Later on, during Fouquet’s imprisonment at Pignerol, La Fontaine wrote further,—

“I sigh to think upon the object of my prayers;
You take my sense, Ariste; your generous nature shares
The plaints I make for him who so unkindly fares.
He did displease the king; and lo his friends were gone
Forthwith a thousand throats roared out at him like one.
I wept for him, despite the torrent of his foes,
I taught the world to have some pity for his woes.”

La Fontaine has been described as a solitary being, without wit, and without external charm of any kind. La Bruyere has said, “A certain man appears loutish, heavy, stupid; he can neither talk nor relate what he has just seen; he sets himself to writing, and it is a model of story-telling; he makes speakers of animals, trees; stones, everything that cannot speak. There is nothing but lightness and elegance, nothing but natural beauty and delicacy in his works.” “He says nothing or will talk of nothing but Plato,” Racine’s daughters used to say. All his contemporaries, however, of fashion and good breeding did not form the same opinion of him. The Dowager-duchess of Orleans, Marguerite of Lorraine, had taken him as one of her gentlemen-in-waiting; the Duchess of Bouillon had him in her retinue in the country; Madame de Montespan and her sister, Madame de Thianges, liked to have a visit from him. He lived at the house of Madame de La Sabliere, a beauty and a wit, who received a great deal of company. He said of her,

“Warm is her heart, and knit with tenderest ties
To those she loves, and, elsewise, otherwise;
For such a sprite, whose birthplace is the skies,
Of manly beauty blent with woman’s grace,
No mortal pen, though fain, can fitly trace.”

“I have only kept by me,” she would say, “my three pets (animaux): my dog, my cat, and La Fontaine.” When she died, M. and Madame d’Hervart received into their house the now old and somewhat isolated poet. As D’Hervart was on his way to go and make the proposal to La Fontaine, he met him in the street. “I was coming to ask you to put up at our house,” said he. “I was just going thither,” answered Fontaine with the most touching confidence. There he remained to his death, contenting himself with going now and then to Chateau-Thierry, as long as his wife lived, to sell, with her consent, some strip of ground. The property was going, old age was coming:—

“John did no better than he had begun,
Spent property and income both as one:
Of treasure saw small use in any way;
Knew very well how to get through his day;
Split it in two: one part, as he thought best,
He passed in sleep—did nothing all the rest.”

He did not sleep, he dreamed. One day dinner was kept waiting for him. “I have just come,” said he, as he entered, “from the funeral of an ant; I followed the procession to the cemetery, and I escorted the family home.” It has been said that La Fontaine knew nothing of natural history; he knew and loved animals; up to his time, fable-writers had been, merely philosophers or satirists; he was the first who was a poet, unique not only in France but in Europe, discovering the deep and secret charm of nature, animating it, with his inexhaustible and graceful genius, giving lessons to men from the example of animals, without making the latter speak like man; ever supple and natural, sometimes elegant and noble, with penetration beneath the cloak of his simplicity, inimitable in the line which he had chosen from taste, from instinct, and not from want of power to transport his genius elsewhither. He himself has said,

“Yes, call me truly, if it must be said,
Parnassian butterfly, and like the bees
Wherein old Plato found our similes.
Light rover I, forever on the wing,
Flutter from flower to flower, from thing to thing,
With much of pleasure mix a little fame.”

And in Psyche:—

“Music and books, and junketings and love,
And town and country—all to me is bliss;
There nothing is that comes amiss;
In melancholy’s self grim joy I prove.”