Volume 44, Number 20 · December 18, 1997
The Fabulous La Fontaine
By Charles Rosen
Le Poète et le Roi: Jean de La Fontaine en son siècle
by Marc Fumaroli
Paris: Editions de Fallois, 511 pp., 145 FF
On the second of May, 1684, La Fontaine, now aged sixty-two, was admitted to the Académie Française, taking the seat of the prime minister Colbert, who had died the year before. Colbert had been ill-disposed toward the poet for a long time, and was the principal agent many years before in the arrest and imprisonment of La Fontaine's patron, Nicolas Fouquet. For more than six months, Louis XIV refused to ratify La Fontaine's election. When the ceremony of admission finally took place, the speech of welcome was made by the abbé de La Chambre, director of the Académie, who remarked that his own profession as a priest made it impossible for him to read La Fontaine's fables properly in order to give him the praise that was his due. 'To tell you the truth, Monsieur,' he added,
Review, 8707 words
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