Ambitious Diminutives: La Fontaine and the Art of the Apologue
Jean de La Fontaine. Love & Folly: Selected Tales and Fables of La Fontaine. Translated by Marie Ponsot. Edited and with an introduction by Benjamin Ivry. Illustrations by Soon Chun Cho. Welcome Rain Publishers 2002. 160 pp. $14.00 (paperback) [Originally published as Selected Fables and Tales of La Fontaine. New American Library 1966]
Jean de La Fontaine. The Complete Fables of Jean de La Fontaine. Translated by Norman R. Shapiro. Introduction by John Hollander. Illustrations by David Schorr. University of Illinois Press 2007. 504 pp. $80.00 $25.00 (paperback)
Nobody knows just when the animals stopped speaking to us. That beastly cold shoulder has gone on for eons now. It’s easy enough to speculate as to why they gave up on us. Perhaps they’d grown tired of our braggadocio. Perhaps Aristotle is to blame. His insistence that humans are “rational animals” must have galled them. This is of course nonsense, as even the most untutored wombat knows. Our rationality, our vaunted logic, is almost always wishful. The lowliest thrip is more rigorous than the Stagirite. The logic of fur and fin, of feather and scale, is unassailable. Animal logic is commonsensical; it works to a purpose. And its premise is always self-interest. Metaphysics doesn’t cloud its syllogisms. But surely we have eloquence, while they have little more than hoots and grunts, warbles and chitterings? Well, not really: Animal speech is richly patterned and often musical. The mockingbird makes Demosthenes sound like the stammerer he was. The squeaks of bats in their exactitude put our equations to shame. Our “rational speech” is but the thinnest band of a vocal spectrum that extends beyond our ken. We are excluded from that vast polyphony. We are monoglots at a festival of tongues.
But perhaps it wasn’t so much that animals stopped talking as that we stopped listening. Montaigne asked, “Why should it be a defect in the beasts and not in us that stops all communication between us?” If we could understand the language of the animals, what would we hear? In my opinion, the closest approximation lies in the Fables of Jean de La Fontaine. This may sound absurd. After all, aren’t his foxes and storks, frogs and mice, lions and wolves, mere surrogates, humans decked out in pelts and hides and manes? Aren’t they us in shaggy camouflage? Certainly their ambitions and intentions seem dangerously familiar; their motives are usually sordid, their calculations petty, their comeuppances abrupt. We recognize their vanity, their guile, their cruelty, their deluded hopes as unmistakably our own.
Take as an example his late fable “The Pig, the Goat, and the Sheep,” quoted here in Marie Ponsot’s translation:
A farmer put a sheep, a plump pig, and a goat
Into his cart, and off to the fair they went.
The creatures were, though unaware, all in one boat,
Soon to be sold for slaughter in the market tent.
These passengers would see no clowns
Or comic dancers in gold gowns.
Sir Swine, despite the farmer’s frowns,
Squealed as if he already glimpsed the butchers’ knives,
Squealed without ceasing, deafening the patient pair
That rode beside him. They had led more sheltered lives
And had no inkling why he shrilled in such despair;
They could not see anything wrong.
“Pig!”the farmer called. “Next time you wont come along
If you don’t stop that! Your friends are ashamed of you.
They are enjoying the change, the fresh air, the view�
See how they behave. Don’t be a vulgarian!
Take a hint from friend sheep there. He�s wise. He keeps cool.”
Said Sir Swine, “He’s a fool!
If he guessed where you’re steering with this caravan,
How he’d howl! These two innocents aren’t frightened
But if you tell them what’s in store
They’ll bleat then, and shriek and implore.
They think they’re going to the fair to be lightened,
The goat of her milk, the sheep of wool—that may be.
But we know about fairs, we swine.
I know what destiny is mine—
Pork! That will be the death of me.
Farewell, fair world!” He did define
What was coming, being smart and energetic;
But when we dread what we are sure we still must face
To express either fear or grief is out of place;
Those best behaved are often those least prophetic.
This isn’t entirely faithful to the original, but never mind. Consider the situation. The pig squeals, as pigs are wont to do, but when the farmer scolds him, he breaks into speech. And not just any speech. This pig is not only articulate but literate; his rhymes are exquisite. In the real world, any farmer with his wits about him would stop and exclaim, “Zut alors! A rhyming pig! I will display him at the fair and make my fortune!” In fairy tales, when animals speak, it betokens an enchantment; a fast-talking frog invariably conceals a prince bewitched. In La Fontaine, animals tend to turn eloquent only when in extremis. Danger fires their tongues. But here the fact that the doomed pig speaks—and in impeccable literary French—is taken for granted. The pig doesn’t express himself in some exotic swine-dialect, the farmer has no need to summon a dragoman fluent in grunts, each understands the other perfectly. The fantastic is accepted as matter-of-course. La Fontaine employs the same strategy that Kafka (who learned from him) would later bring to perfection: He treats the preposterous not merely as normal but as unremarkable and indeed quite unworthy of comment, producing an effect that is both comical and vaguely queasy. It is absurd that a pig would deliver such an oration, but at the same time we acknowledge that if a pig could speak, this is what he might utter on the road to the shambles.
This is no cartoon pig, no Porky or Wilbur, and there’s no Charlotte in the wings, ready to spin a saving web. His plaint isn’t merely reasonable, it’s the discourse of a “rational animal.” The improbable humor of the situation gulls us into empathy until we realize, with a start, that the fable isn’t only about pigs; it’s about us too. We are no better off than the pig. We’re all being trundled to the butcher shop, and no last-minute eloquence will save us. The moral is wry, verging on bitter: Better to be as dumb as a sheep than to foresee what our future holds.
There are subtleties in the original that no translation can capture. The sheep and the goat are described as “bonnes gens,” “good folks,” by the farmer, who praises them further as “honnêtes,” that is, “upstanding,” a characterization that the surly pig takes up a bit later quite sarcastically; for him, to be honnête in such a predicament is to be “un sot,” a fool. The farmer advises the pig to be “sage” (which means both “good” and “wise”), like the docile sheep. This word is also the last in the poem, and reveals its mordant sting only at the end; to be sage here betokens nothing more than blissful ignorance, and this is superior to foresight: “et le moins prévoyant est toujours le plus sage” (“the least discerning is always the wisest”). La Fontaine doesn’t separate his sheep from his goats; both are sunk in snug (and mute) complacency. Their sagesse is in fact the stupidity of the herd, from which La Fontaine throughout his life stood aloof; his beloved Horace’s “Odi profanum vulgus et arceo” could have been his motto. The pig’s final words are stoical and yet unbearably moving. Overall, Ponsot’s translations are the best available in English, but here she stumbles, rendering the exclamation insipidly as “Farewell, fair world!” The pig actually says, “Adieu mon toit et ma maison” (“Farewell, my roof and my house”), and we feel how even a lowly sty may be everything that home can mean.
For La Fontaine, no absolute demarcation obtains between the human and animal realms. “Everything speaks in the universe / there is nothing without its own language,” he insists; in his Fables, he brags, “even the fishes speak.” His is not merely an articulate universe but a positively gabby one. His creatures don’t simply speak, they reason, dispute, haggle, and cajole, the fable serving as a stage on which the protagonists engage each other, usually for a round of self-interested sophistries. La Fontaine’s convictions about animals led him to turn against the reigning Cartesianism of his time, which made of non-human creatures mere “machines,” sentient but devoid of emotional or cognitive, let alone moral, faculties. To modern readers, his belief in a speaking universe may seem merely fanciful. Most of us nowadays wouldn’t subscribe to Descartes’ crude view, but we’re not quite sure how seriously to take La Fontaine’s contrary stance (and it doesn’t help that he’s the sliest and most mercurial of poets). When we aren’t sentimentalizing animals, we tend to view them as motivated purely by instinct, devoid of any interior life analogous to our own and certainly lacking in a moral sense. For us, animals aren’t “innocent” (that would imply an ethical judgment) but amoral.
The notion that animals are amoral would have puzzled La Fontaine. For the point of his fables is not, or not only, that animals serve to illustrate unpalatable aspects of human behavior, but that the world represents a moral continuum in which the smallest insect shares the same hopes and disappointments, the same virtues and foibles, as the loftiest monarch. La Fontaine’s world is ethically seamless. When he declares, “I use animals to instruct mankind,” he doesn’t mean that animals are simply stand-ins for humans. And his motive in using almost exclusively animal protagonists wasn’t just a matter of venerable tradition extending back to Father Aesop, nor was it purely an artistic stratagem. Rather, it rested on a firm philosophical principle: Right and wrong, good and evil, are unshakable values embedded in the cosmos; they are not malleable, to be modified at the whim of a king or compromised by force majeure. And they apply not only to great matters of life and death but to issues of more specific scope: domestic relations, the protocols of friendship, dilemmas of etiquette. In La Fontaine’s poems, the big and the little stand confounded; a small act of selfishness lays bare a rip in the moral fabric of the world. At the same time, the Fables present a view of life that is utterly unsentimental; the innocent are despoiled and the unjust prosper, often monstrously. It isn’t enough to be good; it isn’t enough to be cunning. Luck counts for much; maybe it counts for all. There are fables of cruelty to surpass anything in Dante, for they summon up, not “everlasting pain,” but our first hurts, those experiences of injustice or injury we suffered early in childhood and never forgot. Few of us will undergo the torments of Ugolino but we all remember being the stork at a fox’s dinner party. What gives the fables force is the continual disparity between life as we think it should be and life as it actually is, coupled with the knowledge that there is nothing whatever we can do about it.
Being a moralist, La Fontaine is unsparingly judgmental. Vanity and cruelty are the two traits he most abhors, and he lampoons them savagely, but he can be almost as hard on mere delusion. Error, for him, is a moral failing. Consider “The Old Cat and the Young Mouse,” written when the poet was himself growing old. I quote it in Marianne Moore’s translation:
A young mouse of little experience
Imagined that he could argue in his defense
And that hard old Rominagrab would set him free.
“Why not grant me liberty—
Too minute to be an expense
Amid such prodigality?
Say by what possibility
I could hurt you, your lady, or friends?
A grain of wheat’s enough for me,
A mere nut makes a mouse immense.
Since I am thin at present, wait till I expand.
Your offspring will need food, as any mouse would understand.”
When in straits, that is what a poor mouse found to say.
And was told, “Your logic is astray.
Who am I to listen to your unseasoned fears?
Your logic is wasted upon one of my years.
A cat, an old cat pardon? Never anywhere.
Realize, mouse, that you will go
Where dead mice congregate below.
Logic is not a thing about which the Three Fates care.
My young heirs must find other mice on which to grow.”
And that was all.
As for my fable, well,
This is the moral that seems applicable here:
Fond youth flatters itself that all must heed its prayer;
Old age is inexorable.
Moore takes a few liberties to make this work in English; the original is both suaver and harsher. In the French, the mouse’s speech plays on a wheedling melody while Rominagrab’s rebuttal is gruff and crude, the cat telling his victim, quite literally, to “go to hell“ before he gobbles him up. The exchange creates a discordant music, a duet sung on the scaffold. The mouse is not only a sophist but a self-bamboozled one, and his argument, though charming, makes his delusion painfully plain. The mouse is young; for him the future appears unbounded, even in the paws of death. The cat is old; his future has shrunk to the nearest mouthful. The irony of the fable—which is lost, of course, on the mouse—is that his killer stands almost as close to death as he does.
If our sympathies are with the mouse, La Fontaine’s are not. The moral of the fable is characteristically barbed, and the final line, a marvel of truthful cruelty, presented Moore with a dilemma. In French it reads “la vieillesse est impitoyable” (“old age is pitiless”). Moore chose to translate impitoyable as “inexorable” not only for the sake of her rhyme, but because she knew that the cat’s pitilessness was itself an inexorable effect of old age; in his moral, La Fontaine is chastising old age in its hardheartedness as much as youth in its softheadedness. Unwittingly perhaps, Moore identified with Rominagrab in her own old age. And yet the tragic wit of the fable depends on the equipoise between cat and mouse. Each is the prey of age.
Not surprisingly, La Fontaine’s preferred kind of fable, the subgenre he inherited but made uniquely his own, is the apologue; as he once wrote (in Elizur Wright’s translation), “The apologue is from the immortal gods; / Or if the gift of man it is, / Its author merits apotheosis.” An apologue is a fable, in verse or prose, that tells a story and then draws a moral—known as an epimythium—from it. Though it has a long and distinguished lineage, beginning with Aesop and continuing through Phaedrus, Babrius, and Horace (all of whom La Fontaine gleefully plundered), with tributary influences from such Oriental sources as the Sanskrit pundit Bidpai and the Persian poet Sa’di (from whom La Fontaine filched several of his later fables), the apologue was considered a low, even contemptible form in La Fontaine’s day. It doesn’t stand in much higher repute today. I can think of few modern poets in English (or in French for that matter) who have exploited its rich resources. One exception is Richard Wilbur, whose “A Fable” begins:
Securely sunning in a forest glade,
A mild, well-meaning snake
Approved the adaptations he had made
For safety’s sake.
He liked the skin he had—
Its mottled camouflage, its look of mail
And was content that he had thought to add
A rattling tail.
As with La Fontaine, we guess at once that the snake’s self-approval will lead to its destruction, and so it proves: Its frightening appearance prompts a peasant to dash its brains out. Wilbur’s moral runs:
Security, alas, can give
A threatening impression;
Too much defense-initiative
Can prompt aggression.
Again as with La Fontaine, a seemingly simple anecdote hints at wider concerns (although his snake and the peasant would have had a brief but pungent pow-wow).
The moralistic and edifying nature of the apologue goes a long way toward explaining its current unpopularity. But some of this neglect may also have to do with the fact that it’s fiendishly difficult to handle well. Especially challenging is its tone: However dire its subject matter, the apologue must remain sprightly; it must seem spontaneous, anecdotal, almost casual. The whole purpose of its considerable artifice is to create an effect of complete naturalness, and at this La Fontaine is the uncontested master.
The formal requirements are simple enough. A typical La Fontaine apologue is in rhyming vers libre, with lines of variable length. It often opens with dramatic, sometimes surrealistic abruptness (“A tortoise whose wits had deserted her” begins one), proceeds into bantering dialogue, usually between oddly joined interlocutors (a spider and a swallow, a curate and a corpse), and concludes with a stinging maxim or a curt aperçu. Like the limerick, it’s a form whose structure carries a distinct whiff of impudence; in its very raggedness it offers a rebuke to the august alexandrine (another reason for its outcast status in seventeenth-century France). But for La Fontaine its scruffy measures were what terza rima was for Dante or blank verse for Shakespeare, and out of that very dowdiness he made something unmistakably his own. One can almost imagine this disreputable genre, with its “stink of the schoolroom,” as one detractor put it, plucking the poet by the sleeve, like one of his own hustling monkeys or down-at-the-heel rats, and begging for literary shelter.
Another reason why the apologue is so unfashionable these days may be that it’s closely associated with children’s literature. The Fables, especially when paired with the witty illustrations that have always accompanied the text, beginning with the earliest editions and culminating a century later in the magnificent drawings of Jean-Baptiste Oudry, appear ideally suited for children. Frankly, though, this is an appalling idea. French schoolchildren are still force-fed the Fables and La Fontaine is considered the ”most French“ of authors, but any child who took the surface message of the work to heart and endeavored to live in accordance with its “bitter wisdom” would grow up to be a cold-eyed, cynical, and conniving son of a bitch. La Fontaine’s celebrated gaiety—that “légèreté” for which, alongside the purity of his language, he was so praised during his lifetime—sugars some pretty distasteful bile. The marvel of the Fables as a work of the highest poetic art is that, two centuries before Baudelaire, he could make such glowing gold out of such rank mud. In The Craft of La Fontaine, the best study in English, the critic Maya Slater stresses his extreme disenchantment as well as his “spleen against mankind.” She’s not exaggerating. And yet this isn’t the whole story. Against the bleakness of that prevailing vision, in which both man and beast grub out a deluded existence, and the swindler is even more baffled than his dupe—all of course conveyed in glittering pirouettes of phrase—moments of surprising tenderness and delicacy occur, seeming to startle the poet as much as they do his reader.
One such crops up at the close of “Les Deux Pigeons,” perhaps La Fontaine’s greatest single fable. It tells the story of a doting pair of pigeons, one of whom is tempted by wanderlust and undergoes a series of battering adventures, only to return home to the nest with a fresh appreciation of domestic love. La Fontaine speaks suddenly in his own voice in these lines. No English translation does justice to the poem, but Marianne Moore comes closest:
Fond lovers, since love is all in all, if you go away,
Come hastening home again:
Each a beautiful world to the other of the two,
Forever strange, forever new.
Love the world in each of you, unaware of all the rest.
I who loved long ago, desiring nothing more,
Would not exchange the Louvre’s vast store
Of all that’s rare—or heaven—for love confessed...
Such directness is rare in the Fables; most have a vexing doubleness of effect. They annoy and enchant in almost equal measure. Take the most famous of them all, “The Cicada and the Ant,” based on Aesop’s “The Grasshopper and the Ant.” In his translation, Richard Wilbur, brushing off La Fontaine’s cicada, upholds the Aesopian title and protagonists:
Grasshopper, having sung her song
All summer long,
Was sadly unprovided-for
When the cold winds began to roar:
Not one least bite of grub or fly
Had she remembered to put by.
Therefore she hastened to descant
On famine, to her neighbor Ant,
Begging the loan of a few grains
Of wheat to ease her hunger-pains
Until the winter should be gone.
“You shall be paid,” said she, “upon
My honor as an animal,
Both interest and principal.”
The Ant was not disposed to lend;
That liberal vice was not for her.
“What did you do all summer, friend?”
She asked the would-be borrower.
“So please your worship,” answered she,
“I sang and sang both night and day.”
”You sang? Indeed, that pleases me.
Then dance the winter-time away.”
La Fontaine has refined and concentrated Aesop’s story to rather grating effect; Wilbur’s translation, fine as it is, tends to soften the force of the original. Indeed, the fable has outraged many readers since it first appeared. The ant comes in for particular obloquy: She is smug, selfish, and cruel. She not only refuses to help the needy cicada but jeers at her. The fact that her final words (“Dansez maintenant!”) have become proverbial strengthens the case against her; she has furnished a convenient quip for generations of self-satisfied skinflints. In his brilliant Souvenirs entomologiques, the great nineteenth-century French entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre, sometimes called “the Homer of the insects,” denounced what he termed “the petty malice” of the ant. La Fontaine’s fable, he complained, “offended morality as much as natural history.” Not only was the poet unable to distinguish a cicada from a grasshopper, his “nursery tale” (whose “only merit,” he said, was in “being short”) would blacken the hapless cicada’s reputation for ages to come. Fabre even lambasted J. J. Grandville, one of the most original illustrators of the Fables, for the jaunty outfit (complete with guitar) he gives the cicada, and he raged that Grandville, like the poet, had “no inkling of the real cicada.”
This famous little poem continues to stir indignation. A few years ago, a member of the Société des Amis de Jean de La Fontaine published a scathing denunciation of the ant in Le Fablier, its official journal. The ant has few defenders, perhaps because her character coincides so well with certain national traits French readers fear to discover in themselves; everyone wants to be thought a cicada while swilling the harvest of the ant. La Fontaine’s own position is debated too. Whose side was he really on? But since this is an apologue without an epimythium—La Fontaine lets the reader draw the moral—we don’t know what he thought; except when cruelty or conceit are at issue, he reserves judgment. Surely, some say, La Fontaine sides with the cicada—isn’t she the very emblem of the poet, singing the summer through? Roger Duchêne, his best biographer, goes so far as to assert that throughout his life, La Fontaine “always comported himself like the cicada.” And yet we know that La Fontaine had a bizarre affection for ants. According to one anecdote, he came late to a formal dinner, giving as his excuse that he had attended “the entombment of an ant” and felt duty-bound not only to follow the mourners’ cortège but to accompany the family back to their anthill home; he then regaled the astonished guests with a long disquisition on the social lives of ants. There are no reports that he attended cicada obsequies.
In fact, the fable disturbs precisely because no explicit moral is drawn. Each side has a case. It’s as easy to identify with the insouciant attitude of the cicada and her delight in her own coloratura as it is to share the annoyance of the ant, hauling crumbs on hot afternoons under the deafening racket of those blithe stridulations high in the summer trees. The cicada is manifestly not only an airhead but a hustler, as suggested by the phrase “foi d’animal” (“animal’s honor”) with which she panhandles. Like the young mouse, she takes the future for granted, while the ant, for all her provident foraging, is, like the old cat, stubbornly implanted in the here and now. It’s the sort of theater La Fontaine liked best, one of those tiny but momentous dramas that take place out of sight under the very soles of our shoes. E. M. Cioran once asked, “What would all our stage tragedies amount to if a literate bug could tell us of its own?” The aphorism might have been coined for La Fontaine.
La Fontaine’s apologues often have a slyly disguised political edge. “The Old Cat and the Young Mouse,” which I quoted earlier, seems straightforward. But as Marc Fumaroli suggests in his annotated edition of the Fables, even this fable may have been intended as a “veiled warning.” It appears in the twelfth and final book, dedicated to the Duke of Burgundy, the ten-year-old grandson of Louis XIV. By 1692, when the book was published, the Sun King had been on the throne for over thirty years (with another twenty-three to go!) and was very much “the old cat”; a young mouse, even a ducal one, was well advised to watch out.
In general, whenever La Fontaine satirizes vanity or cruelty—two vices he can neither soften nor forgive—he finds them most rampant at court. He is especially scathing about courtiers. In “The Lion, the Wolf, and the Fox,” he addresses them directly. This time I quote from Norman R. Shapiro’s new complete translation of the Fables. Shapiro has been translating La Fontaine for forty years, and his versions are ingenious, with much of the poet’s humor—if not always his beauty—coming through clearly:
Courtiers—toadies, hypocrites:
Your prattling, tattling tongues cause woes untold.
Nor is there anyone who benefits:
The ills you do return to you fourfold.
The grovelling, duplicity and self-regard of courtiers are not simply loathsome; they represent the willing sacrifice of individual freedom, a sacrifice that is, moreover, futile in the end. Alone among the great writers of the age, La Fontaine refused the sacrifice. For all their genius, Racine, Molière, and Bossuet, along with hordes of less talented hangers-on, were shameless sycophants at court; the asses they
kissed may have been swaddled in velvet, but the aftertaste remained the same. In one of the earliest fables, “The Wolf and the Dog,” a watchdog tries to persuade a famished wolf to join his household, where he would have little work to do and lots to eat. The wolf is about to sign on when he notices that the dog’s neck is rubbed bare. The dog explains that the abrasion was caused by his collar, to which his master attaches a leash; the wolf is appalled and runs away. La Fontaine’s famous last line, in Elizur Wright’s 1841 version, reads, “So ran Sir Wolf, and runneth yet” (“Maître Loup s’enfuit, et court encore”). It could stand as La Fontaine’s signature line.
In “The Frog Who Wanted to Make Herself Big as an Ox,” from the first book of the Fables, La Fontaine unforgettably allegorized the dangers of courtly ambition. I quote from Marie Ponsot’s superb translation:
A frog saw an ox and was stirred
To admiration for his size.
She, no bigger than the egg of a mockingbird,
Began to stretch, and puff up, to hyperbolize
Herself to oxen dimensions, crying,
“Watch, great friend! Shall I keep trying?
Look!” she puffed, “Have I already reached your size?”
“No.”
“Now see!” “Still no.” “How’s this?” “No closer than at first,”
Said the ox. The ambitious diminutive so,
Outdid herself then that she burst.
In liking to seem grand, most men are no sages.
Middle-class folk live in imitation châteaux;
Princelings love protocol’s punctilios,
And minor knights must have pages.
Pretension reaches its apex in the monarch, embodied in the lion, who stands at the cruel center of La Fontaine’s world and wields unfettered power. Power emanates from this crowned beast in an aura at once lethal and intoxicating. Throughout the Fables, the lion is never just or wise or merciful; he is a creature drunk on his own strength. From that strength, and his blithe abuse of it, flow all the vices of his sycophants. They lie, intrigue, slander, and denounce, all in the hope of catching some flitting ray from that supreme but brittle radiance. No one, not even Machiavelli, understood better than La Fontaine the rottenness at the heart of power. In “The Lion’s Court,” the monarch invites his vassals to his “Louvre,” where, in Elizur Wright’s translation, “The charnel scent / Would make the strongest nerves relent.” The bear wrinkles his nose and is “sent to Pluto’s court.” The monkey tries flattery, comparing the stench of decay to “the amber of the Baltic wave,” and he too is dispatched. Only the fox, who claims he cannot smell because of “a dreadful cold,” survives. Power makes the king cruel, but his cruelty is never gratuitous; it is a calculated cruelty that works like a thumbscrew to extort flattery and submission from his entourage. The lion is no Caligula; he uses his absolute power not out of sadism but quite rationally and with scrupulous economy, to further his own ends. Underneath that intimidating mane, behind those sceptered claws, the lion is as grubby and conniving as the fox or rat. Only his motives differ from theirs. He needs others solely as mirrors of his own grandiosity. The lion gorges on acclaim; he is gluttonous for deference.
As everyone knows—and recognized at the time—La Fontaine’s lion is a thinly disguised stand-in for Louis XIV. This was good Aesopic convention, of course, but in La Fontaine’s hands it took on new force; the poet had witnessed the abuse of royal power with his own eyes. In September 1661, Nicolas Fouquet, the superintendent of finances and La Fontaine’s patron, was arrested on trumped-up charges of embezzlement and, after a three-year trial, banished for life to the bleak mountaintop prison of Pignerol, where he spent his last seventeen years shivering in solitary confinement. Fouquet’s real offense, however, had been to invite Louis to a lavish party, complete with spectacular fireworks, at his newly built chateau of Vaux-le-Vicomte, just outside Paris. The buildings and gardens were grander than anything the king possessed—he later built Versailles deliberately to surpass them—and he was mortified. La Fontaine stood by his fallen patron, even composing a verse epistle to Louis in which he asked him to pardon Fouquet. La Fontaine’s loyalty made him suspect; he was barred from court and denied preferment, or even royal notice, for decades. The Fables, the first six books of which appeared ten years later, must be read in the light of this episode; their wry detachment reveals the perspective of a perennial outsider. (Roger Duchêne has noted the irony that La Fontaine, the only author to have made “a moralizing genre” wildly popular in France, lived a life “in scorn of the laws.”)
Though he barred La Fontaine from election to the Académie Française for almost twenty years, the king restrained himself from punishing the poet more severely for his gibes; because he’d used the fable, most trivial of genres, as his weapon of choice, Louis could not be seen to retaliate. Also serving to shield La Fontaine was his reputation for simplemindedness. When a jealous rival, the great lexicographer Antoine Furetière, called La Fontaine a “soft-core Aretino” (“un Arétin mitigé”), because of his salacious Contes, and the insult was transformed by a typo into “a soft-core cretin” (“un crétin mitigé”), the slander stuck, partly because the poet had always cultivated a certain public doltishness. To crush La Fontaine would have been infra dig; it would have made le Roi-Soleil look ridiculous. It would have been loosing a catapult to swat a gnat.
For all this, it would be mistaken to read the Fables as topical satire directed exclusively at Louis XIV and his brown-nosing entourage. La Fontaine’s purpose goes deeper. His apologues rest on his firm belief in a principle of “universal analogy.” What applies to a despairing pig or a puffed-up frog applies with equal force to us. We too are “ambitious diminutives,” as stingy as the ant, as tricky as the fox, as cruel and vain as the lion. In his fables of brute power, it is the little despotic Sun King in us all whom he cunningly portrays, and that hidden analogy gives them enduring immediacy. If this makes him sound a bit too solemn, well, so be it; beneath his frivolity, he was as cynical a moralist as his friend La Rochefoucauld, and as unsparing. But he was also a very great poet, perhaps the greatest of French poets, and he never allows mere censure to ruffle a rhyme or lame a cadence. In a late poem, he called himself “the butterfly of Parnassus” (“papillon du Parnasse”)and “akin to the bees / To whom good Plato compares our prodigies...” Like Muhammad Ali, La Fontaine knew how “to dance like a butterfly and sting like a bee.” In imagining the moral world of a wolf or a hedgehog or a bat, he shows us analogy in its simplest form, as a movement of sympathy that enables us to step briefly into another’s shoes (or hooves). For a Platonic bee like La Fontaine, this is just the first step. In the end, his language of the animals isn’t a matter of lost or forgotten “inter-species” communication, nor a mystical Baudelairean langage des fleurs, nor—and most emphatically—some soppy “language of the heart.” It is a grammar of manners, a moral vernacular. We know this lingo in our bones, and through it we acknowledge a camouflaged kinship with everything that is, from cheese-wheedling crows to vainglorious kings.
—ERIC ORMSBY
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