Forbidden Fruit: Selected Tales in Verse

by Jean de la Fontaine, Richard Shirley Smith (Illustrator), Guido Walman (Translator)

Generations of children have been brought up on La Fontaine's Fables. Only an absent-minded or perversely liberal parent, however, would leave the same author's Contes et nouvelles en vers lying around the nursery. The first volume was published three years before the Fables started to appear. They were the fruit of his wicked delight in the tales he found in Boccaccio's Decameron, Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Rabelais's Pantagruel, and elsewhere. Marital misdemeanours, resourceful females, addled males, proved the inspiration for some richly inventive plotting. He retold the stories in his own words, commenting on them wryly as he went along.

96 pages, Hardcover

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...