His father was Charles de La Fontaine, maître des eaux et forêts – a kind of deputy-ranger – of the Duchy of Château-Thierry; his mother was Françoise Pidoux.

In 1647 his father resigned his rangership in his favor, and arranged a marriage for him with Marie Héricart, a girl of fourteen, who brought him 20,000 livres, and expectations.

There appears to be absolutely no ground for the vague scandal as to her conduct, which was, for the most part, raised long afterwards by gossip or personal enemies of La Fontaine.

At this time the patron of French writing was the Superintendent Fouquet, to whom La Fontaine was introduced by Jacques Jannart, a connection of his wife's.

Few people who paid their court to Fouquet went away empty-handed, and La Fontaine soon received a pension of 1000 livres (1659), on the easy terms of a copy of verses for each quarters receipt.

[4] It was about this time that his wife's property had to be separately secured to her, and he seems by degrees to have had to sell everything that he owned; but, as he never lacked powerful and generous patrons, this was of small importance to him.

In the same year he wrote a ballad, Les Rieurs du Beau-Richard, and this was followed by many small pieces of occasional poetry addressed to various personages from the king downwards.

La Fontaine, like most of Fouquet's literary protégés, showed some fidelity to him by writing the elegy Pleurez, Nymphes de Vaux.

His father and he had assumed the title of esquire, to which they were not strictly entitled, and, some old edicts on the subject having been put in force, an informer procured a sentence against the poet fining him 2000 livres.

He was then forty-three years old, and his previous printed productions had been comparatively trivial, though much of his work was handed about in manuscript long before it was regularly published.

The most characteristic is perhaps that which asserts that a copy of Chapelain's unlucky Pucelle always lay on the table, a certain number of lines of which was the appointed punishment for offences against the company.

The coterie furnished under feigned names the personages of La Fontaine's version of the Cupid and Psyche story, which, however, with Adonis, was not printed till 1669.

Madame de la Sablière, a woman of great beauty, of considerable intellectual power and of high character, invited him to make his home in her house, where he lived for some twenty years.

Madame de Sévigné, one of the soundest literary critics of the time, and by no means given to praise mere novelties, had spoken of his second collection of Fables published in the winter of 1678 as divine; and it is pretty certain that this was the general opinion.

It was not unreasonable, therefore, that he should present himself to the Académie française, and, though the subjects of his Contes were scarcely calculated to propitiate that decorous assembly, while his attachment to Fouquet and to more than one representative of the old Frondeur party made him suspect to Colbert and the king, most of the members were his personal friends.

The king hastened to approve the choice effusively, adding, Vous pouvez incessamment recevoir La Fontaine, il a promis d'etre sage.

Furetière, a man of no small ability, bitterly assailed those whom he considered to be his enemies, and among them La Fontaine, whose unlucky Contes made him peculiarly vulnerable, his second collection of these tales having been the subject of a police condemnation.

[10] A story is told of the young duke of Burgundy, Fénelon's pupil, who was then only eleven years old, sending 50 louis to La Fontaine as a present of his own motion.

He did a little more work, completing his Fables among other things; but he did not survive Madame de la Sablière much more than two years, dying on 13 April 1695 in Paris, at the age of seventy-three.

His later contemporaries helped to swell the tale, and the 18th century finally accepted it; these anecdotes include: La Fontaine meeting his son, being told who he was, and remarking, Ah, yes, I thought I had seen him somewhere!

But after all deductions much will remain, especially when it is remembered that one of the chief authorities for these anecdotes is Louis Racine, a man who possessed intelligence and moral worth, and who received them from his father, La Fontaine's attached friend for more than thirty years.

Among the foremost were Marie de France's Ysopet (1190) and Gilles Corrozet’s Les Fables du très ancien Esope, mises en rithme françoise (1542).

The fable of "The Sculptor and the Statue of Jupiter" (IX.6), for example, reads like a satire on superstition, but its moralising conclusion that "All men, as far as in them lies,/Create realities of dreams" might equally be applied to religion as a whole.

[11] The second division of his work, the tales (Contes et nouvelles en vers), were at one time almost equally as popular and their writing extended over a longer period.

The bronze bust designed by Achille Dumilâtre was exhibited at the Exposition Universelle (1889) before being placed on a high stone pedestal surrounded by various figures from the fables.

[21] The work was melted down, like many others during World War II, but was replaced in 1983 by Charles Correia's standing statue of the fabulist looking down at the fox and the crow on the steps and plinth below him.

[29] The head of La Fontaine also appeared on a 100 franc coin to commemorate the 300th anniversary of his death, on the reverse of which the fable of the fox and the crow is depicted.

[35] In the 2007 film Jean de La Fontaine – le défi, however, the poet resists the absolutist rule of Louis XIV after the fall of Fouquet.