La Fontaine's permanent place in the schoolroom has made him the most widely read of all French writers. Children take his menagerie of talking flora and fauna in their stride. Grown-ups, however, worry about his howlers (grasshoppers don't eat worms) and mutter about the ambiguity of his moral lessons. Lamartine winced at his cynical promotion of self-interest, and for Rousseau the method employed by the fox to relieve the crow of its cheese was as much an advertisement for flattery as a warning against flatterers. But though they mistook his observations of human behaviour for universal precepts, La Fontaine must take some of the blame. He was an awkward kind of fabulist, a tease who directed his subtle ironies as much at his readers as at his cats and foxes. His default creature was the red herring, that most slippery of fish. A playful, elusive writer, La Fontaine is never quite what we expect him to be.

LRB 7 February 2002 | PDF Download