Lafontaine, JEAN DE, was born on July 8, 1621, at Château-Thierry, in Champagne. His early education was neglected. He was placed in a clerical seminary, which he soon quitted to undertake his father's duties as master of woods and forests. Early in life he devoted himself to the study of Rabelais, Marot, and other old writers, and set himself to the composition of verses—all of them more or less worthless. In 1654 he published a verse translation of the Eunuchus of Terence, and then went up to Paris, where he won the favour of Fouquet, who awarded him a pension of 1000 francs on condition that he furnished a piece of verse quarterly. The verses thus produced showed considerable originality, and their author became the darling of the ladies of highest distinction in Paris. During six years he wrote little, abandoning himself to a life of gallantry and to social meetings with Molière, Boileau, and Racine. His Contes et Nouvelles en Vers appeared in 1665; his Fables Choisies mises en Vers in 1668; and his Amours de Psyche et de Cupidon in 1669. Among his chief patronesses were Marguerite of Lorraine and the Duchess of Bouillon, and for nearly twenty years he was maintained in the household of Mme de la Sablière. In 1684 he read an admirable Discours en Vers on his reception by the Academy, to which he was admitted much against the wish of the king. In her later years Mme de la Sablière became devout, but Lafontaine attached himself to the dissolute Prince de Conti, pursuing in his old age the follies and dissipations of his youth. She died in 1693, and for his two remaining years he was cared for by Mme d'Hervart, who maintained him until his death, which occurred at Paris on April 13, 1695. During an illness about two years before he had allowed himself to be converted in so far at least as to acknowledge the impropriety of the Contes and, it is said, destroy a new play. He was one of the idlest, the most reckless, the most frivolous and dissipated of men, but he was likewise one of the most lovable and charming, as he was assuredly one of the most gifted.
The subjects of the Contes are taken from Boccaccio, Ariosto, Machiavelli, Rabelais, the Heptameron, the Cent Nouvelles nouvelles, Apuleius, Athenæus, and other writers. The stories are retold with inimitable skill, Lafontaine surpassing in wit and in narrative dexterity the authors with whom he challenged comparison. Nothing could be easier, more sparkling, more ingeniously and gracefully turned than his verse. The language has a racy archaic flavour, the style combining the elegance of the 17th-century writers with something of the Rabelaisian richness. The subjects are nearly all of the grossest description, and their grossness is in most cases artfully heightened by Lafontaine. His story of Alaciel, for example, is a deeply-degraded version of the sombre though voluptuous tale told by Boccaccio. As for the Fables, their charm is undying, and they are free from the impropriety of the Contes. It has been truly said of them by Silvestre de Sacy that they supply three several delights to three several ages—'The child rejoices in the freshness and vividness of the story; the eager student of literature in the consummate art with which it is told; the experienced man of the world in the subtle reflections on character and life which it conveys.' Nevertheless the general verdict of French critics on Lafontaine can hardly fail to seem unduly high to his English readers. Théodore de Banville, for example, maintains that he is not merely an artist supreme in lyric comedy, but a great romantic poet, in whose work there is always a 'window open to heaven.' Such praise is hardly judicious. Lafontaine was a sparkling satirist, a brilliant versifier, a well-nigh incomparable master of the difficult art of telling a story in rhyme. He combined, as another critic has said, the flower of the esprit Gaulois with a perfume of antiquity. He was a great—not merely an amusing—writer, but he was not a great poet. With all its graces, his verse has not the melody, the passion, the power of suggesting a beauty and mystery beyond the exact meaning of the words, which distinguish all high lyric work. But on the other hand it would be hard to name a French poet, saving Molière, who has given such delight to others than his countrymen as has been given by Lafontaine.
See Sainte-Beuve's Portraits Littéraires, vol. i.; Banville's Petit Traité de Poésie Française; Taine's Essai sur les Fables de La Fontaine; and Lucas Collins' La Fontaine and other French Fabulists (1882). The best editions are by Marty-Laveaux in the Bibliothèque Elzévirienne; A. Pauly in Lemerre's Collection des Classiques Français; L. Moland in the Libraire des Bibliophiles; and Girard and Desfeailles in the Grands Écrivains.