The Money-burier and His Friend (X, 4)
1. The French enfouisseur (burier) of the original is, to say the least, an uncommon noun, and was equally so in La Fontaine’s time. Dictionaries that include it at all usually cite the present fable to authenticate it. That being the case, I have taken a minor liberty with my English version of the title, since the simple “The Burier and His Friend” would hardly denote what the poet intended.
2. This passage, with its indisputable but self-evident digression, is not one of the many studied in a curious little volume of economics-related passages culled from the Fables. But the many that are discussed show to what extent La Fontaine was, at least superficially, concerned with monetary matters. (See Gustave Boissonade, La Fontaine économiste [Paris: Guillaumin, 1872].) For a more telling example, see “The Value of Knowledge,” VIII, 19.
The Spider and the Swallow (X, 6)
1. The enmity referred to is related in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (VI, 1–145), where the young woman Arachne, expert in embroidery, was transformed into a spider after killing herself in despair over the wrath of Minerva, her rival in the art. As for the allusions to Progne (or Procne) and, below, Philomela, see the fable “Philomela and Procne,” III, 15.
The Dog Who Had His Ears Cut Short (X, 8)
1. The original cites the proverbial “Chien hargneux a toujours l’oreille déchirée” (A growling dog always has a ragged ear).
The Fishes and the Shepherd Who Plays the Flute (X, 10)
1. La Fontaine chooses the traditional pastoral name Tircis for his hero, and—his title inexplicably to the contrary—has him playing a likewise traditional musette (bagpipe). I follow him in this curious contradiction.
2. My pun on the verb to serve is not wholly gratuitous, the original traiter suggesting, at least obliquely, a culinary meaning.
The Lioness and the She-bear (X, 12)
1. Hecuba’s name has long been synonymous with overwhelming suffering. Wife of the Trojan king Priam, she was victim of numerous horrendous misfortunes after the fall of Troy, as portrayed by Euripides and other classical authors. Not the least, and the one to which La Fontaine is obviously referring, was the loss of most of her nineteen children; among them Paris, Troilus, Hector, Cassandra, and Polydorus.
The Two Adventurers and the Wondrous Writ (X, 13)
1. The French refers to the friend as having a nosebleed. For readers tempted to compare the translation with La Fontaine, it should be pointed out that nose-bleeds, in his time, were symptomatic of fear. “To have a nosebleed” often meant no more than “to be afraid.” See Gohin, 2:356.
2. The allusion is to Sixtus V, pope from 1585 to 1590. Legend has it that, before his election at age sixty-five, he pretended—for some no doubt political reason—to be a virtual invalid, always dragging himself about on crutches, which he threw away once raised to the papacy.
3. My wordplay here is not atypical of La Fontaine, and I commit it with the caveat that the reader who might wince at it should not look for it in the original.
Discourse [for Monsieur le duc de la Rochefoucauld] (X, 14)
1. For La Rochefoucauld, see note 1 for I, 11.
2. It is hard to reconcile this scenario of the poet shooting indiscriminately at rabbits from his perch on high with his obvious and often-stated love of animals. Perhaps we are meant to understand that he doesn’t really aim to kill any, but only frighten them to prove a point. One would like to think so.
The Merchant, the Aristocrat, the Shepherd, and the Prince (X, 15)
1. See La Fontaine’s note at the end of the fable. To La Fontaine’s note we might add that Belisarius (ca. 494–565) was a Byzantine general, conqueror of the Vandals and Ostrogoths. He drove the former out of much of North Africa and the latter out of Italy. His “master” in question was the emperor Justinian I.
BOOK XI
The Gods Wishing to Instruct a Son of Jupiter (XI, 2)
1. Roman goddess of flowers. See note 2 for VIII, 10.
2. Many-headed monster. See note 1 for I, 12.
The Farmer, the Hound, and the Fox (XI, 3)
1. The allusion is to the beginning of The Iliad, and the son of Atreus referred to is Agamemnon.
2. After the death of Achilles, Ulysses and Ajax wrangled over who should have his arms. (See Ovid, Metamorphoses, XIII.) As for the transformation of Ulysses’ companions into animals, see “The Companions of Ulysses,” XII, 1.
3. La Fontaine did, in fact, father a son with his child-bride, from whom he separated shortly after. See note 1 for VII, 2. His antiprogeny—self-defensive?—parenthesis is accurate, however. Fatherhood was not his strong suit.
The Dream of the Man from the Mogol Land (XI, 4)
1. La Fontaine, certainly sophisticated enough not to confuse Mogol with Greco-Roman theology of the afterlife, is no doubt using the “Elysian Fields” here as a very general, nonspecific reference.
2. This apparent acceptance of the notion that the stars influence human life is curious in light of La Fontaine’s outspoken mockery of astrology in the fable “The Astrologer Who Happens to Fall into a Well” (II, 13). Even his great admirer, the eighteenth-century moralist Chamfort, called attention to the contradiction. See Regnier, 3:119–20.
3. I take the liberty of specifying the Parque (Fate) referred to in La Fontaine’s allusion, since, from the context, it is clear that he is speaking of Clotho, the member of the trio who did the actual spinning of the thread of life. See note 1 for V, 6.
The Lion, the Ape, and the Two Asses (XI, 5)
1. Michel Lambert (1610–96), son-in-law of Lully and a renowned musician, began his long life at court as a page in the chapel of Gaston d’Orléans, brother of Louis XIII. Eventually singing and dancing in court ballets, he crowned his career as music master in the court of Louis XIV from 1661 until his death, and was much admired as a singing teacher and composer. Some three hundred of his airs are still extant.
The Wolf and the Fox (XI, 6)
1. As Ovid recounts in the Metamorphoses (I, 588ff.), Io, daughter of Inachos, first king of Argos, was turned into a heifer by Jupiter—who had, not uncharacteristically, taken a fancy to her—in order to save her from the jealous wrath of Juno.
The Peasant from the Danube (XI, 7)
1. See “The Cockerel, the Cat, and the Little Mouse” (VI, 5).
2. Regarding the legendary ugliness of Aesop and Socrates, as well as that of the Danube peasant, subject of this fable, see Gohin, 2:362–63.
3. Marcus Aurelius (121–80) was Roman emperor (161–80) and author of Meditations. It is generally assumed that La Fontaine found the attribution to Marcus Aurelius of the story of the monstrous Danubian—with more sense than the cultivated Romans—in François Cassandre’s Parallèles historiques (1676). (See Gohin, 2:361–62.) The sympathetic portrayal by Tacitus of the Germanic barbarians conquered by the emperor-philosopher would also seem to have fed into La Fontaine’s scenario.
The Old Man and the Three Young Men (XI, 8)
1. This curiously self-referential conclusion was much admired by Chamfort, who saw it as a rare example of the aging La Fontaine’s artistic self-effacement before impending death. La Fontaine, more concerned with the message than with the medium, passes himself off not as the author of the tale but merely the transcriber of the old man’s memorial inscription. See Regnier, 3:159–60. Regarding that inscription, we must be willing to suspend disbelief: given the length of the story, the cenotaph on which it was supposedly engraved would have to be rather large. To be sure, La Fontaine’s source (Abstemius, 167: “De viro decrepito arbores inserente”) is somewhat shorter, thanks both to the pithy terseness of Latin and to the fact that, in that version, there is only one man instead of three.
The Mice and the Screech Owl (XI, 9)
1. See note 1 for V, 6.
2. See the lengthy “Discourse [for Madame de la Sablière]” (IX, 20).
3. Like the prose passage between the fables “Death and the Wretched Man”
and “Death and the Woodsman” (I, 15 & 16), La Fontaine appends this explanation to his fable. I keep it in the position to which he himself assigned it, rather than relegating it to a note. As for his perhaps naive assurance of veracity, there is, to be sure, considerable question. See Regnier, 3:161.
Epilogue (XI, 10)
1. At the time of writing, Louis XIV had imposed the Treaties of Nijmegen (1878–79) on Spain, Holland, and the Empire, restoring all territories taken from Holland during the Dutch War of 1672–78, and causing France and Spain to exchange considerable lands.
BOOK XII
The Companions of Ulysses (XII, 1)
1. Louis de France (1682–1712), grandson of Louis XIV, son of the Grand Dauphin (to whom the first six books of the Fables had been dedicated), bore the title duc de Bourgogne. Eleven years old at the time, he was said to be especially precocious and intelligent, and was tutored by the philosopher Fénelon. He would eventually be the father of Louis XV.
2. Despite his protestations of waning abilities, and illnesses that had prompted him to make (sincere?) amends to the Church for his rather licentious Contes, La Fontaine was still quite in command of his artistic talents, his seventy-three years notwithstanding.
3. In October and November of 1688 Louis XIV’s army, commanded by the Dauphin, had conquered a number of fortified positions in the Rhineland.
4. The enchantress-goddess Circe’s set-to with Ulysses and his men is related by Homer in The Odyssey, X, 234.
5. La Fontaine is whimsically recalling the Latin talpa (mole), traditionally cited by ancient grammars as an example of a noun of either masculine or feminine gender.
6. The poison referred to is, of course, metaphorical; to wit, the passion of love.
The Cat and the Two Sparrows (XII, 2)
1. See note 1 for XII, 1.
The Treasure-hoarder and the Ape (XII, 3)
1. Bertrand, with and without the honorific “Dom” appended, is one of the two common names La Fontaine uses for his several simians, the other being Gille. For probable origins and the fable in which he uses both, see “The Ape and the Leopard” (IX, 3) and note 1 for that fable.
The Two Goats (XII, 4)
1. My use of the verb capering in the context—recollecting the Latin noun caper (goat)—is not a gratuitous pun, but follows La Fontaine’s own use of the French caprice, from the same root.
2. The allusions are to the Peace of the Pyrenees, concluded in 1659 between Philip IV of Spain and the young Louis XIV’s minister Mazarin, preparing the monarch’s political marriage to María-Teresa, Philip’s daughter.
3. The love of the Cyclops Polyphemus for Galatea is treated in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, XIII, 740–884.
4. The allusion is to the she-goat Amaltheia, who suckled the infant Jupiter, hidden by his mother, Rhea, to save him from the jealous wrath of Saturn, his father. Poussin’s painting, The Nurture of Jupiter (ca. 1637) illustrates the myth.
For Monseigneur le duc de Bourgogne (following XII, 4)
1. See note 1 for XII, 1.
2. See “The Old Cat and the Young Mouse” (XII, 5).
The Old Cat and the Young Mouse (XII, 5)
1. This fable was written as a “command performance” for Louis XIV’s grandson, the young duc de Bourgogne, for whom that title had been revived a few years before, in 1628. According to twenty-two lines of prefatory verse, it was composed at the request of the royal scion, “qui avoit demandé à M. de la Fontaine une fable qui fût nommée le Chat et la Souris” (who had asked M. de la Fontaine for a fable that might be named the Cat and the Mouse).
2. Raminagrobis, the name La Fontaine uses for his stuffy old cat, was borrowed, like a number of his proper names, from Rabelais (Pantagruel, Book III, chapter 21), who gives it to the old poet—supposedly modeled after Guillaume Crétin—visited by Pantagruel and Panurge during their consultations on the advisability of the latter’s marriage. (See note 1 for VII, 15.) The word came to be used throughout the Renaissance as an adjective meaning “pompous,” “vain,” and even gave rise to a verb, raminagrobiser, in a legal context, meaning “to pussyfoot like a lawyer”—no pun intended.
The Quarrel of the Dogs and Cats and of the Cats and Mice (XII, 8)
1. See VI, 20.
The Wolf and the Fox (XII, 9)
1. It is established that the young duc de Bourgogne did, indeed, write a French fable on the subject from a Latin model provided by Fénelon. See Gohin, 2:370.
2. My own linguistic prejudices notwithstanding, I bow to a variety of authoritative English dictionaries to allow “nonpareil” to rhyme with “well.”
3. See The Iliad, XVI.
The Crayfish and Her Daughter (XII, 10)
1. The allusion is to the League of Augsbourg, formed in 1686 of a number of countries, among them Spain, Sweden, Holland, the Empire, and, eventually, England, three years later.
2. Bellona was the Roman goddess of war. Unlike most of the Roman deities—and similar in this regard to Flora, Pomona (see note 2 for VIII, 10), and others—she was not inherited, with a change of name, from the Greek pantheon.
The Eagle and the Magpie (XII, 11)
1. The reference is to one Vulteius Mena, the garrulous town crier satirized by Horace (Epistles, I, 7), who may also have been the inspiration for “The Cobbler and the Financier” (VIII, 2).
The Kite, the King, and the Fowler (XII, 12)
1. François-Louis de Bourbon, the second prince de Conti (1664–1709), was the nephew of the Grand Condé and husband of the latter’s granddaughter Marie-Thérèse de Bourbon. The rather fulsome encomium introducing this fable was probably written to honor their marriage in 1688.
2. La Fontaine’s generous prognostication fell short, one can see, by some fifty-five years.
3. See note 1 for IX, 7. Despite its Hindu (and Pythagorean) subject of metempsychosis, this was not one of the fables inspired by Pilpay, as La Fontaine would later admit. See Gohin, 2:371–72.
4. Metempsychosis, or reincarnation, is described as cyclic in the Laws of Manu and other Hindu literature.
5. This is an allusion to “The Rats in Council Assembled” (II, 2).
6. The banquet of the gods is narrated in the last part of Book One of The Iliad, with Vulcan, husband of Venus, serving nectar.
The Fox, the Flies, and the Hedgehog (XII, 13)
1. This appearance of the hedgehog in La Fontaine’s dramatis animalia, as he confides in a typically personal aside, was indeed the first of his corpus. Unless, that is, one considers a prior version of the present fable, unpublished during his lifetime, cited by various scholars, Regnier among them (see 3:266–67). Though he obviously didn’t know it at the time, it would also be the only one.
2. La Fontaine was not, by any means, the first to adapt this political apologue from Aristotle’s Rhetoric (II, 20), one with a particularly rich history. It would show up, for example, several centuries after Aristotle, in Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews (XVIII, vi, 5) and eventually in a variety of Spanish exemplary tales based on the Gesta Romanorum. For the work of one of La Fontaine’s more important French predecessors, the sixteenth-century fabulist Philibert Guide (a.k.a. Philibert Hegemon), as well as other incarnations before and after, see my The Fabulists French: Verse Fables of Nine Centuries, 28–29.
The Crow, the Gazelle, the Tortoise, and the Rat (XII, 15)
1. See note 1 for IX, 20.
2. See “Discourse,” IX, 20.
3. For an example of just such a magister, see “The Child and the Schoolmaster” (I, 19).
4. For an earlier appearance of the similarly named rat (“Rongemaille” in the original), see “The Cat and the Rat” (VIII, 22).
5. See note 1 for IX, 7.
The Forest and the Woodsman (XII, 16)
1. One should not exaggerate La Fontaine’s seemingly proto-environmentalist defense of nature, evident here, as in many of his more “philosophical” fables. Much has been written on it; but, although it is more probably
something of a pastoral literary conceit more common among his immediate predecessors—Racan, Théophile de Viau, Tristan L’Hermite, and others—than among his citified contemporaries, it is at least based on personal experience. Recall that, as a child, La Fontaine delighted in accompanying his father on his woodland rounds about his native Château-Thierry as Maître des Eaux et Forêts (Master of the Waters and Forests)—roughly the equivalent of a forest warden cum conservationist—and that La Fontaine himself inherited that position as a young adult. (See, inter alia, Philip Wadsworth, Young La Fontaine [Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1952], 16–21.)
The Fox, the Wolf, and the Horse (XII, 17)
1. La Fontaine’s concluding line, meaning literally “The wise man distrusts every stranger,” certainly smacks of a proverb and may well have preexisted his use of it here, though I find no evidence of it in this form. In fact, sources usually cite this line as its origin; and it surely wouldn’t be the only one of his to pass into proverbial usage. Perhaps La Fontaine was expressing, in different dress, the then common proverb “Défiance est mère de sureté” (Distrust is mother of security); one whose cynical message was criticized by his contemporary, the churchman-littérateur Bossuet, who said of it: “J’aime beaucoup mieux être trompé que de vivre éternellement dans la défiance” (I should rather be deceived than to live eternally in distrust). See Quitard, 291.
The Fox and the Young Turkey Cocks (XII, 18)
1. The turkey had been introduced into Europe from North America as early as the sixteenth century. In France, in La Fontaine’s time, one distinguished between the full-grown dindon (turkey cock, the male of the dinde) and the young poulet d’Inde, which today would more usually be termed the dindonneau. All the words carry (and carried) with them the connotation of stupidity, for which the turkey is, perhaps unjustly, famous.
The Complete Fables of Jean de La Fontaine Page 42