56 Fables of La Fontaine: Aesop French Short Stories
Written by Jean de la Fontaine
Narrated by Stuart Walker
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About this audiobook
The Fables were adapted from the classical fabulists like Aesop. The subject of each of the Fables is often common property of many ages and races. What gives La Fontaine’s Fables their rare distinction is the freshness in narration, the deftness of touch, the unconstrained suppleness of metrical structure, the unfailing humor of the pointed the consummate art of their apparent artlessness. Keen insight into the foibles of human nature is found throughout, but in the later books ingenuity is employed to make the fable cover, yet convey, social doctrines and sympathies more democratic than the age would have tolerated in unmasked expression. Almost from the start, the Fables entered French literary consciousness to a greater degree than any other classic of its literature. For generations many of these little apologues have been read, committed to memory, recited, paraphrased, by every French school child. Countless phrases from them are current idioms, and familiarity with them is assumed. “La Fontaine’s Fables,” wrote Madame de Sévigné, “are like a basket of strawberries. You begin by selecting the largest and best, but, little by little, you eat first one, then another, till at last the basket is empty”.
Jean de la Fontaine
Jean de La Fontaine, baptized on July 8, 1621 in the Saint-Crépin-hors-les-murs church in Château-Thierry and died on April 13, 1695 in Paris, is a man of letters of the Great Century and one of the main representatives of French classicism. In addition to his Fables and Contes libertines, which established his fame in the 1660s, we owe him various poems, plays and opera librettos which confirm his ambition as a moralist. Close to Nicolas Fouquet, Jean de La Fontaine stayed away from the royal court, but frequented the Parisian salons, notably that of Madame de La Sablière. Despite opposition, he was admitted to the French Academy in 1684. In the famous Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, he sided with his colleagues Racine and Boileau in the party of the Anciens. It was in fact by drawing inspiration from the fabulists of Greco-Latin Antiquity and in particular from Aesop, that he wrote the Fables which made him famous. The first collection, which corresponds to books I to VI of modern editions, was published in 1668, the second (books VII to XI) in 1678, and the last (current book XII) is dated 1694. The brilliant handling of verses and the moral aim of the texts, much more complex than it appears at first reading, determined the success of this unique work and La Fontaine's Fables are still considered one of the masterpieces of literature French. The fabulist has eclipsed the storyteller, especially as moralizing concerns have overshadowed the licentious tales published between 1665 and 1674.
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