Cinquante fables de Jean de La Fontaine

Abstract

The existence of this book is news to me. I consider myself lucky to have found it on eBay. Génot-Boulanger writes a pointed two-page prologue. He rightly asserts that La Fontaine is mostly 1) a children's book that is known, 2) a schoolbook that is memorized, and 3) a frequent édition illustrée. He for his part has wanted in each fable to illustrate not the title but the moral or at least the the verse or verses that focus the moral. Toward that purpose, he adds a helpful comment on each illustration. So each fable has three parts in its presentation: picture, short comment, and text. The pictures are strong, colorful, full-page. Thus for GA (9-11), Génot-Boulanger chooses What were you doing in the summer? as the moment to illustrate -- and takes the moral of the fable to be that we should work in youth to secure our old age. The lion that follows for LS is deliberately heraldic (14). This same lion is embossed nicely on the front cover. The wolf towers over the lamb in the next illustration. Génot-Boulanger writes L'aggresseur? Les puissants diront toujours que c'est l'agneau (18). Other strong images include The Eagle and the Crow (37); The Dolphin and the Monkey (63); The Rooster, Cat, and Young Rat (91); The Young Widow (99); MM (111); The Women and the Secret (123); The Wolf and the Shepherds (169); The Old Man and the Three Young Men (185); and The Monkey (209). Regularly, the appearance of the full-page title-less illustration, always on the right, challenges the reader to assess the art before turning the page to read the comment on the left or the text on the right. This succession changes unfortunately for those fables too long for one page, like MSA. The illustrations seem to my untrained eye to be water-colors. They lack a certain brightness. T of C at the end. The illustrator, I have learned, gave his significant collection of La Fontaine materials, 240 volumes, to the La Fontaine museum in Chateau-Thierry after his death in 1989. Curiously, this volume is not mentioned as one of his gifts to that library! Not in Bodemann.