La Fontaine's Fables

Jean de La Fontaine collected fables from a wide variety of sources, both Western and Eastern, and adapted them into French free verse.

By this time, La Fontaine was 47 and known to readers chiefly as the author of Contes, lively stories in verse, grazing and sometimes transgressing the bounds of contemporary moral standards.

The most likely source for La Fontaine was the pseudonymous version by Gilbert Gaulmin (1585–1665) under the title The book of Enlightenment or the Conduct of Kings (French: Le Livre des lumières ou la Conduite des Roys, composée par le sage Pilpay Indien, traduite en français par David Sahid, d’Ispahan, ville capitale de Perse; 1644).

What gives La Fontaine's Fables their rare distinction is the freshness in narration, the deftness of touch, the unconstrained suppleness of metrical structure, the unfailing humor of the pointed moral, the consummate art of their apparent artlessness.

Keen insight into the foibles of human nature is found throughout, but in the later books ingenuity is employed to make the fable cover, yet convey, social doctrines and sympathies more democratic than the age would have tolerated in unmasked expression.

Silvestre de Sacy has commented that they supply delights to three different ages: the child rejoices in the freshness and vividness of the story, the eager student of literature in the consummate art with which it is told, the experienced man of the world in the subtle reflections on character and life which it conveys.

But the poets of the Romantic School Hugo, Musset, Gautier and their fellows, found in the popular favor these verses had attained an incentive to undertake an emancipation of French prosody which they in large measure achieved.

In the 1730s eight volumes of Nouvelles Poésies Spirituelles et Morales sur les plus beaux airs were published, the first six of which incorporated a section of fables aimed at children.

The preface to this work announces that its aim is specifically to "give them an attraction to useful lessons which are suited to their age [and] an aversion to the profane songs which are often put into their mouths and which only serve to corrupt their innocence".

These are in prose but Charles Denis' earlier collection was in verse and several authors writing poems specifically for children in the early 19th century also included versions of La Fontaine.

Although there had been earlier complete translations in verse at the start of that century, the most popular was Elizur Wright's The Fables of La Fontaine, first published in Boston in 1841 with prints by Grandville.