The seventeenth century in Europe, especially in France, was the century of magnificence, when the Sun King, Louis XIV, ruled at Versailles over a populace that was the richest in the world at the time. However, grandeur is far from the leading characteristic of the two best writers of the century, La Fontaine and Molière. Molière wrote plays that made fun of wealth and magnificence; the Fabliaux (Fables) of La Fontaine do the same thing in a more modest way.
Jean de La Fontaine was born in 1621. It was an age of patrons, and he was expert at finding and retaining them. As a result he never had to work at anything other than his poems and stories; he always managed to be supported by somebody. This was important because, although most of his works are short, they are extremely polished and it took him a long time to write them. In fact, he was a hard worker, although he enjoyed giving the opposite impression.
The Fables are perfect small poems, each, however, carrying an electric charge of meaning. La Fontaine possessed a microscopic eye that was uncomfortable with large vistas. He much preferred a pinhole view of the world—through which he nevertheless was able to see everything that was important. The fable of the fox and the grapes, the mountain that gave birth to a mouse, the ant and the grasshopper—these little stories, with their big meanings, fitted his temperament and sensibilities.
A fable, of course, is a story in which the characters are animals that talk to one another, like human beings, and act like human beings, too. The form goes back to the Greek fables of Aesop, and many of La Fontaine’s fables are retellings of Aesop’s. Some are retold from other sources, a few are original. Whatever their source, all emerge from La Fontaine’s pen with the same character and quality: he changes them all into something richer and stranger than they were.
It is hard to choose a best among the Fables, but one of the most famous, and most typical, is the Fable of the Grasshopper and the Ant. The grasshopper sings happily all summer long while the ant works from morning to night storing up food for the winter. When winter comes the grasshopper goes to the ant’s little house and asks for something to eat. The ant refuses; the grasshopper should have stored up his own food. Where were you, the ant asks, while I was working? I was singing, replies the grasshopper, to entertain you! Well, says the hardhearted ant, start dancing, then!
This fable is certainly not a simple one. There are readers who feel the ant is perfectly justified. She has worked hard all summer, refusing to rest, to take her pleasure; why should she not enjoy her wealth now instead of having to share it with the careless, happy-go-lucky grasshopper, who has done nothing but sing in the sunlight? If you wish to read the fable thus, of course you may.
I don’t read it that way, nor, I think, did La Fontaine mean it that way (although he was not entirely unsympathetic to the ant). The grasshopper is a symbol or representative of the creative artist, the man or woman who is driven, at any cost, to write or draw or sing or dance for the entertainment of mankind and as a consolation for our heavy burden in the world. The cost to the artist is often very great: not seldom it is poverty and loneliness, disease and the failure of hopes, and an early death. Yet what would our life be without these indigent, thoughtless creators? How shallow, how barren, how dull! Merely to store up sustenance against the winters of our lives is not enough. Our minds and imaginations need another kind of food as well, the rich, spiritual food that only great artists can provide. We owe them nothing; the ant is right; but she is also wrong, for we owe them everything.
The argument between the grasshopper and the ant goes on and on in our imaginations, and so with a dozen other fables, or a hundred of them. Most are good, many are wonderful, all have the same odd, sideways view of things. La Fontaine himself is nowhere visible in them; they have the sheen of polished anonymous works. Nor are they merely French. If anything in French literature has the quality of universality, it is the Fabliaux of Jean de La Fontaine.
There are several good English translations of the Fables, for example, those by Marianne Moore. However, almost any will do, if the English and French texts lie side by side. That is usually desirable when reading lyric poems written in another language. But you should not feel deprived if you have a plain English translation. La Fontaine, generous grasshopper that he was, will entertain you anyway.
MOLIÈRE
1622–1673
Plays
Jean-Baptiste Poquelin was born in Paris in 1622, the son of a prosperous merchant with an appointment as a furnisher to the royal household who gave his son an excellent education at one of the best schools in France and expected him to inherit his court position. But in his teens young Poquelin was already fascinated by the theater and when he was twenty-one he renounced his inheritance and, with nine others, formed a theatrical company. His stage name, Molière, dates from 1644.
The theatergoing audience in Paris in the middle of the seventeenth century was not large, and there were already two established companies presenting plays on a regular basis. Molière’s troupe therefore took to the provinces, where they made a meager living touring for thirteen years. They were hard times, but it was during those years that Molière learned everything there was to know about the stage. Finally the opportunity came for the production of a play in Paris, before the king. The year was 1658, the show was a success, and from that time on Molière never left Paris.
His first Paris play—only two insignificant plays from the touring years survive—was Les Precieuses Ridicules, in which two absurdly affected young ladies are contrasted with two commonsensical servants. This play, a hit, was followed by other successes. The king soon gave his patronage, and the company began to perform in a theater built for it by the great Cardinal Richelieu. But there was trouble to come: it began with the first performance, in 1662, of The School for Wives.
Many consider this play to be Molière’s masterpiece. The plot is delicious. A pedant, Arnolphe, is so frightened of women and so certain they will make a fool of him (and cuckold him) that he decides to marry an absolutely simple and uneducated girl whom he can shape to his heart’s desire. Under his tutelage the girl grows to consciousness both of herself and of society. Arnolphe slowly but surely falls in love with her and has to learn lovers’ talk. Both educations are wonderful, touching, and funny. But the play was a scandal. It suggested too much about the liberation of women from the slavery of their ignorance, as enforced by men, and about the absurdity of men’s illusions about themselves. Molière was attacked and, for a time, the play was taken off the boards.
For the next ten years he was constantly harassed by the authorities. He struggled to keep the company going and wrote play after play, although he was often ill both in body and soul. The year 1665 saw the premiere of The Misanthrope, which from the first was viewed as a masterpiece by the critics. An extraordinary comedy, it is as close to black comedy as the seventeenth century could allow. Molière himself played the hero, Alceste, a new kind of fool, a man of such probity and candor that he can never keep his mouth shut when he should. He constantly criticizes everyone else, always for good reason, but he can’t understand why this makes him unpopular.