Forbidden Fruit Selected Tales In Verse

by Jean de la Fontaine

A comic genius and a wicked delight--The Decameron revisited. Generations of children have been brought up on La Fontaine's fables. Only an absentminded or perversely liberal parent, however, would leave the same author's Contes et nouvelles en vers lying around the nursery. The Contes were the fruit of La Fontaine's wicked delight in the saucy tales he found in Boccaccio's Decameron, Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Rabelais's Pantagruel, and elsewhere. Marital misdemeanors, resourceful females, and addled males proved the inspiration for some rich, inventive plotting. The stories' impact at the time is attested not only by the difficulties their author incurred in gaining election to the French Acadmie but also by the thriving trade in pirated editions after French printers failed to obtain official license to issue them. In the three hundred years that followed, the Contes were relegated to the least-accessible library shelves, and even today there barely exists an English translation of the complete set. France has over the centuries produced notable comic geniuses; the best known are perhaps Rabelais and Molire. On the evidence of these hitherto neglected Tales in Verse, La Fontaine clearly deserves a place with them.

96 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1998

About the author

French writer Jean de la Fontaine collected the stories of Aesop and other persons in his Fables (1668-1694).

French literary figures, including Molière and Jean de la Fontaine, gathered at Auteuil, a favorite place.

People most widely read the famous poet Jean de la Fontaine of the 17th century.

According to Gustave Flaubert, only this poet understood and mastered the texture of the language before Victor Marie Hugo. A set of postage stamps, issued in 1995, celebrates la Fontaine. Jean de La Fontaine, le défi , a film, released in April 2007, starred Lorànt Deutsch of his life.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_de...