Jean de La Fontaine

Start Free Trial

Biography

Download PDF PDF Page Citation Cite Share Link Share

Jean de La Fontaine was born in the province of Champagne at Château-Thierry in 1621. In spite of his name, he was not of noble birth. His father held a government post as an administrator of forest and water resources. It was in the lush, green countryside of Château-Thierry that the poet spent his first twenty years. He loved the surrounding neighborhood with its familiar woods, waters, and meadows. He admired the natural world during a century when it went mostly unappreciated; indeed, to most of his contemporaries the term “nature” meant primarily human nature. Thus, his early upbringing set him apart from the other great classical writers of France’s Golden Age, and the influence of nature and of country people is apparent in many of his tales and fables.

It is well documented that as a boy, La Fontaine was dreamy and absent-minded. He was also cheerful and lively, possessing an amiable disposition which remained with him throughout his life. In 1641, at the age of twenty, La Fontaine decided to study for the priesthood at the Oratoire in Paris, but he abandoned this pursuit after eighteen months and turned to the study of law. In 1647, his father transferred his official post to La Fontaine and married him off to a girl from an affluent family. The match proved to be a disaster, and the couple formally separated after eleven years of marriage. During this period, La Fontaine lived the life of a dilettante. He showed a disinclination for steady work and was content to spend much of his time in idleness; he was a voracious reader. He eventually sold his father’s post and took up permanent residence in Paris.

La Fontaine began writing comparatively late in life, in his middle thirties. Throughout his career as a man of letters, he relied upon generous patrons for his support and well-being. His first patron was also his most important—the wealthy finance minister Nicolas Fouquet. La Fontaine became a pensioner of Fouquet in 1656 and wrote for him such early major works as Adonis and Le Songe de Vaux (the dream of Vaux). Unfortunately for La Fontaine, Fouquet soon fell into disgrace. His opulent lifestyle aroused the envy and anger of the young King Louis XIV. Fouquet was accused of appropriating state funds and spent the rest of his life in prison. During Fouquet’s ordeal, La Fontaine exhibited that particular virtue which would always be characteristic of him as pensioner—a deep sense of loyalty. He did not abandon Fouquet as did so many others, and he even wrote poems, including the “Elégie aux nymphes de Vaux,” begging the king to be lenient. For this display of allegiance, he incurred the king’s lasting enmity. He thus never received a pension from the government, as did many other writers and artists, and his election to the prestigious Académie Française was delayed on the king’s order.

After Fouquet’s downfall, La Fontaine was aided for a short time by the powerful Bouillon family and later by a royal patron, the dowager duchess of Orléans. He was by then forty years old, well into middle age for the times, and he was not a popular or well-known author. He realized that writing idyllic works such as Adonis would no longer be financially rewarding for him. Accordingly, he turned to more popular genres, such as tales and fables. He published his first tales in 1665. They were written in the tradition of Giovanni Boccaccio and Ludovico Ariosto, among others, and they became an immediate success. A second collection appeared a year later, in 1666; a third...

(This entire section contains 810 words.)

Unlock this Study Guide Now

Start your 48-hour free trial and get ahead in class. Boost your grades with access to expert answers and top-tier study guides. Thousands of students are already mastering their assignments—don't miss out. Cancel anytime.

Get 48 Hours Free Access

collection was published in 1671; and the final collection appeared in 1674. At that time, La Fontaine also began to publish those works on which his fame rests—theFables. The first collection appeared in 1668, when he was forty-seven years old; the second, ten years later; and the last collection, in 1694, one year before his death.

The success of the Fables placed La Fontaine at the forefront of French writers. In 1669, he published The Loves of Cupid and Psyche, taken from the tale of Cupid and Psyche in Lucius Apuleius’s The Golden Ass (second century). La Fontaine continued writing many occasional verses of small importance for various patrons. In 1684, despite earlier opposition by the king, he was finally elected to the Académie Française. In 1692, a serious illness occasioned a spiritual renewal, which, in turn, caused him to disavow publicly his earlier tales. In that same year, some of La Fontaine’s fables were translated into English for the first time, by Sir Roger L’Estrange. In 1695, while attending a play, La Fontaine was struck ill and taken to the house of friends, the Haberts, where he died several days later. He is buried in the cemetery of the Saints-Innocents in Paris.

Early Life

Download PDF PDF Page Citation Cite Share Link Share

Jean de La Fontaine was born in Château-Thierry, a small farming town in Champagne located about fifty miles east of Paris. His father, Charles de La Fontaine, was a local administrator of forests and waters. His mother, Françoise Pidoux, belonged to a respected middle-class family from Poitiers. The widow of a wealthy merchant, she had one daughter when she married Charles in 1617.

Although little is known about La Fontaine’s early years, most scholars believe he attended school in Château-Thierry before going to college in Paris. During his school years, he learned Latin rhetoric and grammar and was introduced to ancient works that would provide subjects for his later creative endeavors. He was most likely a sensitive student who liked to daydream and who perhaps found his teachers boring and authoritative. Several uncomplimentary references to schoolboys and schoolmasters in his fables suggest that his school years were not entirely pleasant.

On April 27, 1641, La Fontaine entered the Oratory, a religious seminary in Paris. By October, his teachers had discovered his preference for popular love stories and wrote that he should be strongly urged to study theology. After eighteen months, La Fontaine withdrew from the seminary and returned to Château-Thierry to read and daydream. Although many writers refer disparagingly to this idle period, La Fontaine was becoming familiar with ancient and modern authors, especially the poets François Malherbe and Vincent Voiture, François Rabelais, and the Latin writers Horace, Vergil, and Terence.

From 1645 to 1647, La Fontaine studied law in Paris, spending much of his time, however, with aspiring young writers (François Maucroix, Paul Pellisson, and Antoine Furetière) who would influence and support him throughout his career. In this formative period, La Fontaine continued to increase his knowledge of ancient and modern literature.

In 1647, at the age of twenty-six, La Fontaine was married to Marie Héricart, who was fourteen and a half years of age, and who brought him a dowry of thirty thousand livres, a considerable sum. Although amiable at first, the couple drifted apart. Absorbed for weeks in his reading, La Fontaine ignored both his family and his duties as forest warden, a position he obtained in 1652. Although he appeared idle and absentminded, the extent of his voracious reading and keen observation would become evident in his later works.