La Fontaine facing power

Much has been written and one could have read everything and sometimes anything, for decades if not centuries, on the question which is the title of this article. From the offended Sun to the Poet and the King, from Paul Morand to Marc Fumaroli, the legend, the novel, and history have presented to satiety the charade of the names of Fouquet, Colbert, Louis XIV, and La Fontaine with a sometimes suspicious brilliance. Let us try to come back to it with a clear head, disentangling the facts from their interpretation.

by Patrick Dandrey, professor emeritus of French literature

In 1658, Jean de La Fontaine, water and forestry officer at Château-Thierry and apprentice writer in Paris, was introduced to the Superintendent of Finance, Nicolas Fouquet, a trusted man of Mazarin and promised, it is said and thought- he, in succession to the aging minister, under the reign of a king who is slow to take charge of his scepter and seems more inclined to the delights of love than to the rigors of power. A double and solid sponsorship recommends the applicant: that of his uncle by marriage, Jacques Jannart, substitute for Fouquet in his functions as prosecutor in the parliament of Paris; and that of a faithful friend, Paul Pellisson, a prominent man of letters and responsible for culture in the superintendent's entourage. He already takes care of his "soft power" by maintaining an elegant and learned court, for which he intends the palace built in Vaux near Melun by a cohort of eminent artists: first and foremost the architect Le Vau, the painter-decorator Le Brun and gardener Le Nôtre. Richelieu had his estate in Tours, Mazarin the Hôtel Tubœuf enlarged by the sumptuous Mansart gallery for his princely collections. Fouquet, their potential successor, would also have his palace of wonders.

The sumptuous patronage of the superintendent

La Fontaine, who, already thirty-five years old, had still published almost nothing, quickly found himself enlisted in the service of this financier of bourgeois extraction in whom a Renaissance prince lay dormant: he signed with him a contract of “ poetic pension” which promises the patron a regular batch of verses in exchange for the payment of annual subsidies which would prove very useful to this new light-headed client, still well off no doubt, but very impecunious. The death of his father, which occurred precisely in April 1658, certainly left him with several movable and immovable properties, responsibilities, and offices, but above all a heap of debts and procedural problems, Cigale's promise of tomorrow for those who believed themselves to be a nest egg of Ant: which could have encouraged Uncle Jannart, smelling a future of bankruptcy, to place this nephew with a lighter head than a manager with his protector, while separating him from his property with his wife, a useful precaution to preserve at least the dowry of this one. The (sad) reality would quickly overtake this wise prediction.

Propelled to the heart of one of the central spheres of present and, it is believed, future power, the new client was immediately recommended there by a poetic gift: a “heroic idyll”, entitled Adonis, which tells the story of love ( idyllic) of Venus with the handsome hunter and his (heroic) death under the teeth of a monstrous boar. Well-versed in the codes of praise of the great, the poet boasts of having abandoned his ordinary subjects for the occasion, "the shades of the woods, the green carpet of the meadows and the silver of the fountains", by raising his voice and his talent to Olympus: Fouquet, “hero destined to overcome the harshness of our century and the contempt for the fine arts” (to be fair…), deserved it. He will have the manuscript of the poem illuminated and will soon commission a new piece from the author: a poetic description of Vaux, which La Fontaine transposes into a dream palace under the title Songe de Vaux. At the same time, André Félibien, future chronicler of festivals and describer of Louis XIV's buildings, produced a technical and scholarly description of the future estate. Everything about Fouquet, decidedly, prepares behind the scenes the splendor of the great reign, of which La Fontaine has the right to hope one day becoming the official poet.

The fall and the struggle

We know what happened: a sumptuous party given to the king at Vaux in July 1661, the splendors of which the future fabulist recounts in playful and elegant terms, was followed on September 5 by the arrest of the overly magnificent host, by his preventive sequestration, his indictment, his trial and his sentence to exile which Louis XIV will add to perpetual detention. A frantic missive from La Fontaine immediately informed his friend Maucroix of the terrible news. The sincere dismay she betrayed announced the part he would take in the public campaign in favor of the accused: an anonymous elegy “For M. F.” (claimed in 1671) and a signed Ode to the King, of which Fouquet disapproved too much humility. The poet will defend it by alleging that the humble lawyer can allow himself to make prostrations unworthy of his illustrious client. Pellisson, for his part, strove from the Bastille, others too, all convinced and rightly that Colbert had plotted the drama while ignoring or pretending to ignore that the king was even more vindictive.

That said, did La Fontaine do more than these two poems? It is to underestimate him to attribute to him, as was recently done, the harsh verses of a virulent pamphlet entitled Persecuted Innocence: a piece unworthy of him. More serious and decisive, here is the hypothesis that on this occasion he encountered the fable. Not through the fable of Aesop, but that of Phaedra, the Latin fabulist persecuted by Sejanus, favorite of Tiberius, for his freedom of speech: the transposition to Colbert and Louis XIV may seem tempting. Especially since we found, in the manuscripts of a scholar collector of the time named Valentin Conrart, the copy of some of the very first fables from the collection that La Fontaine published in 1668. Almost all of them are imitated from Phèdre, and they are associated with an apologue of the Fox and the Squirrel which offers itself to a political decryption since we know the squirrel to be the emblem of Fouquet (the fox, for its part, is of more questionable application: Colbert had the snake in his talking weapons, and the castle is not his style). In any case, this fable, the exclusion of which may seem to confirm its allusive and suspicious character, has prompted us to reread the few others associated with it in the light of the Fouquet affair. From there to making La Fontaine's Fables as a whole a grimoire à clef, and La Fontaine an opponent of Colbert, or even of Louis XIV, there was only one step.

But it's a big step. The moral themes developed in these ten fables and the one hundred and twenty-four of the collection are topical and diverse: it is the standard Aesopic wisdom, which denounces imprudence and presumption, illusion and vain glory, noise, and universal deception. The Lion is only once identified with the king, and it is to praise his good management of the kingdom. The satire of the Court, of injustices, of flattery and slander, will rather be the business of the collection of 1678-1679. Fouquet will then be well forgotten. We can certainly imagine it in the transparency of each fable. But an application is not a key. And those that Conrart copied (on what date, we do not know) have nothing particularly allusive or explosive. Let us therefore guard against a biased reading: La Fontaine fabuliste certainly denounces and condemns a lot, but it is his role, and everyone takes it here or there for his rank. Many sermonizers, moralists, and satirists then say the same, sometimes worse, and without seeming like secret and virulent opponents of the regime. After all, in his vast and diverse work, the fabulist who has once again become a simple poet very often exchanges his stylus for the polishing brush: are we to believe that then he is lying? Here we are sent back to the revolving door of supposed intentions: very clever who can produce objective proof.

A service offer?

Perhaps a way out of this uncertainty is offered by the (provisional) farewell to the fables which closes the 1668 collection: according to La Fontaine, a certain Damon (?) advised him to stop his book there and to “return to Psyche” to recount “her misfortunes and her felicities”. A year later, The Loves of Psyche and Cupid appeared, a mythological tale imitated from Apuleius (2nd century) and told in the “gallant” manner of the Grand Siècle. La Fontaine framed it in the stroll of four friends supposed to enjoy the pleasure of reading while wandering around the grounds of Versailles, newly remodeled by Fouquet's former team who had moved to the king and associated with the cultural policy of Colbert. Throughout this stroll, vibrant praises of these marvels, of their royal sponsor and his talented minister exalt the benefits of the reign and the beauties that it promises, while recycling, under this new identity, passages from the Songe de Vaux unfinished and unpublished. Some suspicious readers thought they saw in these praises a superficial complacency or even a hidden irony.

We want it; but on what basis?

A precise study that we carried out allowed us to show that this laudatory entourage could only have been written in the ten months that elapsed between the publication of the Fables and the completion of the Loves of Psyche, at no doubt starting from a writing begun very previously, in the taste and spirit of the Fouquet years. This first phase of writing had to be interrupted by that of the Tales (1664-1666), full of a Gallic and scabrous flavor covered with a gauze of refined wit, then by that of the Fables (1668), a school exercise raised to the rank of falsely naive and delicately incisive poetry. However, we have been able to show that the praise of Versailles surrounding the late completion of the story of Psyche was informed first-hand about the spirit and projects of the aesthetic and political program that then defined this royal domain and more generally for the image of the reign, the scholars gathered in a “Little Academy” around Colbert. Would “Damon” have been one of them?

In any case, Perrault was, who after having worked for Fouquet, found himself secretary of this circle led by the new minister. Nothing surprising: Fouquet’s alumni are everywhere behind the scenes of Louis XIV’s reign. Even Pellisson, formerly responsible for the cultural policy of the superintendent, would end up entering into the confidence and even the confidence of the king, to the point that the latter delegated to him in 1670 the formatting of the memoirs on the profession of the king that he intended to his son the Dauphin! Now this child is the very one to whom La Fontaine obtained, with the signal honor, to dedicate his collection of Fables. Will we therefore accuse him of having betrayed Fouquet, condemned and imprisoned? On the contrary, will we see here a cunning mask to secretly continue to work for its cause behind the collection thus adorned? Let's not complicate things: when the elite of Fouquet's friends, after having loyally supported him, took sides with his end and naturally turned towards the new power, would La Fontaine alone have camped in rebellion, he, such a weak link in this chain that, if he accompanied Jannart to Limoges in 1662, exiled there (sacked, in short), it was of his own free will, to draw from it a very spiritual travel report – and then he returns to Paris, without anyone, not even Colbert, worrying about his fate. Better – or worse – when the same year he found himself condemned to a heavy fine for usurpation of nobility, he did not hesitate to request and obtain a pardon from the all-powerful minister, through the Duke of Bouillon who intercedes on his behalf. Everything is more fluid and mixed in life than in the stories we draw from it.

Let us therefore bind the sheaf by the appropriate thread offered to us by the dedication of the Fables of 1668 to the Dauphin. The child who reaches the age that year to leave the gynoecium and “pass over to men” sees an educational effervescence brewing around him: everyone wants to be counted in their education. Soon, under the aegis of Perrault, the Labyrinth grove, in the Gardens of Versailles, will be transformed for him into the Labyrinth of Aesopic Fables, drawing a moral itinerary for children. Didn't everything call on La Fontaine, crowned by the recent success of his Fables dedicated to the royal child, to request a place in this educational system? Impoverished by the debacle of his patrimony, living since 1664 on his mediocre emoluments as a gentleman serving with the Dowager Duchess of Orléans, a princess allied to the royal family, he may have wanted, on the suggestion and with the support of some "Damon » benevolent towards him, making his Loves of Psyche enhanced with praise of Versailles a disguised request to take service with the new power.

We can even imagine that this reorientation of his loyalties will have been sealed by the publication of Adonis, which until then remained a manuscript in Fouquet's library, and which he had printed as an appendix to The Loves of Psyche. Because it is a boldly reoriented Adonis, presented in a completely pastoral and no longer heroic light who, deprived of his dedication to his first recipient, now intends to seduce the reader with his bocage charm, without worrying about grandeur. Two years later, a reissue of the poem, joined with some fragments of the Songe de Vaux and various pieces from the distant "Fouquet years", will settle the account of this era in the life of their author, as a simple complement to new fables which definitively sign the reorientation of his aesthetic and his career: a farewell to the weapons he once sharpened, but without success, for a cause now lost and, if not forgotten, at least outdated.

And yet the offer of service contained in Les Amours de Psyché remained unanswered. It was Bossuet who in 1670 became tutor to the Dauphin; it was Benserade who a few years later would compose the quatrains taken from Aesopic fables for the pedestal of the animal statues intended to adorn the Versailles Labyrinth; and it is another poet, Nicolas Boileau, who with his contemporary Jean Racine Louis So, would the hypothesis of a dissident La Fontaine, too rebellious to ever be in favor with the king, make a comeback? Even. It is rather a detour which here again will suggest to us a more nuanced answer.

A controversial election

We know that in November 1683, his academic friends asked La Fontaine to present his candidacy to succeed Colbert, who had died two months earlier. We wanted to see this as a slight towards the hated minister, explaining the difficulties encountered by the election of the poet: a new effect of prejudice on his supposed dissidence. Because La Fontaine did not choose the Colbert succession in particular: it is almost certain that he had already presented himself without success, the previous year, to that of Abbé Cotin, a gallant poet formerly caricatured by Molière as Tristan. Beaten then by Abbé Dangeau, it is normal that he tries his luck again – and it does not matter that it is on Colbert’s seat.

A testimony, admittedly late, reports that for the occasion he would have taken the precaution of probing the intentions of Boileau, also promised to this honor and that the latter, fifteen years his junior, would have left him the field free. But the Academy was then more or less divided into cliques: the king's party and the devout party, the party of men of letters, the party of men of states, war, and administration. And due to the conversion of Louis Academy, Toussaint Rose, cabinet secretary to Her Majesty. Supporting Boileau, Rose raged against the candidacy of La Fontaine, telling his supporters who undoubtedly praised the playful charm of the fables: “I see that you need a Marot” – which could certainly be heard as the name of the playful poet protected by Francis I, but just as much like the insulting term “maraud”. “And a favorite for you,” Benserade would have replied, referring to the scepter of fools.

La Fontaine was nevertheless elected. But Louis XIV, protector of the Academy, argued that this election has given rise to “noise and cabal”, he suspended its consumption. We understood: these gentlemen elected Boileau the following year. Learning of this, the king asked them to “consummate the election of M. de La Fontaine which until then had been suspended”. Attributing this suspension to the resentment of Louis makes Boileau a major poet and dazzling illustration of his reign, a new Horace alongside the new Augustus; and then, another reason for royal distrust, a reason that will be taken up in the speech with which the Abbé de La Chambre, director of the Academy, was going to welcome him, La Fontaine had the detestable reputation not of a caustic fabulist, but of a scabrous storyteller clashing head-on with the great classical taste and the air of candied devotion which were to put the second half of the reign under their screed of sclerotic conformism.

A good sign of this divergence in reputation between the storyteller and the fabulist is that the collection of New Tales, the boldest, published in 1674 under anonymity, without privilege or permission, was banned and seized on the orders of lieutenant police station La Reynie, while, at the same time, Mme de Montespan, the king's appointed mistress, accepted that the second collection of Fables be dedicated to her in 1678. And again in 1693, it was to the new dauphin, the Duke of Burgundy, educated by the pious Fénelon, that the twelfth book of the Fables will be dedicated: the little prince, we learn, even submitted to the fabulist the subject which inspired his apologue of The Old Cat and the Young Mouse. If the Fables were the corrosive and dissident work that we too often assume, we would have to believe that Louis XIV, his ministers, and his police were myopic and deaf. It was the Tales that hindered La Fontaine's career, for reasons where politics had no place.

Let's conclude. Faithful to Fouquet, La Fontaine was, and his writings prove it, during the procedure during which acting for the cause of the illustrious reprobate made sense. Whether this loyalty then lasted deep within him, whether he even conceived a lasting distrust or hatred towards Colbert, towards Louis XIV, and towards the political regime and the social order of his time, we are not in doubt. able to know. The criticism of the human failings of his time and of all times readable in his fables comes from this experience, it is a solicited and selective reading of their morality: amused, ironic, sarcastic, indignant, even desperate, the voice of the fabulist l he is in turn, but without being able to push his criticism to the point of diatribe without anachronism or selective distortion of his remarks or to direct it specifically in the direction of opposition to the policy of the monarch and his minister.

At most, we can draw from the contemptuous assimilation attempted by Rose between La Fontaine and Marot an explanation of his failure to obtain the status of the great poet from Louis the Great: the genres in which he distinguished himself, the humble epic fable and the Gallic tale, reduced him to the rank of maraud of belles lettres in the eyes of a power which hierarchized literary merits and the world of the spirit in terms of generic dignity. On the other hand, the pleasant familiarity that had governed his relations with Fouquet, in the humanist mode of the banter practiced by a Marot with King François, could only have done him a disservice towards a deified Louis XIV, in the context of a state cultural policy which substituted prostration for simple respect and the administration of things of the spirit, for their free springing. Dissident, no; offbeat, perhaps: coming a century too late, after that of Marot; or a century too early, before that of Figaro.

The struck squirrel: Fouquet, Colbert and Louis XIV

An interesting and little-known explanation of Louis XIV's relentlessness against Fouquet appears in the Memoirs of Brienne the Younger, who knew the protagonists closely. He says that before each council, Colbert instructed the king on the delicate questions to ask Fouquet. The latter, instrument and then continuator of Mazarin's tortuous economic policy, diverted the question and amused the monarch, either out of a deferential concern to preserve the memory of the minister who had instructed the young king and had undoubtedly lied to him a lot, or by feeling (very shared at the time) that Louis of work” – so what’s the point of going into an often embarrassing detail? After the council, Colbert dismantled point by point the pointless responses of the Superintendent of Finance and demonstrated to the monarch that they were trying to abuse him. The vexation of being taken for duped and cheated like a little boy must have affected the king even more harshly than the discovery of the backstage of an unorthodox and prevaricatory system. Fouquet's attitude, perhaps based on the laudable desire to spare him the knowledge of certain turpitudes that had become common if not indispensable since the previous ministry, turned into a crime of treason against royal dignity. According to Racine, Louis, I would have let him die. »We never overestimate the role of affectivity in a political and legal decision.

The mystery of Psyche's four friends

The supposed identity of the four friends who carry the story of The Loves of Psyche (1669) through the alleys of Versailles has long aroused feverish curiosity. As a debate pits Gélaste (“the laugher”) and Ariste (“the best”) on the comparative merits of comedy and tragedy, we thought we recognized Molière and Racine. Acante's lyricism, tinged with melancholy, distributed it approximately in Boileau, who is said to have been in a dark mood. And Poliphile (“he who loves everything”), author of the story which he submits to the judgment of the three others, could only be La Fontaine, who we recognize in the hymn to voluptuousness imitated from Lucretia which concludes the walk with a hedonistic profession of faith: “I love the Game, Love, Books, Music, / The City and the Countryside, in short everything, there is nothing / That is not my sovereign good, / Until the dark pleasure of a melancholy heart. »

As time passed and the reading became more refined, we attempted other, less crudely obvious, identifications. No doubt we would have been better inspired to consider that Ariste and Gélaste had already made a brief appearance in the unfinished Le Songe de Vaux and that their debate undoubtedly figured there in the passage where the sleeper, who is already called... Acante visits the room of the Muses where Thalia and Melpomène are represented: La Fontaine will have taken it there. As for Poliphile, it is the name of the allegorical hero of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (The Dream of Poliphile), an initiatory and allegorical story from the Renaissance (1499), to which La Fontaine will precisely refer the genre of the literary dream in the published fragments of the Songe de Vaux in 1671. Psyché thus quite simply recycled the spirit and the letter of the work interrupted by the fall of Fouquet. We were wrong to look for the key to fiction in reality.