Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 14.djvu/216

 204 LA FONTAINE at the college (grammar school) of his native town, and at the end of his school days he had, singularly enough, an idea of taking orders. He entered the Oratory in May 1641, and the seminary of St M agio ire 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, though there does not seem to be actual proof of this. He was, however, settled in life, or at least might have been so, somewhat early. In 1647 his father resigned his rangership in his favour, and arranged a marriage for him with Marie Hericart, a young girl of sixteen, who brought him twenty thousand livres, and expectations. She seems to have been both handsome and intelligent, but the two did not get on well together. There appears to be absolutely no ground for the vague scandal as to her conduct, which was, for the most part long afterwards, raised by gossips or personal enemies of La Fontaine. All that is positively said against her is that she was a negligent housewife and an inveterate novel reader ; La Fontaine on the other hand was con stantly 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 for the benedt of the family, and was a perfectly amicable transaction; by degrees, however, the pair, still without any actual quirrel, ceased to live together, and for the greater part of the last forty years of La Fontaine s life he himself 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. Even in the earlier years of his marriage La Fontaine seems to have been much at Paris, but it was not till 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, and he continued to hold it till 1672. It was not till he was past thirty that his literary career began, for he was by no means a precocious writer. 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, &c. His first serious work was a translation or adaptation of the Eunuckus of Terence (1654). At this time the Maecenas of French letters was the superintendant Fouquet, to whom La Fontaine was introduced by Jacques Jannart, a connexion of his wife s. Few people who had paid their court to Fouquet went away empty-handed, and La Fontaine soon received a pension of 1000 livres (1659), in repayment possibly of the poem of Adonis which in 1658 he had, in manuscript, dedicated to the financier. He began too a medley of prose and poetry, entitled Le Songe de Vaux, on Fouquet s famous country house. It was about this time, as has been said, that his wife s property had to be separately secured to her, and he seems by degrees to have had to sell every thing of his own ; but, as he never lacked powerful and generous patrons, this was of small importance to him, especially as he had no establishment to maintain. In the same year he wrote a ballet, Lcs Pdeurs du Beau- Richard, and this was followed by many small pieces of occasional poetry addressed to various personages great and small, from the king downwards. Fouquet soon incurred the royal displeasure, but La Fontaine, like most of his literary prote ge s, 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 which he took 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 himself 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 by the king, an informer procured a sentence against the poet fining him 2000 livres, which from what is known of the state of his private affairs it was probably impossible for him to pay. 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, Anne Mancini, the youngest of Mazarin s nieces, arid 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, let it be remembered, forty-three years old, and his previous printed productions had been comparatively trivial, though, as was the habit of the time, much of his work was handed about iu manuscript long before it was regularly published. It was about this time that the quartette of the Rue du Vieux Colombier, so famous in French literary history, was formed. It consisted of La Fontaine, Racine, Boileau, and Moliere, the last of whom was almost of the same age as La Fontaine, the other two considerably younger. Chapelle was also a kind of outsider in the coterie. There are many anecdotes, some of which are pretty obviously apocryphal, about these meetings. The most characteristic of these 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 L i Fontaine s version of the Cupid and Psyche story, which, however, with Adonis, was not printed till 16G9. Mean while the poet continued to find friends. In 1664 he wa.i regularly commissioned and sworn in as gentleman to the duchess dowager of Orleans, and was installed in the Luxembourg. He still retained his rangership, and iu 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 th? Falles, 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 de 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 Orleans died, and ho 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 Sabliere, 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 ; he was free to amuse himself or to w r ork as he liked, and as a matter of fact he worked steadily at his two different lines of poetry. Besides these he ventured on a third, in which he met and indeed deserved much less success, that of theatrical composition. The next event of importance in La Fontaine s life, apart from the publication of his works, did not occur till after nearly ten years. In 1682 he was a man of more than sixty years old, recognized as one of the first men of letters of France. Madame de Sevigne, one of the soundest literary critics of the time, and by no means given to praise