Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 14.djvu/217

 LA FONTAINE 20;j mere novelties, lud 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 Academy, and, though the subjects of his Conies 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 Dangeau. The next year Colbert died and La ! Fontaine was again nominated. Boileau was also a candi- ; date, but the first billot 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 j 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, &quot; Vous pouvez incsssamment rece- : voir La Fontaine, il a promis d etre sage.&quot; His admission was indirectly the cause of the only serious literary quarrel ! of his life. A dispute, into the particulars of which there is no need to enter here, took place between the Academy and one of its members, Furetiere, on the subject of the latter s j French dictionary, which was decided to be a breach of the Academy s corporate privileges. Furetiere, a man of no small ability, bitterly assailed those whom he considered to ; be his enemies, and among them La Fontaine, whose fault probably was not so much that he was a principal offender i as that the unlucky Contes made him peculiarly vulnerable. His second collection of these tales had been actually the subject of a police condemnation, of which, as may be supposed, Furetiere did not fail to make the most. 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 Perrault were the chiefs, and in which La Fontaine (though lie had been specially singled out by Perrault for favourable com parison with JEsop and Phaedrus) took the ancient side. About the same time (1685-87) he made the acquaintance of the last of his many hosts and protectors, Monsieur and Madams 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 Vendome, Chaulieu, and the rest of the libertine coterie of the Temple ; but, though Madame de la Sabliere 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. &quot; J y allais &quot; was La Fontaine s answer, j He had already undergone the process of conversion during | a severe illness which befell him 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 repsntance. 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 quite 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 n.&amp;gt;t survive Madame de la Sabliere much more than two years, dying on the 13th of April 1095, at the age of seventy-three. He was buried in the cemetery of the Holy Innocents. His wife survived him nearly fifteen years, and his posterity lasted until the present century. The curious personal character of La Fontaine, like that of some other men of letters, has been enshrined in a kind of myth or legend by literary tradition. At an early nge his absence of mind and indifference to business gave a subject to Tallemant des Pveaux, the most indefatigable and least scrupulous (at best the least critical) of gossips. His later contemporaries helped to swell the tale, and the 18th century finally accepted it. We have neither space rior desire to recount the anecdotes of his meeting his son, being told who he was, and remarking, &quot; Ah, yes, 1 thought I had seen him somewhere ! &quot; 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, &amp;lt;tc. It may be taken for granted that much of this is apocryphal, and the companion anecdotes of his awkwardness and silence, if not positive rudeness, in company are still more doubtful. It ought to be remembered, as a comment on the unfavourable description which La Bruyere gives or is supposed to give of his social abilities, that La Fontaine was a special friend and ally of Benserade, La Bruyere s chief literary enemy, who long prevented the author of the Caracteres from entering the Academy. But after all deductions much will remain, especially when it is remem bered that one of the chief authorities for such 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 quartette, which tells how Moliere, while llacine and Boileau were exercising their wits upon &quot;lebonhomme&quot; or &quot;le bon &quot; (by both which titles La Fontaine was familarly known), remarked to a bystander &quot; nos beaux esprits ont beau faire, ils n effaceront pas le bonhomme.&quot; They have not effaced him and will not do so, and the half contemptuous term &quot; uos beaux esprits &quot; marks well enough the sound judgment of the greatest of the four as to the merits of his companions. The works of La Fontaine, the total bulk of which is consider able, fall no less naturally than traditionally into three divisions, the Fables, the Contes, and the miscellaneous works. Of these the first may be said to be known universally, the second to l known to all lovers of French literature, the third to be with a few exceptions practically forgotten. This distribution of the judgment of pos terity is as usual just in the main, but not wholly. There are excellent things in the (Eurres Dircrscs, but their excellence is only occasional, and it is not at the best equal to that of the Fables or the Contes. It was thought by contemporary judges who were both competent and friendly that La Fontaine attempted too many styles, and there is something in the criticism. His dramatic elibrts are especially weak, and indeed it is evident that his forte lay neither in the dramatic delineation of character nor in the arrangement of dramatic action. The best pieces usually published under his name Ragotin, Lc Florcntin, La Coupe. Enchantfe, were not originally fathered by him but by Champmesle, the husband of the famous actress who captivated Kacine and Charles dc Sevigne. His avowed work was chiefly in the form of opera, a form of no &amp;lt;*rcat value at its best. Psyche has all the advantages of its charm ing story and of La Fontaine s style, but it is perhaps principally inFeresting nowadays because of the framework of personal conver sation already alluded to. The mingled prose and verse of the Sonyt dc J aux is not uninteresting, but its best things, such as the description of night &quot; Laissant tomber les fleurs et ne les semant pas,&quot; which has enchanted French critics, are little more than conceits, though as in this case sometimes very beautiful conceits. The elegies, the epistles, the epigrams, the ballades, contain ninny things which would be very creditable to a minor poet or a writer of vers de societe, but even&quot; if they be taken according to the wise