Miscellaneous writings and the Contes

La Fontaine’s many miscellaneous writings include much occasional verse in a great variety of poetic forms and dramatic or pseudodramatic pieces such as his first published work, L’Eunuque (1654), and Climène (1671), as well as poems on subjects as different as Adonis (1658, revised 1669), La Captivité de saint Malc (1673), and Le Quinquina (1682). All these are, at best, works of uneven quality. In relation to the perfection of the Fables, they are no more than poetic exercises or experiments. The exception is the leisurely narrative of Les Amours de Psiché et de Cupidon (1669; The Loves of Cupid and Psyche), notable for the lucid elegance of its prose, its skillful blend of delicate feeling and witty banter, and some sly studies of feminine psychology.

Like his miscellaneous works, La Fontaine’s Contes et nouvelles en vers (Tales and Novels in Verse) considerably exceed the Fables in bulk. The first of them was published in 1664, the last posthumously. He borrowed them mostly from Italian sources, in particular Giovanni Boccaccio, but he preserved none of the 14th-century poet’s rich sense of reality. The essence of nearly all his Contes lies in their licentiousness, which is not presented with frank Rabelaisian verve but is transparently and flippantly disguised. Characters and situations are not meant to be taken seriously; they are meant to amuse and are too monotonous to amuse for long. The Contes are the work far less of a poet than of an ingenious stylist and versifier. The accent of La Fontaine the narrator enlivens the story with playfully capricious comments, explanations, and digressions.

Personality and reputation

Though he never secured the favour of Louis XIV, La Fontaine had many well-wishers close to the throne and among the nobility. He moved among churchmen, doctors, artists, musicians, and actors. But it was literary circles that he especially frequented. Legend has exaggerated the closeness of his ties with Molière, Nicholas Boileau, and Jean Racine, but he certainly numbered them among his friends and acquaintances, as well as La Rochefoucauld, Mme de Sévigné, Mme de La Fayette, and many less-well-remembered writers.

The true nature of the man remains enigmatic. He was intensely and naively selfish, unconventional in behaviour, and impatient of all constraint; yet he charmed countless friends—perhaps by a naturalness of manner and a sincerity in social relationships that were rare in his age—and made apparently only one enemy (a fellow academician, Antoine Furetière). He was a parasite without servility, a sycophant without baseness, a shrewd schemer who was also a blunderer, and a sinner whose errors were, as one close to him observed, “full of wisdom.” He was accommodating, sometimes to the detriment of proper self-respect, but he was certainly not the lazy, absent-minded simpleton that superficial observers took him for. The quantity and the quality of his work show that this legendary description of him cannot be accurate: for at least 40 years La Fontaine, in spite of his apparent aimlessness, was an ambitious and diligent literary craftsman of subtle intelligence and meticulous conscientiousness.

He was an assiduous and discriminating reader whose works abound in judicious imitations of both the matter and the manner of his favourite authors. He was influenced by so many 16th- and 17th-century French writers that it is almost invidious to mention only François Rabelais, Clément Marot, François de Malherbe, Honoré d’Urfé, and Vincent Voiture. The authors of classical antiquity that he knew best were Homer, Plato, Plutarch—these he almost certainly read in translation—Terence, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid. Boccaccio, Niccolò Machiavelli, Ludovico Ariosto, and Torquato Tasso were his favourites among the Italians. La Fontaine was no romantic; his work derives its substance and its savour less from his experience of life than from this rich and complex literary heritage, affectionately received and patiently exploited.

Too wise to suppose that moral truths can ever be simple, he wrote stories that offer no rudimentary illustration of a certain moral but a subtle commentary on it, sometimes amending it and hinting that only the naive would take it at face value. Thus, what the Fables teach is trivial in comparison with what they suggest: a view of life that, although incomplete (for it takes little account of man’s metaphysical anguish or his highest aspirations), is mature, profound, and wise. Enjoyed at many different levels, the Fables continue to form part of the culture of every Frenchman, from schoolchildren to such men of letters as André Gide, Paul Valéry, and Jean Giraudoux, who have given fresh lustre to La Fontaine’s reputation in the 20th century.