draw the obvious
lesson for himself. This has grown to be very generally
the practice of modern writers; and, if the fable itself
have sufficient point, it would seem to be the perfection
of such literature for a cultivated age.
142
CHAPTER VI.
RICHER-DESBILLONS-AUBERT-LE MONNIER.
AMONG the French fable-writers of the eighteenth cen-
tury, Henri Richer, Advocate to the Parliament of his
native city of Rouen, is one of the earliest in date and
the most prolific.
He soon gave up the bar for litera-
ture, and published twelve books of fables, the greater
number of which have at least the merit of originality.
Many are very prettily turned, but there is a want of
the racy vigour which marks the work of La Fontaine.
Their moral is generally good-humoured and refined-
a lesson in social life rather than in graver matters of
conduct. "The Stilts" is a fair specimen, though in this
case the idea can hardly be called original: it is only a
variation of the fable whose application is said to have
proved fatal to Esop-"The Floating Sticks" of La
Fontaine,¹ though it must be allowed that Richer has
very much improved the setting of the moral:
"What sight is this which meets my wondering eyes?
Two giants-and their heads quite touch the skies!'
So spoke a rustic, gaping with amaze·
1 iv. 10: see p. 16.
RICHER.
Two children upon stilts was what he spied,
Stalking along the mountain side,
Who showed like Titans to his distant gaze.
'Go closer,' said a friend; the man moved nearer;
With every step he took, their height grew less;
Who, to the distant eye,
Had seemed some twenty fathoms, at a guess,
Now that he saw them clearer,
Were barely four feet high.
So the great man we worship at a distance
Is but a dwarf save for his stilts' assistance."
The following is borrowed from Lenoble, but Richer
has recast it in a much livelier form :—
THE SNAKE AND THE HEDGEHOG.
"Soon as he felt the winter frosts begin,
A Hedgehog begged a Snake to take him in:
"Twill be a deed of charity,' said he;—
'I'm perishing with cold, as you may see;
And then
143
In this great hole how lonely you will be,
All by yourself, till summer comes again!
So take me under cover-
I'm first-rate company, as you'll discover.'
The Snake consented,
And very soon repented.
The Hedgehog proved a most unpleasant guest;
Curled himself up into a horrid ball,
Rolled here and there, with no regard at all
For his poor hostess, who could get no rest,
And even pricked her side
With those sharp-pointed quills upon his hide.
Vainly she made complaint;-
It was the brute's amusement so to do.
Such conduct would provoke a very saint:
At last she said—‘Behave yourself, or go!'
144
LA FONTAINE,
'Go!' said the brute-not I! I'm here at present,
And here I'll stay:
Go out yourself, if you find things unpleasant.'
In a companion one may find a master.
A solitary life is dull, you say:
Life with a Hedgehog is a worse disaster."
The Jesuit colleges continued to produce Latin fables
which were very fair imitations of Phædrus.
The art
was much cultivated amongst their pupils; and in 1745
a volume was published by the College Louis le Grand,
at Bourges, containing a collection of these literary exer-
cises by the students, many of them young men of rank.
The fathers themselves set the example, as has been
seen already; and the fables of Francis Joseph Des-
billons may bear comparison with those of Commire.
He was a simple, good man, unsuited for the France of
his days. He quitted the country on the expulsion of his
Order by the royal edict, and took refuge at Mannheim
under the protection of the Elector of Bavaria. Fable
had not wholly lost its ancient province of reading
lessors to the powerful; and few who knew the state
of the French lower orders in France would miss the
application (though the moral is only hinted) of "The
Peasant and his Ass." The Latin is pretty, but Des-
billons evidently enjoyed his powers of composition,
and gives us rather too much of it. The reader must be
content with its skeleton in prose:
A Peasant was driving home his Ass, already quite
sufficiently loaded. As he passed a thicket of brush-
wood by the roadside, he bethought himself that a few
fagots would be very useful, and could not add materially
AUBERT.
145
to the Ass's burden. He cut some, and laid them on
the creature's back, who went on as patiently as before.
Next he passed a heap of stones, and picked out two
that looked useful for building: they were not so very
heavy, and could surely not make much difference; he
added them to the load, and the poor Ass summoned all
his little remaining strength, and struggled on. The
Peasant was delighted; never had he seen this good
servant of his do his work so cheerfully. The day was
growing hot: he took off his coat, and threw it on the
Ass's back—that could be no weight at all.
But now
at last the Ass fell down, and, to his master's horror,
never got up again, he was dead.
France saw the fulfilment of the Jesuit's fable at the
Revolution-but with this difference, that it was not
the Ass who was the victim.
Jean Louis Aubert (several of whose fables Desbillons
paraphrased in Latin) enjoyed in his day almost as great
popularity as La Fontaine. He is generally known by
the prefix "Abbé," for he had taken the tonsure though
he never entered the priesthood. He published his
Fables in 1756; in a few years they ran though six
editions, and were translated into various languages. So
highly were they praised and admired, that we are told
there was hardly a fashionable salon without its fire-
screens embellished with the text and subjects of some
of his fables. This, combined with the flattery of Vol-
taire, rather spoilt him. He had praised Voltaire's
tragedies; in return for which their gratified author had
written him a letter placing him on a level with La
Fontaine. Aubert's theory was, that later fable-writers
had failed because of their slavish imitation of their great
F.C.-XIV.
K
146
LA FONTAINE.
predecessor; and that they would have had more chance
of success if they had been more original in style and
subject, as he himself not unfairly claimed to be. His
fables, however, have been nearly forgotten, and are not
of any remarkable merit, though written in an easy and
polished style. The following is considered his best :-
S
THE MORAL MIRROR
"Once in a certain public square
may not tell the when or where)
A mirror stood, of wondrous kind;
It showed to each who looked therein
Not the mere outward face and skin,
But all the features of the mind.
Not one of all the passers-by
But stopped, and gazed with curious eye.
Came a coquette; she could not pass
Without a study of the glass;
She saw reflected on its plane
Her jealous arts, caprices vain :
(
That picture-ha! I know it well,-
The very self of Isabel!
It represents to admiration
Her haughty airs and affectation;
A most instructive glass,' she cried,
(
To mortify that creature's pride!'
Next came a fop, and looked, and saw
Reflected by this marvellous law
Proud looks, with little sense;
Said he' There's Damon, on my word!
The likeness really's quite absurd-
What insolent pretence !
"Twould do him good, conceited ass,
To take a lesson from this glass!'
Next came a miser, old and grim,
Peering with purblind gaze;
AUBERT.
At once the glass reflected him
In all his niggard ways:
'Ah! that's Ariston, stingy clown,
Who'd sell himself for half-a-crown;
To show him up, now, would be funny;
I'd buy this glass-but for the money.'
A thousand visitors, in short,
Came, looked their fill, and made great sport
Of all that they were shown;
Each, in the image there reflected,
Some neighbour's character detected—
But never saw their own."
The next is also pretty, though the introduction woul!
show better, for every reason, in its French dress:
THE HEN AND HER BROOD (v. 1).
"As some young beauty, fresh from Morpheus' arms,
Waking displays a thousand new-born charms,
So in the night
Nature grows rich, and with the morning's light
Shows forth her fairest treasures new bedight.
The smiling hills are tipped with radiant gold;
Th' enamelled flowers unfold;
Before the deepening azure pales the rose
Which o'er the fields of heaven Aurora sows:
The crystal of the streams
Glances and sparkles in the slanting beams;
The Zephyrs come to kiss fair Flora's lips;
And from the bed of Thetis, where he dips
At night, all-radiant Phœbus 'gins to rise.
The shepherd hopes that on this genial day
Nymphs will no more be coy;
Nature herself is gay,
147
And breathes of love, of pleasure, and of joy.
In such bright morning hours, a mother hen
Led forth her brood from home,-
148
LA FONTAINE.
Their restless spirits wearying of their pen,-
Into the fields to roam.
She watched them as they chirped, and pecked, and sported,
With the new joys of liberty transported,
When suddenly she stopped-looked in the sky—
And with a piercing cry
Gave warning to her scattered progeny.
The little wanderers wished themselves at home;
In the long grass they hid,
Under a molehill slid,
Crouched in the cart-ruts, waiting what might come.
Some travellers stopped, and laughed at the poor mother;
'She fears,' said one, her chicks may come to harm;
But I can see no reason for alarm:'
'Nor I,' rejoined another,
Casting a glance into the clear blue sky-
'
And yet I'm thought to have a keenish eye:'
That hen,' they said,
(
'Has some chimera in her foolish head.'
A third came up-' Here, take this glass,' said he;
There's a black speck just overhead, I see.'
Yes-'twas a bird; and, now they saw it clearer,
A vulture, plainly, coming near and nearer.
At last they made it out,
By scientific help-the glass had shown it:
Without a moment's doubt,
At the first glance, the mother's eye had known it.
O wondrous keenness of a mother's sight!
O watchful care, that fails not day or night!
They paint Love blind; if he be wronged, his part
I leave for lovers, if they will, to take:
But the great love that fills a mother's heart
Has more than Argus' eyes, and all awake.”
AUBERT.
THE ASS AND THE NIGHTINGALE (ii. 2).
"An Ass, mistrustful of his vocal powers,
And conscious that his race
Was not the work of Nature's happiest hours,
Resolved to mend his case
By learning music; and with that intent
Into the woods he went,
To hear the Nightingale, and learn her style.
He listened for a while,-
149
Some twice or thrice, it might be,-when he thought
He really had no need of being taught;
'My voice,' he told himself, 'is wondrous good,
And-not to be vainglorious-
'Gainst all the feathered singers in this wood
I'd back my weakest notes to be victorious!'
He brayed his loudest; all the songsters round
Grew dumb with horror at the fearful sound
Which through the forest rang;-
Even the Nightingale was mute;
'Ay,' said the long-eared brute,
'I knew they'd all be silenced when I sang!'"
The writer leaves his readers to draw the moral. The
cases in which the Ass brays down the Nightingale are
at least as frequent in our own days as in his.
Aubert was an able literary critic as well as a writer
of fables, and at different times either conducted or
contributed to some of the best French literary journals.
The chair of French literature in the College-Royal was
founded expressly for him, and he held it for some years.
Though much more of a philosopher than an ecclesiastic,
he had little sympathy with the principles of the Revolu-
tion, and was suspected and attacked by the Jacobin
party. But he weathered the storm, and lived to see
the return of the Bourbons.
150
LA FONTAINE.
The Abbé Guillaume Le Monnier, though by ten years
the senior of Aubert, did not publish his fables until
nearly twenty years later. He was a man of humble
origin, but the preface to his Fables, rather than the
fables themselves, show him to have possessed very con-
siderable abilities, and a cultivated taste. This preface
is, in fact, a dissertation upon the principles of fable.
in general, combined with an appreciative criticism of
La Fontaine, whose supremacy, as has already been said,
Le Monnier heartily acknowledges. "I will speak of
him," says he, "in a prose fable.'
"A certain man had a son born to him. A Fairy
who was present at his birth said to the father—‘This
child shall be famous in horse-racing and in travel: when
he is grown up, I will make him a present of a steed.'
From the moment the child could sit a horse, the father
instructed him in the art of riding. All its precepts
were carefully impressed upon him, a hundred times
over. At last the Fairy arrived with her present-it
was a horse with wings. The youth leaped upon it at
once. The father cried out to him-'Forget, my son,
forget all my lessons: grasp his mane, hold on tight,
and let him carry you away.' The boy was La Fon-
taine-the steed was Pegasus.'
Le Monnier makes this fable a text on which he
dwells with much ingenuity to show how La Fontaine's
great success was owing to his disregard of the recog-
nised canons of his art, and his following a new line
dictated only by his natural genius. "To compare other
writers with La Fontaine is," he says, "to make the
ordinary horse try to follow the horse with wings." For
La Motte's more formal system he expresses almost
contempt: "La Motte," he observes,
wrote a very
""
">
LE MONNIER.
151
ingenious dissertation on the Art of Fable; but at the
same time he wrote fables which prove how little mere
theory and cleverness can supply the place of genius."
Perhaps we may be inclined to say in turn of Le
Monnier's own fables, that they show him to have been
stronger in criticism than in performance. Scarcely
any of them are worth extracting; and none are so
pretty as the following little story, very much in the
nature of a fable, which is to be found in this pre-
face:-
"One day I called on a lady who had a reputation
for cleverness. I waited in the drawing-room while she
was finishing her toilet. Her two little girls, eight and
six years old, were there playing at being "Mamma."
They had set their dolls on two footstools; these dolls
were their children. Each mamma was teaching her
daughter, lecturing her upon her faults, and all with
a childish grace which much amused me. The mother
came in, and saw me smiling. I repeated to her, aside,
what I had just been listening to. She laughed too; and
then made the children begin the scene over again, not
failing to criticise any faults of language that escaped
the little actresses, and dictating to them what would
be the more correct expression to use. All was spoilt :
adieu to all natural grace and sportiveness and uncon-
sciousness! I had been listening to two little La Fon-
taines talking; and now here were two little Houdard
de La Mottes holding a dissertation!"
Le Monnier was deprived of his cure, and thrown
into prison, during the Reign of Terror, but was fortu-
nate enough to be set at liberty at the general release of
prisoners which followed the counter-revolution of the
9th Thermidor.
152
CHAPTER VII.
FLORIAN.
THE latest and the best of the French Fabulists of the
eighteenth century (his fables did not appear until 1792)
is Jean Paul Claris-better known under his surname
of Florian, which he took from the castle of that name
built by his grandfather in the Cevennes, where he was
born. One of his uncles, an officer of cavalry, had
married a niece of Voltaire; and the nephew spent a
summer with this relative at Ferney. Voltaire took a
great fancy to the handsome and clever boy, whom he
called by the pet name of "Florianet," allowed him to
slice off the heads of the flowers in the garden while
imagining himself to be Ajax among the Trojans, and
helped him slyly in his themes, to the entire mystifica-
tion of his surprised and gratified tutor. He was taken
to Paris at an early age by one of his aunts, and initiated
too early into the gay society of the capital. He became
page to the Duke de Penthièvre, son of one of the illegiti-
mate sons of Louis XIV., who seems to have been as fond
of him as Voltaire had been, and gave him another pet
name-" Pulcinella so much amused was he with the
boy's clever and sportive character. He soon began to
""
FLORIAN.
153
write little comedies, harlequinades, and pastorals, light
and graceful enough, but probably owing much of their
reputation to the position of their author in society,-
for he was now gentleman-in-waiting to the Duke. Their
little day of popularity has long passed away with the
artificial taste which called them forth; but his fables
will always be charming, and are not so well known as
they deserve to be.
Florian is perhaps more of the Court poet than La
Fontaine. He does not show the same love of country
life, and his conceptions of it are of a more artificial
kind, as was to be expected from one who confesses
himself a disciple of Gesner-the author who did more
than any other to awaken and develop, by his pastorals
and idylls, that strange taste for reproducing the impos-
sible Arcadia of the classic poets which seized upon
French society towards the close of the sixteenth cen-
tury,—a taste only to be explained by the fact that
innocence and simplicity were to that society such very
novel ideas. When Florian in one of his own pastorals
grows enthusiastic on the charms of a country life, it is
a French Arcadia that he is dreaming of, and not the
woods and wilds of the Basses Cevennes. He wrote pas-
torals as he also wrote a sermon when he was a youth,
without much more real vocation for a country life than
for that of an ecclesiastic. It is never safe to take the
poet's tastes in such matters as necessarily representing
those of the man. Some pages of clever criticism have
been written to prove that Virgil would have preferred
above all things the life of a country gentleman; but it
may be doubted whether he would have found himself
as much at home in that position as he was in the court of
154
LA FONTAINE.
Augustus, or whether his theories in the Georgics would
have insured him much success as a practical farmer.
Florian did not study his birds and beasts in their
native fields and forests, as La Fontaine did: he found
his birds, as he tells us himself, in the cages on the
Quai de la Ferraille, where they were sold, and he had
a large aviary adjoining his library. He does not trouble
himself very much about their special natural history, so
long as their leading popular characteristics serve the
purpose of his story. He is commonly less cynical, and
therefore less piquant, than La Fontaine : his morality
often rises to a higher tone; and there is a vein of melan-
choly which contrasts distinctly with the buoyant spirit
and light and laughing touch of the earlier fabulist. He
was living in times which he felt were evil-in the last
days of the grand old French Monarchy; on the brink
of that terrible social revolution which was to desolate
France, and to destroy that world of feudal grandeur, of
aristocratic traditions, and of chivalrous sentiment, in
which he had been born and lived. He loved the better
side of it, while his eyes were not shut to its darker
features the tyranny and oppression on which so much
of it rested, and from which its final overthrow was
soon to come. All his sympathies and predilections,
like his natural ties, were with the nobility; but he
would have had them show themselves noble in spirit
as well as in blood. It is not difficult to discover -or
at least to fancy we discover-in some of his fables a
forecast of the coming storm. The melancholy pathos
of the following, when we bear in mind the date at
which it was written, has a meaning that can hardly
be mistaken :-
FLORIAN.
THE CONFIDENT PARROT (iii. 19).
It will be nothing '--so the thoughtless cry,
What time the storm hangs threatening in the sky;
(
Why vex ourselves before the evil day?'
Why but to save ourselves while yet we may?
A stout sea-captain once, who knew no fears,
But lacked the prudence that became his years,
Resolved to put to sea:
What though the wind was high, the skies were wild,
Little recked he;
Vain was the pilot's warning;
Still came the same reply, all danger scorning-
‘It will be nothing '—and the captain smiled.
A parrot sat on board,
And caught the refrain of the captain's word;
And all the while the good ship rushed ahead,
'It will be nothing,' still the parrot said.
Long time by adverse winds the barque was tossed;
The course was lost:
155
At last they lay becalmed; short store of bread,
No land in sight, all hearts disquieted.
The captain spoke no word;
'It will be nothing,' still repeats the bird.
And day by day the measured food ran short,
Till, as a last resort
(The crew were starving, and no help was nigh),
Even the sailor's pets,
Macaws and parroquets,
To still their hunger, all were doomed to die.
Sadly the parrot sat, and drooped his head;
'It will be nothing,'-feebly still he said.
Meanwhile his cage stood open on the deck,-
He might have saved himself, if he had tried:
At last they wrung his neck;
'It will—be—nothing,' he gasped out, and died."
The author himself was at least not one of those who,
156
LA FONTAINE.
under such ominous skies, lived in a fool's paradise. It
is related of him that in September 1793, before the
storm broke, he was one of a gay circle assembled to-
gether at the Chateau du Marais, belonging to Madame
la Briche. They were acting one of Florian's little
dramas, and he, as actor and stage-manager, was as usual
the life and soul of the party. It was one of the most
glorious days of autumn, and every one's spirits were at
their highest under the brilliant sunshine and the clear
blue sky. But in the midst of it all Florian grew
thoughtful, and said to a friend, "We shall pay dearly,
believe me, for these days of enjoyment!" He added a
wish that, if he died young, he might be buried in a
spot in the gardens which he pointed out. Some of the
gay company laughed when they heard of it, and went
so far as to compose for him a jesting epitaph. But in
little more than a year his presentiment was fulfilled.
He had felt some sympathy with the revolutionary
movement, but it soon took a turn which he did not
expect, and which bitterly disappointed him. Still he
hoped to escape the general proscription levelled against
men of talent. But some of his writings had been
denounced, and he was arrested by a mandate of Robes-
pierre. Then he seems to have lost heart entirely, and
descended to petitions and memorials to the authorities
of the day, which were quite unworthy of his name and
blood. "Can a poor writer of fables and pastorals like
me" "—such was his language--" commit crimes against
the people? Let me go back to my books and my
printers, whom I have maintained for fifteen years.'
Such appeals were in vain. However, he was set at
liberty, with Le Monnier and others, at the fall of the
FLORIAN.
Jacobins on the 9th Thermidor; but his nerves and con-
stitution were utterly shaken, and he died soon after-
wards, before he had completed his fortieth year.
The fable which he gives as a kind of prologue to the
rest is admirable. He would appear to have taken as
his text two lines from La Fontaine-
"A naked moral will disgust, they say;
Linked with a story, it may make its way."
"1
FABLE AND TRUTH.
"Truth from her well one day
Stepped into upper air,
Naked, as usual-and, if one must say,
Her charms, from age, somewhat the worse for wear.
All, young and old, at the strange vision fled:
Poor Truth stood shivering there,
Nor found a sheltering roof to hide her head.
When full in sight my lady Fable came,
Bedecked with plumes and diamonds-mostly false,
But brilliant all the same.
'What, is it you?' she cried-'Good-day, my dear!
What in the name of wonder make you here?
And all alone, too, in the public street!'
'Alas!' said Truth, 'I'm starving with the cold,
And not a soul I nieet,
Humbly as I entreat,
Will give me shelter.-Ah! when one gets old,
One grows a fright, you see-men scorn me now.'
'Well, you're my younger sister, anyhow,'
Said Fable; 'and-don't think me vain to say so-
I'm pretty well received: from me, I vow,
Men do not run away so.
157
1 "Une morale nue apporte de l'ennui;
Le conte fait passer le precepte avec lui.”
-La Fontaine, vi. 1.
158
LA FONTAINE,
But my dear Truth-this primitive costume!
O fie! it's not the thing; look here, there's room
Under my cloak for both;
Come-don't be loath,-
We shall do best in partnership, believe me:
The wise, for your wise sake, will all receive me,
And, for my sake, the fools
Will not object so much to your strict rules.
To each will we dispense
Food to their taste, so all will be delighted :
Thanks to my folly and to your good sense,
We shall find welcome always, thus united."
:
Florian's mother was a Spaniard; he had learnt her
language, and borrowed some few of his subjects from
the Spanish poet Yriarte for instance, "The Ape and
the Magic Lanthorn," "The Rope-dancer," and "The Ass
and the Flute." But these are hardly his best, or at least
so well suited for translation as those given below. The
first is said to have been intended to satirise Madame
de Genlis, and its last line has almost passed into a
proverb.
THE SILKWORM (v. 12).
"Talking among themselves one day,
The animals, each in their different way,
The Silkworm's skill were praising :
How wondrous fine
↓
She spins her tureads! such talent is divine!
And then the price they fetch is quite amazing!'
Only the Spider had some fault to find;
She showed a critic's mind,
Putting in 'ifs' and 'buts,' and not a few—
Remarks that seemed to them quite out of season:
'Sirs,' said the Fox, 'you understand the reason?
Madame spins too."
FLORIAN.
The two next are of somewhat the same character :
the first of them is borrowed, as is the case with two or
three others of Florian's fables, from the English of
Gay.
THE PEACOCK, THE GEESE, AND THE DIVER
(iii. 16).
"His jewelled tail a peacock was displaying ;
Admiring birds their compliments were paying;
While from the neighbouring mere
Two geese turned up their noses with a sneer:
They noted only his defects. Said one,
'What hideous feet! what legs to stand upon!'
'And then his voice!'
159
Remarked the other; of the two, for choice,
I think the screech-owl has the best of it:'
And each laughed loudly at the other's wit.
Up jumped a Diver; 'Gentlemen,' said he,
You have discerning eyes;
Full three miles off that bird's defects you see;
But let me tell you this-
You have a voice and legs far worse than his,
Without his brilliant dyes."
as
"The Shepherd and the Philosopher" of Gay appears
"The Philosopher and the Farmer" (iv. 1); and
Gay's well-known "Hare and many Friends" is "The
Hare, her Friends, and the two Deer" (iii. 7) of Florian.
In the French fable the moral is strengthened by the
contrast between the many and inconstant friends of the
Hare, who all fail her in the day of trouble, and the
exclusive and faithful attachment of the two Deer, who
save each other from the hounds; but the machinery is
somewhat clumsy.
160
LA FONTAINE.
THE Parrot (iv. 3).
"An old grey Parrot from his cage had flown,
And fixed his quarters in a neighbouring wood;
And there he sat, affecting quite the tone
Of modern connoisseurs, as nearly as he could,
And criticised with supercilious air
Each bird that warbled there.
Even the nightingale's enchanting song
He found too long;
Besides, her cadences were sometimes wrong.
As for the linnet,
Her style was poor-there was no science in it;
Besides, her voice was waning.
The lark-well, possibly, when she was young,
Had she enjoyed the advantage of his training,
She might have sung.
In short, no bird could please him: when they chaunted
He hissed so loud that they all stopped, quite daunted.
Tired out with such affronts, the birds one day
Approached him in a body. Sir,' said they,
'You always hiss, and mercilessly flout
These poor attempts of ours;
You have a splendid voice yourself, no doubt;
For our instruction, just for once display
Your own superior powers.'
The critic was embarrassed-scratched his head-
And slowly said:
'Ladies and gentlemen, the fact is this;
I don't sing much, but I know how to hiss.'"
S
THE KING AND THE TWO SHEPHERDS (i. 3).
"A certain king one day bewailed his fate;—
The affairs of state
Did so perplex him:
'Lives there a man,' he murmured, 'small or great,
That has so much to vex him?
FLORIAN.
I long for peace-yet go to war I must;
I love my subjects-yet the taxes rise;
I love the truth-men always tell me lies;
There's no one I can trust.
My people are distrest,
I myself get no rest :
As for advice, I seek the very best;
I try all means for help, and all in vain;
The more I try, the more I don't succeed.'
Just then his Majesty saw on the plain
A flock of sheep at feed,
Lean, closely shorn,
Ewes without lambs, and lambs without their mothers,
Wandering and bleating, utterly forlorn:
The rams, half-starved, were straying, and the others
Gave their unhappy shepherd much ado.
Now 'twas a sheep would bolt into the wood,
Now 'twas a lamb that in a lazy mood
Would lag behind, and now his favourite ewe;
He ran, and raved, and panted,
161
But always missed the point where he was wanted:
While he runs one way, comes a wolf another,
And steals a sheep-he rushed to make him drop it,
When the wolf's brother
Pounced on the lamb, before the man could stop it.
Breathless at last he stopped, and tore his hair,
And beat his head, and in his sore despair
Prayed death to end his pains.
'That's me exactly,' thought the King: 'these swains,
Like me, find government no joke;
To rule our flocks is no such easy matter.'
As he spoke,
He saw another flock, much fatter,
Down in the vale below: rams quite a model
Of what a ram should be, with ewes surrounding-
Ewes with such fleeces they could hardly waddle-
To whose full udders happy lambs came bounding.
F.C.-XIV.
L
162
LA FONTAINE.
As for their shepherd, he
Was making love-songs to some rustic Phillis
Or Amaryllis,
Stretched at his ease beneath a shady tree,
Waking the tender echoes with his strain,
Then tuning it upon his pipe again.
'Ha!' said the King,
This flock will come to grief; wolves don't much care
For love-sick shepherds who do nought but sing;
One doesn't scare
Such creatures with a sentimental ditty:
Well-I should laugh, and think it no great pity.'
Just then, as if to please him,
Out springs a hungry wolf,—but, quick as thought,
Up jumps a dog to seize him.
Scared at the din,
Two of the flock rushed wildly o'er the plain;
Off goes another dog, and brings them in,
And in an instant order reigned again.
Stretched on the grass,
The Shepherd saw it all, sang on, and let it pass.
Zounds!' cried the King, half-angry and quite jealous,
'How do you manage things, my friend?
The woods here swarm with wolves-your sheep are fat-
You don't disturb yourself a whit for that,
And hardly take the trouble to attend ;-
What is your secret ?-tell us.'
'Sire,' quoth the Shepherd, there's not much to tell;
My secret is-I choose my sheep-dogs well.'"1
THE OWL, THE CAT, THE GOOSE, AND THE RAT (iii. 17).
"An Owl, of whom some scholars had made prize,
Lived in the college cloisters as their pet,
And there he met
1 The late Prince Consort, in a conversation with the Emperor
Napoleon III., remarked that "no monarch had ever been great
without having a great Minister."-Martin's Life, vol. iv. p. 113.
FLORIAN.
A Cat and a young Goose, not over-wise-
These were the porter's treasures :
All three were friends, and shared their cares and pleasures.
Through college-chambers, lecture-rooms, and hall,
They walked about,
Went in and out,
As if they were the masters of it all.
Admitted members of a learned college,
They had imbibed good store of classic knowledge;
Had read Herodotus, aud Dion Cassius,
And Dionysius Halicarnassius;
Disputed, too,
On knotty points, as learned doctors do.
One night they held a lively disputation,
Which in times past was the most famous nation.
'I give my voice for Egypt,' quoth the Cat,-
'A people wise and learned, grand and calm,
And full of reverence towards their gods—and that,
In my opinion, always bears the palm.'
Nay, Athens has my vote,'
Rejoined the Owl; 'what elegance, what wit,
What gallantry in battle! do but note
The heroes she gave birth to! I submit
No people did so much with such small means:
Her place among the nations is a queen's.'
Upon my word,' broke in the Goose, irately,
"You gentlemen amuse me greatly:
And how about the Romans, might I ask?
To find their match in grandeur and in fame
Would be no easy task:
163
Your favourites, it is true, have made a name;
But still, in peace or war,
Those conquerors of the world surpassed them far.'
Each held his ground, as far as words could go;
When an old Rat who heard the conversation
(A learned Rat, who in his hole below
Was making a dry meal of college themes)
Said, 'Gentlemen, to me it seems
164
LA FONTAINE.
You have good reason for your choice of nation :
Th' Egyptians worship Cats; the Greeks, the Owl;
At Rome, the Geese are held in veneration,
And have free quarters in the Capitol.
Whichever way our several interests veer,
'Tis by that compass our opinions steer.'"
THE APES AND THE LEOPARD (iii. 1).
'A little band of gamesome Apes, one day,
Met in the woods to play.
The game was this: one had to hide his face
Within a comrade's lap, while on his back
He stretched his paw out for the rest to smack;
Then he must guess who struck; and, in such case,
Guessed wrong, of course:
Then they all grinned, and screamed till they were hoarse.
Attracted by the sound,
A smart young leopard sallied from his lair,
And with a gracious air
Bowed most politely round.
All trembled at his presence. 'Pray,' said he,
'Don't be alarmed: I'm a good-natured beast—
Don't stop for me-
I would not interrupt you in the least:
Nay, I've come here to-day
Quite in a friendly way,
To join your sports myself; so pray go on,
And I'll make one.'
'Oh, monseigneur! your Highness is too good!
What! join in these rude sports with such as we?'
'Well, 'tis my whim-just now I'm in the mood;
Besides, my Highness takes a philosophic view
As to the rights of animals-don't you?
I go in for equality, you see:
Come-let's begin.'
FLORIAN.
The Apes, delighted, listened fast enough
(As fools will always listen to such stuff),
And, with a general grin,
Took it all in.
So the blindfolded Ape held out his paw:
The Leopard smote,-beneath the princely claw
Out sprang the blood. This time there was no doubt:
The poor Ape guessed who struck,
But held his tongue, limped off, and cursed his luck :
His comrades feigned a laugh-the prince laughed out.
So, one by one,
The Apes made their excuses, and were gone,
But muttered to themselves upon the way—
Such games with princes are not safe to play:
Under the velvet paw,
Smooth as it looks, there always lurks a claw.'"
165
Like La Fontaine, Florian has sometimes included in
his volume pieces which have no claim to be called
fables. Such is the case with the following, which is
only a story in verse, cleverly told :—
THE PACHA AND THE DERVISH—(iv. 7).
"Once at Marseilles I heard an Arab tell
How that a great Pacha, in days gone by,
Sent a small casket, having sealed it well,
To the most learned sage in Araby:
'Within this casket,' said the Turk, there lie
Rubies and diamonds of rare worth:
6
This prize I send to him whom you shall find,
In your wise judgment, out of all mankind,
The greatest fool on earth.'
The Dervish took the thing, and straight set out
To travel on this quest.
Need he go far, you ask me? Well, no doubt,
Fools are not scarce; but then-to make the choice?
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LA FONTAINE.
They came from North, and South, and East, and West-
Fools whose strong claims the puzzled sage confessed,
And all but gave his voice-
Ay, and the casket too-to more than one,
Who seemed the very man to fix upon;
But that some secret feeling in his mind
Warned him a greater fool was yet to find.
Our friend pursued his quest from land to land
(The casket still in hand);
From shore to shore, from sea to sea he passed,
And reached Constantinople at the last.
The town was all in jubilee-' And why?'
He asked an Imaum who was passing by;
'What means this great rejoicing that I see?'
'Oh! nothing much,' said he ;
"Tis only our Grand Vizier has been sent
(Graced with a silken noose, for ornament)
To bear the Sultan's firman to the Prophet
In Paradise-that's all the meaning of it.
These little things amuse our folk—and so,
Our master, kindly soul,
Knowing how dull their lives are on the whole,
He just indulges them sometimes, you know.'
"Often?' 'Oh, yes!' 'Tis well,' the sage replied;
'One word beside-
Your new Grand Vizier-was he named to-day?'
'He was—and, see! his Highness comes this way.'
The Dervish crossed the square,
And recognised his friend the Pacha there.
(
Ha, well met, Dervish !-and the casket? say,
What is your news?'
'I've travelled, sir, a long and weary way,
And have seen many fools; but which to choose
'Twas hard to know:
To-day my task is done: Grand Vizier, lo!
(So may your slave find favour in your eyes)
To you I give the prize.'"
167
CHAPTER VIII.
LE BAILLY.
THERE seems something in fable naturally akin to the
genius of the French language. The point, the vivacity,
the finish, which a good fable ought to have, are all
found in happiest combination in the best French writers.
We need not, therefore, be surprised to find that this
kind of composition continued to be highly popular in
France. Not that very many collections of fables issued
from the press; but it had become the habit of authors
to put their lighter thoughts and fancies, satirical, humor-
ous, or didactic, occasionally into that convenient form.
The style and character of this species of writing gradu-
ally underwent a considerable change. The birds and
beasts of sop and Phædrus were often replaced, as has
been remarked, by more abstract personages; and when
they still appeared, became much more decidedly human
in their behaviour. The old broad moral which had
sufficed for a simpler age no longer furnished variety
enough for illustration; indeed, that vein had been
pretty well worked out. Modern society had a thousand
shades of character and laws of behaviour unknown to
a ruder civilisation. And so the modern fable became
168
LA FONTAINE.
more often a brief form of allegory, and affecting what
we call "prettiness" of conceit rather than force. This
will be found very much the case with the fables of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
But here and there we come upon one which, though
very different from the early models that held their
ground so long, has quite as much vigour, and whose
grave moral is almost solemn. Baron Frederick von
Grimm, in his correspondence, has cited a fable of
this kind which he assigns to a Captain de Lisle, and
which expresses admirably in very brief words the
claims of modern inquiry and the alarmed resistance
of conservative orthodoxy:-
"To the doors of the Sorbonne
Truth one day came all alone;
Her the porter met, and smiled—
'Say, what seek'st thou here, my child?'
'Shelter is all I ask, in sooth;'
'And your name?' 'My name is Truth.'
'Ha!' the guardian cried: Away!
<
Make escape while yet you may,
Ere I raise the hue and cry,
And denounce Impiety!'
Slow and sad she left the gate-
(
You reject me? I can wait;
Child of Time am 1-and he
All I seek will grant to me.'"
In 1801 appeared a small volume by Baron Dutram-
blay de Rubelles, who deserves some brief notice here as
having successfully pleaded before Louis XVIII. the
cause of young De Marson de la Fontaine, great grand-
son of the fabulist. Dutramblay's fables are slight, and
LE BAILLY.
169
have more prettiness than point. One of the best is
"The Sheep's Petition" (ii. 16), which he inscribes to a
"Madame P-;" a graceful compliment to the lady,
if we may suppose that her character led to the dedica-
tion. The tone is as different as possible from that of
La Fontaine, or indeed of any of the earlier fable-
writers:
"Thus to the Ruler of the skies
The Sheep made plaint in piteous guise:
'It ill beseems my place, I know,
To weary Heaven with tales of woe;
Why should the gods who dwell on high
Take note of such poor wretch as I?
And yet, O Jove! hard is my fate,
Whom in thy wrath thou didst create:
Helpless, unarmed, the fierce ones still
Oppress me at their wicked will.'
Jove heard her prayer, looked down, and smiled;
'Good creature, peaceable and mild!
Hard-hearted wretches must they be,
That could work harm to such as thee!
I cannot change their brutal mind;
But thou shalt pay them back in kind:
I give and grant thee, free and full,
The horned weapons of the Bull;
I make thee valorous, fierce, and strong;
And woe to all who do thee wrong!'
Ah! mighty Jove,' the suppliant said-
I shall be marked for hate and dread!
Take back thy gifts-they suit not me;
Life on such tenis were misery.
Thou mad'st me gentle: every sense
Within me shrinks from violence;
If I gave pain, my heart would rue it—
Better to suffer wrong than do it !'"
170
LA FONTAINE,
Towards the close of the last century, Antoine Fran-
cois Le Bailly, a young advocate whom the Duke of
Orleans had taken under his patronage, published his
first volume of Fables. He was an ardent admirer of
La Fontaine, whom he adopted as his model in style.
and mode of treatment, though he confined himself
almost entirely, in his later work, to original subjects;
and, with a modesty and self-renunciation not too com-
mon amongst authors, suppressed in his later editions.
all such fables as he had adapted from common sources,
and which he thought had been more successfully imi-
tated by other French writers-in fact, all which had
not also some claim to originality. Besides a second
series of Fables, he published a volume of complimen-
tary effusions in verse-Hommages Poetiques,' he
called them-in honour of La Fontaine, selected from
Rousseau, Racine, Voltaire, Delille, &c., in 1821.
Le Bailly's fables, if those which he suppressed had
been included in the later edition, would have nearly
equalled in number those of La Fontaine. Many of
them are exceedingly graceful and elegant, and their
tore is on the whole more good-humoured and less
cynical. His political motto would appear to have been
very much that of La Fontaine-"Vive le Roi! Vive
La Ligue!" He swam with the tide. The verses in
honour of Napoleon with which he closed his edition of
1811, he exchanged in 1823 for an eulogy on the Bour-
bons; and an allegorical fable composed in honour of
the little King of Rome was replaced in his second
series by another "The Bull-dog and the Spaniel."
Those which are given below are fair specimens of
his style and subjects. The first is curious as a literary
171
reminiscence of a minor branch of commerce which has
now disappeared. At the date of this fable, dried sage
formed an article of export to China and Japan, the
Dutch buying it up in large quantities from Provence.
for that purpose; and so valuable was it, that the com-
mon rate of exchange is said to have been three chests
of tea for one of sage.
LE BAILLY.
MADAM SAGE AND MADAM TEA (iv. 15).
"Far out at sea,
A cargo of dried Sage met Madam Tea,
Sailing for France from China. Ah! good day,
And whither bound, fair foreigner, I pray?'
'
(
Europe, of course, my dear; I'm quite the rage
With all its population, low or high:
But pray, good Madam Sage,
Where are you bound ?' 'Oh, China!' 'Really!-why?'
'I love the country-as I ought, indeed—
They know my value there;
At home, they treat me almost like a weed:
Thank Heaven, the wind is fair—
China's the place where merit makes its way;
I'm going there-good-day!'"
THE ASS AND THE HORSE (Fabl. Nouv., i. 6).
"An Ass, past master in the graphic arts,
Had finished a great picture—something new:
The Animals, invited from all parts,
Came to a private view.
His work the artist to their taste submitted;
It was a horse-' superb!' they all admitted-
'Nature,' they said, 'has found a rival here!'
'Humph!' said the Ass-'to me that's not so clear.
172
LA FONTAINE.
Our friend has done a clever thing, of course,
But to my humble judgment it appears
That to have perfect symmetry, that horse
Should have had longer ears.'"
The author has another fable conveying much the
same moral-" The Hunchback and the Camel." A
Camel is being led through the streets, and the populace
(to whom the strange animal is supposed to be a novelty)
crowd round to admire him. A rich man, whose great
desire is to have others pay court to him, praises the
Camel's look of submissiveness; a magistrate admires
his air of gravity; a miser his sobriety. A Hunchback,
who overhears these remarks, says "Gentlemen, you
have omitted his great merit, after all: see how lightly
he moves under that large eminence which rises from his
back! and what dignity and grace it adds to his appear-
ance!" "In our praises of another," concludes the
author, we commonly pass an eulogium on ourselves.”
(C
THE PERSIAN PHILOSOPHER.
"A Persian sage,
Who had borne all too long the jealous taunts
Of fools who flourished in that stupid age,
At length abjured mankind, and 'mid the haunts
Of the wild forest beasts, man's natural foes,
Sought silence and repose.
'Nay,' said a friend, perhaps you do well to fly,
Far as you may, from men's society;
They are, I grant, fools mostly, if not knaves;
But to prefer these frightful dens and caves
Where tigers prowl, and hungry lions roar-
'Friend,' interposed the sage-'no more:
Beasts have but teeth and claws to work me wrong;
Men have a tongue.""
LE BAILLY.
The following version is little better than a paraphrase,
yet it may serve to convey some notion of the grace and
beauty of the original.
THE ROSE AND THE BUSH (i. 13).
"A fair young Rose (her name Coquette),
With charms but half developed yet,
Beneath a sheltering Thorn-bush grew,
And much bemoaned her cheerless lot,
Imprisoned in so dull a spot,
Whose gloom was all she knew.
'Patience, my child; whilst here you find
Shelter from sun and stormy wind,
Rest you content,' the Bush replies;
Thanks to my thorns, no insect pest
Can stain your tints, or soil your breast:
In shadow safety lies.'
The Rose, indignant, would not hear:
What was there in the world to fear?
Life, to that dull retirement tied,
Brought neither pleasure nor renown:
'Woodman, I pray thee, cut me down
This villain Bush,' she cried.
'Tis done no more her guardian spread
Its kind protection overhead;
The Rose rejoices to be seen:
Her beauties court the public gaze;
A silly swarm of zephyrs plays
Around the garden's queen;
She hears sweet words of flattery-
The fairest of all roses she;'
But o'er her leaves, in evil hour,
A caterpillar crawls at will,
And next a snail, more hateful still,
Attacks the opening flower;
173
The scorching sunshine pales her bloom,
The hot blasts waste her sweet perfume;
174
LA FONTAINE.
Too late, the hapless Rose recalls
That kindly shelter scorned too soon:
Ere she has reached her beauty's noon,
She withers, droops, and falls.”
The reader will not be far wrong who shall surmise
that the extract from Le Bailly's pages with which this
little volume is to be concluded has been chosen on the
principle of keeping the best till last. It is as different
as possible in character from anything of La Fontaine's.
It has neither his vigour of expression nor his wonderful
play of language. It is not so much a fable as a grace-
ful legend; but it strikes a note we should hardly have
heard from La Fontaine. Of all the French literature
of fiction, fable is the purest; and even La Fontaine's
muse, as has already been gladly acknowledged, is above
reproach when she adopts fable as her costume.
If we
owe to Le Bailly, as seems almost certain, the invention
as well as the arrangement of the following story of
"The Venus of Zeuxis" (iii. 20), it ought of itself to
be sufficient to rescue his name from the long list of
forgotten poets.
Pliny records how the people of Agrigentum com-
missioned the great painter Zeuxis to execute a picture
of Helen for their temple of Juno Lacinia.¹ Other
writers place the scene at Crotona. He acceded to their
request on one condition-that some of the most beauti-
ful maidens of their city should display their charms
before him, that he might choose from each some special
grace of form or feature, and compose the whole into the
perfection of female beauty. There was no difficulty,
according to Pliny's story, in finding the models, and
1 Nat. Hist., Book xxxv. c. 10.
175
the picture was a complete success. So far, the legend
was common property. Le Bailly's adaptation of it is
his own.
He makes the subject of the picture to be
Venus instead of Helen; and he describes the painter
as making choice of five out of the many candidates, in
each of whom he thinks he sees some peculiar charm-
Zelis, Aglaura, Thamyra, Glycera, and Anais. They
are to disrobe before him; and Zelis-only too proud
“to be painted by Zeuxis, and painted as Venus "—sets
the example at once; the others follow, and stand before
the painter as the rival goddesses stood before Paris—
all but one :-
LE BAILLY.
"Fair Anais remained alone,
With glowing cheek and eyes cast down.
'How!' said the painter-' you refuse?
Is it you fear your charms might lose
By close comparison with theirs?
Not so each well with each compares:
Do like the rest-you blush? Nay, nay;
'Tis nothing-art must have its way.'
'I do like them? Not though your hand
Held Paris' apple at command—
Not at that price,' the maiden said,
And gathered close her robes, and fled."
The picture was completed, however, from the other less
scrupulous models, and all who saw it pronounced it to
be a masterpiece, embodying all that could be conceived
of womanly beauty. The friends of Zeuxis came to
congratulate him on his complete success.
"The Painter shook his head, and sighed;
Cast on his work a restless glance,
And mused, and frowned, and looked askance,
Then turned away, dissatisfied.
176
LA FONTAINE.
'How!' said an artist friend-' you sigh?
Has it some fault, then, in your eye
?'
C
Yes,' said the Painter, gloonily.
'But you are wrong: each several grace
Drawn from your models, I can trace-
Aglaura, Zelis, Thamyra,
All, all are there; and Glycera—
Methinks I see her radiant smile-
Yet no-'tis Venus all the while!'
Ah, flatterer, cease!' said Zeuxis: 'I
Am in no mood for flattery.
What Venus had not, they have not;
That one sweet charm was all forgot;
It failed my models as they stood-
The crowning grace of womanhood.'
What is it, then, my friend, you miss?'
'The modesty of Anais.'"
END OF LA FONTAINE.
THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
GRADUATE LIBRARY
APR 2 0 1971
APR 28 1975
APR211973
APR 02 1976
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