It’s often forgotten that being memorized is the best way to be remembered. For centuries, British schoolchildren had to learn to recite the first 20 lines of Geoffrey Chaucer’s general prologue from the “Canterbury Tales.” Then that got thrown out. Now, Chaucer has, for most people, joined that long list of vague names inhabiting a vague past.
An Innocent Genius
Born in 1621, La Fontaine lived during the age of Louis XIV, a period similar to the Elizabethan age in its rich productions of poetry and drama. He was described by those who knew him as charming and absentminded. According to his wife, he would often forget that he was married. Once, he struggled to recognize a familiar face at a party—his own son, it turned out. Another time, he visited the house of an old friend. When told the friend had died six months previously, La Fontaine expressed shock—then remembered that he had attended the friend’s funeral.His naivete was almost as bad as his absentmindedness. He once challenged a man to a duel, not because he bore a personal grudge but because he thought it was an expected custom.
“I want to fight with you because I have been told to do so,” he said.
When he pulled out his sword, his adversary knocked it out of his hand with one stroke. The charming La Fontaine then convinced the man to breakfast with him instead of killing him, and they went off together.
His graceful manners always seemed to get him out of sticky situations. This came in handy when, after publishing his first six books of “Fables” in 1668, this middle-class lawyer was admitted to the inner circle of the Sun King himself.
The Fables
La Fontaine adapted stories from history’s great fabulists, notably Aesop and the Sanskrit writer Bidpai, as well as inventing his own. His innovation was to write in poetry rather than prose, raising this practice to a high art form.Charming, graceful, and witty, the fables have a natural simplicity that reflects La Fontaine’s personality. Many involve a naive animal being taken advantage of by a more cunning or powerful one. In this fictional world, however, lapses of judgment are more unforgiving than La Fontaine’s acquaintances were, and the animals often suffer fatal consequences. Exactly which character trait is being lampooned, however—the naivety or the ruthlessness—is a matter of interpretation.
After publishing “Fables,” La Fontaine was invited to dine with a young Louis XIV. The king rewarded him with a purse of money—which La Fontaine forgot about and left in the carriage that took him home. Despite Louis’s generosity, the king didn’t like La Fontaine’s verse. Its naturalness contrasted with the artificial style of the court poets that were in fashion at the time. And unlike these sycophants who praised kingly dignity and splendor, La Fontaine satirized royal pomp.
“Then, carving up the game
Into four quarters, he laid claim
To the first on the grounds that he was a lord:
‘I’m entitled to award
This chunk to myself because Lion is my name.’
Not a murmur of protest was heard.”
The lion then allots himself the second and third portions, citing his superior bravery and strength.
“'And if any of you touches the last lot,
She’ll be strangled on the spot!'”
There’s no summarizing maxim, no closing moral. The fable, with its subtle details (such as the subservient beasts being all female), is left to speak for itself. Given that Louis bankrupted France with his lavish building projects and costly foreign wars and was a notorious womanizer to boot, it’s tempting to draw a comparison. Overtly criticizing the king would have resulted in direct censure, La Fontaine knew. Several years earlier, Louis had imprisoned his finance minister, Nicolas Fouquet, La Fontaine’s first patron, chiefly because the palace Fouquet was building for himself rivaled the ostentation of Versailles. He also threw one of La Fontaine’s closest friends in the Bastille.
Another fable, “The Wolf and the Lamb,” gently ridicules this arbitrariness of absolute authority. It begins:
“Might is right: the verdict goes to the strong.
To prove the point won’t take me very long.”
A lamb is accosted by a wolf for drinking from his stream. The thirsty lamb begs pardon. The wolf then accuses the lamb of other impossible transgressions before blaming all sheepkind for making his survival difficult:
“Whereupon he dragged the lamb deep
Into the forest and had his meal.
Sympathy for the Humble
In contrast to aristocratic carnivores, La Fontaine always portrayed humble creatures with compassion. In these fables, virtue is rewarded. In “The Oak and the Reed,” a tree pities a piece of grass for its smallness:“... the least puff of wind
That chances to wrinkle the face of the stream
Forces your head low; whereas I,
Huge as a Caucasian peak, defy
Not only the sun’s glare, but the worst the weather can do.
What seems a breeze for me is a gale for you.”
The reed responds that it bends, but never breaks, and the oak should be more cautious. As he speaks, a storm arises with a strong wind.
“It uprooted the one that had touched the sky with its head
But whose feet reached to the region of the dead.”
The story and the proverb associated with it are well-known, but La Fontaine’s original expression has a classic quality that feels fresh despite familiarity.
After Louis imprisoned Fouquet, La Fontaine acquired even more generous patrons with royal connections. For the last 30 years of his life, he could afford to be absentminded without having to worry about practical concerns. His social graces and charming naivety saved him from the king’s disfavor, and Louis permitted the poet’s disguised criticisms of his royal authority to go unpunished.
It isn’t uncommon for thinkers to be so preoccupied with ideas that they neglect what they’re doing. Although inattentive to their immediate surroundings, these “dreamer” types are intensely focused on their interior projects and goals, giving a level of dedication to their art that parallels the dedication that more practical people have toward outer reality. And as it turns out, the dreamy La Fontaine, so unmindful of his everyday affairs, was a far keener observer of human nature than his critics.
