Born in Château-Thierry, the author of Les Fables spent thirty years in Champagne.
‘I am a man of Champagne… ‘ Jean de La Fontaine was 33 years old when he introduced himself in a letter addressed to the Abbess of Mouzon. He was not yet the poet we know today. Born into a family of merchants whose wealth stemmed from the well-equipped marriage of his father, he had long dreamed of fleeing from the small town nestled amidst the Champagne hills and making his way to Paris. He believed that becoming a novice at the Oratory would help to make this dream a reality, but it was not to be… He then went to Paris to study law. He made strong friendships in the cabarets of the Capital, including those with Boileau and Molière. In his fable ‘Les Deux Pigeons’ (The Two Pigeons), La Fontaine tells of the misfortunes of the pigeon whose ‘desire to see’ and taste for change led him to leave the peace of the dovecote, revealing the inconsistency which forms, according to him, the core of his true nature. He was destined to spend much of his life in Champagne. His friend, Louis Maucroix, described him as ‘a good boy, very wise and modest,’ and he was said to be a dreamer.
Upon his return from Paris, he married Marie Héricart at the request of his father. It was a good match, too, particularly for Marie, the cousin of Racine, who was happy to leave her village of La Ferté-Milon and relocate to a ‘city’. Meanwhile, Jean de La Fontaine had inherited his father’s rangership. He was now the Master of Water and Forests, covering a vast territory. From this, it is not difficult to imagine him inspecting the animals of the Champagne countryside on a daily basis. Admittedly, his responsibilities were primarily administrative; the Master of Water and Forests ensured the smooth running of the domains and settled small conflicts. It forced him to make frequent rounds, supervising the logging and observing the sales of timber. Before becoming a fabulist, La Fontaine was a ‘civil servant’ who travelled the backroads of Western Champagne, drawing up reports on his journeys back home. This home, on Rue des Cordeliers in Château-Thierry, still exists today and houses a museum. However, he also had to ensure the proper maintenance of the forests, the cleaning of the ponds and ditches, and the proper circulation of water in the streets and rivers. Unlike others of his time, La Fontaine travelled through the countryside to carry out occasional inspections, along the banks of the streams that flowed towards the Marne, across the plateaus of the Valois and through the forests of the Tardenois. He was also a knowledgeable observer of the customs of his city. His love life was filled with many adventures, one of which allegedly led him to a duel with the husband of one of his conquests, a military officer, who disarmed him with a single swing of his sword. The two duellists later buried their conflict over a few drinks at the tavern. La Fontaine already began to try his hand at writing. He started by writing a ballet, ‘Les Rieurs du Beau-Richard’, in which he depicted his fellow citizens. The Beau-Richard was one of the main crossroads of the city, where people gathered and met.
The dreamy ‘La Fontaine’ who his contemporaries described was not a legend. He sold his rangership position and left for Paris, intending to fully devote himself to his work as a poet and courtier, leaving behind his wife and child in Champagne. Since then, exegetes of the fabulist’s work – which with the utmost sensitivity succeeds in combining the language of the elite and the common sense of the people – have wondered to what extent more than thirty years of life in Château-Thierry and Champagne spent monitoring the countryside shaped his relationship with nature and his contemporaries. It is most likely that he was more inspired by the hundreds of animal fables written by Aesop during his lifetime than by the surrounding countryside. In fact, some may note a familiar scene in the story of ‘Le Coche et la Mouche’ (The Coach and the Fly), that of the coach travelling from Château-Thierry to Soissons (or Paris), which, upon leaving the poet’s home town, was forced to negotiate a long and arduous climb that would surely have left its mark amongst the travellers, who would have been panting and pushing the carriage in order to reach the top of the hill more quickly. At least this is what the local myth, passed down from generation to generation, suggests.
