Bon Garçon 

David Coward

La Fontaine’s permanent place in the schoolroom has made him the most widely read of all French writers. Children take his menagerie of talking flora and fauna in their stride. Grown-ups, however, worry about his howlers (grasshoppers don’t eat worms) and mutter about the ambiguity of his moral lessons. Lamartine winced at his cynical promotion of self-interest, and for Rousseau the method employed by the fox to relieve the crow of its cheese was as much an advertisement for flattery as a warning against flatterers. But though they mistook his observations of human behaviour for universal precepts, La Fontaine must take some of the blame. He was an awkward kind of fabulist, a tease who directed his subtle ironies as much at his readers as at his cats and foxes. His default creature was the red herring, that most slippery of fish. A playful, elusive writer, La Fontaine is never quite what we expect him to be.

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