[In the following essay, Guiton commends the appealing, poetic language of La Fontaine's fables.]

Le Corbeau et le Renard

    Maître corbeau, sur un arbre perché,
     Tenait en son bec un fromage.
    Maître renard, par l'odeur alléché,
     Lui tint à peu près ce langage:
     "Hé bonjour, Monsieur du Corbeau.
Que vous êtes joli! que vous me semblez beau!
    Sans mentir, si votre ramage
    Se rapporte à votre plumage,
Vous êtes le phénix des hôtes de ces bois."
A ces mots, le corbeau ne se sent pas de joie;
    Et pour montrer sa belle voix,
Il ouvre un large bec, laisse tomber sa proie.
Le renard s'en saisit, et dit: "Mon bon monsieur,
       Apprenez que tout flatteur
    Vit aux dépens de celui qui l'écoute.
Cette leçon vaut bien un fromage sans doute."
     Le corbeau honteux et confus,
Jura, mais un peu tard, qu'on ne l'y prendrait plus.

The Fox and the Crow

    Master crow, perched on a tree,
     Was holding in his beak a cheese.
    Master fox, enticed by the odor,
     Addressed him more or less in these terms:
     "Ah! good day, my dear Sir Crow.!
How pretty you are! how beautiful you seem!
    Truly, if your warbling
    Is in keeping with your plumage,
You are the phoenix of the denizens of this forest."
At these words, the crow is beside himself with joy;
     And to show his beautiful voice,
He opens a large beak, lets fall his prey.
The fox grabs it up, and says: "My good fellow,
       Learn that all flatterers
   Live off those who listen to them.
This lesson is well worth a cheese no doubt."
     The crow embarrassed and ashamed,

Swore, a bit too late, he wouldn't get caught again.

Most of us learned, or read, the fable at a fairly tender age. How many of us were even faintly amused or pleased? How many of us actually realized that we were reading a poem? And how many of us have since reread and understood the poem as poetry? Has it not rather foundered among the irreclaimable bric-a-brac we carry with us through the years, like a familiar but useless household object? And yet the fable is a poem—a poem which, with its unexpected blend of humor and irony and sensuality, its harmonious and varied cadences, its virtuoso treatment of an unusual and complex verse form, demands a fairly descerning and experienced reader.

La Fontaine, who had little fondness for children, and still less for pedagogues, would have been surprised to learn that his fables would, to a large extent, survive as required school reading. He originally wrote them for a select elite of adult connoisseurs: the little coteries that gathered in the literary salons of his time. Madame de Sévigné, Madame de Lafayette, the Duc de La Rochefoucauld were among his admirers. So were a number of less reputable figures: the fascinating and amoral Duchesse de Bouillon, the libertine poet Saint-Evremond. Aesop's fables, then as now, were for children; but not the fables of La Fontaine. His choice of the familiar schoolroom genre merely gave added piquancy to a type of poetry so alien to the schoolroom atmosphere.

Our own childhood reading of the fable of the fox and the crow probably brought us little that we could not have found in Aesop: an anecdote and a moral. We have only to compare La Fontaine's fable with a more traditional version (here translated from the Greek by S. A. Handford) to realize how much we lost:

A crow sat in a tree holding in his beak a piece of meat that he had stolen. A fox which saw him determined to get the meat. It stood under the tree and began to tell the crow what a beautiful big bird he was. He ought to be the king of all the birds, the fox said; and he would undoubtedly have been made king, if only he had a voice as well. The crow was so anxious to prove that he had a voice, that he dropped the meat and croaked for all he was worth. Up ran the fox, snapped up the meat, and said to him: "If you added brains to all your other qualifications, you would make an ideal king."

The storyteller spells out, with somewhat laborious insistence, the underlying mechanics of his plot: the fox is flattering the crow because he is determined to get the meat; the crow is so anxious to prove that he has a voice that he drops the meat. We can hardly fail to get the point but we do not actually witness the event. We are not sure who the two animals are or why they are behaving as they do and, consequently, take little interest in their actions. La Fontaine, whose poem is not much longer than the prose fable, produces the opposite effect.

Maître corbeau, sur un arbre perché,
 Tenait en son bec un fromage.
Maître renard, par l'odeur alléché,
 Lui tint à peu près ce langage …

The curtain has risen on a drama, a form that can dispense with the obtrusive explanations of the author. We know, with the unreflecting certainty of an eyewitness, why the fox appears upon the scene and what he intends to do. Not a fox, as in the Aesopian fable, but "Maître renard," the particular fox that we are watching.

"Maître," a somewhat archaic tern Rabelais often used for his animal heroes, changes color in its two contrasting contexts. As applied to the black-coated crow it acquires legal overtones—a connotation of bourgeois scholarship that will put the fox's subsequent "Monsieur du Corbeau" in proper perspective. As applied to the fox, it conveys a sense of expertise. The repetition of the word, in conjunction with La Fontaine's syntax, meter, and rhyme scheme, serves an important function. La Fontaine, no less concise and to the point than Aesop, uses the first two sentences of the fable to introduce the two fable characters. But the symmetrical treatment points up the underlying contrast and, such is the authority of poetic form, gives it a wider application. The "corbeau" (two syllables that impose a stupid open-mouthed expression on the face) and the "renard" (two syllables that are enunciated with a knowing half-smile) are here immortalized in an eternal antithesis of dupe and duper.

In substituting a cheese for the traditional piece of meat, La Fontaine is following the Latin poet, Phaedrus, who also put Aesop's fables into verse. The change is understandable. A piece of meat is not an attractive object, particularly when situated—shapeless, presumably raw—in the beak of a crow. If this is sufficient bait for Aesop's famished beast, how different do we feel ourselves to be! But Phaedrus's fox merely "sees" the crow with the piece of cheese. La Fontaine, whose fox is "enticed by the odor" of the cheese, develops the full potentialities of the transposition. The "fromage," here revealed as one of the most beautiful words in the French language, arouses the interest not only of that dainty epicure, La Fontaine's fox, but of the reader. "What kind of cheese?" one is almost moved to inquire. Is not the voluptuous "alléché" a sufficient indication? Certainly not an English cheddar or a round Dutch cheese. Perhaps a Camembert. Perhaps a Brie. The first four verses of the fable are impregnated by its delicate aroma: the tender ge and che sounds that linger at the rhyme in premonition of some delectable sensation.

The scene is now set for the fox's manipulation of the crow.

     "Hé bonjour, Monsieur du Corbeau.
Que vous êtes joli! que vous me semblez beau!
      Sans mentir, si votre ramage
      Se rapporte à votre plumage,
Vous êtes le phénix des hôtes de ces bois."

La Fontaine's fox has more or less disguised the straightforward logic of his Aesopian model. He approaches the crucial argument indirectly, though with amazing speed. In three short sentences he skyrockets from introductory courtesies, through the artless ejaculations of astonished admiration, to the noble figures of high-class literature. The two opening verses are calculated to catch the attention of the crow and convince him of the fox's sincerity. Why waste fine rhetoric on an indifferent or suspicious audience? The "ramage," which is distinctly literary, raises the tone a notch or two. It also reminds us that the fox, though engaged in his manipulation of the crow, still has his eyes riveted on the cheese. The tender, enticing syllable keeps rising to the surface, and very effectively. Had not the fox been working under some such stimulus, would he have ascended to the lyric heights of his concluding observations?

The first six verses of the fable consist of brief, factual, sharply punctuated phrases. "Sans mentir," the opening words of a particularly blatant lie, introduces a sustained and beautifully constructed period. Two octosyllables lead up to a twelve-syllable alexandrin,² the most powerful of all French verse forms and one that La Fontaine has reserved, intact, for this particular moment. (The earlier twelve-syllable verse, "Que vous êtes joli! que vous me semblez beau!" is too abrupt and discontinuous to have the unified sweep of a lyric alexandrin.) The ninth of eighteen verses, it is at once the center and the climax of the poem; and "phénix," which falls at the accented sixth syllable, or caesura, is the apex of the climactic verse. One might suppose that La Fontaine constructed the entire fable around this rich, exotic, and dramatically situated epithet. It was actually an inspired afterthought.

A number of delicate adjustments are involved. A literal translation of Aesop would have given: "Vous seriez le roi des hôtes de ces bois" ("You would be the king of the denizens of this forest"). La Fontaine sometimes uses internal rhymes for their shock value, as in the ensuing verse. The "roi"-"bois" collision is exactly the reverse of what is needed here. One false move and the tenuous illusion will be torn apart. In addition, the brusque monosyllable "roi" at the caesura creates an unpleasant jerky movement that in and of itself is undesirable.

In his first version of the fable La Fontaine, apparently following Phaedrus's "nulla prior ales foret" ("no bird would excel you"), wrote: "Vous êtes le premier des hôtes de ces bois" ("You are the first of the denizens of this forest"). The two-syllable word at the caesura improves the rhythm of the alexandrin. Still, "premier" is too pale an epithet for the key word of the fox's speech; the expectorated p is inadvisable; the terminal ier is weak. La Fontaine needed two syllables that would carry the fable to its topmost peak. The perfect, the irreplaceable word at this particular moment is, and must be, the word "phénix"—not merely a royal but a supernatural bird and at the same time a poetic figure for a rare and almost supernatural type of excellence! It begins with a suave ph, which recalls the f of "fromage," and ends with an authoritative ix, which gives the alexandrin a strong and nobly rounded cadence. The fox—a sportive Molière marquis doffing his heavily plumed hat—is describing a sweeping Comédie-Française arabesque with his bushy tail.

What is both amusing and surprising is the total lack of preparation for this startling hyperbole. The fox, aware that pleasurable illusions are generally unaffected by the laws of common sense, does not even bother to give his flattery a veneer of plausibility. It is thus that Oronte addresses the Misanthrope in Molière's comedy:

   L'Etat n'a rien qui ne soit au-dessous
Du mérite éclatant que l'on découvre en vous.

   The Nation has nothing that is not inferior
To the dazzling merit one finds in you.

The crow, unlike the Misanthrope, never senses the latent insult to his intelligence:

A ces mots, le corbeau ne se sent pas de joie

…

Another alexandrin, but a somewhat offbalance alexandrin strongly accented on the third, sixth, and final syllables. The explosive internal rhyme, "A ces mots, le corbeau," in conjunction with the terminal rhyme, which ties the verse to the preceding verse, and the shift from a past to a present narrative tense, creates an impression of almost instantaneous cause and effect. Five short vowel sounds are propelled, with gathering speed, toward the rich, triumphant "joie." Here, unmistakably, is the first shuddering thrill of sudden self-realization—an emotion that suggests the tremulous upward-straining attitude of a bird about to break into song.

    Et pour montrer sa belle voix,
Il ouvre un large bec, laisse tomber sa proie.

"Sa belle voix" versus "un large bec." Much is implied in La Fontaine's rather unexpected use of these two innocent little words. The crow is convinced he has a beautiful singing voice; he is unaware he has so large a beak.

Rousseau, though he considered the fable unethical, particularly admired La Fontaine's description of the falling cheese. "This verse is admirable, the harmony alone creates the image. I see a big, ugly, open beak; I hear the cheese falling through the branches." The effect depends on the general construction of the poem. La Fontaine's fable, after reaching its highest altitude at "phénix," coasts along on accumulated momentum until the moment the crow opens his beak, when it stops short; then, like the cheese, it makes a vertical descent to earth. "Bec" is the crucial word, the turning point of the entire fable. A wide-open, gaping beak is an ugly spectacle, a shocking one if you have been previously admiring the plumage of a bird as La Fontaine's fox has more or less invited us to do. Baby birds, so charming in themselves, become hideous at meal time. "Bec," too, is an ugly word; in French ("corbeau," "bec"), a crowish word. The heavy monosyllable, here following a slow and somehow insidious progression of sounds, falls into place at the caesura with the cool precision of a coin dropped into a slot. Out comes the cheese, and slithers through the branches to the ground.

Le renard s'en saisit, et dit: "Mon bon
monsieur …"

The internal rhyme ("saisit, et dit") echoes the previous "mots"—"corbeau" in inverse order. The fox's first speech produced the desired effect of making the crow drop the cheese. He is now about to make a moral commentary on the incident. His opening words, a familiar and somewhat patronizing "Mon bon monsieur," stand in apposition to the previous "Monsieur du Corbeau" and are a good indication of the fox's sudden shift of tone.

        "Apprenez que tout flatteur
    Vit aux dépens de celui qui l'écoute.
Cette leçon vaut bien un fromage sans doute."

I think this is the only time La Fontaine uses a seven-syllable verse in combination with a decasyllable and an alexandrin. The meter is so uncertain as to convey the quality of prose speech, a pointed, aphoristic prose. The so-desirable "fromage" of the opening verses seems almost commonplace now that the fox has brought it back to earth and is gulping it down in a succession of incisive, terminal ts. One last bite—"sans doute"—in both literal and figurative senses, and he will be off to greener pastures. One can be sure he has enjoyed himself. To make a fool of someone and give him a moral lecture about it afterwards! And, wonder of wonders, the crow seems just as deeply affected by Master fox the moralist as by Master fox the poet.

     Le corbeau honteux et confus,
Jura, mais un peu tard, qu'on ne l'y prendrait plus.

In other words, he all but apologizes for his previous credulity.

This is the very trick La Fontaine has simultaneously played upon his reader, even though the reader, unlike the crow, has the advantage of foreknowledge. We are well aware, before we even start the fable, that we are heading toward a moral: appearances are deceitful; don't believe everything you are told; don't speak with your mouth full. By the time we reach the moral we have succumbed entirely to the spell of La Fontaine's poetry and must be brutally awakened by the falling cheese.

La Fontaine's fable poetry, like all great lyric poetry, is a form of verbal seduction; but La Fontaine has added a further refinement to the familiar game. The reader is informed that he is being seduced, and on the flimsiest of all possible grounds: by certain words arranged in a certain order. Should he forget, and totally abandon himself to the illusion of poetry, La Fontaine is there to wake him up with a sudden change of tone, a broken meter, or a falling cheese. So perilous an equilibrium demands a reader who can keep his balance. We must remain as simple, as responsive as the crow, as flexible, as wary as the fox. Most poetry supposes "a willing suspension of disbelief." What Coleridge apparently considered a special concession of the poetry reader appeared to La Fontaine as the most natural, the most delectable, and the most precarious of mental postures.

Notes

¹ I have not given a literal translation of the fox's opening line; the English language has no exact equivalent and I have tried to preserve the fox's tone. I am sure he would never have greeted the crow with five brusque monosyllables: "Ah! good day, Sir Crow."

²I shall use this spelling to distinguish the French alexandrin from the very different English Alexandrine.