X-Nico

7 unusual facts about Jean de la Fontaine


Antonio Escobar y Mendoza

They were also ridiculed in witty verses by Molière, Boileau and La Fontaine, and gradually the name Escobar came to signify in France any person who is adroit in making the rules of morality harmonize with his own interests, a casuist.

Ivan Dmitriev

His poems include songs, odes, satires, tales, epistles, and others, as well as the fables—partly original and partly translated from La Fontaine, Florian and Arnault—on which his fame chiefly rests.

Jan van der Brugge

Van der Brugge's engraved portrait dated 1689 with a poem at the bottom declaring his admiration for Lafage was written (in part) by Jean de La Fontaine.

Jean de La Fontaine

The reading of Malherbe, it is said, first awoke poetical fancies in him, but for some time he attempted nothing but trifles in the fashion of the time - epigrams, ballades, rondeaux, etc.

Pierre Perret

A master of the subtleties of the French language and French slang (he even rewrote some of Jean de La Fontaine's fables), his songs are often cheeky (for example Le zizi (The willy)), asking questions in a seemingly naive child's tone, but has written more serious political songs, such as La bête est revenue, La petite kurde, Vert de Colère ou Lily.

Sheela na gig

Andersen reproduces a plate from La Fontaine's Nouveaux Contes (1674) showing a demon being repulsed by the sight of a woman lifting her skirt to display her genitals.

Why I Am a Separatist

For Chaput, the Quebec autonomist was depicted in the 17th century by Jean de La Fontaine in the fable The Wolf and the Lamb.


Eugène Green

Declamation of Jean de La Fontaine, Le chêne et le roseau ; Torquato Tasso, La mort de Clorinda (La Gerusalemme liberata); Théophile de Viau, La Mort de Pyrame ; William Shakespeare, The Death of Kings (Richard II), To be or not to be (Hamlet); Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, Qu'est-ce que notre être (excerpt from Sermon sur la mort); Jean Racine, Je ne croiray point?

Jean Charles Baquoy

The eldest son of Maurice Baquoy, he engraved book-plates after the designs of Eisen, Gravelot, Moreau, and others, among which are a set of vignettes for the French translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, published by Basan, which are executed in a finished style, and a set of plates, after Jean-Baptiste Oudry, for the Fables of La Fontaine.

Jean-Charles Darmon

Resident of the Fondation Thiers, he completed his thesis there titled Philosophie épicurienne et littérature au xviie siècle en France : études sur Gassendi, Cyrano de Bergerac, La Fontaine, Saint-Évremond (Epicurean philosophy and literature in seventeenth-century in France: studies on Gassendi, Cyrano de Bergerac, La Fontaine, Saint-Evremond), regarding the heterodox currents of thought of classical France.

Jean-Jacques Caffieri

He produced bust or portraits of many great men, notably Pierre Corneille, Thomas Corneille, Philippe Quinault, Jean de la Fontaine and Jean-Philippe Rameau, as well as the monument to Richard Montgomery in St. Paul's Chapel in New York.

José Núñez de Cáceres

he Know to all the classics fabu-lists (Aesop, Phaedrus, Jean de La Fontaine, Samaniego and Tomás de Iriarte and, consciously he influenced, especially in the use of character animals : eagle, bee, Donkey, Stork, Rabbit, Lamb, Owl, Wolf, Mule, Palomo, Raposa.

Le Bal de Sceaux

In writing this novella Balzac seems to have been inspired by the fables of La Fontaine, especially La fille ("The Girl") and Héron ("The Heron").

Perrin Dandin

Perrin Dandin is a fictional character in the Third Book of Rabelais, who seats himself judge-wise on the first stump that offers, and passes offhand a sentence in any matter of litigation; a character who figures similarly in a comedy of Racine's, and in a fable of La Fontaine's.


see also

Florence Delay

The daughter of Marie-Madeleine Carrez and Jean Delay, Delay studied at the Lycée Jean de La Fontaine and then the Sorbonne.

The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse

Ida Gotkovsky, the third fable in her Hommage à Jean de La Fontaine for choir and orchestra, commissioned for the tercentenary of La Fontaine's death (1995)