¹ Fables, contes et nouvelles, éd. E. Pilon, R. Groos et J. Schiffrin, Bib. de la Pléiade (Paris, 1959), p. 268. All references to the fables and contes are to this edition.

² Œuvres diverses, éd. P. Clarac, Bib. de la Pléiade, nouv. éd. revue (Paris, 1958), p. 657. Later references to this edition are designated OD.

³ La Fontaine's closest approach to an “art poétique” is the discussion between Apollo and the Muses which runs through Clymène (OD, pp. 20–46). For a thorough, well-organized compilation of his literary views, see A. Chassang, “Essai de bilan des idées littéraires de La Fontaine,” Information littéraire, xiii (1961), 217–225, and xiv (1962), 35–44. For a sensitive and illuminating study of his esthetic, see O. de Mourgues, O Muse, fuyante proie … Essai sur la poésie de La Fontaine (Paris, 1962).

⁴ For accounts of the circle of Mme de La Sablière and of its influence on La Fontaine, see the Discours à Madame de La Sablière, éd. H. Busson et F. Gohin (Genève et Lille, 1938), pp. 9–15, and P. Clarac, La Fontaine, nouv. éd. revue (Paris, 1959), pp. 112–122.

⁵ In “Un Animal dans la lune” (vii., 181, La Fontaine made a more definite but similarly unkept promise to write a work explaining in detail how uncontrolled sensory evidence can mislead the observer of celestial and terrestrial phenomena. See Fables, p. 179.

⁶ The extent to which La Fontaine's views on “l'âme des bêtes” were influenced by and reflect the doctrine of Gassendi was debated by R. Jasinski and H. Busson thirty years ago. For Jasinski's thesis, see Revue d'histoire de la philosophie, i (1933), 316–330, and ii (1934), 218–242; and Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France, xlii (1935), 401–407, and xliii (1936), 317–320. For Busson's position, see RHL, xlii (1935), 1–32 and 631–636; and xliii (1936), 257–286.

⁷ La Fontaine's best-known treatment of the old theme that “Dieu fait bien ce qu'il fait” is no doubt the fable “Le Gland et la citrouille” (ix, 4). For variations, see “Jupiter et le métayer” (vi, 4), and the conclusion of “La Querelle des chiens et des chats, et celle des chats et des souris” (xii, 8).

⁸ It may be recalled that in La Fontaine's day astrology had two main divisions, judicial and natural. The former claimed to predict the future of men and nations by observations of the positions and aspects of the heavenly bodies. The latter included both a meteorological branch, concerned with forecasting inanimate phenomena such as seasonal and weather changes, and a medical branch, which made diagnoses and advised treatments according to astrological data. As will be seen, La Fontaine sought to refute only “astrologie judiciaire”; he apparently considered “astrologie météorologique” a legitimate science, and seems never to have mentioned “astrologie médicale.”

⁹ On the vogue of astrology in seventeenth-century France, see H. Busson, La Religion des classiques (Paris, 1948), pp. 275–281.

¹⁰ See The City of God, trans. M. Dods (New York, 1948), i, 190–198. For the similarity between La Fontaine's development and that in Montaigne's “Apologie,” see F. Gohin, La Fontaine; études et recherches (Paris, 1937), pp. 68–70.

¹¹ See Gohin, op. cit., pp. 87–90. References to Bernier's Abrégé are to the first complete edition, Lyon: Anisson & Posuel, 1678, 7 vols. in-12⁰.

¹² This had long been a favorite argument of opponents of judicial astrology. See, e.g., St. Augustine, The Confessions, trans. W. Watts, ed. W. Rouse, Loeb Classical Library (London and New York, 1912), i, 351–359, and Calvin, Advertissement contre l'astrologie qu'on appelle iudiciaire (Genève: Girard, 1549, in-4⁰), pp. 13–14.

¹³ La Fontaine may owe such Gassendist terms to Bernier's Abrégé (ed. cit., iv, 307) or to discussions at the salon of Mme de La Sablière. More interesting than his source is the implication of his argument, that no action or motion could occur without physical contact or impulsion of some kind. Still widespread in his time, this view was shortly to cause the Cartesians and others to consider the Newtonian system of gravitational attraction at a distance a regression from a mechanistic, more “scientific” explanation of the world to one that was supernatural, even magical.

¹⁴ Another fable, “Les Devineresses” (vii, 15), deals with a less pretentious form of fortune-telling than astrology. Instead of attacking the diviners or mocking the credulity of their clients, La Fontaine uses the rise and fall in a fortuneteller's popularity to illustrate a human trait which is as universal as deception and gullibility: “C'est souvent du hasard que naît l'opinion, / Et c'est l'opinion qui fait toujours la vogue” (p. 175).

¹⁵ See “Le Lion” (xi, 1) for an animal who plays the astrologer.

¹⁶ For other uses of astrological themes and terms in La Fontaine's “pièces de circonstance,” see OD, pp. 514–515, 590, and 696–698.

¹⁷ For a different and, I believe, unconvincing interpretation, that the poet accepted the influence of the heavens upon an individual's basic temperament but not upon the details of his life, see G. Tronquart, “Notule sur La Fontaine et l'astrologie,” Dix-septième siècle, lx (1963), 49–59.

¹⁸ See the Fables, pp. 66, 148, and 293, for examples of these clichés.

¹⁹ La Fontaine also treats the apparent daily journeyings of the sun in “counterpoet” mood. Witness his effective mockery of epic style in “Le Fermier, le chien, et le renard” (xi, 3). So terrible was the scene of carnage at dawn, after a fox had raided a henhouse during the night, that “Peu s'en fallut que le soleil / Ne rebroussât d'horreur vers le manoir liquide” (p. 266).

²⁰ Few fables illustrate so well the ultimate futility of trying to unravel the sources of a poet who knew whereof he spoke in calling himself a “Papillon du Parnasse” (OD, p. 645). The cases of deceptive sensory data which he uses appear in seventeenth-century French works other than Bernier's A brégé, for example in La Logique de Port-Royal, and in a long line of texts running from the Renaissance back to Sextus Empiricus, Seneca, and Lucretius.

²¹ Pensées, éd. Brunschvicg, #218. It is significant that La Fontaine should handle the question of the earth's movement in the same way as his older contemporary, Saint-Amant. In several poems written in the 1640's, the latter treats heliocentrism and other developments in astronomy with a similar brevity and casualness, seeking to give his reader the same impression that they were obvious truths, and in the process successfully eliminating any taint of pedantry or dogmatism. See my “Saint-Amant and the ‘New Astronomy’,” MLR, liii (1958), 26–37.

²² It is typical both of La Fontaine and of seventeenth-century French writers that he should merely describe the rough lunar surface. Unlike many contemporaries in England, neither he nor any of the few French poets who refer to the telescopic moon seems to have found it a source of conjecture or concern about the decay of the world or the breaking of the circle of celestial perfection.

²³ The possibility of telescopes powerful enough to reveal living lunar creatures was, however, seriously discussed by seventeenth-century French savants. See, e.g., the conclusion of Descartes's letter of 13 November 1629 to the glass-maker Ferrier, expressing the cautious hope, regarding the hyperbolic telescope, “que nous verrions, par votre moyen, s'il y a des animaux dans la Lune.” Correspondance, éd. C. Adam et G. Milhaud, i (Paris, 1936), 82. The enthusiasm for the “world in the moon” had also been noted by French satirists. See Molière's Les Femmes savantes (m, 2), where Philaminte claims an even more sensational discovery than that made by La Fontaine's virtuosos: “Pour moi, sans me flatter, j'en ai déjà fait une, / Et j'ai vu clairement des hommes dans la lune.” Œuvres complètes, ed. M. Rat, Bib. de la Pléiade (Paris, 1947), ii, 783.

²⁴ On the poet's contacts with Frenchmen living in England, see L. Petit, La Fontaine et Saint-Evremond (Toulouse, 1953).

²⁵ Samuel Butter, Three Poems, ed. A. Spence (Los Angeles, 1961), p. 23.

²⁶ I am indebted to Professors C. K. Abraham, W. N. Francis, and P. A. Wadsworth for valuable suggestions concerning this study.