public favour. After several years at the Nouveautés and the Vaudeville, on the burning of the latter in 1838 he went to England, and married, at Gretna Green, Ienny Colon, from whom he was soon divorced. On his return to Paris he joined the Variétés, where he acted for fifteen years in such plays as Le Chevalier de Saint Georges, Le Lion empaillé, Une dernière conquéte, &c. Another engagement at the Vaudeville followed, and one at the Gaiété, and he ended his brilliant career at the Gymnase in the part of the noble father in such plays as Les Vieux Garçons and Nos bons villageois. He died in Paris on the 19th of April 1873.
LA FONTAINE, JEAN DE (1621–1695), French poet, was
born at Château Thierry in Champagne, probably on the 8th of
July 1621. His father was Charles de La Fontaine, “maître
des eaux et forets”—a kind of deputy-ranger—of the duchy of
Château Thierry; his mother was Françoise Pidoux. On
both sides his family was of the highest provincial middle
class, but was not noble; his father was also fairly wealthy.
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, 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 Héricart, a 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 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 séparation 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 Château 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. It was not till 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, &c. His first serious work was a translation or adaptation of the Eunuchus 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 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 quarter’s receipt. 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 that his wife’s property had to be separately secured to her, and he seems by degrees to have had to sell everything of his own; 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 protégés, 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 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, 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 Château 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, 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. 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 Molière, 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 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. Meanwhile the poet continued to find friends. In 1664 he was 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 in 1666 we have something like a reprimand from Colbert suggesting that he should look into some malpractices at Château 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 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 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.
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 Academy, 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 Dangeau. The next year Colbert died and La Fontaine was again nominated. Boileau was also a candidate, but the first ballot gave the fabulist
