Jean de La Fontaine

Born in July 8, 1621, in Château-Thierry (Champagne, France), where his father was in charge of Water, Forests and Hunting, Jean de la Fontaine spent his whole childhood and adolescence in the countryside, where he mainly studied Latin language. In 1641, he moved to Paris to continue his study at the Oratoire, rue St Honoré. But he stayed there only for 18 months because he didn't like it. Then he studied law and became a lawyer at the Parliament of Paris in 1649. Before that his father married him to 14-years-old Marie Héricart in 1647. They later had a son, Charles, in 1653. Then he decided to become a writer and first published l'Eunuque, in 1654, translated from Terentius's old version, then a heroic poem, Adonis, in 1658, inspired by Ovid. The latter work allowed him to have the admiration and protection of Nicolas Fouquet. But in 1661, while La Fontaine was writing Le Songe de Vaux, Fouquet was disgraced, arrested and put in jail by the king. Thus La Fontaine lost his protection and was pursued for royal disgrace because of his faithfulness with Fouquet, for who he wrote several poems including Élégie aux nymphes de Vaux. Thus he left Paris for the Limousin. When he came back to Paris, his career restarted with the publication of his Contes (divided in 5 books) from 1664 to 1674, his 243 Fables from 1668 and his novel les amours de Psyché et Cupidon in 1669. He successively found the protection of the Duchesse de Bouillon, the Duchesse d'Orléans, Mme de La Sablière and finally Madame Hervart. Elected at the Académie française in 1683, his passion for ancient Greece and Rome brought him on the Ancients side during the century's quarrel between Ancients and Moderns. He had a quite brilliant social life and regularly saw the most famous writers of his time: Perrault, Mme de Sévigné, Boileau, Molière, Racine and La Rochefoucauld. Nevertheless during the last two years of his life he gave up with social life, was obliged to deny some of his work and devoted himself to meditation. That's how he died in 1695. Nowadays some people still say that Jean de la Fontaine copied everything he wrote (especially the fables of Aesop and Phaedrus) but others defend him by saying that he generally improved them and he also made us know the ancient authors he liked and who would have been probably forgotten without him. .