The Complete Fables of Jean de La Fontaine

by Jean La Fontaine

  3. In 1675, Charles II of England did, in fact, try to mediate between Louis XIV and the Dutch—in one of the Sun King’s endless wars—although Parliament had forced him to end his alliance with the French the preceding year. (It is historical references such as this, not to mention the numerous philosophical allusions that pepper his later fables, that draw La Fontaine farther and farther from the category of “children’s poet” in which popular wisdom, well meaning but ill—or only partially—informed, seems intent on forcing him to remain.)

  BOOK VIII

  The Cobbler and the Financier (VIII, 2)

  1. La Fontaine is apparently alluding to the Seven Sages of Greece—Solon of Athens, Chilo of Sparta, Thales of Miletos, Bias of Priene, Cleobulos of Lindos, Pittacos of Mitylene, and Periander of Corinth—although I don’t know what specific classical text, if any, suggests that their varied wisdom brought them much happiness.

  The Lion, the Wolf, and the Fox (VIII, 3)

  1. Another allusion to the ceremonial bedtimes of Louis XIV. See note 3 for VII, 11.

  The Power of Fables (VIII, 4)

  1. Paul de Barillon, French ambassador to England from 1677 to 1688, was also a prominent social luminary.

  2. The fabled, many-headed Hydra (see note 1 for I, 12) is taken by La Fontaine as symbolic of the Triple Alliance of Spain, Holland, and the Empire, aligned against Louis XIV.

  3. The allusion to the hundred sheep is a sly jab at M. Barillon for his well-known hearty appetite, bordering on gourmandise.

  4. See note 5 for I, 14.

  5. The orator referred to is the famous Athenian statesman, Demosthenes (384–22, bce). His attempts to alert the Athenians to the ambitions of Philip of Macedon fell on deaf ears.

  6. Roman goddess of agriculture. See note 1 for IV, 21.

  7. With a harangue similar to his Philippics, Demosthenes upbraids the Athenians for ignoring Philip’s threat. It is conceivable, if unlikely, that the reference was also intended as a veiled contemporary allusion to Spanish king Philip IV’s anti-French adventure in the Thirty Years’ War. By the time these lines were being written, however, that adventure had soured, and he had, in 1659, already ceded Roussillon and Artois to France.

  8. “Peau d’âne” (“The Ass’s Skin”) is an ancient children’s tale. It would eventually figure in the fairytale collection Contes de ma mère l’oye (1694) of Charles Perrault. (Or of his seventeen-year-old son, under whose name the tales were originally published: there is at least some doubt as to which of the two was the actual author.)

  Women and Secrets (VIII, 6)

  1. French grammar being what it is, La Fontaine’s title “Les Femmes et le Secret” can be understood in either a general or specific sense. I think it is safe to assume that he intended the former.

  The Rat and the Oyster (VIII, 9)

  1. See note 2 for V, 6.

  2. I take the liberty (translator’s license?) of attributing to the rat this reflection that La Fontaine omits; one that, under the circumstances, seems warranted.

  3. Many La Fontaine morals with a proverbial ring to them were, in fact, like this one, introduced by him into the language. Others, while predating his use, no doubt owe much of their currency to their appearance in the Fables.

  The Bear and the Garden-lover (VIII, 10)

  1. After Bellerophon, with the aid of his winged steed Pegasus, had defeated the fire-breathing Chimera, he proceeded on to other successful exploits. Eventually, when his arrogance prompted him to attempt to fly to the heavens, Jupiter sent a gadfly to sting Pegasus and cast Bellerophon back to earth. Lame and blind, he was condemned to wander, aimless and alone. Milton refers to his fate in Book Seven of Paradise Lost:

  Lest, from this flying steed unreined (as once

  Bellerophon, though from a lower clime),

  Dismounted, on the Aleian field I fall,

  Erroneous there to wander and forlorn.

  2. Flora and Pomona were the Roman goddesses of the garden; the former, of its flowers, and the latter, of its fruits.

  3. As he does elsewhere, La Fontaine repeats here the traditional characterization of the Gascons as crafty and generally disreputable. (See III, 11.)

  The Two Friends (VIII, 11)

  1. Monomotapa was a vast Kafir territory in southeastern Africa, thought to be mythological by some, but attested, from the sixteenth century on, by Portuguese and Dutch sources, and reaching as far northward as beyond the Zambezi. It is extensively documented in the nine volumes of translations from the Portuguese by G. M. Theal, Records of South Eastern Africa (London, 1898–1903). Evidently, La Fontaine chose it merely as an exotic example of a distant land.

  2. The circumlocutory allusion to Morpheus, among many similar, shows how willingly La Fontaine will use an exaggeratedly précieux expression, rather than the simple verb “awaken,” with obviously humorous intent.

  The Hog, the Goat, and the Sheep (VIII, 12)

  1. “Tabarin” was the pseudonym of a hugely popular Parisian mountebank and huckster of the 1620s, who worked in collaboration with the charlatan “Mondor”—also a pseudonym—selling unguents and potions on the Pont Neuf and Place Dauphine. His blatantly physical and verbal humor was a blend of medieval French farce tradition and the Italian commedia dell’arte, whose practitioners had been established on the Parisian theatrical scene since 1570. (See Oeuvres complètes de Tabarin, avec les rencontres, fantaisies et coq-à-l’âne facétieux du baron de Grateland, et divers opuscules publiés séparément sous le nom ou à propos de Tabarin, ed. Gustave Aventin [Auguste Veinant], 2 vols. [Paris: P. Jannet, 1858].) Tabarin’s real name, in all likelihood, was Antoine Girard, though for a long time the man behind the mask was thought to be one Jean Salomon. (See Georges Mongrédien, “Bibliographie tabarinique,” in Bulletin du bibliophile, 1928, 358–68, 415–47.)

  Tircis and Amaranth (VIII, 13)

  1. Gabrielle-Françoise de Sillery (1649–1732) was the niece of La Rochefoucauld. See note 1 for I, 11. If we can believe La Fontaine, it was she who objected to his semiabandonment of the brief fable in favor of the lengthier—and sometimes very much lengthier—Contes et nouvelles en vers, inspired, as he goes on to imply, by the likes of Boccaccio, Marguerite de Navarre, Rabelais, et al. One may also assume that, still of tender years, the young lady was not a little abashed by the often scabrous nature of those tales, quite unlike the fables that had no doubt peppered and enlivened her childhood. (For a selection, see La Fontaine’s Bawdy: Of Libertines, Louts, and Lechers.)

  2. See note 1 for IV, 2.

  The Lioness’s Funeral (VIII, 14)

  1. La Fontaine combines two references from Proverbs: 16:14 and 20:2.

  The Horoscope (VIII, 16)

  1. The Roman god Aesculapius, like his Greek counterpart Asklepios, was the god of medicine. The son of Apollo, not content to heal the sick, he offended Hades by resuscitating the dead, thus risking a severe dearth of population in the underworld, for which he was punished by one of Zeus’s thunderbolts.

  2. I need hardly point out, at the risk of offending those who, even today, believe firmly in the principles of astrology, that La Fontaine would not be of their number. In this regard, see also “The Astrologer Who Happens to Fall into a Well” (II, 13).

  The Ass and the Dog (VIII, 17)

  1. La Fontaine sarcastically refers to the ass as a roussin d’Arcadie (Arcadian mount). See note 4 for VI, 19. Hence my honorific, no less sarcastic.

  The Pasha and the Merchant (VIII, 18)

  1. As the following lines explain, the Turk refuses to believe that the merchant will do him in, thereby recalling Alexander the Great’s confidence in his physician, accused of planning to poison him at Darius’s behest. The episode is related in Plutarch’s Life of Alexander, xix.

  Jupiter and the Thunderbolts (VIII, 20)

  1. The Greeks considered the three serpent-headed Furies (or Eumenides, or Erinyes) such fearsome dispensers of vengeance that, as Bulfinch relates, “Aeschylus, the tragic poet, having
on one occasion represented the Furies in a chorus of fifty performers, the terror of the spectators was such that many fainted and were thrown into convulsions, and the magistrates forbade a like presentation in the future.” (See Thomas Bulfinch, The Age of Fable [Mineola, NY, Dover, 2000], 159–60.) See note 1 for V, 6.

  The Falcon and the Capon (VIII, 21)

  1. Jean de Nivelle’s recalcitrant “dog,” product of a linguistic misunderstanding, has been symbolic since the fifteenth century of unwillingness to heed the call of duty. The historic Jean de Nivelle (ca. 1422–77) refused the repeated orders of his father, Jean II de Montmorency, to march against the duc de Bourgogne, thus earning for him the opprobrious appellation “ce chien Jean de Nivelle” (that dog Jean de Nivelle)! The popular expression invented a dog where there had been none: “ressembler au chien de Jean (de) Nivelle.”

  2. La Fontaine would more than once refer to the proverbial Norman quality of shrewdness. For other examples see III, 11 and VII, 6.

  The Two Dogs and the Dead Ass (VIII, 25)

  1. This fable is an excellent example of La Fontaine’s almost improvisational development of a subject. The opening lines point us in one direction, only to lead us, finally, to an utterly unexpected moral conclusion.

  Democritus and the Abderitans (VIII, 26)

  1. See note 1 for VII, 17.

  2. Many sources attest to the reputation of the Abderitans—inhabitants of the coastal city of Abdera, in Thrace—for stupidity. (See, inter alia, any of the many editions of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.) Some, early environmentalists, attributed it to the bad quality of the air. That notwithstanding, the city produced a number of eminent philosophers, Democritus, “the laughing philosopher,” one of the foremost among them. (Today he might be diagnosed as manic, owing perhaps to the aforementioned insalubrious vapors…)

  3. In his typically charming offhand manner, La Fontaine is referring, of course, to the popular Latin adage “Vox populi, vox Dei” (The voice of the people is the voice of God).

  BOOK IX

  The Faithless Trustee (IX, 1)

  1. The allusion is to Mnemosyne and her daughters, the Muses (see note 4 for I, 14). One wonders if La Fontaine had in mind a sonnet from Les Regrets of Pléiade poet Joachim Du Bellay (1522–60), which begins: “Nous ne faisons la cour aux filles de Mémoire” (We pay no court to Memory’s daughters).

  The Ape and the Leopard (IX, 3)

  1. La Fontaine uses the names Gille and Bertrand several times for his various monkeys. The former, possibly akin to the Old French gilain (trickster), which personified fraud and deceit as early as the medieval Roman de Renart, would later come to suggest simplicity, no doubt from the name of the popular seventeenth-century clown Gilles le Niais (Gilles the Simpleton). Bertrand, on the other hand, has no specific connotations that I know of, though La Fontaine himself uses it in “The Treasure-hoarder and the Ape” (XII, 3) with the ecclesiastical title Dom. That being the case, and following the context here, I have taken the minor liberty of doing likewise.

  The Schoolboy, the Pedant, and the Owner of a Garden (IX, 5)

  1. Roman goddess of flowers. See note 2 for VIII, 10.

  The Sculptor and the Statue of Jupiter (IX, 6)

  1. Although Pygmalion sculpted a statue of Galatea and not of Venus, Ferdinand Gohin (2:141) suggests that the reference to Venus is to be taken in the abstract: that is, a statue of sheer beauty. He points out another possibility as well—that La Fontaine was perhaps confusing the sculptor Pygmalion with a king of Tyre by the same name, who fell in love with a statue of Venus.

  The Mouse Metamorphosed into a Maiden (IX, 7)

  1. Many of La Fontaine’s fables, especially among the later ones, were, in fact, inspired by the legendary Brahman fabulist Pilpay (or Bidpay).

  2. Few readers will have to be reminded that it was the abduction of Menelaus’s queen, Helen—she of the thousand-ship-launching beauty—by Paris, son of King Priam of Troy, that triggered the Trojan War.

  The Oyster and the Adversaries (IX, 9)

  1. I see fit to change the peasant’s name here, Perrin Dandin, to one more common to Anglophone ears and more readily pronounceable by Anglophone tongues. Suffice it to remind the reader that both Perrin and Dandin are traditional names for typically naive rustics—ironic, under the circumstances, given this one’s finesse—the latter immortalized in Molière’s comedy Georges Dandin (1668).

  2. My translation reflects (with liberty) a reading offered by Regnier, 2:406.

  The Wolf and the Scrawny Dog (IX, 10)

  1. The earlier fable alluded to is “The Little Fish and the Fisherman” (V, 3).

  All in Moderation (IX, 11)

  1. Roman goddess of agriculture. See note 1 for IV, 21.

  The Taper (IX, 12)

  1. A mountain south of Athens famous for its excellent honey and—though not alluded to here—its fine marble.

  2. An eminent philosopher and doctor of the fifth century bce, reputed to have possessed magical powers. According to one version of his death, he flung himself into Mount Etna, which spewed forth a single sandal as his only remains.

  The Cat and the Fox (IX, 14)

  1. Tartuffe, Molière’s celebrated comedy about a hypocritical religious zealot, was controversial when it first appeared in 1664, some fifteen years before publication of this fable, by which time the character’s name had become proverbial.

  2. Pierre Pathelin, the hero of the fifteenth-century farce bearing his name, had long since become a traditional figure, the embodiment of shrewd and self-serving, albeit eventually chastised, deceitfulness.

  3. See note 1 for V, 17.

  The Treasure and the Two Men (IX, 16)

  1. There is some disagreement regarding the origin of the proverbial expression “loger le diable dans sa bourse” (to lodge the devil in one’s purse) to indicate utter poverty. The tireless lexicographer Littré accepted its attribution to the Renaissance poet Mellin de Saint-Gelais, though casting some doubt by citing an Italian equivalent. (See his four-volume Dictionnaire de la langue française [Paris: Hachette, 1881–82], under diable, 2:1146.) Another explanation suggests an origin based on the fact that early coins were struck with an image of the cross, obviously antithetical to the devil. (See P.-M. Quitard, Dictionnaire étymologique, historique et anecdotique des proverbes et des locutions proverbiales de la langue française [Paris: P. Bertrand, 1842], 309–10.) One way or the other, it is clear that, unlike several of the proverbs in La Fontaine’s Fables, this one considerably antedates his use.

  2. After much translatorly soul searching I decided on the present lines rather than my first choice, to wit:

  … and found

  The treasure, object of his concupiscing,

  Missing.

  Although the verb “to concupisce” seems never to have been documented (at least according to the OED), the attested adjective “concupiscible” would, I think, have justified its use. That solution, however, struck me, for all its virtues, as something of an overtranslation in light of La Fontaine’s extreme simplicity, and I abandoned it, albeit reluctantly.

  The Monkey and the Cat (IX, 17)

  1. See note 1 for IX, 3.

  The Kite and the Nightingale (IX, 18)

  1. See note 1 for III, 15.

  2. Although often credited with having done so, La Fontaine did not originate the pithy French proverb that concludes this fable. It is found, a century earlier, in Rabelais (Pantagruel, Book IV, chapter 63), and may well have predated even him. But the idea, at any rate, goes back to antiquity. Plutarch mentions that Cato the Censor, addressing the Roman citizenry in time of famine, assured them: “It is a hard thing (my Lords of Rome) to bring the belly by persuasion to reason, that hath no ears.” See Sir Thomas North’s 1579 translation of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, 8 vols. [New York: The Limited Edition Club, 1941], 3:179.

  Discourse [for Madame de la Sablière] (IX, 20)

  1. Marguerite Hessein (16
40–93), the wife of Antoine de la Sablière, was a woman of great learning, and was host to many of the intellectuals and artists of her day, La Fontaine among them. His celebrated “Discourse” reflects both her and his considerations on the intelligence of animals. In it he attempts to refute the Cartesian assumption that animals are mere machines. For him, while they may lack souls—a concession to the religious authorities?—they are clearly not unthinking automata, as his several examples dramatically show.

  2. Iris was La Fontaine’s pet name for his erudite friend, perhaps in reference to the several colorful qualities of the mythological goddess of the rainbow.

  3. Roman goddess of flowers. See note 2 for VIII, 10.

  4. La Fontaine here expresses succinctly the famous cogito of Descartes: “I think, therefore I am.” Early philosophers, lacking today’s epistemological sophistication, assumed that one has to exist in order to think about one’s existence.

  5. The northern land in question would seem to be Ukraine, described by Guillaume le Vasseur de Beauplan in his Description d’Ukranie (Rouen, 1560; Paris, 1561).

  6. Jan Sobieski, chosen king of Poland in 1674, was a friend of Madame de la Sablière and frequenter of Parisian salons, where he no doubt recounted the impressive anecdote that follows. It was he who delivered Vienna from the Turks in 1684.

  7. See note 1 for VI, 19.

  8. Gohin (2:349) discusses in detail the origin of this fable within a fable.

  BOOK X

  The Man and the Snake (X, 1)

  1. Roman goddess of agriculture. See note 1 for IV, 21.

  2. La Fontaine’s somewhat convoluted musing—attributable to the ox’s style, as ponderous as his person—seems to suggest that here, as in “The Coach and the Fly” (VII, 8), we are dealing with a quadruped’s only concrete form of remuneration. In a “manure” of speaking…

  The Turtle and the Two Ducks (X, 2)

  1. If readers of the original wonder how each of La Fontaine’s ducks (canards) could suddenly be transformed into a gosling (oison), they should be aware that others too have asked the same question. For the venerable lexicographer Littré, the poet was guilty of “une inexactitude de langage, malgré la parenté de l’oie et du canard” (an imprecision of language despite the kinship of the goose and the duck). (See the entry on oison in Littré, 3:815.) Be that as it may, I have taken the liberty of not following La Fontaine in his pardonable “inexactitude.”