The fables of Babrius

Babrius was the author of a collection of fables written in Greek. He collected many of the fables that are known to us today simply as Aesop's fables (see Aesop's fables).

Practically nothing is known of him. He is supposed to have been a Hellenized Roman, whose gentile name was possibly Valerius, living in the East, probably in Syria, where the fables seem first to have gained popularity. The address to "a son of King Alexander" has caused much speculation, with the result that dates varying between the 3rd century BC and the 3rd century AD have been assigned to Babrius. The Alexander referred to may have been Alexander Severus (AD 222‑235), who was fond of having literary men of all kinds about his court. "The son of Alexander" has further been identified with a certain Branchus mentioned in the fables, and it is suggested that Babrius may have been his tutor; probably, however, Branchus is a purely fictitious name. There is no mention of Babrius in ancient writers before the beginning of the 3rd century AD. As appears from surviving papyrus fragments, his work is to be dated before ca 200 AD (and probably not much earlier, for his language and style seem to show that he belonged to that period).

The first critic who made Babrius more than a mere name was Richard Bentley, in his Dissertation on the Fables of Aesop. In a careful examination of these prose Aesopian fables, which had been handed down in various collections from the time of Maximus Planudes, Bentley discovered traces of versification, and was able to extract a number of verses which he assigned to Babrius. Tyrwhitt (De Babrio, 1776) followed up the researches of Bentley, and for some time the efforts of scholars were directed towards reconstructing the metrical original of the prose fables.

In 1842 the Greek Minoides Mynas came upon a manuscript of Babrius in the convent of St Laura on Mount Athos, now in the British Museum. This manuscript contained 123 fables out of the supposed original number, 160. They are arranged alphabetically, but break off at the letter O. The fables are written in choliambic, i.e. limping or imperfect iambic verse, having a spondee as the last foot, a metre originally appropriated to satire. The style is extremely good, the expression being terse and pointed, the versification correct and elegant, and the construction of the stories is fully equal to that in the prose versions. The genuineness of this collection of the fables was generally admitted by scholars. In 1857 Minas professed to have discovered at Mount Athos another manuscript containing 94 fables and a preface. As the monks refused to sell this manuscript, he made a copy of it, which was sold to the British Museum, and was published in 1859 by Sir G Cornewall Lewis. This, however, was soon proved to be a forgery. Six more fables were brought to light by P Knoll from a Vatican manuscript (edited by A Eberhard, Analecta Babriana, 1879).

Editions[link]

• Boissonade (1844)
• Lachmann (1845)
• Schneider (1853)
• Johann Adam Hartung (1858, edition and German translation)
• Eberhard (1876)
• Gitlbauer (1882)
• Rutherford (1883)
• Knoll, Fabularum Babrianarum Paraphrasis Bodleiana (1877)
• Feuillet (1890)
• Desrousseaux (1890)
• Passerat (1892)
• Croiset (1892)
• Crusius (1897).
• Mantels, Über die Fabeln des B. (1840)
• Crusius, De Babrii Aetate (1879)
• Ficus, De Babrii Vita (1889)
• J Weiner, Quaestiones Babrianae (1891)
• Conington, Miscellaneous Writings, ii. 460-491
• Marchiano, Babrio (1899)
• Fusci, Babrio (1901)
• Christoffersson, Studia de Fabvlis Babrianis (1901).

Early translations in English were made by Davies (1860) and in French by Levêque (1890), and in many other languages. More contemporary translations are by Denison B. Hull (University of Chicago Press) and Ben E. Perry (Harvard University Press).

In 1941, Heritage Press produced a "fine book" edition of Aesop, translated and adapted by Munro Leaf as juvenalia and lavishly illustrated by Robert Lawson.

In 1998, Penguin Classics released a new translation by Olivia and Robert Temple entitled, Aesop: The Complete Fables in reference to the fact that some previous translations were partial. Working from the Chambry text published in 1927, the Temple translation includes 358 fables; Robert Temple acknowledges on page xxiv that scholars will in all likelihood challenge the "Aesopian" origin of some of them.

References[link]

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Babrius

Attribution

•  Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Babrius". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 

Jean de La Fontaine
Portrait by Hyacinthe Rigaud (Private collection)
Born	(1621-07-08)8 July 1621 Château-Thierry, Champagne. 1
Died	13 April 1695(1695-04-13) (aged 73) Paris, France
Occupation	Fabulist, Poet

Jean de La Fontaine (IPA: [ʒɑ̃ də la fɔ̃tɛn]; July 8, 1621, Château-Thierry – April 13, 1695, Paris) was the most famous French fabulist and one of the most widely read French poets of the 17th century. He is known above all for his Fables, which provided a model for subsequent fabulists across Europe and numerous alternative versions in France, and in French regional languages.

According to Flaubert, he was the only French poet to understand and master the texture of the French language before Hugo. A set of postage stamps celebrating La Fontaine and the Fables was issued by France in 1995.

Life[link]

Early years[link]

La Fontaine was born at Château-Thierry in France. His father was Charles de La Fontaine, maître des eaux et forêts - a kind of deputy-ranger - of the duchy of Château-Thierry; his mother was Françoise Pidoux. Both sides of his family were of the highest provincial middle class; though they were not noble, his father was fairly wealthy.^[1]

Jean, the eldest child, was educated at the collège (grammar school) of Reims, and at the end of his school days he entered the Oratory in May 1641, and the seminary of Saint-Magloire in October of the same year; but a very short sojourn proved to him that he had mistaken his vocation. He then apparently studied law, and is said to have been admitted as avocat (lawyer).

Family life[link]

He was, however, settled in life, or at least might have been so, somewhat early. In 1647 his father resigned his rangership in his favor, and arranged a marriage for him with Marie Héricart, a girl of sixteen, who brought him 20,000 livres, and expectations. She seems to have been both beautiful and intelligent, but the two did not get along well together. There appears to be absolutely no ground for the vague scandal as to her conduct, which was, for the most part, raised long afterwards by gossip or personal enemies of La Fontaine. All that can be positively said against her is that she was a negligent housewife and an inveterate novel reader; La Fontaine himself was constantly away from home, was certainly not strict in point of conjugal fidelity, and was so bad a man of business that his affairs became involved in hopeless difficulty, and a separation de biens had to take place in 1658. This was a perfectly amicable transaction for the benefit of the family; by degrees, however, the pair, still without any actual quarrel, ceased to live together, and for the greater part of the last forty years of La Fontaine's life he lived in Paris while his wife dwelt at Chateau Thierry, which, however, he frequently visited. One son was born to them in 1653, and was educated and taken care of wholly by his mother.^[2]

Paris[link]

File:La Fontaine - Fables choisies, Barbin 1692, tome 1.djvu Even in the earlier years of his marriage La Fontaine seems to have been much in Paris, but it was not until about 1656 that he became a regular visitor to the capital. The duties of his office, which were only occasional, were compatible with this non-residence. It was not until he was past thirty that his literary career began. The reading of Malherbe, it is said, first awoke poetical fancies in him, but for some time he attempted nothing but trifles in the fashion of the time - epigrams, ballades, rondeaux, etc.

His first serious work was a translation or adaptation of the Eunuchus of Terence (1654). At this time the Maecenas of French writing was the Superintendent Fouquet, to whom La Fontaine was introduced by Jacques Jannart, a connection of his wife's. Few people who paid their court to Fouquet went away empty-handed, and La Fontaine soon received a pension of 1000 livres (1659), on the easy terms of a copy of verses for each quarters receipt. He also began a medley of prose and poetry, entitled Le Songe de Vaux, on Fouquet's famous country house.

It was about this time that his wife's property had to be separately secured to her, and he seems by degrees to have had to sell everything that he owned; but, as he never lacked powerful and generous patrons, this was of small importance to him. In the same year he wrote a ballad, Les Rieurs du Beau-Richard, and this was followed by many small pieces of occasional poetry addressed to various personages from the king downwards.

Fouquet soon incurred the royal displeasure, but La Fontaine, like most of his literary proteges, was not unfaithful to him, the well-known elegy Pleurez, Nymphes de Vaux, being by no means the only proof of his devotion. Indeed it is thought not improbable that a journey to Limoges in 1663 in company with Jannart, and of which we have an account written to his wife, was not wholly spontaneous, as it certainly was not on Jannart's part.

Just at this time his affairs did not look promising. His father and he had assumed the title of esquire, to which they were not strictly entitled, and, some old edicts on the subject having been put in force, an informer procured a sentence against the poet fining him 2000 livres. He found, however, a new protector in the duke and still more in the Duchess of Bouillon, his feudal superiors at Chateau Thierry, and nothing more is heard of the fine.

Some of La Fontaine's liveliest verses are addressed to the duchess, Marie Anne Mancini, the youngest of Mazarin's nieces, and it is even probable that the taste of the duke and duchess for Ariosto had something to do with the writing of his first work of real importance, the first book of the Contes, which appeared in 1664. He was then forty-three years old, and his previous printed productions had been comparatively trivial, though much of his work was handed about in manuscript long before it was regularly published.

Fame[link]

It was about this time that the quartet of the Rue du Vieux Colombier, so famous in French literary history, was formed. It consisted of La Fontaine, Racine, Boileau and Molière, the last of whom was almost of the same age as La Fontaine, the other two considerably younger. Chapelain was also a kind of outsider in the coterie. There are many anecdotes, some pretty obviously apocryphal, about these meetings. The most characteristic is perhaps that which asserts that a copy of Chapelain's unlucky Pucelle always lay on the table, a certain number of lines of which was the appointed punishment for offences against the company. The coterie furnished under feigned names the personages of La Fontaine's version of the Cupid and Psyche story, which, however, with Adonis, was not printed till 1669.

Portrait of La Fontaine attributed to François de Troy

Meanwhile the poet continued to find friends. In 1664 he was regularly commissioned and sworn in as gentleman to the duchess dowager of Orléans, and was installed in the Luxembourg. He still retained his rangership, and in 1666 we have something like a reprimand from Colbert suggesting that he should look into some malpractices at Chateau Thierry. In the same year appeared the second book of the Contes, and in 1668 the first six books of the Fables, with more of both kinds in 1671. In this latter year a curious instance of the docility with which the poet lent himself to any influence was afforded by his officiating, at the instance of the Port-Royalists, as editor of a volume of sacred poetry dedicated to the Prince of Conti.

A year afterwards his situation, which had for some time been decidedly flourishing, showed signs of changing very much for the worse. The duchess of Orléans died, and he apparently had to give up his rangership, probably selling it to pay debts. But there was always a providence for La Fontaine. Madame de la Sablière, a woman of great beauty, of considerable intellectual power and of high character, invited him to make his home in her house, where he lived for some twenty years. He seems to have had no trouble whatever about his affairs thenceforward; and could devote himself to his two different lines of poetry, as well as to that of theatrical composition.

Academy[link]

In 1682 he was, at more than sixty years of age, recognized as one of the first men of letters of France. Madame de Sévigné, one of the soundest literary critics of the time, and by no means given to praise mere novelties, had spoken of his second collection of Fables published in the winter of 1678 as divine; and it is pretty certain that this was the general opinion. It was not unreasonable, therefore, that he should present himself to the Académie française, and, though the subjects of his Contes were scarcely calculated to propitiate that decorous assembly, while his attachment to Fouquet and to more than one representative of the old Frondeur party made him suspect to Colbert and the king, most of the members were his personal friends.

He was first proposed in 1682, but was rejected for Marquis de Dangeau. The next year Colbert died and La Fontaine was again nominated. Boileau was also a candidate, but the first ballot gave the fabulist sixteen votes against seven only for the critic. The king, whose assent was necessary, not merely for election but for a second ballot in case of the failure of an absolute majority, was ill-pleased, and the election was left pending. Another vacancy occurred, however, some months later, and to this Boileau was elected. The king hastened to approve the choice effusively, adding, Vous pouvez incessamment recevoir La Fontaine, il a promis d'etre sage.

A scene from La Fontaine's story Le Gascon Puni by Nicolas Lancret, Musée du Louvre

His admission was indirectly the cause of the only serious literary quarrel of his life. A dispute took place between the Academy and one of its members, Antoine Furetière, on the subject of the latter's French dictionary, which was decided to be a breach of the Academy's corporate privileges. Furetire, a man of no small ability, bitterly assailed those whom he considered to be his enemies, and among them La Fontaine, whose unlucky Contes made him peculiarly vulnerable, his second collection of these tales having been the subject of a police condemnation. The death of the author of the Roman Bourgeois, however, put an end to this quarrel.

Shortly afterwards La Fontaine had a share in a still more famous affair, the celebrated Ancient-and-Modern squabble in which Boileau and Charles Perrault were the chiefs, and in which La Fontaine (though he had been specially singled out by Perrault for favorable comparison with Aesop and Phaedrus) took the Ancient side. About the same time (1685–1687) he made the acquaintance of the last of his many hosts and protectors, Monsieur and Madame d'Hervart, and fell in love with a certain Madame Ulrich, a lady of some position but of doubtful character. This acquaintance was accompanied by a great familiarity with Vendôme, Chaulieu and the rest of the libertine coterie of the Temple; but, though Madame de la Sablière had long given herself up almost entirely to good works and religious exercises, La Fontaine continued an inmate of her house until her death in 1693.

What followed is told in one of the best known of the many stories bearing on his childlike nature. Hervart on hearing of the death, had set out at once to find La Fontaine. He met him in the street in great sorrow, and begged him to make his home at his house. J'y allais was La Fontaines answer. He had already undergone the process of conversion during a severe illness the year before. An energetic young priest, M. Poucet, had brought him, not indeed to understand, but to acknowledge the impropriety of the Contes, and it is said that the destruction of a new play of some merit was demanded and submitted to as a proof of repentance.

A pleasant story is told of the young duke of Burgundy, Fenelon's pupil, who was then only eleven years old, sending 50 louis to La Fontaine as a present of his own motion. But, though La Fontaine recovered for the time, he was broken by age and infirmity, and his new hosts had to nurse rather than to entertain him, which they did very carefully and kindly. He did a little more work, completing his Fables among other things; but he did not survive Madame de la Sablière much more than two years, dying on 13 April 1695, at the age of seventy-three. When the Père Lachaise Cemetery opened in Paris, Lafontaine's remains were moved there. His wife survived him nearly fifteen years.

Anecdotes[link]

The curious personal character of La Fontaine, like that of some other men of letters, has been enshrined in a kind of legend by literary tradition. At an early age his absence of mind and indifference to business gave a subject to Gédéon Tallemant des Réaux. His later contemporaries helped to swell the tale, and the 18th century finally accepted it, including the anecdotes of his meeting his son, being told who he was, and remarking, Ah, yes, I thought I had seen him somewhere!, of his insisting on fighting a duel with a supposed admirer of his wife, and then imploring him to visit at his house just as before; of his going into company with his stockings wrong side out, &c., with, for a contrast, those of his awkwardness and silence, if not positive rudeness in company.

It ought to be remembered, as a comment on the unfavourable description by Jean de La Bruyère, that La Fontaine was a special friend and ally of Benserade, La Bruyere's chief literary enemy. But after all deductions much will remain, especially when it is remembered that one of the chief authorities for these anecdotes is Louis Racine, a man who possessed intelligence and moral worth, and who received them from his father, La Fontaine's attached friend for more than thirty years. Perhaps the best worth recording of all these stories is one of the Vieux Colombier quartet, which tells how Molière, while Racine and Boileau were exercising their wits upon le bonhomme or le bon (by both which titles La Fontaine was familiarly known), remarked to a bystander, Nos beaux esprits ont beau faire, ils n'effaceront pas le bonhomme. They have not.

Works[link]

The numerous works of La Fontaine fall into three traditional divisions: the Fables, the Contes and the miscellaneous works. Of these the first may be said to be known universally and to exhibit the versatility and fecundity of the author's talent more fully than any of his other work; the second division, his tales, are known to all lovers of French literature, but the rest of his writing, with a few exceptions, is practically forgotten.

Popular culture[link]

A film of his life was released in France in April 2007 (Jean de La Fontaine - le défi, starring Lorant Deutsch).^[3] Astronomers named the asteroid 5780 Lafontaine in his honor upon the 300th anniversary of his birth.^[4]

See also[link]

• Fable

References[link]

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: George Saintsbury (1911). "La Fontaine, Jean de". In Chisholm, Hugh. Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 

Further reading[link]

The original fables of La Fontaine, edited by Frederick Colin Tilney (1865–1951)

• Young La Fontaine: A Study of His Artistic Growth in His Early Poetry and First Fables, by Philip A. Wadsworth. Pub. Northwestern University Press, 1952.
• Oeuvres diverses de Jean de La Fontaine, edited by Pierre Clarac. Pub. Gallimard ("Bibliothèque de la Pléiade"), 1958. The standard, fully annotated edition of LF's prose and minor poetry.
• O Muse, fuyante proie ...: essai sur la poésie de La Fontaine, by Odette de Mourgues. Pub. Corti, 1962. Seminal.
• Le Monde littéraire de La Fontaine, by Jean-Pierre Collinet. Pub. PUF, 1970
• The Esthetics of Negligence: La Fontaine's Contes, by John C. Lapp. Pub. Cambridge University Press, 1971.
• [La Fontaine] l'Esprit Créateur 21.4 (1981); guest-editor: David Lee Rubin.
• Patterns of Irony in the Fables of La Fontaine, by Richard Danner. Pub. Ohio University Press, 1985.
• La Fontaine: Fables, 2 volumes, edited by Marc Fumaroli. Pub. Imprimerie Nationale, 1985. Brilliant introductory essays and notes on texts.
• La Fontaine, by Marie-Odile Sweetser. Pub. G.K. Hall (Twayne World Authors Series 788), 1987.
• Oeuvres complètes de Jean de La Fontaine: Fables et Contes, edited by Jean-Pierre Collinet. Pub. Gallimard ("Bibliothèque de la Pléiade"), 1991. The standard fully annotated edition of these works.
• A Pact with Silence: Art and Thought in the Fables of Jean de La Fontaine, by David Lee Rubin. Pub. Ohio State U Press, 1991.
• La Fabrique des Fables, by Patrick Dandrey. Pub. Klincksieck, 1991.
• Figures of the Text: Reading and Writing (in) La Fontaine, by Michael Vincent. Pub. John Benjamins (Purdue University Monographs in Romance Literatures), 1992.
• La Fontaine's Bawdy: Of Libertines, Louts, and Lechers, selections from Contes et nouvelles en vers, transl. Norman Shapiro. Pub. Princeton University Press, 1992; repr. Black Widow Press, forthcoming.
• Lectures de La Fontaine, by Jules Brody. Pub. Rookwood Press, 1995.
• Refiguring La Fontaine: Tercentenary Essays, edited by Anne L. Birberick. Pub. Rookwood Press, 1996.
• Reading Under Cover: Audience and Authority in Jean La Fontaine, by Anne L. Birberick. Pub. Bucknell University Press, 1998.
• Cognitive Space and Patterns of Deceit in La Fontaine's Contes, by Catherine M. Grisé. Pub: Rookwood Press, 1998.
• In La Fontaine's Labyrinth: a Thread through the Fables, by Randolph Paul Runyon. Pub. Rookwood Press, 2000.
• Poet and the King: Jean de La Fontaine and His Century, by Marc Fumaroli; Jean Marie Todd (transl.). Pub. University of Notre Dame, 2002.
• The Shape of Change: Essays on La Fontaine and Early Modern French Literature in Honor of David Lee Rubin, edited by Anne L. Birberick and Russell J. Ganim. Pub. Rodopi, 2002.
• La Fontaine à l'école républicaine: Du poète universel au classique scolaire, by Ralph Albanese, Jr. Pub. Rookwood Press 2003.
• The Complete Fables of Jean de La Fontaine, Norman Shapiro (transl.). Pub. University of Illinois Press, 2007.
• La Fontaine's Complete Tales in Verse, An Illustrated And Annotated Translation, by Randolph Paul Runyon. Pub. McFarland & Company, 2009.

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Jean de La Fontaine

French Wikisource has original text related to this article: Jean de La Fontaine

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Jean de La Fontaine

• The museum is the native house of the poet in Château-Thierry, France (in French but soon in English)
• Works by Jean de La Fontaine at Project Gutenberg
• (French) Extensive information and works online
• (French) Biography, Analysis
• (French) Chocolat Menier - Les Fables de La Fontaine pictures and French language text
• (Italian) Jean de La Fontaine: text, concordance and frequency list
• (French) Biography and Fables in French language
• English translations of the complete fables
• Eric Ormsby on La Fontaine's fables from Parnassus: Poetry in Review
• Texts on Wikisource:
  • "La Fontaine, Jean de". New International Encyclopedia. 1905. 
  • James Wood (1907). "Lafontaine, Jean de". The Nuttall Encyclopædia. 
  • "La Fontaine, Jean de". Encyclopedia Americana. 1920. 
  • "La Fontaine, Jean de". Collier's New Encyclopedia. 1921.