The Fables of La Fontaine / Translated into English Verse by Walter Thornbury and Illustrated by Gustave Doré

by Jean de La Fontaine

[AN ESSAY ON THE LIFE AND WORKS]

OF

JEAN DE LA FONTAINE.

There are some writers the facts about whom can never be entirely told, because they are inexhaustible, and speaking of whom we do not fear to be blamed for repetition, because, though well known, they furnish topics which never weary. La Fontaine is one of this class. No poet has been praised oftener, or by more able critics, and of no poet has the biography been so frequently written, and with such affectionate minuteness. Nevertheless, it is certain that there will yet arise fresh critics and new biographers, who will be as regardless as ourselves of the fact that the subject has been so frequently enlarged upon. And why, indeed, should we refuse to ourselves, or forbid to others, the pleasure of speaking of an old friend of our childhood, whose memory is always fresh and always dear?

This truly worthy man was born in Château-Thierry, a little town of Champagne, where his father, Charles de la Fontaine, was a supervisor of woods and forests. His mother, Françoise Piloux, was the daughter of a mayor of Coulommiers. An amiable but careless child, he was lazy in his studies, and certainly did not display, by the direction of his earlier inclinations, the germs of his future genius. At twenty years of age, after the perusal of some religious works, he formed the idea that his vocation was the Church, and entered the seminary of Saint Magloire, where, however, he remained only one year. His example was followed by his brother Claude, with this difference, that the latter persevered to the end. On quitting the seminary, La Fontaine, in the paternal mansion, led that life of idleness and pleasure which so frequently, especially in the provinces, enervates young men of family. To bring him back to a more orderly course of life, his father procured him a wife, and gave him the reversion of his office. He was then twenty-six years of age, and the demon of poetry had not yet taken possession of him. La Fontaine never hurried himself about anything.

The accidental recitation in his presence of an ode by Malherbe aroused in his soul, which had hitherto been devoted to pleasure and idleness, a taste for poetry. He read the whole of Malherbe's writings with enthusiasm, and endeavoured to imitate him. Malherbe alone would have spoiled La Fontaine, had not Pintrel and Maucroix, two of his friends, led him to the study of the true models. La Fontaine himself has left a confession of these first flights of his muse. Plato and Plutarch, amongst the ancients, were his favourite authors; but he could read them only by the aid of translations, as he had never studied Greek. Horace, Virgil, and Terence, whose writings he could approach in the original, also charmed him. Of modern authors his favourites were Rabelais, Marot, De Periers, Mathurin, Régnier, and D'Urfé, whose "Astræa" was his especial delight.

Marriage had not by any means fixed his inconstant tastes. Marie Héricart, whom he had been induced to marry in 1647, was endowed with beauty and intellect, but was unsupplied with those solid qualities, love of order, industry, and that firmness of character which might have exercised a wholesome discipline over her husband. Whilst she was reading romances, La Fontaine sought amusement away from home, or brooded either over his own poems or those of his favourite authors. The natural consequence was, that the affairs of the young people soon fell into disorder; in addition to this, when La Fontaine's father died, he left our poet an inheritance encumbered with mortgages, which had been the only means of paying debts, and preserving the family estate intact; these became fresh sources of embarrassment to our poet, who being, as may well be supposed, anything but a man of business, incapable of self-denial, and unassisted by his wife, soon, as he himself gaily expressed it, devoured both capital and income, and in a few years found himself without either.

La Fontaine seems to have confined his duties, as supervisor of woods and waters, to simply taking long rambles under the venerable trees of the forests submitted to his care, or to enjoying prolonged slumbers on the verdant banks of murmuring brooks. And that this was the case we may reasonably suppose, since at sixty years of age he declared that he did not know what foresters meant by round timber, ornamental timber, or bois de touche.

His soul was wrapped up in poetry. His first poems were what might be called album verses, and could scarcely have been understood beyond Château-Thierry. These verses, however, obtained so favourable a reception, that at length he ventured to attempt a comedy. But, as the faculty of construction had been denied him, he only adapted one of Terence's plays, changing the names of the characters, and taking certain liberties with the situations. The piece which he had selected, the "Eunuchus," was very unsuited to the boards of the French stage, and he never attempted to get it produced; but he published it, and it was by means of this mediocre, although neatly versified work, that his name first became known to the public, when he had already entered his thirty-third year.