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La Fontaine   /lɑ fɔntˈeɪn/   Listen
La Fontaine

noun
1.
French writer who collected Aesop's fables and published them (1621-1695).  Synonym: Jean de La Fontaine.






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"La Fontaine" Quotes from Famous Books



... finger-ring made of its wood is an antidote against sickness. The mandrake, as a mystic plant, was extensively sold for medicinal purposes, and in Kent may be occasionally found kept to cure barrenness; [12] and it may be remembered that La Fontaine's fable, La Mandragore, turns upon its supposed power of producing children. How potent its effects were formerly held may be gathered from the very many allusions to its mystic properties in the literature of bygone years. Columella, ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer

... but in prose, when Pascal published his "Provincial Letters," French style reached at once a point of perfection beyond which it never since has gone. Bossuet, Bourdaloue, Fenelon, Massillon, Moliere, La Fontaine, Boileau, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyere,—what a constellation of names are these, to glorify the age of Louis XIV.! And Louis XIV. himself, royal embodiment of a literary good sense carried to the pitch of something very ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson

... Sminaire de Villemarie, cited by Faillon, I. 350. Lauson's father owned Montreal. The son's grant extended from the River St. Francis to a point far above Montreal.—La Fontaine, Mmoire sur la Famille ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman

... to any importance. But of what consequence is the subject? Is it not the idea which is developed through it, the emotion with which it vibrates, which expands, elevates and ennobles it? What tender melancholy, what subtlety, what sagacity in the master-pieces of La Fontaine, although the subjects are so familiar, the titles so modest? Equally unassuming are the titles and subjects of the Studies and Preludes; yet the compositions of Chopin, so modestly named, are not the less types of perfection in a mode created by himself, and stamped, like all ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt

... and "Peau d'Asne." The first appeared, anonymously it is true, in 1961; but, when it came to be reprinted with "Les Souhaits Ridicules" and "Peau d'Asne" in 1695, they were entrusted to the firm of Coignard and described as being by "Mr Perrault, de l'Academie Francoise." La Fontaine had made a fashion of ...
— The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault • Charles Perrault

... to believe, like La Fontaine," she questioned, "that sorrow and unhappiness are akin to disease, a mental instead of a physical scourge—that it ...
— The Profiteers • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... jamais dire a la fontaine, je ne boirai pas de ton eau," his Eminence cautioned her, whilst the lines of humour about his mouth emphasised themselves, and his grey eyes twinkled. "Other things equal, marriage is as much the proper state for the laity, as celibacy is the proper state for the clergy. You will marry. It would ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland

... spots and blemishes which, on a survey of the vast and various orb, dwindle into natural and so comparative insignificance. Byron was under no delusion as to the grossness of Don Juan. His plea or pretence, that he was sheltered by the superior grossness of Ariosto and La Fontaine, of Prior and of Fielding, is nihil ad rem, if it is not insincere. When Murray (May 3, 1819) charges him with "approximations to indelicacy," he laughs himself away at the euphemism, but when Hobhouse and "the Zoili of Albemarle Street" talked to him "about morality," ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron

... small extent. The morality of the Fables is commonplace; their workmanship is only facile and agreeable; as literature—as achievements in a certain order of art—they have a poor enough kind of existence. In comparison to the work of La Fontaine they are the merest journalism. The simplicity, the wit, the wisdom, the humanity, the dramatic imagination, the capacity of dramatic expression, the exquisite union of sense and manner, the faultless balance of matter and style, are qualities for which in the Englishman you look in vain. ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley

... before us. All were full of passengers, owing to the weather having been long unfavourable for sailing. We had on board forty-six passengers, amongst whom were several Frenchmen, who again gave me occasion to remark the loquacity of their nation; and they only agreed with La Fontaine in the former part of the line, where he says, "Il est bon de parler, et meilleur de se taire;" 'Tis good to speak, but better to be silent. Our passage was extremely rough; but after twelve hours sailing, we entered the port of Dover, and I felt great pleasure in finding ...
— A tour through some parts of France, Switzerland, Savoy, Germany and Belgium • Richard Boyle Bernard

... came back to Douai, like La Fontaine's pigeon to its nest; he wept with joy as he re-entered the town on the day of the Gayant procession,—Gayant, the superstitious luck of Douai, the glory of Flemish traditions, introduced there at the time the Claes family had emigrated ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac

... La Fontaine was in society a mere simpleton. His blunders would not come in amiss among the stories of Hierocles. But these men attained literary eminence in spite of their weaknesses. Boswell attained it by reason of his weaknesses. If he had not been a great ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... a couvert, Repondit le pot de fer Si quelque matiere dure Vous menace d'aventure, Entre deux je passerai, Et du coup vous sauverai. ........ Le pot de terre en souffre!"—LA FONTAINE. ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... and rendered his glorious eyes even more radiant. I stood before him in reverential awe, and he gazed upon me with a kindly smile. Then he commenced examining me about my studies, and finally he drew a volume of La Fontaine's 'Fables' from his pocket, opened the book and asked me to translate the fable on the page he showed me. I did so—but when he afterward was going to praise me for the skill with which I had rendered it, ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach

... for the same purpose. "Whoever," says Lambe, "would see the subject fully discussed, should turn to the Essay on the Literary Character by Mr. Disraeli." He enumerates as instances of free writers who have led pure lives, La Motte le Vayer, Bayle, la Fontaine, Smollet, and Cowley. "The imagination," he adds, "may be a volcano, while the heart is an Alp of ice." It would, however, be difficult to enlarge this list, while on the other hand, the catalogue of those who really practised ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus

... the foibles and the cunning of men and women are thinly veiled under the disguise of animal life, give a foretaste of the charming art which was to blossom forth so wonderfully four centuries later in the Fables of La Fontaine. ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey

... reaction. As there was again a throne and a court, a magistracy, a chivalry, and a hierarchy, so was there a revival of classical taste. Honour was again paid to the prose of Pascal and Massillon, and to the verse of Racine and La Fontaine. The oratory which had delighted the galleries of the Convention was not only as much out of date as the language of Villehardouin and Joinville, but was associated in the public mind with images of horror. All the peculiarities of the Anacreon of the guillotine, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... bed, only half-dressed, and with legs dangling over the edge, contemplating a host of garments, which with their fringes, lace, embroidery, and slashes of ill-assorted hues, were strewed all over the floor. Porthos, sad and reflective as La Fontaine's hare, did not observe D'Artagnan's entrance, which was, moreover, screened at this moment by M. Mouston, whose personal corpulency, quite enough at any time to hide one man from another, was effectually doubled by a scarlet coat which the intendant was holding up for his master's ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... the attraction; for the commentaries on the Bible, which can be read with pleasure and without mental fatigue, are intelligible to persons of most mediocre mind and cultivation. The words of a certain French critic upon another writer of Champagne, La Fontaine, might be applied to Rashi, though a comparison between a poet and a commentator may not be pressed to the utmost. "He is the milk of our early years, the bread of the adult, the last meal of the old man. He is the familiar genius of ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber

... locks of steel and silver. The first object which met my eyes was a fine and charming portrait of Madame de la Valliere. The face was smiling in the midst of this great tragedy, and that upset me entirely, and made my tears flow again. Five or six tales of M. la Fontaine had been imitated most elegantly by the young Prince himself, and to these rather frivolous verses he had joined some songs and madrigals. All these little relics of a youth so eager to live betokened a mind that was agreeable, and not libertine. In any case the sacrifice ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... impressibility. It is an amiable admission, but she has very fine and rational ideas of her own, notwithstanding. In books, for which she had always a passion, she found unfailing consolation. Corneille and La Fontaine were her favorite traveling companions. "I am well satisfied to be a substance that thinks and reads," she says, finding her good uncle a trifle dull for a compagnon de voyage. Her tastes were catholic. She read ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason

... live according to my fancy; to work as I wish and in my own way; to do nothing if I wish it; to dream of a beautiful future; to think of you and to know you are happy; to have as ladylove the Julie of Rousseau; to have La Fontaine and Moliere as friends, Racine for a master, and Pere-Lachaise to walk to,—oh! if it would only ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars

... remarkable in having resuscitated our knowledge of the existence of the seed-storing habit. Mr. Moggridge points out that the ancients were familiar with the facts, and quotes the well-known fable of the ant and the grasshopper, which La Fontaine borrowed from Aesop. Mr. Moggridge (page 5) goes on: "So long as Europe was taught Natural History by southern writers the belief prevailed; but no sooner did the tide begin to turn, and the current of information to flood from north to south, than ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin

... part of the King, and when I called for my robes Yamba would bring some indescribable garments of emu skin, with a gravity that was comical in the extreme. I, on my part, recited passages from the French classics—particularly the Fables of La Fontaine, in French; which language the girls ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont

... attitude, she began, "La Ligue des Rats: fable de La Fontaine." She then declaimed the little piece with an attention to punctuation and emphasis, a flexibility of voice and an appropriateness of gesture, very unusual indeed at her age, and which proved she had been ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte

... private preserve of his own, there was the beautiful public garden of Nimes—called the Jardin de la Fontaine—draping a hillside that looks down upon the marble baths of the Romans, almost as freshly new to-day as two thousand years ago. A thick battalion of trees at the summit of the hillside makes stubborn insistence to the northern mistral, so that even ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg

... affected at this time to look down with a forgiving contempt on the animosity of the nobles. He passed much of his time alone, writing his eternal dispatches to the King. He had a country-house, called La Fontaine, surrounded by beautiful gardens, a little way outside the gates of Brussels, where he generally resided, and whence, notwithstanding the remonstrances of his friends, he often returned to town, after sunset, alone, or with but ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... Montaigne and Rabelais (great in wisdom and in wit), Moliere and that illustrious group that are collected round him (in the print of that subject) to hear him read his comedy of the Tartuffe at the house of Ninon; Racine, La Fontaine, ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... la Fontaine," replied Eugene, recovering himself, "and they will incommode you no longer than the time it will occupy you to weave them into a tissue of ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach

... encourager of Gay. When Gay died, she eloquently rebuked the vitriolic Swift, for expressing the heartless sentiment, that a lost friend might be replaced as well as spent money. Madame Rambouillet was the friend of Voiture; Madame Sabliere of La Fontaine. Hundreds of similar examples might easily be gathered. Few of the French literary men of the seventeenth or the eighteenth century led those disorderly and disreputable lives which were the calamity and the disgrace ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger

... the fountain, afford the exit and entrances so necessary for the dramatic masters and valets whose business it is either to meet or to avoid each other. At the corner of one of these streets, called the rue de la Fontaine, shone the notarial escutcheon of Maitre Lupin. The houses of Messieurs Sarcus, Guerbet the collector, Brunet, Gourdon, clerk of the court, and that of his brother the doctor, also that of old ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac

... steady light which we and millions of myriads besides go to make up. Are we much surer of being alive to-morrow than of being dead in fifty years? "Is there any moment which can certify to its successor?" That is the answer to La Fontaine's octogenarian, planting his trees, despite the gibes of the little beardless boys whom, as is inevitable in such cases, ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee

... poetical talent was like many other Russian authors more remarkable for successful imitation than for original genius. His most remarkable production is "Doushenka," "The Darling," a composition somewhat in the style of La Fontaine's "Psyche." Its merit consists in graceful phraseology, and a ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin

... the ancient Danish city of Odense, on April 2d, 1805, of poor and shiftless parents. He had little regular instruction, and few childish associates. His youthful imagination was first stimulated by La Fontaine's 'Fables' and the 'Arabian Nights,' and he showed very early a dramatic instinct, trying to act and even to imitate Shakespeare, though, as he says, "hardly able to spell a single word correctly." It was therefore natural ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner

... fantastic features of that style. Therefore, at a period when a strict and jealous architecture ruled construction, when the Middle Ages were not even considered, at a time when literature was not as clearly welded to art as it is now, La Fontaine said of the chateau de Blois, in his hearty, good-humored way: "The part that Francois I. built, if looked at from the outside, pleased me better than all the rest; there I saw numbers of little galleries, little windows, ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac

... Herodotus, Arabian Nights, Canterbury Tales, Montaigne's Essays, Shakespeare, Gibbon. Famous literary compositions at different levels or in their various classes are Boccaccio's Decameron, Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Aretino, Spenser's Faery Queen, Rabelais, Pilgrim's Progress, La Fontaine's Tales, Rousseau's Confessions, Tristram Shandy, Candide, Don Juan; and even among these how fair a proportion depends for its value and fruitfulness on the student? And, again, on his training. For we are aware of readers who prefer Bunyan to Spenser, others who place Sterne, Voltaire, ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt

... the second edition of 1766, becoming Essay xxviii, pp. 241-45. This is the text here followed. The poem is an obvious imitation of what its author calls ('Letters from a Nobleman to his Son', 1764, ii. 140) that 'French elegant easy manner of telling a story,' which Prior had caught from La Fontaine. But the inherent simplicity of Goldsmith's style is curiously evidenced by the absence of those illustrations and ingenious allusions which are Prior's chief characteristic. And although Goldsmith included 'The Ladle' and 'Hans Carvel' in his ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith

... which the middle ages have handed down to us. Somewhat later, Clement Marot composed ballades of great precision of form, and the fashion culminated in the 17th century with those of Madame Deshoulieres, Sarrazin, Voiture and La Fontaine. Attacked by Moliere, and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various

... story very like this occurs in A Sackful of Newes, 1673. It was originally related by Poggius in his Facetiae, where it is entitled Asinus Perditus, and it has been imitated by La Fontaine in the fable of "Le Villageois qui cherche son veau." It is also the 12th tale of ...
— Shakespeare Jest-Books; - Reprints of the Early and Very Rare Jest-Books Supposed - to Have Been Used by Shakespeare • Unknown

... country; and that, if life should not allow him time to see his endeavours crowned with success, his children will see it? The impatient patriots are like the young men (mentioned in the beautiful fable of LA FONTAINE) who ridiculed the man of fourscore, who was planting an avenue of very small trees, which, they told him, that he never could expect to see as high as his head. 'Well,' said he, 'and what of that? If their shade afford me no pleasure, it may afford ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett

... than Rueckert is Adalbert von Chamisso (1781-1838). Though he was born in the Champagne in France, and was therefore a fellow-countryman of Joinville and La Fontaine, he became a German by education and preference, and his name is inseparably linked with German scholarship and letters. It is remarkable that Chamisso began to write German only after 1801 and is reported never ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various

... inst. Des Coigns is overjoyed but a tiny bit hurt, too, that French Headquarters should get the news first from me and not from their own War Ministry. He insists on my going round the French trenches and sent a capitaine de la Fontaine along with me. Until to-day I had quite failed to grasp the extent of the ground we had gained. But we want a lot more before we can begin to feel safe. The French trenches are not as good as ours by a ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton

... literary tastes there are few things more depressing than the conversations of 'small-talk' which an exacting society occasionally demands. Who has not suffered from their enervating effects? We are not all possessed of that mental abstraction which La Fontaine succeeded in carrying with him throughout life, forming a buffer from which all idle talk rebounded. He was once asked to dinner by a 'fermier-general' to amuse the guests. Thoroughly bored, La Fontaine ate much and said little, and rising very early from the table said that he had ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan

... Until the day of Malherbe, the didactic Regnier and the Calvinistic Marot are the only two who could be said to give colour to the preconceived and prevalent notion as to the dryness of French poetry. And even after Malherbe, in the seventeenth century, we find that La Fontaine, the most truly French of French writers, was a passionate lover of Nature. He who can see nothing in the latter's fables beyond the little dramas which they unfold and the ordinary moral which the poet draws therefrom, must confess ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti

... love enough, all the world is in good humour, and that is the essential point; for without good humour, what becomes of the pleasures of society? As to the rest, I think of inconstancy, or infidelity, as it is called, much as our good La Fontaine did—"Quand on le sait, c'est peu de chose—quand on ne le ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth

... shoaling as we advanced from eighteen to less than five as fast as a man could heave the lead. Finding this place too hazardous, we stood out to sea, and were blown farther north than we designed. Being greatly at a loss where to procure wood and water, one Joseph de la Fontaine, a Frenchman, proposed going to the island of Chiloe, assuring us that the towns of Chaiao and Calibuco, the former on the island and the latter on the continent, were rich places, where we could not fail of procuring whatever we wanted. Cliacao was, he said, the usual ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr

... the maiden with the anachronic baby-cart? She is the milkmaid of the country. Here in Germany Perrette does not poise her milk upon her head or weigh it in a balance, in order to afford by its overthrow a fable to La Fontaine. She can dream at her ease as she draws it behind her. My fair-haired neighbor paused. A tall lad thereupon emerged from the neighboring trees, and, replacing Perrette at her wagon, he fitted himself dexterously into her maiden dream and into the shafts of her equipage. As the avenue ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various

... line of Don Quixote or Gil Blas, though all have their adventures by heart; while Goldsmith's "Deserted Village" has been committed to memory by our daughters and wives, in a series of exquisite illustrations. Every body has La Fontaine by heart, thanks to the pencil of Granville, which requires neither grammar nor dictionary to aid its interpretations; and even Defoe—even the unparalleled Robinson Crusoe—is devoured by our ingenuous youth in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various

... and Tasso. These were followed, in France, by Racine, Corneille, Boileau, Voltaire, La Fontaine and Delille; in England, by Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Thomson, Young, Collins, Gray, Byron, Coleridge, &c; in Scotland, by Sir Walter Scott; in Ireland, by Thomas Moore; in Germany, Klopstock, ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers

... to-day it is the resort of lawyers, journalists and Bohemians—lesser lights who seem to like the location, on the confines of the bad Boulevard Montmartre, and have no objection to the cocottes who come there in the evening. Like La Fontaine's mule, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various

... happiness. Why do the names of the two estates purchased after the Restoration, and in which Monsieur and Madame de Mortsauf both took the deepest interest, the Cassine and the Rhetoriere, move me more than the sacred names of the Holy Land or of Greece? "Who loves, knows!" cried La Fontaine. Those names possess the talismanic power of words uttered under certain constellations by seers; they explain magic to me; they awaken sleeping forms which arise and speak to me; they lead me to the happy valley; they recreate skies and landscape. But such evocations are in the regions ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac

... truth," replied the prisoner, "and can prove it. Listen, and then judge. I was born on the first floor of the house No. 28 Rue de la Fontaine, at Auteuil, on the night of the 27th to the 28th of September, 1807. My father, Monsieur de Villefort, told my mother I was dead, wrapped me in a napkin marked H. 15, put me in a small box and buried me alive in the garden of the house. At the same moment he received a thrust ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere

... is that we find he has been a manual with men the most diverse in their natures, culture, and pursuits. Dante ranks him next after Homer. Montaigne, as might be expected, knows him by heart. Fenelon and Bossuet never weary of quoting him. La Fontaine polishes his own exquisite style upon his model; and Voltaire calls him "the best of preachers." Hooker escapes with him to the fields to seek oblivion of a hard life, made harder by a shrewish spouse. Lord Chesterfield tells us, "When I talked my best I quoted Horace." To Boileau ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin

... is a form of fiction in which the French have always delighted and in which they have always excelled, from the days of the jongleurs and the trouveres, past the periods of La Fontaine and Voltaire, down to the present. The conte is a tale, something more than a sketch, it may be, and something less than a short story. In verse it is at times but a mere rhymed anecdote, or it may attain almost to the direct swiftness of a ballad. The ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee

... thus: "L'Homme dans la lvne ou le Voyage Chimerique fait au Monde de la Lvne, nouellement decouvert par Dominique Gonzales, Aduanturier Espagnol, autremt dit le Courier volant. Mis en notre langve par J. B. D. A. Paris, chez Francois Piot, pres la Fontaine de Saint Benoist. Et chez J. Goignard, au premier pilier de la grand'salle du Palais, proche les Consultations, MDCXLVII." ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... the slightest taste. I consequently made no effort whatever to improve my mind, a fact which did not in the least disturb his equanimity. The great interest of those journeys to the Hermitage were the fables of La Fontaine—which I learned as repetition and enjoyed—and the enormous number of lizards on the walls, which could disappear with lightning rapidity when seen, though they would stay almost motionless, waiting for a fly to come near, which ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell

... place of secretary to Napoleon, and who remained attached to the Emperor until the end, says of Josephine (tome i. p. 227), "Josephine was irresistibly attractive. Her beauty was not regular, but she had 'La grace, plus belle encore que la beaute', according to the good La Fontaine. She had the soft abandonment, the supple and elegant movements, and the graceful carelessness of the creoles.—(The reader must remember that the term 'Creole' does not imply any taint of black blood, but only that the person, of European family, has been born in the West Indies.)—Her temper ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne

... had no literature worth preserving, except Rabelais, Montaigne, a few odes of Malherbe, a page or two of Marot, and the tragedies of Corneille. Pascal published the "Provincial Letters" in the year of Regnard's birth. La Fontaine had written a few indifferent verses; Moliere was almost unknown. In 1686, when Regnard became an author, the Voitures, Balzacs, and Benserades, the men of fantastic conceits, the vanguard of the grand army of French wits, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various

... RATON, two personages in La Fontaine's fable of the Monkey and the Cat, of whom R. cracks the nut and ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... is well known that in his dreams Goethe solved many weighty scientific problems and put into words many most beautiful verses. So also La Fontaine (The Fable of Pleasures) and Coleridge and Voltaire. Bernard Palissy had in a dream the inspiration for one of ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various

... France. After Brother Seguin we have the student from Limousin to whom Pantagruel says: "Thou art Limousin to the bone and yet here thou wilt pass thyself off as a Parisian." It is the lot of M. de Pourceaugnac. La Fontaine, in 1663, writes from Limoges to his wife that the people of Limousin are by no means afflicted; neither do they labour under Heaven's displeasure "as the folk of our provinces imagine." But he adds that he does not like ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France

... FRANCOISE: avec un Abrege des Vies du Cardinal de Richelieu, Vaugelas, Corneille, Ablancourt, Mezerai, Voiture, Patru, la Fontaine, Boileau, Racine Et autres Illustres Academiciens qui ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse

... can laugh at me, great man," returned Vauvinet, once more jovial and caressing; "you've turned La Fontaine's fable of 'Le Chene et le Roseau' into an elixir—Come, Gubetta, my old accomplice," he continued, seizing Bixiou round the waist, "you want money; well, I can borrow three thousand francs from my friend Cerizet instead of two; 'Let us be friends, ...
— Unconscious Comedians • Honore de Balzac

... and fable, that he could adapt with great skill to the promotion of moral and political truth. He was master of that infantine simplicity which the French call naivete, which never fails to charm, in Phaedrus and La Fontaine, from the cradle ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various

... rowers toward Nantes and Fouquet's own fortress of Belle Isle, only to be overtaken by Colbert's boat with its twelve sturdy oarsmen. Whatever may have been the sins of Fouquet, he had so many charming traits and was so beloved by the great writers of France—Moliere, La Fontaine, Madame de Sevigne, Pelisson, and all the rest whom he gathered around him at his chateau—that our sympathies are with him rather than with the cold and calculating Colbert. Putting their hands into the public coffers was so much the habit of the financiers and royal almoners ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton

... as a means of preventing masturbation. De la Fontaine has mentioned this fact, and there is a case in this country in which acute dementia from masturbation was cured by infibulation. In this instance the prepuce was perforated in two opposite places by a trocar, and ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... the Facetiae of Poggio. It has been imitated by Straparolo, Malespini—whom it will be unnecessary to mention each time as he has copied the whole of the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles with hardly one exception—Estienne (Apologie pour Herodote) La Fontaine (Contes, lib ...
— One Hundred Merrie And Delightsome Stories - Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles • Various

... written his mother all about the town, and sent postcard pictures of its pride, the fortress-like, fifteenth-century church with a vast tower set upon a height. He liked Chateau-Thierry because Jean de la Fontaine was born there, and called it "a peaceful-looking place, just right for the dear fable-maker, who was so child-like and sweet-natured, that he deserved always to be happy, instead of for ever in somebody's debt." A soldier having seen the wasted country at the front, might still describe ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... victoriam canere triumphum to sell the skin before you have caught the bear. In the "Kalilah and Dimnah" and its numerous offspring it is the "Ascetic with his Jar of oil and honey;" in Rabelais (i., 33) Echephron's shoemaker spills his milk, and so La Perette in La Fontaine. See M. Max Muller's "Chips," (vol. iii., appendix) The curious reader will compare my version with that which appears at the end of Richardson's Arabic Grammar (Edit. Of 1811): he had a better, or rather a fuller MS. (p. 199) than ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton

... Femmes,' where the humour of the piece turns upon a young gentleman confiding his progress in the affections of a lady to the ear of her guardian, who believed he was on the point of espousing her himself." Two other French plays were based upon the story, one of which was written by La Fontaine under the title of "La Maitre en Droit." Readers of "Gil Blas" will also recollect how Don Raphael confides to Balthazar the progress of his amour with his wife, and expresses his vexation at the ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton

... over Europe through literary channels, Professor Cowell says, "They are the stray waifs of literature, in the course of their long wanderings coming to be recognized under widely different aspects, as when they are used by Boccaccio, or Chaucer, or La Fontaine." ...
— More Jataka Tales • Re-told by Ellen C. Babbitt

... thoughtless wit and a man of the world. But it is worthy of him whose contracted heart could never open to patronage or friendship. From such we might expect the unfeeling observation in the "Anecdotes of Painting," that "want of patronage is the apology for want of genius. Milton and La Fontaine did not write in the bask of court favour. A poet or a painter may want an equipage or a villa, by wanting protection; they can always afford to buy ink and paper, colours and pencil. Mr. Hogarth has received no honours, but universal admiration." ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli

... a very high degree of excellence in the fourteenth century, and in old documents describing valuable articles of furniture, care is taken to note that they are of Parisian workmanship. According to Lacroix, there is an account of the court silversmith, Etienne La Fontaine, which gives us an idea of the amount of extravagance sometimes committed in the manufacture and decorations of a chair, into which it was then the fashion to introduce the incrustation of precious stones; thus for making a silver arm chair and ornamenting ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield

... singly, but at certain Periods of Time appear together, and in a Body; as they did at Rome in the Reign of Augustus, and in Greece about the Age of Socrates. I cannot think that Corneille, Racine, Moliere, Boileau, la Fontaine, Bruyere, Bossu, or the Daciers, would have written so well as they have done, had they not been Friends ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele

... before they be hatched," is a well-known proverb in English, and most people, if asked what was its origin, would probably appeal to La Fontaine's delightful fable, La Laitire et le Pot au Lait.[1] We all know Perrette, lightly stepping along from her village to the town, carrying the milk-pail on her head, and in her day-dreams selling her milk for a ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller

... had their place in this universal comedy. The passions or the weaknesses of humanity were attributed to them, and the narrator makes the lion, rat, or jackal to utter sentiments from which he draws some short practical moral. La Fontaine had predecessors on the banks of the Nile of ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... better to be good than to be handsome; with all other wholesome truisms of the kind. They have been to school, and had their minds improved in all modern ways,—have calculated eclipses, and read Virgil, Schiller, and La Fontaine, and understand all about the geological strata, and the different systems of metaphysics,—so that a person reading the list of their acquirements might be a little appalled at the prospect of entering into conversation with them. For all these reasons I listened quite indulgently ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... who subsequently assumed the name of Moliere, was born in the year that Francois de Sales died, one year after the birth of La Fontaine, four years before the birth of his friend Chapelle and of Madame de Sevigne. When Le Cid was first performed he was fourteen years old, and twenty-two at the time of the first representation of Le Menteur. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various

... now speak of the amiable Bernier, the "pretty philosopher," as he was entitled in his polite circle, in which were found Ninon and La Fontaine, Madame de la Sabliere, St. Evremont, and Chapelle, without reckoning many other good and gay spirits, refractories from the stiff solemnity which then weighed upon the entourage of Louis XIV. Bernier could ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne

... taken a queer twist, nor can I explain how its present meaning arose from a shebird which lays her egg in a strange nest. Wittol, on the other hand, from Witan, to know, is rightly applied to one whom La Fontaine calls "cocu et content," the ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton

... entertainment and instruction, and scarcely modified since the days of its invention. A dialogue is in reality a little drama without a theatre, and with scarcely any change of scene. It should be illuminated with those qualities which La Fontaine applauded in the dialogue of Plato, namely vivacity, fidelity of tone, and accuracy in the opposition of opinions. It has always been a favourite with those writers who have something to censure or to impart, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various



Words linked to "La Fontaine" :   author, writer



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