The Complete Fables of Jean de La Fontaine

by Jean La Fontaine

  BOOK II

  Against Those with Too Difficult Tastes (II, 1)

  1. The Muse of lyric poetry, Calliope has, in later years, seen her noble name given to the tooting steam-whistle instrument characteristic of circuses and carnivals.

  2. See note 1 for I, 14.

  3. In lines 29–39 La Fontaine, with typical tongue-in-cheek pomposity, uses the episode of the Trojan Horse in The Iliad to launch an endless description with which his readers were already quite familiar.

  4. For La Fontaine’s celebrated version of “The Crow and the Fox,” a fable existing since Aesop, see I, 2.

  The Rats in Council Assembled (II, 2)

  1. La Fontaine borrows the name of the cat, Rodilard(us)—Nibblelard in my translation—from Rabelais (Pantagruel, Book IV, chapter 67).

  2. The question forms the recurring line in the fourteenth-century fabulist Eustache Deschamps’s treatment of the same fable in ballade form. (See my collection The Fabulists French: Verse Fables of Nine Centuries [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992], 10–11.)

  3. For a list of some of the dozens of Oriental and Occidental antecedents and adaptations of this popular tale, probably introduced to the West by the Arabs in the thirteenth century, see Paul Franklin Baum, “The Fable of Belling the Cat,” in Proverbia in Fabula: Essays on the Relationship of the Proverb and the Fable (ed. Pack Carnes [Bern: Lang, 1988], 37–46).

  The Wolf Pleading against the Fox before the Ape (II, 3)

  1. In classical mythology, Themis was the goddess of the Law, and mother of the Fates. She is represented as sitting by Jove, with her balances in hand, ready to offer him counsel.

  2. La Fontaine’s note.

  The Bat and the Two Weasels (II, 5)

  1. The reference in the last line is to the late sixteenth-century wars of religion, in which the Sainte Ligue, originally founded to defend the cause of Catholicism against the forces of Calvinism, later became inimical to the kingdom by its alliance with Philip II of Spain. Only a hypocrite, La Fontaine is saying, could bear allegiance to both. The Ligue was eventually dissolved when Henri IV renounced the Calvinist faith.

  The Eagle and the Dung Beetle (II, 8)

  1. Ganymede, a Trojan prince, was borne off by Zeus in the form of an eagle, and became the cupbearer of the gods.

  The Ass with a Load of Sponges and the Ass with a Load of Salt (II, 10)

  1. La Fontaine is no doubt referring here to the celebrated episode in Rabelais (Pantagruel, Book IV, chapter 8), in which Panurge loses all his sheep once he has lost the first.

  The Lion and the Rat & The Dove and the Ant (II, 11 & 12)

  1. Generations of critics have noted that this concluding line seems curiously out of place, introducing a second moral apparently unrelated to the one announced in the opening quatrain and illustrated by both fables. Regnier (2:163) explains it away as merely a typical passing reflection, unconnected to what precedes or follows. But La Fontaine does seem to be suggesting, albeit vaguely, that the virtues of patience and hard work are, after all, ones that the small and weak are, by their very nature, obliged to display. Without presuming to second-guess him, or to contradict the learned Regnier, I offer a translation that, with a minor liberty, assumes that to have been La Fontaine’s intent.

  2. Antiquity’s association of the dove with Venus is recorded in a number of works, among them Ovid’s Metamorphoses (XV, 386), where “Cytherea’s dove” figures in a brief listing of those birds especially dear to certain gods.

  The Hare and the Frogs (II, 14)

  1. As occasionally happens, owing to La Fontaine’s somewhat capricious punctuation, it is not clear if the moral here is spoken by the hare or by the poet. I opt for the former.

  The Crow Who Wanted to Imitate the Eagle (II, 16)

  1. Polyphemus, a Cyclops, is the villain of Book IX of The Odyssey and later works of Homeric inspiration—and, perhaps not coincidentally, is himself a shepherd. He is, in his many graphic representations, always heavily bearded, a characteristic consistent with his persona in Euripides’ satyr play Cyclops.

  The Will Explained by Aesop (II, 20)

  1. The highest court in ancient Athens, the Areopagus was known for its rigorous impartiality in even the most serious crimes.

  2. Aesop was believed to have been a native of Phrygia. The assumption is as impossible to prove as is his actual historical existence.

  BOOK III

  The Miller, His Son, and the Ass (III, 1)

  1. The fable is dedicated to La Fontaine’s friend, the poet François de Maucroix (or, occasionally, Maucroy) (1619–1708).

  2. The poet Honoré de Bueil, marquis de Racan (1589–1670), was one of Malherbe’s disciples, author of his biographical Vie de Malherbe, and an early member of the Académie Française. For Malherbe, see note 1 for I, 14.

  3. The reference is to a popular song of the period: “Adieu cruelle Jeanne; / Si vous ne m’aimez pas, / Je monte sur mon âne / Pour galoper au trépas.” / “Courez, ne bronchez pas, / Nicolas, / Surtout n’en revenez pas.” (“Farewell cruel Jeanne; / If you do not love me, / I’ll get on my ass / And gallop to my death.” / “Hurry, and don’t you stumble, / Nicolas, / And above all don’t come back.”)

  The Limbs and the Stomach (III, 2)

  1. This personification of the stomach, from the Greek gaster (belly), which La Fontaine was to help popularize, is found in Rabelais (Pantagruel, Book IV, chapter 57). Lest there be any doubt, La Fontaine, in a rare note to his fable, specifies that it does, indeed, mean l’estomach.

  2. Menenius Agrippa, immortalized in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, was Roman consul in 503 bce. His apologue “The Limbs and the Stomach” was intended to pacify the commoners and resulted in the appointment of two tribunes from the plebeian ranks.

  The Wolf Turned Shepherd (III, 3)

  1. The name La Fontaine chooses—here and in many other fables—for his hero (and antihero), is one of the many typically bucolic and pastoral names common since the Middle Ages. This one is especially appropriate, given the fictitious, allusive existence, in the sixteenth century, of one Guillot le menteur (Guillot the liar). (See Edmond Huguet, Dictionnaire de la langue française du seizième siècle, 4:411.) Interesting too is the fact that La Fontaine considers the word he uses to characterize his sham Guillot—sycophante—uncommon enough to require a footnote, defining it as trompeur (deceiver). The word is, in fact, attested at least as early as the preceding century.

  The Fox and the Goat (III, 5)

  1. Punctuational imprecision in the original makes it unclear whether this last line is spoken by the wolf or, characteristically, by the moralizing La Fontaine. Both possibilities make equally good sense. I have chosen the latter because it gives me the excuse to give two proverbs for the price of one.

  The Drunkard and His Wife (III, 7)

  1. Regnier (1:223) points out that, despite analogues as far back as Aesop, this tale—really a conte rather than a fable—was thought by some to be inspired by a true anecdote occurring between a lawyer and his wife in the year 1550.

  2. La Fontaine’s choice of Alecto rather than either of her sister Furies of Greco-Roman mythology, besides probably being dictated by exigencies of rhyme, was appropriate in that she, unlike Tisiphone (the Avenger) and Megaera (the Disputatious), was the implacable member of the trio.

  The Fox and the Grapes (III, 11)

  1. Gascons in France are known for their bluster and braggadocio, and Normans for their shrewdness, though neither quality is especially evident in La Fontaine’s rendition of Aesop’s celebrated fox.

  Philomela and Procne (III, 15)

  1. The reader familiar with Ovid’s Metamorphoses (VI, 412–676) will recall the tale of the two sisters, Procne (or Progne) and Philomela, turned into swallow and nightingale respectively, as a result of a nasty family squabble with the mythical King Tereus of Thrace. When the king, married to Procne, seduced her sister, he cut out the latter’s tongue to keep her from telling; but Philomela cleverly
revealed the news by stitching it into her embroidery. To avenge Tereus’s infidelity, Procne killed his son and served him up for supper. The king’s resulting rage would have led to the two sisters’ deaths were it not for the gods, who took pity on them, and turned them into birds. (Sources differ as to which became the swallow and which the nightingale, though French tradition generally identifies the latter with Philomela.) Tereus himself was metamorphosed into the hawk, or, according to other accounts, into the much less fearsome hoopoe.

  The Cat and an Old Rat (III, 18)

  1. See note 1 for II, 2.

  2. The mythological three-headed hound who stood guard over the gates of Hades. His triple vigilance was lulled from time to time by various means: a honey cake offered by Aeneas, the sweet strains of Orpheus’s lute, et al.

  BOOK IV

  The Lion in Love (IV, 1)

  1. Mademoiselle de Sévigné was the daughter of Marie de Rabotin-Chantal, marquise de Sévigné (1626–96). Not long after publication of this fable, the young beauty married, becoming Mme de Grignan, celebrated in literary history as the frequent recipient of her mother’s letters, models of epistolary form and finesse.

  The Shepherd and the Sea (IV, 2)

  1. The reader will appreciate La Fontaine’s intention in contrasting the names Tircis and Corydon, on the one hand, with Pierrot, on the other. The former, from many a classical eclogue and Renaissance pastoral romance, bespeak a much more stylized and elegant simplicity than the latter, the very essence of earthiness and banality.

  The Fly and the Ant (IV, 3)

  1. This allusion, a translator’s nightmare, refers, as La Fontaine’s fly rightly informs us, to that cosmetic meaning of the noun mouche. Equally challenging is his punning reference, in line 40 of the original, to the noun mouchard (squealer).

  2. This ant of La Fontaine’s, staunch defender of the work ethic, is obviously a close, but much more loquacious, relative of the famous heroine of his first fable, “The Cricket and the Ant” (I, 1).

  The Gardener and His Lord (IV, 4)

  1. One can suppose a thinly veiled off-color suggestion on the part of the seigneur, the escarcelle, in the original, being at the time a little sack usually hung from the belt. (The reader should keep in mind that the analogous French noun la bourse [purse], in the plural, has also long been used to designate the scrotum.) Such—and more pointed—liberties are the stuff of which many of La Fontaine’s Contes et nouvelles en vers are made. (See my volume La Fontaine’s Bawdy: Of Libertines, Louts, and Lechers [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992], passim.)

  2. If I wanted to justify my onomastic liberty and the arithmetical exaggeration it entails, I could point out that, for the Romans, a large portion of southern France was, indeed, known as Provincia.

  The War between the Rats and the Weasels (IV, 6)

  1. Assuming a translator’s license to indulge in name-play no less than La Fontaine, I choose here the obviously medieval-sounding “Rat le Bel”—a reference to the thirteenth-century king Philippe le Bel—and, below (line 25), “the Ratovingian host,” to render, respectively, his “Ratapon” and “le peuple Souriquois” of the originals, the latter a conflation of souris (mouse) and the then celebrated Iroquois.

  2. Meridarpax (bit-thief) and Psicarpax—or, more properly, Psicharpax (crumb-thief)—are characters in the 303–line Greek mock-epic Batrachomyomachia (“The Battle of the Frogs and the Mice”), long attributed to Homer but most likely dating, anonymously, from the sixth century. No character named Artarpax (bread-thief) actually appears in the text, though others with similarly compounded names do. See Regnier, 1:287.

  The Ape and the Dolphin (IV, 7)

  1. La Fontaine’s comment reflects the high esteem in which the literati of the Western world held Pliny the Elder’s first-century Historia naturalis, from the Middle Ages through the end of the seventeenth century. His prestige began to wane only with the advent of more scientifically discriminating commentators.

  2. According to legend, Arion, the Greek poet said to have flourished at the court of Corinth some seven centuries before Christ, was saved by a dolphin after jumping into the sea to escape from a band of thieving sailors. The tale is told by Herodotus (I, 23, 24) and by Pliny (IX, 8), among others. Arion is immortalized astronomically as a constellation representing the dolphin and the lyre.

  3. In La Fontaine’s day, this was a small village not yet incorporated into the city limits of Paris. The name was commonly used to suggest “the sticks,” as in “prendre Vaugirard pour Rome” (to think Vaugirard is Rome). See Regnier, 1:293.

  The Camel and the Floating Sticks (IV, 10)

  1. My use of a single rhyme over three lines is not an oversight. La Fontaine uses the same expedient in this poem, though not in the corresponding lines. And for no apparent literary effect. He does the same in several other fables.

  The Frog and the Rat (IV, 11)

  1. La Fontaine’s aphorism, with a typically chatty aside on the archaic verb engeigner, was proverbial. As for the “Merlin” referred to, not all commentators are in agreement. It is likely an allusion to the popular sixteenth-century collection of prophecies and legends anonymously attributed to King Arthur’s famous sorcerer. Some have taken it to be an allusion to the work of the Italian macaronic poet Teofilo Folengo, whose poem Baldus, first published in 1517 under the pseudonym Merlin Coccaie (and then republished several times), supposedly was a prototype for Rabelais. La Fontaine’s maxim in question is found both in the former and in some versions of the latter. See Regnier, 1:306–8.

  2. Although a lover of animals and a defender of their integrity against the Cartesians, who thought of them as mere mindless machines—his celebrated “Discourse [for Madame de la Sablière]” argues the point eloquently (see IX, 20)—La Fontaine seems to be no zoologist, classifying the frog as a fish. (The misconception does not occur in the Aesopic original, drawn from the medieval Life of Aesop [see Regnier, 1:52], though I cannot state with certainty that it is not in any of the subsequent versions of the same fable, with which La Fontaine may have been acquainted.) More than likely, he is thinking theologically here rather than zoologically, the frog being permissible fare on fast days.

  The Old Man and His Sons (IV, 18)

  1. Aesop. See note 2 for II, 20.

  2. Phaedrus (ca. 15 bce–ca. 50 ce), a Roman slave freed by Augustus, was a Latin poet whose imitations of Aesop served as a model for later fabulists, La Fontaine among them.

  The Miser Who Lost His Treasure (IV, 20)

  1. The allusion is, of course, to the Cynic philosopher Diogenes (ca. 412–323 bce), celebrated for his quest for “the honest man,” whose contempt for his age led him to divest himself of all the comforts of life and live in a tub.

  2. The fable referred to is 225 in “Fabulae Graecae” of Ben Edwin Perry, Aesopica (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1952; rpt., New York: Arno Press, 1980), 409.

  The Master’s Eye (IV, 21)

  1. Since some of my readers may be a little less familiar with classical mythology than La Fontaine’s, I add to his mention of Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture, provider of grain, like the Greek Demeter, the appropriate adjective “fair,” often associated with her.

  2. The citation echoes the characteristically pithy moral of Phaedrus’s fable “Cervus et Boves” (“The Stag and the Oxen”) (II, 8): “Haec significat fabula / Dominum videre plurimum in rebus suis” (This fable means / That a master sees to his own affairs best).

  BOOK V

  The Woodsman and Mercury (V, 1)

  1. The initials are thought to refer to either Monsieur le chevalier de Bouillon or Monsieur le comte de Brienne, the latter minor poet, a good friend of La Fontaine, being considered the more likely.

  2. See “The Frog Who Would Grow as Big as the Ox” (I, 3).

  The Little Fish and the Fisherman (V, 3)

  1. The original “Un ‘tiens’ vaut mieux que deux ‘tu l’auras’” (a “you have it” is better than two
“you shall have it”) is a common and ancient proverb. The context makes my translation more appropriate than the usual English equivalent of “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.”

  The Hare and His Ears (V, 4)

  1. For details regarding the mental hospital known as Les Petites-Maisons, founded in Paris in 1497, and whose name eventually came to be used generically, see Regnier, 1:377.

  The Old Woman and the Two Servants (V, 6)

  1. A thoroughgoing classicist, La Fontaine is, of course, alluding to the three Fates: Clotho, who spun the thread of life; Lachesis, who measured it out; and Atropos, who cut it.

  2. The Greek mythological sea goddess Tethys is not to be confused with Thetis, a later sea divinity and mother of Achilles. The confusion is especially common in French, where the two names are homonyms.

  3. I am assuming, from La Fontaine’s context, that both meanings of the English “spinster” are applicable to his characters.

  The Satyr and the Passerby (V, 7)

  1. It probably bears mention that La Fontaine’s satyr, his many offspring notwithstanding, is the mythological creature of that name—half-man, half-goat—rather than simply an oversexed male.

  The Hen with the Golden Eggs (V, 13)

  1. Some Aesopic antecedents identify the bird in question as a goose, more familiar to our ears than the present poule. (See no. 87 of the “Fabulae Graecae,” in Perry, 355.) Others, like Babrius, 123, La Fontaine’s probable model, refer to an ornis (bird), though the Greek word often specifies the hen.

  The Snake and the File (V, 16)

  1. La Fontaine’s predecessors made the snake’s neighbor a locksmith. (See, inter alia, my Fables from Old French: Aesop’s Beasts and Bumpkins [Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1982], 112–13.) Perhaps he changed serrurier to horloger to permit his biting allusion to “the teeth of Time” (line 12). Or perhaps the allusion grew out of the change. At any rate, for those more accustomed to the sound of “locksmith,” “clocksmith” provides a serendipitous echo.