[In the following essay, Gross asserts that the narrative remarks which frame La Fontaine's story Psyché are meant to draw the reader's attention to the powerful effects of both nature and art on human emotion.]

La Fontaine's longest tale, Les Amours de Psyché et de Cupidon, is his most ambitious completed work.¹ Like the unfinished Songe de Vaux, it utilizes a mixed style of prose and verse. For structure, however, there is no comparable work by him or any other classical French writer. La Fontaine set Apuleius' tale in a frame constantly held before the reader in Part I and recalled occasionally in Part II. In the Golden Ass, Apuleius also used a frame for the tale: to comfort a young woman captured by bandits, their old slave narrates the religious allegory of Psyche, the Soul, and Cupid, Love, while Lucius listens, transformed into an ass seeking metamorphosis to his human form.² But he included no elaborate introduction: the interpolated tale could be removed from the romance as an independent, integral story. The frame is forgotten during the narration; no character from the novel interrupts the tale, which, however, is related to the context of the whole work: the soul's pilgrimage and metamorphosis reflect thematically Lucius' journey to salvation through Isis' love. Quite different is the connection between La Fontaine's frame and his retelling. Of course his version is not allegorical: unlike Apuleius, he was not writing propaganda for a religious sect; if anything, he mocks the story's sacred aspects. He could have presented the story following Apuleius' example without an elaborate frame, a practice he usually followed in the verse tales which lack a similar introduction and intrusions that constitute a running commentary on the plot. The form he chose betrays an intention beyond that of simply presenting Psyché's adventures for his contemporaries' pleasure. He was as interested in the strategy of presentation and the effects he might work as in the tale itself. That strategy and the psychology involved may be elucidated by considering the frame, the intrusions of characters from the frame into the tale, and the reflections in the tale of the analysis of the emotions provoked by tragedy, in the work's central "digression."

The frame depicts the activities and emotional responses of four friends: Poliphile, Gélaste, Ariste, and Acante. While at Versailles to hear Poliphile's version of Apuleius' tale, they admire the royal buildings, gardens, fountains, and they analyze the effects of tragedy and comedy. Whether the four men are portraits of La Fontaine and three of his friends bears no importance to their function in the work. Perhaps, as M. Clarac proposes, La Fontaine borrowed character traits from his companions and himself for the creatures of his imagination.³ Surely they are neither the "generation of 1660" nor Furètiere, Maucroix, Pellisson, and La Fontaine himself.⁴ As they function in the work, the four characters represent sensitive men of taste who react to nature and plastic and literary art according to their disposition, and who are able to analyze thoughtfully their responses. This becomes clear if one attends to details of style and structure in the tale. La Fontaine sketches four portraits of men before nature and the arts, spectators of a sunset as well as listeners at a dramatic reading—for such is Poliphile's recitation of Psyché's adventures—in the splendid setting of Versailles that combines nature's wonders and man's art. La Fontaine introduces the friends as men of four different, though compatible, temperaments who shun rigor and rules in their social and artistic pursuits. "La première chose qu'ils firent, ce fut de bannir d'entre eux les conversations réglées, et tout ce qui sent sa conférence académique" (p. 127). They admire ancients and moderns, and affect modesty toward their own literary efforts. The names symbolize their preferences and temperaments. Poliphile, "friend of many things," "aimait toutes choses"; he appreciates serious and comic drama, gardens, lyric poetry. "Gélaste" derives from the Greek root for laughter: he prefers comedy and light, mocking narration. "Ariste" suggests his nobility; "sérieux sans être incommode," he prefers tragedy. "Acante" stems from the leaf characteristic of Corinthian capitals; he delights in nature and the imitation of nature in art: "il aimait extrêmement les jardins, les fleurs, les ombrages" and, like Poliphile, he enjoys lyric poetry. However, Acante "avait quelque chose de plus touchant, Poliphile de plus fleuri." This is a significant distinction as well as a paradoxical pun: by virtue of his name, Acante should be "plus fleuri." During the tale, Poliphile's lyric outburst tends to decorate rather than inspire emotional reactions, while Acante's poem on the orange trees at Versailles, the first verse passage in the work, clearly is emotionally oriented rather than merely decorative. It is Acante who suggests, after Part I, that the friends stroll in the garden, and it was his idea that brought them to the countryside to hear Poliphile's tale; significantly, though, the noble Ariste suggested Versailles as the appropriate setting.

Each of Poliphile's friends has a marked literary preference, for tragedy, comedy, lyric poetry. One can imagine how each advised when Poliphile asked how he should continue his composition.⁵ "L'un lui donna un avis, l'autre un autre" (p. 127). Gélaste probably recommended a treatment designed to provoke laughter with mockery of the curious Psyché, more irony toward Venus, an even less serious attitude toward the gods. Ariste would have liked a graver version inducing more pity and sympathetic tears. Acante must have proposed more description of nature and more lyric flights to simulate beautiful landscapes and noble feelings, rather than to move him either to laughter or tears. Poliphile includes elements of all three proposals in proportions which please him: "de tout cela, il ne prit que ce qui lui plut." The mixing of genres, tones, and narrative devices appropriately matches the friends' eclectic tastes and pursuits. Satisfying the fictional friends' eccentric criteria, however, also enables La Fontaine to solve a major esthetic problem confronting the adaptor of Apuleius in an age when "I'uniformite de style est la regle la plus etroite que nous ayons," as he notes in the Preface (p. 123). By reducing within the frame of his tale the public whom he had to please, to the three friends listening to and commenting on Poliphile's narration, La Fontaine was able to utilize elements that were "galant," "héroïque," and "merveilleux" in both verse and prose; for, having created the tastes of his fictional frame-characters, he was sure to satisfy them in Poliphile's recitation. Is it not likely that he created fictional characters, analogous to the real readers of the tale, who would react with pleasure to the diverse elements in his adaptation of "Psyché"? The "goût du siècle" that La Fontaine claims tended "au galant et à la plaisanterie" (p. 123) is thus satisfied; the interjections of the narrator, Poliphile, and his friends supply appropriate badinage that complements and relieves the serious, "galant" aspects of the tale. The demands of the reader, and his reactions, are matched by those of the friends whose tastes represent, in a greatly reduced society, the "goût du siècle."

While Psyché's adventures are the nominal subject of La Fontaine's tale, no less important as a theme is the fictitious society of four friends kept before us throughout the narration of her fortunes. They react as we do, and their emotional responses toward Psyché, especially Poliphile's, condition ours. Poliphile's frequent verbal interpolations on the tale he reads, as well as his badinage in the prepared text, lend wit and irony to the narration: they also remind us of our own sly comments. The playful style characteristic of the narration does not function to prevent the reader from taking Psyché's suffering to heart; it reminds the reader that, in fact, he could never take the tale all that seriously because it is "plein de merveilleux, A la verite, mais d'un merveilleux accompagne de badineries, et propre a amuser des enfants" (Preface, p. 123). The marvelous aspects of the story (which, after all, deals with unreal, pagan gods treated lightly even in Apuleius) are fit to entertain children; the adult reader, however, can hardly refrain from taking the miraculous events with a grain of salt—in the form of wit, and his pleasure is surely enhanced as he discovers that the frame-characters' reactions parallel his own. Those responses form the main concern of the work. The tale of Psyché is the work of art that provokes reactions; as such, it is a beautiful decorative pretext, like a lovely tapestry or painting, a cause of pleasurable responses. The work of art exists in the context of a human audience to stimulate emotional and intellectual responses. La Fontaine demonstrates this in the frame before Psyché's story, using Versailles as the esthetic pretext; and during the interval between Parts I and II he returns to Versailles as a stimulus to pleasure and admiration. Essentially, the pleasurable responses that art in all forms provokes are the real concern in the whole work, frame and Psyché's adventures alike.

The first responses occur before the wonders of Versailles. The experience of the artful assemblage of natural and artificial marvels and of architecture and sculpture precedes the literary esthetic experience. As in the Songe de Vaux, architecture provides a subject for celebration in literature and the poetic description surpasses the realities as La Fontaine imaginatively treats Versailles, not as it was but as it was to be (Preface, p. 126). Visual art is transformed into poetry by a favorite device of La Fontaine repeated in the tale with descriptions of Cupidon's palace and gardens and of the temples to Venus and other gods in Part II. In the description of Versailles in Part I, La Fontaine emphasizes the friends' responses to the palace's beauty and exotic marvels. At the menagerie where the tour begins, the reaction is wonder: "Ils admirerent en combien d'especes une seule espece d'oiseaux se multipliait, et louerent l'artifice et les diverses imaginations de la nature.… Ce qui leur plut davantage, ce furent les demoiselles de Numidie." A bird whose very name suggests distance and the exotic particularly impresses them. At the orangerie, the next stop, in his excited admiration Acante cannot keep from reciting his poem. This emotional ode betrays how exotic nature moves Acante, not only to pleasure and wonder, but to memories of love and a beloved woman as well. The marvelous quality of the orange trees celebrated in the poem already has begun to establish the presence of elements in the tale of Psyché: the illusion of distance provoked by the marvelous object—"Sommes-nous, ditil, en Provence?"; the vocabulary of minor gods and spirits like Flore and Zephire; the theme of "espoir avec jouissance," which will be Psyché's hope of seeing her unknown husband even while together they find delight in love. The poem also shows how Acante is moved by beauty to a moral reflection:

Vous êtes nains; mais tel arbre géant,
 Qui déclare au soleil la guerre,
   Ne vous vaut pas,
Bien qu'il couvre un arpent de terre
   Avec ses bras.

These verses recall Fable 1, 26, "Le Chene et le Roseau": size, strength, and presumption do not guarantee beauty and the power to elicit emotional responses here, as in the fable they do not assure survival—in effect, in the fable they invite destruction. Acante's poem, then, records his response before exotic nature, contributes to the construction of an atmosphere conducive to the illusion of reality in the tale of Psyché, and is the first indication that a link exists between the esthetic experience and moral reflection, the point to which the whole discussion of tragedy and comedy will lead.

While they eat, after leaving the orangerie, the friends turn to praise of the king for whom so much exotic natural beauty has been assembled. The esthetic experience provokes a neo-mythology of Louis, who is compared with ancient rulers and great men, and it turns through this transition from natural wonders to man-made marvels, from nature to art, from birds and trees to men and their works. When they enter the palace after lunch, wonder again dominates. As Boileau was to propose in the Art Poétique, La Fontaine avoids the excess of describing in detail the interior, mentioning just "entre autres beautés" the bed, tapestry, and chairs in the king's apartment. Here too, though, as in the zoo and the orangerie, the object of wonder is extraordinary: "C'est un tissu de la Chine, plein de figures qui contiennent toute la religion de ce pays-la" (p. 130). La Fontaine's joke about the fabric's subject, "Faute de brachmane, nos quatre amis n'y comprirent rien," emphasizes its marvelous, incomprehensible, mysterious aspect. This suffices to establish the wonder of the interior which, like the evocation of the orange trees, functions as realistic preparation for the tale. We will not forget Louis's apartment when interior decoration of Cupidon's palace is described to satisfy Psyché's curiosity, her "impatience de voir les raretes de ce beau sejour" (p. 144). Poliphile's description exceeds La Fontaine's account of Louis's palace; but the impression one gets is that in both cases it would be an "ceuvre infinie" (p. 130) to describe the place fully. Louis's palace is the real analogue of the fictional one; the experience of seeing Versailles facilitates our belief in the existence of Cupidon's palace.

La Fontaine has now utilized nature and the decorative arts to project an idea of the wonders of Versailles. He has also introduced the marvelous nature of the king dwelling there. We pass to the wonders of architecture and sculpture as La Fontaine describes in a long poem the grotto where Poliphile will read Part I of his manuscript. The grotto celebrates the king as Apollo, the Sun-god; it is filled with characters and objects belonging to the classical mythology of which Psyché is a part. Until now La Fontaine has only hinted at the atmosphere of the tale in the exotic birds, trees, and interior. Now he introduces us into a setting fully as marvelous as Cupidon's palace. The poem puts the friends and us in the context of the tale's mythology. We see and hear graces, zephyrs, tritons, gods. Miraculous sounds and sights fill the atmosphere. La Fontaine pointedly notes that "afin de rendre le lieu plus frais, on en fit jouer les eaux" (p. 130): the visual effect is that of animating the mythologically designed scene. The art of the grotto seems to bring to life mythological characters whose sudden reality strikes the friends and reader with wonder. The long decorative poem (pp. 130-133; 132 alexandrines) establishes in detail that mythological realism, as the art of Versailles provides preparation for the tale's mythology. Significantly, Part II is read in the open air because it does not take place in the palace that the grotto recalls, and because then Psyché wanders in natural settings outdoors. Nevertheless, La Fontaine provides architectural preparation and transition for Part II during the interval occupied by the discussion of tragedy and comedy.

That interruption (pp. 174-188) permits renewal of the tale's architectural realism, as La Fontaine reminds us that settings like Cupidon's palace and gardens do exist, that, in fact, we hear the tale while in such a place. Typically, Acante suggests the quartet move outside to see "en nous promenant les endroits les plus agréables de ce jardin" (p. 175); just as typically, esthetic pleasure inspires psychological reaction in him. "Bien que nous les ayons vus plusieurs fois, je ne laisse pas d'en etre touché, et crois qu'Ariste et Poliphile le sont aussi," says Acante. The experience of architecture and landscape, beauty in man's arrangement of nature, buildings in a setting shaped to complement them, is a work of art, like the literary art the friends will soon discuss, never failing to arouse appropriate sentiments. The adjective "touché," often followed by "compassion," "pitié," "tendresse," suggests a link with tragedy, as though architecture and landscape functioned in this passage as a plastic doublet to the tragic mode discussed there. Acante chooses an atmosphere appropriate both to the debate and Part II of the tale; it enhances the pleasure appropriate to Psyché's misfortunes, for "la presence de ces objets nous emplira d'une douce melancolie" (p. 176). La Fontaine has Acante dwell on the setting's effects because the discussion will concern the emotions aroused by art in the forms of literature. His speech, which concludes the passage before the debate, is capped by a poetic fancy further linking the discussion to the tale: "Quand le Soleil nous verra pleurer, ce ne sera pas un grand mal: il en voit bien d'autres par l'univers qui en font autant, non pour le malheur d'autrui, mais pour le leur propre" (p. 176). The sun, in the guise of Apollo-Louis, had witnessed Part I in the grotto. Now, the sun in heaven will witness Part II and the friends' responses. The image of the sun, appropriate to the friends' poetic vocabulary, conforms to the manner of narrative. That people bewail their own misfortune refers to Psyché's predicament when the narrative was suspended. Acante began with a reference to the landscape and the sentiments evoked; he ends with a reminder of both the interrupted story and the emotions about to be analyzed that Part II will inspire. Architecture and landscape introduce the subject of debate, serve as background for it, and are restored after it as a subject for celebration in poetry. The quarrel is halted because Acante "meurt d'envie de vous faire remarquer les merveilles de ce jardin" (p. 184). Then, Acante again transposes the subject from literature and its emotional responses to architecture and landscape. Once the reader has been sufficiently informed of tragedy's pleasures so he may more fully appreciate the tale's effects in Part II, La Fontaine turns to the plastic analogue at hand, the "fer-à-cheval" at Versailles, to reintroduce elements of wonder that will appear in Part II. At the horseshoe the friends remain enraptured a long while, "ne se pouvant lasser d'admirer cette longue suite de beautés toutes différentes qu'on découvre du haut des rampes" (p. 185). As with the "endroits les plus agréables" that Acante had invited his friends to visit before the discussion, repetition does not reduce the pleasure experienced before the sublime. The setting also prepares for the mixed techniques that reappear in Part II, doubled in the landscape by the different beauties seen from one vantage point. La Fontaine describes his own style through the landscape—the "longue suite de beautés toutes différentes" that combine to produce one work of art visible from the vantage point of the "fer-à-cheval"; significantly, to demonstrate the point of his mixed style, he switches to poetry (p. 185). The mythology of Versailles reorients us to the setting of Psyché, completed by an allusion to a real marvel exactly like one about to happen in the tale. The disappearing palaces of the fête of 18 July 1668 prefigure Cupid's vanishing palace in Poliphile's resumed narrative. The Versailles setting returns us from the analysis of emotions Part II will evoke back to the tale itself, again establishing a realism that extends our belief from Versailles's artistic landscape and architecture to the tale's artfulness.

While we believe in the illusions the tale creates, we also believe in the friends' presence. Just as the narration of Part I is to commence (p. 133), La Fontaine has Poliphile cough to clear his throat; then after his verse introduction, he coughs again to attract his friends' attention and ours before beginning the tale. This strange realistic detail provides transition from the neomythology of the long verse description of the grotto and reminds us of the friends. The good humor of the friends is also recalled in a joke after the verses on the grotto: they did not want to get wet and so "ils prièrent celui qui leur faisait voir la grotte de réserver ce plaisir pour le bourgeois ou pour l'Allemand" (p. 133). Their badinage in the frame-scene will be recalled throughout the tale. La Fontaine also maintains an awareness of Poliphile and the friends with occasional personal interjections in the narrative like "vous disje," "voyez,' and "il me semble," as well as with pauses in the tale when the narrator comments on his style. These first-person intrusions of Poliphile occur in three general stylistic situations: when badinage is imposed on a serious situation; when an awkward construction obliges Poliphile to repeat the sentence's subject; when attention is directed to the introduction of verse.

With badinage imposed on a serious episode, La Fontaine distinguishes between the gravity of Psyché's fictional situation and the friends' lighter, ironic attitude to the heroine's distress, functioning to avoid the excessive pity Poliphile fears to induce. The badinage temporarily distracts from the fictional suffering, at a moment when the friends and the reader, involved with Psyché's plight, might forget that Poliphile is narrating a nonhistorical tale, that they are pitying a woman who never existed except in Apuleius' imagination. That is the illusion of historicism and reality that the effective tragic poet creates, precisely to move an audience to tears of pity and fear. La Fontaine, though, is not writing a tragedy; interested in the effects of tragic narration—and of comic narration as well—he provokes tragic effects and then ironically reminds the reader of the artifice, rather than the reality, inducing tragic sympathies. When Psyché's situation is most serious, for example, during her attempts at suicide at the beginning of Part II, the apparently irrelevant badinage undercuts the reader's compassionate reaction. Poliphile notes that Cupidon orders Zéphire to follow her: "Dans cette pensée, il défendit au Zéphire de la quitter (pour quelque occasion que ce fût, quand même Flore lui aurait donné un rendez-vous) tant que cette première violence eût jeté son feu. Je me suis étonné cent fois comme le Zéphire n'en devint pas amoureux" (p. 190). Irrelevant to Psyché's plight are Poliphile's amazement and the wind's affairs with Flore, a fact La Fontaine emphasizes by introducing Flore parenthetically. The joking distraction from Psyché's predicament, however, lessens the chance of the reader's becoming overinvolved. A similar irrelevant remark undercuts the reaction to the danger of Venus' presence near the river: "C'était dans ce fleuve qu'elle se baignait d'ordinaire. Je pense même vous avoir dit que le dieu du fleuve en tenait un peu" (p. 193). In fact, Poliphile had implied the contrary: since the river-god "était d'un tempérament froid" (p. 191), unconcerned with either Psyché or Cupidon, one may assume he was dispassionate about Venus as well. The comic relief is prolonged by "une oie babillarde" who informs Venus of Psyché's proximity: La Fontaine uses the devices of the modern animated cartoon film in the midst of Psyché's troubles (p. 193). Another impertinent detail also deflects us from Psyché's humiliation, as two of her former serving nymphs find her in the river, and from the moral observation provoked in Poliphile:

Telle est la folie de l'esprit humain: les personnes nouvellement déchues de quelque état florissant fuient les gens qui les connaissent avec plus de soin qu'elles n'évitent les étrangers, et préfèrent la mort au service qu'on peut leur rendre. Nous supportons le malheur, et ne saurions supporter la honte. Je ne vous assurerai pas si ce fleuve avait des Tritons, et ne sais pas bien si c'est la coutume des fleuves que d'en avoir. Ce que je vous puis assurer, c'est qu'aucun Triton n'approcha de notre héroïne …

(pp. 191-192)

The abruptly and irrelevantly introduced tritons and Poliphile's ignorance concerning them, a form of bardinage, provide relief from the serious philosophical remark and from Psyché's situation. In Part 1, a personal intrusion serves a similar function: after Psyché announces her decision to fulfill destiny, Poliphile ironically questions her motives: "Je ne veux pas dire que cette belle, trouvant a tout des expedients, fut de l'humeur de beaucoup de filles qui aiment mieux avoir un mechant mari que de n'en point avoir du tout. 11 y a de l'apparence que le desespoir, plutôt qu'autre chose, lui faisait chercher ces facilites" (p. 139). This ironic denial, maintaining a comic tone in the midst of a melodramatic situation, he immediately undercuts as he returns to the text: "Quoi qu'il en soit, on se resout a partir" (p. 140).

La Fontaine also uses personal interpolations when Poliphile has reached an awkward stylistic impasse, where to make sense he must repeat the subject of his sentence. This first happens in the tale when Psyché is introduced: "… car Psyché (c'est ainsi que leur jeune sceur s'appelait), Psyché, dis-je, possedait tous les appas que l'imagination peut se figurer, et ceux ou l'imagination même ne peut atteindre" (p. 134). Because of the parenthesis, Poliphile must repeat the name, creating an effect of emphasis. The "dis-je" suggests that Poliphile orally interpolated the parenthesis and that he is returning to the prepared text, as if he had neglected to name the heroine in the manuscript, just as he had named neither her parents nor sisters. Since no other human character participating in Psyché's adventures is named properly, one gets the impression that even Psyché may not have been introduced by name in the text: she might have just appeared by name in an episode. Of course, the friends knew, as the reader knows from the title, that the tale concerns Psyché; but someone unfamiliar with Apuleius might not realize immediately that the beautiful youngest sister is the girl of the title. The parenthesis seems to show Poliphile suddenly aware of a flaw in his text, covering it up as best he can on the spot, and then caught stylistically, as it were, by his carelessness. The "dis-je" construction occurs during passages of badinage as well, where the thought is unrelated to Psyché's situation. During the episode of attempted suicide in Part II, Poliphile remarks of the river-god: "Néanmoins, la crainte qu'il eut que les poètes ne le diffamassent si la première beauté du monde, fille de roi, et femme d'un dieu, se noyait chez lui, et ne l'appelassent frere du Styx, cette crainte, dis-je, l'obligea de commander à ses Nymphes qu'elles recueillissent Psyché …" (p. 191). The "dis-je" informs us that Poliphile again has left his text, making a joke—"frere du Styx" indeed—and, in fact, that the whole development is spontaneously created. Poliphile tries to make his remark conform to literary style: the two imperfect subjunctives attest to that. But the sentence emerges clumsily. The second subjunctive verb governed by "les poètes" is far removed from its subject, and the string of epithets attached to "la premiére beauté du monde" keeps its verb awkwardly far away. The style of the sentence jars with the passage where it occurs, further suggesting that La Fontaine meant it to appear unrevised in contrast with the surrounding sentences, as if Poliphile, carried away by a joke or conceit that occurred to him, left the prepared text, and returned to it through the emphatic "dis-je." The awkward, overdeveloped description of the river-god's fear and the subsequent repetition of the subject are characteristic of unrevised oral, rather than polished written, style. The attempt at interpolating a new joke, like the "dis-je," reminds the reader that Psyché's story is to be heard in Poliphile's voice. The interpolation already noted concerning the river-god's penchant for Venus, "je pense même vous avoir dit" (p. 193), serves the same function as a moment's comic inspiration, a fact substantiated by Poliphile's own declaration, in the text previously read, that "ce dieu était d'un tempérament froid" (p. 191). The oral nature of the reading and Poliphile's occasional straying from his prepared text add vividness and realism to the frame-scene.

In the episode of the old man and his two granddaughters (Part II, pp. 195-212), Poliphile's comparison of the old man to the aged Trojans on the wall, introduced by "il me semble," represents a similar oral interpolation: "II me semble que je vois les vieillards de Troie qui se preparent à la guerre en voyant Helene" (p. 195). The point in Homer's scene, as La Fontaine surely knew, concerns the old men's wish that Helen leave, despite their pleasure at seeing such beauty; and Homer's old men do not prepare for war. The comparison, however, betrays no unfamiliarity with the epic; rather, its inexactness, even inappropriateness, suggests that this point, which a prior checking of the poem would have eliminated, is the moment's inspiration, that Poliphile reciting his own tale, recalled the old Trojans on the wall. The "il me semble que je vois" properly introduces an oral elaboration of the prepared text, while the comparison's inaptness suggests that La Fontaine used the sentence as another reminder of his tale's oral narration.

A third stylistic situation served by Poliphile's selfintroduction increases awareness of the tale's varied rhetorical modes and narrative media. While verse usually replaces prose without introduction, several times the narrator notes the necessity of leaving prose, as if he were pointing out his work's novel style. At one point toward the end, when Psyché leaves the infernal labyrinth, La Fontaine carries this device still farther, reminding us that Poliphile too is his invention.

Aussitôt qu'elle fut sortie du labyrinthe, les deux démons l'abordérent, et lui firent voir les singularités de ces lieux. Elles sont tellement étranges que j'ai besoin d'un style extraordinaire pour vous les decrire.

Poliphile se tut à ces mots; et, après quelques
moments de silence, il reprit d'un ton moins familier:
Le royaume des morts a plus d'une avenue.
11 n'est route qui soit aux humains si connue.
(p. 242)

The tale suddenly halts while Poliphile switches styles. La Fontaine reminds us of his work's three distinct levels: the tale itself, in Poliphile's voice—

Aussitôt qu'elle fut sortie du labyrinthe, les deux demons l'aborderent, et lui firent voir les singularites de ces lieux;

the oral interpolation of Poliphile, excusing to his friends at Versailles his hesitation and his changing of style to suit the subject—

Elles sont tellement étranges que j'ai besoin d'un
style extraordinaire pour vous les décrire;

and the introduction to the verse passage, La Fontaine's reminder through narration in his own voice that Poliphile has been reading to his friends in La Fontaine's work; that, in effect, Poliphile is a character in Les Amours de Psyché et de Cupidon by Jean de La Fontaine—

Poliphile se tut à ces mots; et, après quelques moments de silence, il reprit d'un ton moins familier.

A similar device functions early in the tale as Poliphile explains the shift from prose to verse when Venus returns to Cythera:

Et je dirai en passant que l'offense la plus irrémissible parmi ce sexe, c'est quand l'une d'elles en défait une autre en pleine assemblée; cela se venge ordinairement comme les assassinats et les trahisons. Pour revenir à Venus, son fils lui promit qu'il la vengerait. Sur cette assurance, elle s'en alla à Cythère en équipage de triomphante. Au lieu de passer par les airs, et de se servir de son char et de ses pigeons, elle entra dans une conque de nacre attelée de deux dauphins. La cour de Neptune l'accompagna. Ceci est proprement matière de poésie: il ne siérait guère bien à la prose de décrire une cavalcate de dieux marins: d'ailleurs je ne pense pas qu'on put exprimer avec le langage ordinaire ce que la déesse parut alors. (pp. 135-136)

Here too there are stages of transition: first, "Et je dirai en passant" introduces an interpolated quasi-philosophical reflection on the nature of women, provoked by Venus' request in verse that Cupidon punish Psyché. Poliphile is once more thinking out loud, commenting on his text which he picks up again after the phrase, "Pour revenir à Vénus." Then, in another deviation, he explains the switch to verse: "Ceci est proprement matière de poésie." In the narration, Poliphile relates that Venus returned; in the subsequent verse passage (p. 136), he describes how she returned for the sake of decoration itself, as if the return were the subject of a tapestry he had undertaken to transfer from a plastic art form to a verbal art form, as La Fontaine did in the Songe de Vaux. ⁶

La Fontaine also uses the device of citing the extraordinary quality of the subject to present Psyché's leave-taking from her parents in verse: "De représenter à quel point l'affliction se trouve montree, c'est ce qui surpasse mes forces" (p. 141). The mother's hyperbolic behavior and nature's extreme reaction to the scene, La Fontaine could not convey in prose with impunity—or a straight face. His verse here ironically conveys exaggeration as he mocks the mother. Poliphile twice pretends he will not describe the scene, once in prose, once in the verse itself—but then he does so with great hyperbole.

L'éloquence elle-même, impuissante à le dire,
Confesse que ceci n'est point de son empire:
C'est au silence seul d'exprimer les adieux
Des parents de la belle, au partir de ces lieux.
Je ne décrirai point ni leur douleur amère,
Ni les pleurs de Psyché, ni les cris de sa mère
Qui, du fond des rochers renvoyés dans les airs,
Firent de bout en bout retentir ces déserts.
Elle plaint de son sang la cruelle. aventure,
Implore le soleil, les astres, la nature;
Croit fléchir par ses cris les auteurs du destin;
Il lui faut arracher sa fille de son sein:
Aprés mille sanglots en fin l'on les sépare.
Le Soleil, las de voir ce spectade barbare,
Précipite sa course, et, passant sous les eaux,
Va porter la clarté chez des peuples nouveaux:
L'horreur de ces déserts s'accroît par son absence.
La Nuit vient sur un char conduit par le Silence;
Il amène avec lui la crainte en l'Univers.
(p. 141)

Our awareness of the frame-characters is reinforced by their interruptions of the narration. After the poem describing Venus' journey, Gelaste playfully intrudes: rather than return immediately to the tale's prose, La Fontaine effects a transition (and for added realism perhaps connects the poem to another work of his, the Adonis published in the same volume with Psyché, as if the friends were living men who had read the real poem, although Adonis was a hunter, not a shepherd: Gdlaste may be referring to Anchises): "'Cela devait etre beau, dit Gelaste; mais j'aimerais mieux avoir vu votre deesse au milieu d'un bois, habillee comme elle était quand elle plaida sa cause devant un berger.' Chacun sourit de ce qu'avait dit Gelaste; puis Poliphile continua en ces termes" (p. 136). La Fontaine brings us out of the tale momentarily so we do not forget the friends, because poetry more effectively captures the imagination than prose. La Fontaine reminds us of them after the first poems, this time by Gelaste's witticism; the first time, after Venus' speech in verse ("Mon fils, dit-elle," p. 135) with Poliphile's comment on female character; the third time, more weakly, after the verse oracle by a brief first-person intrusion of Poliphile: "Je laisse á juger" (p. 138). After this, La Fontaine abandons the device of following each poem with a frame-character's reaction, for the friends' presence is already established.

But the friends do occasionally inject comments into the narration, a process that leads eventually to the central discussion on comedy and tragedy. Significantly, their subsequent participation in Part II is limited to only one interruption, on the subject of laughter and tears, compassion and irony, toward the end of the tale (pp. 251-252). In Part II, La Fontaine wishes to distract as little as possible from the tale itself: the reader's reactions, like the friends', are conditioned by the analysis of tragic and comic experiences, and the friends' reactions are no longer desired to guide those of the reader or to break the narrative's tone. In Part 1, however, Acante mocks women's excessive love of clothes:

"Changer d'ajustement tous les jours! s'écria Acante; je ne voudrais point d'autre paradis pour nos dames." On avoua qu'il avait raison, et il n'y en eut pas un dans la compagnie qui ne souhaitat un pareil bonheur à quelque femme de sa connaissance. Cette réflexion étant faite, Poliphile reprit …
(p. 148)

and Poliphile recalls the incident during his narration of the sisters' first visit, when he notes that Psyché's "attirail est une chose infinie" (p. 163). There is also an outbreak of Gelaste mocking Poliphile's emotional involvement with the tale (p. 157) which prefigures the central digression on laughter and tears. All in all, in Part I the friends' participation reminds us that the tale, like any work of art, provokes sentimental reaction in those to whom it is directed, that the work of art exists in the context of a human audience whose pleasure consists of the reactions that art provokes. In the discussion of tragedy and comedy that separates the parts of Psyché, La Fontaine attracts attention to those effects. The digression functions thematically; it also has a strategic role in the work's structure.

The digression occurs as the narration breaks off for fourteen pages (in the Pléiade edition) at the turning point of Psyché's fortune. She finds disaster on discovering her husband's identity, for Cupidon, wounded psychologically and physically, is about to punish his curious, disobedient spouse. The delightful atmosphere that pleased Psyché, the friends, and the reader is on the verge of disappearance when Poliphile refuses to continue, fearful that his companions would be "touchés de trop de pitié au récit que je vous ferais." The operative notion here is excess: Poliphile willingly moves his auditors to pity, but not beyond pleasurable limits. Poliphile warns his friends, in an envoi to Part 1, that

Là finit de Psyché le bonheur et la gloire,
Et là votre plaisir pourrait cesser aussi.
Ce n'est pas mon talent d'achever une histoire
 Qui se termine ainsi.
(p. 174)

The interruption, when curiosity about Psyché has developed, stimulates interest and creates suspense, as we wonder what will produce "trop de pitié" in Psyché's misfortunes. The break also permits a gradual change of tone, from the predominantly comic, appropriate to the heroine's good fortune, to the more serious tone of Part II. (This changed tone is reflected in the friends' restraint from interrupting the narrative in Part II, although Poliphile, following his temperament, does interject badinage: at a tragedy, one does not whisper his reactions to his neighbor, whereas at a comedy, the temptation to comment is much greater.) The change in tone neither strikes the reader, nor lessens his pleasure, because the intervening passage on the effects of tragedy and comedy provokes a transitional mode of half-playful, half-serious critical discussion with its own peculiar effects and pleasant surprises. The reader is not obliged to shift suddenly from comic to tragic mode. While La Fontaine injects humor and wit effectively in serious situations, he does not force us to readjust our sensibilities so that we may appreciate tragedy immediately after witnessing a comedy. Indeed one aspect of the digression concerns the qualitative differences of the pleasure the dramatic genres provoke and the abilities of individuals, the four friends, to appreciate them. From the discussion, one may judge that La Fontaine believed each man, predisposed to prefer one genre, could not easily enjoy both tragedy and comedy without a transitional esthetic experience. In Psyché, the digression itself puts that idea into practice.

The leading idea of the discussion is Ariste's notion that the compassion evoked by the spectacle of suffering human beings is the most pleasurable emotion because pity "est un mouvement charitable et genereux, une tendresse de ccur dont tout le monde se sait bon gre" (pp. 183-184). Through compassion, the spectator becomes morally better, more like a god than a man. Art awakens in the honnete homme sentiments that transform him into a person capable of sublime feeling and more aware of beauty in art and in nature. (That is perhaps why La Fontaine ends the tale with a magnificent sunset that the friends can appreciate the more after experiencing the pleasures of tragic narration.) This analysis of compassion prepares for Part II, where pity will be the principal emotional experience of the reader, the friends, and virtually all of the tale's characters. In Part II Psyché acquires pity for other people, while Venus finally relents before Psyché's suffering and shows compassion. In the two major episodes that La Fontaine added to Apuleius' tale,⁷ Psyché pitiés other unfortunates: the old man of the mountain, his daughter and granddaughters, and Mégano, the beauty who died of grief when rejected by the king. These emotions evoked in Psyché, while related to her selfpity, show her capable of responding to other people's grief too. Significantly, in both episodes, unusual beauty is linked to great distress. Like Psyché before Venus took notice, the old man's daughter was wooed by the noblest men; she too found marriage disastrous: her husband was exceedingly jealous. When he died, she fled the advances of the prince and nobles. Psyché, though, cannot yet accept the old man's solution in philosophy and isolation. (Later, when her face is blackened, she will give up searching for Cupidon and will seek solitude in wild places.) Psyché takes an interest in the granddaughters, persuading the old man to take them to the nearby town before his death and giving them her jewel-encrusted gown as a dowry. La Fontaine shows Psyché emotionally involved with other people and actually forgetting her own predicament—precisely the situation of the spectator of tragedy. At Mégano's tomb, where she cannot understand why the beautiful woman was refused, she suffers sympathetically. Psyché offers her tears: "ne refuse point mes larmes," she says, "je suis accoûtumée d'en verser" (p. 226). She weeps now for Mégano, not only for herself, although she recalls her own misfortunes, as she will remember Cupidon's palace on seeing the marvelous temple grounds. Her pity for other women evokes selfpity, making all the keener her suffering and not purging her of grief. However, she discovers a community of grief, finding that she is not the only one who suffers through beauty and love. She learns the tragic experience that makes us weep for the sorrows of others, reminding us of our own and of the possibility that we, humans subject to the accidents of fortune and the whim of the gods, may suffer likewise. She experiences the noble sentiments evoked by tragedy, charité and générosité, the elements of pity that Ariste points out (p. 184). After weeping for Mégano, she enters Venus' temple, prepared for submission to face the consequences of her acts after an experience involving pity for others' suffering.

Psyché eventually goes beyond the mystery felt before suffering caused by accidental beauty. When physically transformed, her face blackened by Prosperine's gift to Venus, Psyché finally understands her responsibility for misfortune in her "curiosité incorrigible" (p. 248). In a moment of enlightenment, after accusing Venus of relentless persecution, she recognizes curiosity as the flaw in her character which caused her suffering. Perhaps now one may see the tragic potential of the Psyché tale. Born beautiful through no fault of her own, she arouses Venus' wrath. Once the goddess singles her out for sacrifice, however, Psyché does not suffer as a matter of course. On the contrary, Cupidon interferes and gives her every pleasure imaginable. She falls prey to Venus' wrath only when curiosity, her flaw, makes the character lose one god's protection and abandons her to the irrationally vengeful god. Psyché cannot escape her destiny, Venus' wrath, because she cannot control her passion, curiosity. When she sees this, her self-knowledge makes her worthier of our pity. She recognizes her own frailty and ceases to blame Venus, Cupidon, or destiny for her mistakes. And she is willing to suffer the consequences: she will no longer seek Cupidon (who would flee from her anyway, she thinks, in another error of judgment); she will abandon all company and, like the old man of the mountain, live among wild beasts (pp. 248-249). She makes herself the object of pity, renouncing all claim to beauty, punishing herself for her fault. Psyché had already learned to feel for other people: Mégano, the old man and his family; and her passion finally subsides before her self-comprehension. Pity for others has helped her to understand herself.

Psyché's adventures in Part II also provoke a change of heart in Venus, who becomes an ideal mother-in-law. The vindictive goddess, whose angry appearance resembled a Fury's, experiences pity on seeing Psyché's blackened face and self-humiliation. When Psyché admits her fault in public—"Je n'oserais vous prier de me pardonner, et me viens soumettre a la peine que ma curiosité a méritée" (p. 255)—Venus at last becomes worthy of her divinity. "Un mouvement de compassion" changes her to a model of charité and générosité: love and nobility. Even if Psyché were beautiful again, she need no longer fear the woman as a rival for worship because now Venus has more than beauty; for she has sentiments that assure her divinity as beauty could not: as Ariste had said of the spectators at tragedy, compassion makes her a goddess, in a literal sense analogous to our figurative psychological "divinization" when we extend compassion to tragic victims.

Cupidon too, feeling pity for his wife throughout Part II, undergoes a compassionate experience. "Outré de colere," he punishes her for disobedience, leaving her and making the palace vanish (p. 188). This excessive passion is characteristic of tragic agents who act and later regret their deeds, recovering the pity forgotten during the passionate moment. However, even while angry, Cupidon remains the compassionate god; the sight of his suffering wife moved him: "Il la vit tomber évanouie sur la roche dure; cela le toucha, mais non jusqu'au point de l'obliger à ne se plus souvenir de la faute de son épouse" (p. 189). At the end, when Psyché's black and worn face awakens all his compassion, he overlooks her fault and blames his "caprice" for her suffering. Cupidon forgets his anger, for he has loved Psyché throughout and, ready to forgive her, he had been helping her perform the labors for Venus. His change is thus not so great as Venus'. Still, his tears move the sympathetic spectator, who rejoices at the lovers' reunion. It is at this point that La Fontaine interrupts the narrative for the only time in Part II:

A cette exclamation, Poliphile, tout transporté, laissa tomber l'écrit qu'il tenait; et Acante, se souvenant de quelque chose, fit un soupir. Gélaste leur dit avec un sourire moqueur: "Courage, Messieurs les amants! voilà qui est bien, et vous faites votre devoir. O les gens heureux, et trois fois heureux que vous êtes! Moi, misérable! je ne saurais soupirer aprés le plaisir de verser des pleurs." Puis, ramassant le papier de Poliphile: "Tenez, lui dit-il, voilà votre écrit; achevez Psyché, et remettez-vous."

(pp. 251-252)

Ariste's reaction is not noted. The connoisseur of tragedy is moved silently: immersed in the fictional situation, his own similar preoccupations are forgotten. For Acante, conversely, the moving situation makes him recall his own experience; his sigh expresses compassion for himself as well as for the fictional lovers.

The sentiments and pleasures evoked by tragedy, in the frame and in the tale, are those that Ariste named at the climax of the digression. The digression, strategically located at the center of the work, functions structurally, as we have seen, partly as a transition piece between Parts I and II. With the introduction and the serene ending, when the friends silently admire the majestically setting sun, it indicates the real interest of the Psyché, for it informs us of La Fontaine's views of the effects of art as the introduction and ending help us understand those of nature. The discussion is the logical culmination of the frame-characters' intrusions into Poliphile's narration that systematically reveal their reactions to the story. It completes in an extended passage La Fontaine's strategy of making the reader watch the development of fictional characters' emotional involvements—as well as his own. The whole frame functions strategically to place into clearer perspective our feelings before the spectacles of art and nature. Viewed as the coping stone of the tale's structure and its strategy, and as the place where the emotional developments of Part II are introduced and analyzed, the discussion is no "digression"; it is the heart of La Fontaine's most complex, and most rewarding tale.

Notes

¹ The edition cited will be that of Pierre Clarac in La Fontaine, Œuvres diverses (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade; Paris: Gallimard, 1958). This paper was written while I held a Lawrence Chamberlain Fellowship in the Humanities for which I thank the Dean of Columbia College. I also want to thank my friend and colleague, Donna Winter, who prepared the final typescript.

² The importance of the allegorical function of the tale becomes evident when one realizes that Apuleius' version of the transformed ass tale celebrates the Isis-Osiris cult. Apuleius changed the tale of the voyeuristic Lucius into the edifying story of a man permitted through the grace of Isis to pass beyond sexual and bestial obsessions to the perception of spiritual truths: his journey becomes a pilgrimage toward the saving grace of Isis. The humiliation of Psyche and her final apotheosis reflect the same progress presented at a time early in Lucius' experience as an ass, assuring the reader, if not the character, of the man's ultimate transformation to a human form and higher spiritual state as a priest of Isis.

³Œuvres diverses, p. 827, n. 1.

⁴ On the problem of the four friends, see Antoine Adam, "L'Ecole de 1660—Histoire ou légende," Revue d'Histoire de la Philosophie, VII (1939), 215-250; Jean Demeure, "Les Quatre Amis de Psyché," Mercure de France, CCI (15 jan. 1928), 331-366; and Demeure, "L'Introuvable Société des quatre amis," Revue d'Histoire littéraire de la France, XXXVI (1929), 161-180, 321-336. The bothersome aspect of the historical searching is that it contributes nothing to an appreciation of the work itself.

⁵ "Les aventures de Psyché lui avaient semblé fort propres pour être contées agréablement. Il y travailla longtemps sans en parler à personne. Enfin il communiqua son dessein à ses trois amis; non pas pour leur demander s'il continuerait, mais comment ils trouvaient à propos qu'il continuât" (p. 127).

⁶ Poetry, it should be noted, is also used for descriptions of Cupidon's palace, its luxurious contents, its gardens, for the same reason. These lengthy accounts (pp. 145-146, 149) decorate the tale, as the narrative itself is suspended. Since the palace and gardens are unusual, highly imaginative works of art that provide a decorative setting for the activities of Cupidon and Psyché, it is only appropriate that La Fontaine decorate his tale with poetic descriptions of them. A work of plastic or architectural art in the tale provides a pretext for a poetic work of art, whose function, like that of the works in the tale, is purely decorative. (The analogy of poetry and art, of course, already operates in the frame-introduction at Versailles.)

⁷ In the Préface, La Fontaine makes a point of indicating these episodes as original without, however, revealing why he added them: "Il y a quelques épisodes de moi, comme l'aventure de la grotte, le vieillard et les deux bergères, le temple de Venus et son origine, la description des enfers, et tout ce qui arrive A Psyché pendant le voyage qu'elle y fait, et à son retour jusqu'A la conclusion de l'ouvrage" (p. 124). The adventure of the grotto in Part 1, in which Psyché has a romantic encounter with her husband, adds to her curiosity concerning his identity while permitting La Fontaine to narrate a scene of "dépit amoureux" followed by a tender love scene (pp. 150-151). The additions to Part II, however, do not fit into the structure of the narrative as the grotto scene does in Part I—unless the reader realizes that La Fontaine employs them less for their actual content (the plot) than for the emotional situations they evoke in Psyché, whose bad fortune is neither improved nor worsened by her adventures with the old man. In the temple, though, the worshipers' mistaking her for Venus does contribute to the plot's development—although not so much as to the character development of Venus: she hears of the confusion of identity, "ce qui la fit accourir le visage en feu, comme une Mégère, et non plus la reine des Grâces, mais des Furies" (p. 228). Her pitilessness motivated by jealousy characterizes Venus until nearly the end. Every character in Part II except Venus and Proserpine extends compassion to Psyché—and Proserpine is pitiless also because she is jealous (p. 246). Even the Furies in the Underworld feel pity for her: "La pitié entra pour la première fois au cccur des Furies" (p. 246). The episodic nature of La Fontaine's original adventures can be excused if one realizes that in Part II following the "digression," he was evoking the sentiments of tragedy and tragicomedy; fear, in the journey to the Underworld, as well as pity.