"La Fontaine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... true, but what matters that?) stupefied, petrified, and as though asphyxiated in the presence of the incommensurable tirades which welled up every instant from all parts of his bridal song. I affirm that he shared the general beatitude, and that, quite the reverse of La Fontaine, who, at the presentation of his comedy of the "Florentine," asked, "Who is the ill-bred lout who made that rhapsody?" Gringoire would gladly have inquired of his ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... truth," replied the prisoner, "and can prove it. Listen, and then judge. I was born on the first floor of the house No. 28 Rue de la Fontaine, at Auteuil, on the night of the 27th to the 28th of September, 1807. My father, Monsieur de Villefort, told my mother I was dead, wrapped me in a napkin marked H. 15, put me in a small box and buried me alive in the garden of the ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... pays de Lorraine, laquelle elle nommoit bonne fontaine aux Fees Nostre Seigneur, at en icelluy lieu tous ceulx de pays quand ils avoient fiebvre ils alloient pour recouvrer garison; et la alloit souvent ladite Jehanne la Pucelle sous un grand arbre qui la fontaine ombroit; et s'apparurent a elle Ste Katerine et Ste Marguerite qui lui dirent qu'elle allast a ung Cappitaine qu'elles lui nommerent, laquelle y alla sans prendre conge ni a pere ni a mere; lequel Cappitaine ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... skipping off into dancings of Verse every now and then, 'a charming RELATION of a certain VOYAGE or Home Tour' (whence or whither, or correctly when, this Editor forgets), ["First printed in 1665," say the Bibliographies; "but known to La Fontaine some time before." Good!—Bachaumont, practically an important and distinguished person, not literary by trade, or indeed otherwise than by ennui, was he that had given (some fifteen years before) the Nickname FRONDE (Bickering of Schoolboys) to the wretched Historical Object which is still so ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... died too soon to be elected. The one astounding omission of the 17th century, however, is the name of Moliere, who was excluded by his profession as an actor.1 On the other hand, the French Academy was never more thoroughly representative of letters than when Boileau, Corneille, La Fontaine, Racine, and Quinault were all members. Of the great theologians of that and the subsequent age, the Academy contained Bossuet, Flechier, Fenelon, and Massillon, but not Bourdaloue. La Bruyere and Fontenelle ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Europe through literary channels, Professor Cowell says, "They are the stray waifs of literature, in the course of their long wanderings coming to be recognized under widely different aspects, as when they are used by Boccaccio, or Chaucer, or La Fontaine." ...
— More Jataka Tales • Re-told by Ellen C. Babbitt
... rats, and a big cage was built for them, with inner stairs leading to the different stories, eating-places, bedrooms, and trapezes for gymnastics. They were unquestionably happier and better off there than La Fontaine's rat ...
— My Private Menagerie - from The Works of Theophile Gautier Volume 19 • Theophile Gautier
... woman would prefer an additional inch of penis to anything this world or the next can offer her. In the Book of Sindibad it is the story of the Peri and Religious Man; his learning the Great Name; and his consulting with his wife. See also La Fontaine's "Trois Souhaits," Prior's "Ladle," and "Les ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... subject? Is it not the idea which is developed through it, the emotion with which it vibrates, which expands, elevates and ennobles it? What tender melancholy, what subtlety, what sagacity in the master-pieces of La Fontaine, although the subjects are so familiar, the titles so modest? Equally unassuming are the titles and subjects of the Studies and Preludes; yet the compositions of Chopin, so modestly named, are not the less types of perfection in ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... little more energy, if you please. "But!" sighs the Commune, "I have done my best, it seems to me. Thanks to Jourde,[70] who throws Law into the shade, and to Dereure,[71] the shoemaker —Financier and Cobbler of La Fontaine's Fable—I pocket daily the gross value of the sale of tobacco, which is a pretty speculation enough, since I have had to pay neither the cost of the raw materials nor of the manufacture. I have besides this, thanks ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... vegetables. To-morrow, alas! we return to our packet, much refreshed, however, by two pleasant days on shore, and consoling ourselves for our prolonged voyage by the reflection, that had we gone direct to Havana, we should not have seen Tampico; and, as La Fontaine's travelling ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... soutane, en culotte courte, avec son rabat flottant sur son gilet. Sa belle figure laide sourit tristement, demi claire par la lune.... Une seule main lui suffi pour mettre le suicid par terre; de l'autre main il tient encore sa carafe, qu'il vient de remplir la fontaine de la cour. ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet
... to dream of a life of fame. In his garret, too, he began to develop that longing for luxury which was to increase with the years, and which was to cost him so much. At this time, he took frequent walks through the cemetery of Pere-Lachaise around the graves of Moliere, La Fontaine and Racine. He would occasionally visit a friend with whom he could converse, but he usually preferred a sympathetic listener, to whom he could pour out his plans and his innermost longings. Otherwise his life was as solitary as it was cloistered. ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... told of the renowned fabulist La Fontaine. One day some one informed him that Poignan, a retired captain of dragoons and one of his friends, was by far too intimate with Madame La Fontaine, and that to avenge his dishonour he ought to fight a duel with him. La Fontaine calls upon Poignan at four o'clock in the morning, ...
— Sganarelle - or The Self-Deceived Husband • Moliere
... which he could no more be unacquainted with, than our country was with his; for he often frequented lord Montague's house, when he was embassador in France, and being also an intimate friend of Monsieur De la Fontaine, who had spent some time in England, it was therefore impossible he could be ignorant of the fame of Dryden; but it is peculiar to that nation to hold all others in contempt. The French would as fain monopolize wit, as the wealth and power of Europe; but thanks to the arms and genius ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... Dimna, or the later Persian version, made A.D. 1494, of Hossein Vaez, called the Anvari Sohaili, 'the Canopic Lights'—from which, when published in Paris by David Sahid of Ispahan, in the year 1644, La Fontaine drew the substance of many of his best fables.—Let us say, too, that all can be found in the Life of the Seven Sages, or the Book of Sendabad as it was called in Persia, after an apocryphal Indian sage—came by translation—that is to say, through the cells of ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... life, and yet she seems happy, like that poor Mademoiselle La Fontaine, whom I last saw at the Maison de Sante of Doctor Schwanthaller, seated with a straw crown on her head ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... to hear him say to her, to respond with the affectionate and familiar 'toi', was so amusing! It was droll to see her cut out her husband in chemistry, history, and grammar, and make him confound La Fontaine with Corneille. She had such a little air while doing it! And at the close, when he said to her: "If I give you a pony to-morrow, and a good hearty kiss this very minute, shall you be willing to give up getting that degree?" she responded, with such ...
— Jacqueline, v2 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... a word). "Your Majesty, you see here one before you;—one whom the French themselves have translated, calling him the German La Fontaine!" ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... eloquently rebuked the vitriolic Swift, for expressing the heartless sentiment, that a lost friend might be replaced as well as spent money. Madame Rambouillet was the friend of Voiture; Madame Sabliere of La Fontaine. Hundreds of similar examples might easily be gathered. Few of the French literary men of the seventeenth or the eighteenth century led those disorderly and disreputable lives which were the calamity and the disgrace of most of the professed writers of England at that time. Madame ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... persons have entered this passage, and proceeded a considerable way by the light of torches, without arriving at the source, which (if we may believe the tradition of the country) is at the distance of eight leagues from this opening; but this is altogether incredible. The stream is now called la fontaine de muraille, and is carefully conducted by different branches into the adjacent vineyards and gardens, for watering the ground. On the side of the same mountain, more southerly, at the distance of half a mile, there is another still more copious ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... narrative power displayed in some of these pleasant satires, where the foibles and the cunning of men and women are thinly veiled under the disguise of animal life, give a foretaste of the charming art which was to blossom forth so wonderfully four centuries later in the Fables of La Fontaine. ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... attitude, she began, "La Ligue des Rats: fable de La Fontaine." She then declaimed the little piece with an attention to punctuation and emphasis, a flexibility of voice and an appropriateness of gesture, very unusual indeed at her age, and which proved ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... family, who, sad and silent, seemed also to say to me, 'Don't go, young master, don't go.' Hortense, my eldest sister, pressed me in her arms, and Amelie, my little sister, who was in a corner of the drawing room looking at the pictures in a volume of La Fontaine, came up to me, holding out ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... newspapers, kept up a regular correspondence with the Orleans Princes, was thinking of starting a racing stable, and finished up by believing that he really was a fashionable man, and strutted about, and was puffed out with conceit, as he had probably never read La Fontaine's fable, in which he tells the story of the ass that is laden with relics which people salute, and so takes ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... very foolishly appeals from pictures to the amphitheatre; and I am glad to observe, that the native taste of La Fontaine (l. iii. fable x.) has omitted this most ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... strong reenforcements hurried to the spot enabled the French to deliver a counterattack and recover some of the lost ground. Simultaneously, the Germans attempted to storm the French position in the neighborhood of La Fontaine-aux-Charmes, but with less success. During the last week of July and the first half of August, 1915, large bodies of German troops were detached from the armies operating on the eastern front and poured ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... too homesick for the white fulgurant heights of Heaven to negate itself at the behest of French society and conform to what the academicians declared to be "la vielle tradition francaise." Franck was too much an artist in the spirit of La Fontaine and Germaine Pillon and Poussin and the others who formed that tradition, and who would be assailed in its name fiercely were they to reappear to-day. Moreover, he was of the race of musicians who come to make music largely to ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... been very much talked of in France, and Mr. De la Fontaine, St. Evremont, and Bayle have written his eulogium, but still his name only is known. He had much the same reputation in London as Voiture had in Paris, and in my opinion deserved it better. Voiture ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... of dancing attain such eminent honours in the eyes of mankind, as during the siecle dore of the latter monarch. At an epoch boasting of Moliere and Racine, Bossuet and Fenelon, Boileau and La Fontaine, Colbert and Perrault, (the fairy talisman of politics and architecture,) the court of Versailles could imagine no manifestation of regality more august, or more exquisite, than that of getting up a royal ballet; and the father of his people, Louis XIV., was, in his youth, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... abundant, four or five being found in Italy, and a number in France, the best known of which is La Fontaine's fable of "The Bear and the Amateur Gardener," ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane
... ses avis je me mis en route pour Nazareth, et, apres avoir traverse une grande plaine, je vins a la fontaine dont Notre Seigneur changea l'eau en vin aux noces d'Archeteclin; [Footnote: Architriclinus est un mot Latin forme du Grec, par lequel l'Evangile designe le maitre d'hotel ou majordome qui presidoit aux noces ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, Volume 10 - Asia, Part III • Richard Hakluyt
... survey of the vast and various orb, dwindle into natural and so comparative insignificance. Byron was under no delusion as to the grossness of Don Juan. His plea or pretence, that he was sheltered by the superior grossness of Ariosto and La Fontaine, of Prior and of Fielding, is nihil ad rem, if it is not insincere. When Murray (May 3, 1819) charges him with "approximations to indelicacy," he laughs himself away at the euphemism, but when Hobhouse and "the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... You go to church together, I do not doubt, and do good in secret. The close of this letter will seem to you very primitive, I expect, but think of the too eager friendship which prompts these fears—a friendship of the type of La Fontaine's, which takes alarms at dreams, at half-formed, misty ideas. You deserve to be happy, since, through it all, you still think of me, no less than I think of you, in my monotonous life, which, though it lacks color, is yet not empty, and, if uneventful, is not unfruitful. ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... is one sort of men, modest but not unwise in their generations, who buy up the pretty books published in very limited editions by French booksellers, like MM. Lemerre and Jouaust. Already their reprints of Rochefoucauld's first edition, of Beaumarchais, of La Fontaine, of the lyrics attributed to Moliere, and other volumes, are exhausted, and fetch high prices in the market. By a singular caprice, the little volumes of Mr. Thackeray's miscellaneous writings, in yellow paper wrappers (when they are first editions), have become objects of ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... best of the argument,' said La Fontaine, to the great scandal of the peace-lovers. The exigencies of verse, rhyme and rhythm, carried the worthy fabulist further than he intended: he meant to say that, in a fight between mastiffs and in other brute conflicts, the stronger is left master of the bone. He well knew that, as things go, ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... la pauvre bete. Un manant lui coupa le pied droit et la tete. Le seigneur du village a sa porte les mit; Et ce dicton picard a l'entour fut ecrit: 'Biaux chires leups, n'ecoutez mie Mere tenchent (grondant) chen fieux (son fils) qui crie.'" (LA FONTAINE, Fables, iv. 16.) ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... well known for his illustrations of early French literature, is an enthusiastic admirer of La Fontaine: and he has spent a vast sum in having printed one copy only, and for himself alone, of an edition of his works, illustrated by the first artists of the day, accompanied by notes and prefaces of the most eminent writers, and forming a ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... I assure you we have one capital book in the language, a book of fables by an old missionary of the unpromising name of Pratt, which is simply the best and the most literary version of the fables known to me. I suppose I should except La Fontaine, but L. F. takes a long time; these are brief as the books of our childhood, and full of wit and literary colour; and O, Colvin, what a tongue it would be to write, if one only knew it—and there were only readers. Its curse in common use is an incredible left-handed wordiness; but ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... pleasure. He had talents for irony, allegory, and fable, that he could adapt with great skill to the promotion of moral and political truth. He was master of that infantine simplicity which the French call naivete, which never fails to charm, in Phaedrus and La Fontaine, from the cradle ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... of the most famous of early French poets, and the creator of the school of nave poetry in which La Fontaine afterwards so remarkably excelled. His poetical version of the Psalms was read and sung in many lands; and in spite of prohibition copies could not be printed so fast as they were eagerly bought. They were at one time as popular in the Court of Henry II. of France as they were amongst the ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... breakfast, the Emperor was playing with the new King's oldest son, the little Napoleon, who was only three years and a half old, but was very bright for his age, and already knew by heart La Fontaine's fables. The Emperor made him recite the fable about the frogs who wanted a king, and listened to it, laughing loudly. He pinched the Queen's ear, and asked her, "What do you say to that, Hortense?" The allusions to the poor ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... Shakespeare, Gibbon. Famous literary compositions at different levels or in their various classes are Boccaccio's Decameron, Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Aretino, Spenser's Faery Queen, Rabelais, Pilgrim's Progress, La Fontaine's Tales, Rousseau's Confessions, Tristram Shandy, Candide, Don Juan; and even among these how fair a proportion depends for its value and fruitfulness on the student? And, again, on his training. For we are aware of readers who prefer Bunyan to Spenser, others who place Sterne, ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... March has four other origins, from March in Cambridgeshire, from march, a boundary, from marsh, or from Mark; while May means in Mid. English a maiden (Chapter XXI), and is also a dim. of Matthew (Chapter IX). The names of the seasons also present difficulty. Spring usually corresponds to Fr. La Fontaine (Chapter II), but we find also Lent, the old name for the season, and French has Printemps. [Footnote: The cognate Ger. Lenz is fairly common, hence the frequency of Lent in America.] Summer and Winter [Footnote: Winter was one of Hereward's most faithful comrades.] are found very ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... horoscopists (the old Chaldaic genethliacs), or those who predicted the fortunes of individuals by an examination of the planet which presided at the natal hour, was as much in vogue as that of any other of the masters of the occult arts; and La Fontaine, towards the end of the seventeenth century, apostrophises ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... be alarmed: it was long after Noah—a frightened hare ran by a pond; the frogs splashed in the water, smit with awe. Then she said, 'Ah ha! there are people in the world I frighten in my turn; I am the thunderbolt of war.' Excuse my quoting La Fontaine: I am not in 'Charles the Twelfth of Sweden' yet. I ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... shoes and nice curls, and must remember that it is better to be good than to be handsome; with all other wholesome truisms of the kind. They have been to school, and had their minds improved in all modern ways,—have calculated eclipses, and read Virgil, Schiller, and La Fontaine, and understand all about the geological strata, and the different systems of metaphysics,—so that a person reading the list of their acquirements might be a little appalled at the prospect of entering into conversation ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... only the more certain, and Monsieur Mouilleron himself escorted him back to the Hochons'. Joseph was greeted with such overflowing tenderness by his mother that the poor misunderstood son gave thanks to ill-luck—like the husband to the thief, in La Fontaine's fable—for a mishap which brought him such ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... part of his youth, La Fontaine was distinguished for his idleness, but hearing an ode by Malherbe read, he is said to have exclaimed, "I too am a poet," and his genius was awakened. Charles Bossuet's mind was first fired to study by reading, at an early age, Fontenelle's 'Eloges' of men ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... and Apuleius cites the passage in his Apology for the same purpose. "Whoever," says Lambe, "would see the subject fully discussed, should turn to the Essay on the Literary Character by Mr. Disraeli." He enumerates as instances of free writers who have led pure lives, La Motte le Vayer, Bayle, la Fontaine, Smollet, and Cowley. "The imagination," he adds, "may be a volcano, while the heart is an Alp of ice." It would, however, be difficult to enlarge this list, while on the other hand, the catalogue of those who really practised ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... reasonable enough. The original tale was the sixth novel in the ninth day of the Decameron, and probably was taken by Chaucer from a Fabliau by Jean de Boves, "De Gombert et des Deux Clercs." The same story has been imitated in the "Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles," and in the "Berceau" of La Fontaine. Horne's removal from the tale of everything that would offend a modern reader was designed to enable thousands to find pleasure in an old farcical piece that ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... peoples, the French were most alien to the spirit of his humour. In 'Le Figaro', at the time of Mark Twain's death, this fundamental difference in taste once more comes to light: "It is as difficult for a Frenchman to understand Mark Twain as for a North American to admire La Fontaine. At first sight, there is nothing in common between that highly specialized faculty which the Anglo-Saxons of the old and the new world designate under the name of humour, and that quality with us which we call wit (esprit). And yet, at bottom, ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... Essay xxviii, pp. 241-45. This is the text here followed. The poem is an obvious imitation of what its author calls ('Letters from a Nobleman to his Son', 1764, ii. 140) that 'French elegant easy manner of telling a story,' which Prior had caught from La Fontaine. But the inherent simplicity of Goldsmith's style is curiously evidenced by the absence of those illustrations and ingenious allusions which are Prior's chief characteristic. And although Goldsmith included 'The Ladle' and 'Hans Carvel' in his 'Beauties of English Poesy', 1767, he refrained wisely ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... the next morning we were passing down the banks of the stream called La Fontaine qui Bouille, from the boiling spring whose waters flow into it. When we stopped at noon, we were within six or eight miles of the Pueblo. Setting out again, we found by the fresh tracks that a horseman had just been out to reconnoiter us; he had circled half round ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... genius of an epic, dramatic, or lyric poet? or how does it corrupt the eloquence of an orator in the pulpit or at the bar? The number of good French authors, such as Corneille, Racine, Moliere, Boileau, and La Fontaine, who seemed to dispute it with the Augustan age, flourished under the despotism of Lewis XIV.; and the celebrated authors of the Augustan age did not shine till after the fetters were riveted upon the Roman people by that ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... that his features were almost hidden. Then, during the entire journey, seated at the end of the tramcar he had kept his back turned on the other passenger: he seemed to be absorbed in watching the movements of the driver. At the end of the rue Mozart, where the rues La Fontaine, Poussin, des Perchamps meet, he had quitted the ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... precieuses the "Jansenists of love," an expression which became very popular. Her salon was situated on the Rue des Tournelles. Ninon de Lenclos was a woman of the most brilliant mind and exquisite taste, and it was at her hotel that Moliere first read his Tartuffe before Conde, La Fontaine, Boileau, Lulli, Racine, and Chapelle, and it was there that he received the ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... St. Jacques past the church of the same name and turning down the street which cuts it at right angles, called the "Rue de la Fontaine", the ancient part of the town can be reached. It may be here remarked the peculiar characteristics of Pau, and yet probably seven visitors out of ten fail to notice it. the other end of "Fountain Street" leads into the Rue de la Prefecture. this is one of the very busiest streets ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... until the death of Charles II., no French literature could be said to have gathered or established itself; and as yet no ostentation of a French literature began to stir the air of Europe. By the time, however, that Racine, La Fontaine, Boileau, Bossuet, and Fontenelle, had begun to fix the attention of foreign courts upon the French language, a necessity, no longer to be disguised, for some modern language as the common organ of diplomacy, had made itself universally acknowledged. Not only were able negotiations ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... Olympian throne. Never was a monarch served by such idolaters. "Bossuet and Fenelon taught his children; Bourdaloue and Massillon adorned his chapel; La Chaise and Le Tellier directed his conscience; Boileau and Moliere sharpened his wit; La Rochefoucauld cultivated his taste; La Fontaine wrote his epigrams; Racine chronicled his wars; De Turenne commanded his armies; Fouquet and Colbert arranged his finances; Mole and D'Aguesseau pronounced his judgments; Louvois laid out his campaigns; Vauban fortified his citadels; Riquet dug his canals; Mansard constructed his palaces; ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... age of twenty he was so fortunate as to attract, by an ode in honor of the marriage of King Louis XIV., the favor of that exacting monarch,—a favor which he was to enjoy during forty years. Yet more fortunate in the friendship of Molire, of La Fontaine, and especially of his trusty counsellor, Boileau, he doubtless owed to them his determination to devote himself ...
— Esther • Jean Racine
... before they be hatched," is a well-known proverb in English, and most people, if asked what was its origin, would probably appeal to La Fontaine's delightful fable, La Laitire et le Pot au Lait.[1] We all know Perrette, lightly stepping along from her village to the town, carrying the milk-pail on her head, and in her day-dreams selling her milk for a good sum, then buying a hundred eggs, then selling the chickens, then buying ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... two personages in La Fontaine's fable of the Monkey and the Cat, of whom R. cracks the nut and ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... finer wit than Swift," that "we have no political satire so good as the Satyre Menipee," "no English humor comparable for a moment with that of the fabliaux," "no letter-writer like Voiture," "no teller of tales like La Fontaine," and "no chansonnier like Beranger." Now, it is evident that this is a comparison not of French and English humorists, but of certain classes of writers in the two languages in reference to their manifestation of humor. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... his bosom was sick, and he understood the law that he was to be buried with her. It is all very well, in the sick chamber, for the husband to say to his departing partner for life—"Wait, my dearest—I will go with you." She is sure, as La Fontaine says in his satire, reversing the case, "to take the journey alone." This is all talk on the man's side—but see what the master of the slave woman has actually imposed upon her as a law. The Hindoo widow ascends the funeral pile, and is burnt rejoicing. What male creature ever thought of enduring ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... morality. But there had now been a literary as well as a civil reaction. As there was again a throne and a court, a magistracy, a chivalry, and a hierarchy, so was there a revival of classical taste. Honor was again paid to the prose of Pascal and Massillon, and to the verse of Racine and La Fontaine. The oratory which had delighted the galleries of the Convention was not only as much out of date as the language of Villehardouin and Joinville, but was associated in the public mind with images of horror. All ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... La Fontaine, in 1853, attracted much attention, both the style and the matter being singularly fresh and original. He has since republished it, with alterations which serve to show that he can be docile toward intelligent ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... called Renaissance, and presents the most fantastic features of that style. Therefore, at a period when a strict and jealous architecture ruled construction, when the Middle Ages were not even considered, at a time when literature was not as clearly welded to art as it is now, La Fontaine said of the chateau de Blois, in his hearty, good-humored way: "The part that Francois I. built, if looked at from the outside, pleased me better than all the rest; there I saw numbers of little galleries, little windows, little balconies, little ornamentations without ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... Sweden, a finger-ring made of its wood is an antidote against sickness. The mandrake, as a mystic plant, was extensively sold for medicinal purposes, and in Kent may be occasionally found kept to cure barrenness; [12] and it may be remembered that La Fontaine's fable, La Mandragore, turns upon its supposed power of producing children. How potent its effects were formerly held may be gathered from the very many allusions to its mystic properties in the literature of bygone years. Columella, in his ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... La Fontaine's Fables. Translated by Edward Shirley. Illustrated by C.M. Park and Rene Bull. ...
— A Mother's List of Books for Children • Gertrude Weld Arnold
... surrendered myself to contemplation and reverie, it seemed to me that I touched for a moment the ancient world. Such moments are illuminating, and the light of this one mingles, in my memory, with the dusky greenness of the Jardin de la Fontaine. ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... will be confined to running in the forest to satisfy his hunger, and his brutal appetites; the Dog is inclined in a more easy way to seek his living, and fattens his sides with what comes from his masters kitchen. The Comparison of La Fontaine is in my ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams
... amongst the gods, as Homer tells us; and 'tis by that heavenly name, the nymph Oenone invokes it, in her epistle to Paris. The Trojan virgins used to offer their first favours to it, by the name of Scamander, till the adventure, which Monsieur de la Fontaine has told so agreeably, abolish'd that heathenish ceremony. When the stream is mingled with the Simois, they run ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... like this occurs in A Sackful of Newes, 1673. It was originally related by Poggius in his Facetiae, where it is entitled Asinus Perditus, and it has been imitated by La Fontaine in the fable of "Le Villageois qui cherche son veau." It is also the 12th tale of Les Cent ...
— Shakespeare Jest-Books; - Reprints of the Early and Very Rare Jest-Books Supposed - to Have Been Used by Shakespeare • Unknown
... praise," said the king, whose large eyes fastened themselves more attentively upon Gellert's modest, expressive face. "You are then called the German La Fontaine? Have you ever read ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... pictures in a casual way every time she took a seat at the table, for the beast and the bird were old acquaintances. She had learned La Fontaine's version of the fable one time to recite at school. To-day, with the problem in her mind of how to rid herself of an unwelcome guest, they suddenly took ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... slightest taste. I consequently made no effort whatever to improve my mind, a fact which did not in the least disturb his equanimity. The great interest of those journeys to the Hermitage were the fables of La Fontaine—which I learned as repetition and enjoyed—and the enormous number of lizards on the walls, which could disappear with lightning rapidity when seen, though they would stay almost motionless, waiting for ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... yellow copper, was a set of shelves, attached to the wall, containing three rows of books, in gray linen binding. Julien, approaching, read, not without surprise, some of the titles: Paul and Virginia, La Fontaine's Fables, Gessner's Idylls, Don Quixote, and noticed several odd ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... especially the case in the vicinity of Chteau-Thierry—the birthplace of La Fontaine—where the view is shut in on all sides by vine-clad slopes, which the spring frosts seldom spare. Hence merely one good vintage out of four gladdens the hearts of the peasant proprietors, who find eager purchasers for their produce among the lower-class manufacturers of champagne. In the ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly
... La Fontaine stole one of Grattelard's dialogues bodily, and converted it into the celebrated fable of The Acorn and the Pumpkin. Grattelard was contemporary with Tabarin, as remarked above: he and his partner, Desiderio Descombes, sold quack medicines at the north ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... pasuolans, were in great number. The handgunshot was innumerable and incredible. Also there were twelue potgunnes of brasse that shot vpward, whereof eight were set behind the church of S. Cosme and Damian, and two at saint Iohn de la Fontaine toward the port of Italy, and the other two afore the gate of Auuergne, the which were shot night and day: and there were three sorts of them, whereof the greatest were of sixe or seuen spannes about. And the sayd stones were cast into the towne to make murder of people, which is ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, v5 - Central and Southern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... to believe, like La Fontaine," she questioned, "that sorrow and unhappiness are akin to disease, a mental instead of a physical scourge—that it must pass ...
— The Profiteers • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Goldsmith, nor La Fontaine in his Tableau de Famille, have in my mind quite delineated an English clergyman, at least of the present day, fond of and entirely engaged in literature, no man's enemy but his own. Pray, dear Madam, ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... humiliating manner with Egmont. All these stories were fables. Bold as he was arrogant, he affected at this time to look down with a forgiving contempt on the animosity of the nobles. He passed much of his time alone, writing his eternal dispatches to the King. He had a country-house, called La Fontaine, surrounded by beautiful gardens, a little way outside the gates of Brussels, where he generally resided, and whence, notwithstanding the remonstrances of his friends, he often returned to town, after sunset, alone, or with but a few attendants. He avowed ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... opponents and adversaries. Boileau avenged and angrily upheld the ancients against Perrault, who extolled the moderns—that is to say, Corneille, Moliere, Pascal, and the eminent men of his age, Boileau, one of the first, included. Kindly La Fontaine, taking part in the dispute in behalf of the learned Huet, did not perceive that, in spite of his defects, he was in his turn on the point of being ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... written his mother all about the town, and sent postcard pictures of its pride, the fortress-like, fifteenth-century church with a vast tower set upon a height. He liked Chateau-Thierry because Jean de la Fontaine was born there, and called it "a peaceful-looking place, just right for the dear fable-maker, who was so child-like and sweet-natured, that he deserved always to be happy, instead of for ever in somebody's debt." A soldier having seen ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... in that long Rue La Fontaine at Auteuil which partook of the characteristics of a suburban main street and a provincial faubourg, with its summer villas, its little cottages enclosed within gloomy little gardens, railed-off flower-beds, boarding-schools for young people, and elbowing each other ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... fables by Gordon, published at Vienna, in 1860, under the title Mishle Yehudah, forming the second part of his collected poems, and being itself divided into four books. It consists of translations, or, better, imitations of Aesop, La Fontaine, and Kryloff, together with fables drawn from the Midrash. The style is concise and telling, ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... the French writers of Louis XIV. and we all feel that Moliere and La Fontaine and Mme. de Sevigne are our personal friends, so that the value of their books ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... duty of parents to make their children acquainted with La Fontaine? Well, then, no better opportunity of so doing could possibly be afforded them than is given by the new Bodley Head edition. It is a metrical version of the time-honoured favourites, and every fable has a picture filling the page opposite. The child would be hard to please who did ...
— A Hundred Anecdotes of Animals • Percy J. Billinghurst
... La Fontaine was in society a mere simpleton. His blunders would not come in amiss among the stories of Hierocles. But these men attained literary eminence in spite of their weaknesses. Boswell attained it by reason ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... your trees divide their discourse somewhat Ellesmerically: they do not talk with the simplicity La Fontaine's would; but there is a good deal in them. ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... of the work as a whole, or who would relegate it to obscurity for its occasional gross indecency, know and love the story of Cupid and Psyche, if not in the original at least in many a work of art, and in the pages of La Fontaine, Walter ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... the Berjere. L'heure du berger ou l'amant trouve celle qu'il aime favorable a ses voeux. cf. La Fontaine, Contes. La Coupe Enchantee. 'Il y fait bon, l'heure du berger sonne.' It is a favourite expression of Mrs. Behn. cf. Sir Patient Fancy, Act I, i. 'From Ten to Twelve are the happy hours of the Bergere, those of intire enjoyment.' Also the ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... Un peu de chaque chose et rien de l'ensemble, a la Francaise: telle etait la devise de Montaigne et telle est aussi la devise de la critique francaise. Nous ne sommes pas synthetiques, comme diraient les Allemands; le mot meme n'est pas francaise. L'imagination de detail nous suffit. Montaigne, La Fontaine Madame de Sevigne, sont volontiers ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... there is love enough, all the world is in good humour, and that is the essential point; for without good humour, what becomes of the pleasures of society? As to the rest, I think of inconstancy, or infidelity, as it is called, much as our good La Fontaine did—"Quand on le sait, c'est peu de chose—quand on ne le sait pas, ce ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... species of fame to be derived from men of letters. He knew their venality and their needs. His sumptuous, well-appointed table was placed in grandiose fashion at their disposal. Moreover, he made sure of their attachment and esteem by fees and enormous pensions. The worthy La Fontaine nibbled like others at the bait, and at any rate paid his share of the reckoning by the most profuse gratitude. M. Fouquet had one great defect: he took it into his head that every woman is devoid of will-power and of resistance if only one ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... Contes de la Fontaine, avec miniatures, vignettes et culs-de-lampes a chaque conte; 2 vol. in 4o.; m. bleu, double de tapis, etuis. "Manuscrit incomparable pour le genie et l'execution des dessins. Il est inconcevable que la vie d'un artiste ait pu ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... forty-five pounds; Roman de Guy de Warwick, Paris, 1525, one hundred and thirty pounds; the New Actes and Constitucionis of Parliament maid by James V., Kyng of Scottis, printed on vellum at Edinburgh in 1541, one hundred and fifty-one pounds; the Contes of La Fontaine, Amsterdam (Paris), 1762, in two small 8vo volumes, bound in red morocco, ninety-three pounds; Moliere's Works, with plates by Moreau, six volumes, 1773, ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... He said nothing of himself. He was absorbed in my stories concerning you. I told him as pretty a fable as La Fontaine related of the Avare qui avait perdu son tresor! I said you were a beautiful chatelaine besieged by an army of lovers, but the knight errant Fortunatus had alone won your favor, and would receive your hand! The brave Colonel! I could see he winced at this. His steel cuirass was not invulnerable. ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... is pleasantly situated at the entrance of the Bois de Boulogne. Here he took delight in assembling under his roof the most eminent geniuses of the age; especially Chapelle, Racine, Moliere, and La Fontaine. Racine the younger gives the following account of a droll circumstance that occurred at supper at Auteuil with these guests. "At this supper," he says, "at which my father was not present, the wise Boileau was no more master of himself than any of his guests. ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... over his copy-books at one end of the table where Mademoiselle Servien had just cleared away the meal. His father would be busy with a book. As age advanced he had acquired a taste for reading, his favourites being La Fontaine's Fables, Anquetil's History of France, and Voltaire's Dictionnaire Philosophique, "to get the hang of things," as he put it. His sister made fruitless efforts to distract his attention with some stinging criticism ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... followers of the French, in a genre not, strictly speaking, lyric at all, were the two fabulists, Samaniego and Iriarte. F. Maria de SAMANIEGO (1745-1801) gave to the traditional stock of apologues, as developed by Phaedrus, Lokman and La Fontaine, a permanent and popular Castilian form. Tomas de IRIARTE (1750-1791), a more irritable personage who spent much time in literary polemics, wrote original fables (Fabulas literarias, 1781) directed not against the foibles of mankind in general, but against the ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... years in Boston, Elizur Wright translated La Fontaine's Fables into English verse,—one of the best metrical versions of a foreign poet,—and it is much to be regretted that the book is out of print. It did not sell, of course, and Elizur Wright, determined that neither he ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... Gil Blas, though all have their adventures by heart; while Goldsmith's "Deserted Village" has been committed to memory by our daughters and wives, in a series of exquisite illustrations. Every body has La Fontaine by heart, thanks to the pencil of Granville, which requires neither grammar nor dictionary to aid its interpretations; and even Defoe—even the unparalleled Robinson Crusoe—is devoured by our ingenuous youth ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... allowing the others to pass on. She neared my window. Who is the maiden with the anachronic baby-cart? She is the milkmaid of the country. Here in Germany Perrette does not poise her milk upon her head or weigh it in a balance, in order to afford by its overthrow a fable to La Fontaine. She can dream at her ease as she draws it behind her. My fair-haired neighbor paused. A tall lad thereupon emerged from the neighboring trees, and, replacing Perrette at her wagon, he fitted himself dexterously into her maiden ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... when she smiles. But did you never reprove your witty friend, La Fontaine, for the vicious levity that appears in many of his tales? He was as guilty of the crime of debauching the Muses as ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... fellow with literary tastes above his calling, was engaged towards midnight in reading M. de la Fontaine's 'Elegie aux Nymphes de Vaux,' when a sudden violent jangling fetched him to his feet, with every hair of his head erect and separate. Before he could collect his senses the jangling broke into a series of terrific detonations, in ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... again of pony—this time cold! 'I will frankly confess that I was not enchanted, and had it not been for the Monopole, of which there are great stores in the hotel and the club—thousand cases in all, I believe—I should have collapsed. For as Monsieur la Fontaine has informed us, even the most willing of stomachs has certain rights, and there are times when a good deal of zeal is necessary. It is true we have now a narcotic to feed on which supports us at all times almost without ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... president of the internal republic. He has charge of the stoves; the whole weight of affairs is on his hands, and he provides for the interests of all. Aesop taught us this, long ago, in his fable of "The Belly and Members." [Footnote: La Fontaine's translation is quoted in the French original, where the name of the fable is "Messer Gaster," a more correct title than our own. Gaster is a Greek word signifying stomach; and it is strictly the stomach ...
— The History of a Mouthful of Bread - And its effect on the organization of men and animals • Jean Mace
... the publication, in attractive form, of juvenile books. Newbery's children's books made him famous in his day, but the world seems to have forgotten him. Yet he deserves a monument along with AEsop, and La Fontaine, and Kate Greenaway, and Andersen, and Scott and Henty, and all the other greater and lesser lights who have done so much to gladden the heart and enlarge the mind of ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... practical purposes a French unit, Roman Catholic in religion, and, in structure, semifeudal. In the cities, the national self-consciousness of the French was most conspicuously present; and leaders like Papineau, La Fontaine, and Cartier proved the reality of French culture and political skill. Below the higher classes, Durham and Metcalfe noticed that in Lower Canada the facilities given by the church for higher education produced a class of smaller professional men, from whose number the ordinary politicians ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... produce anything, and Lucian in an after age is scarcely characteristic enough for the purpose, perhaps we may pronounce Rabelais and Montaigne the earliest of writers in the class described. In the century following theirs, came Sir Thomas Brown, and immediately after him La Fontaine. Then came Swift, Sterne, with others less distinguished; in Germany, Hippel, the friend of Kant, Harmann, the obscure; and the greatest of the whole body—John Paul Fr. Richter. In him, from the strength and determinateness ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... may very well be appended to all. "MM. les voyageurs, sont pries, quand ils descendent, de ne pas aller plus vite que la voiture:" passengers are requested, when they descend, not to go faster than the vehicle. A most necessary request! La Fontaine, when he wrote the fable in which he gives an account of a vehicle ascending a steep eminence, and the exertions of a fly to assist the horses, must have just returned from some excursion in a Diligence, during which he was witness to the creeping, toiling, panting of the animals pulling it up ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... sympathy with such labor as you yourself have bestowed upon the most brilliant civilization of the East, has often sustained my ardor through nights of toil given to the details of our modern civilization. And will not you, whose naive kindliness can only be compared with that of our own La Fontaine, be glad to know ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... heard last," she says, laughing at her own impressibility. It is an amiable admission, but she has very fine and rational ideas of her own, notwithstanding. In books, for which she had always a passion, she found unfailing consolation. Corneille and La Fontaine were her favorite traveling companions. "I am well satisfied to be a substance that thinks and reads," she says, finding her good uncle a trifle dull for a compagnon de voyage. Her tastes were catholic. She read Astree ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... short of a dozen years of heculean labor: That a man must have explored every sphere of social life, to become a genuine novelist, inasmuch as the novel is the private history of nations: That the great story-tellers, Aesop, Lucian, Boccaccio, Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, La Fontaine, Lesage, Sterne, Voltaire, Walter Scott, the unknown Arabians of the Thousand and One Nights, were all men of genius as well as ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Second Part • Honore de Balzac
... all foreign illustrators for babyland is M. Boutet de Monvel, whose works deserve an exhaustive monograph. Although comparatively few of his books are really well known in England, "Little Folks" contains a goodly number of his designs. La Fontaine's "Fables" (an English edition of which is published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge) is (so far as I have discovered) the only important volume reprinted with English text. Possibly his "Jeanne d'Arc" ought not to be named among ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... seems misplaced, we see more absurdity than talent in representing a sheep as talking to a wolf. To us fables now present, not what is strange and difficult of comprehension, but mentally fanciful folly. In some few instances in La Fontaine and Gay, the wisdom of the lessons atones for the strangeness of their garb, and the peculiarity of the dramatis personae may tend to rivet them in our minds. There is something also fresh and pleasant in the scenes of country life ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... high degree of excellence in the fourteenth century, and in old documents describing valuable articles of furniture, care is taken to note that they are of Parisian workmanship. According to Lacroix, there is an account of the court silversmith, Etienne La Fontaine, which gives us an idea of the amount of extravagance sometimes committed in the manufacture and decorations of a chair, into which it was then the fashion to introduce the incrustation of precious stones; thus for ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... but a tiny bit hurt, too, that French Headquarters should get the news first from me and not from their own War Ministry. He insists on my going round the French trenches and sent a capitaine de la Fontaine along with me. Until to-day I had quite failed to grasp the extent of the ground we had gained. But we want a lot more before we can begin to feel safe. The French trenches are not as good as ours by a long chalk, and bullets keep coming through ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... you like the bear in the fable of La Fontaine; she will throw paving stones at your head to drive away the flies that alight on it. She will tell you in the evening all the things that have been said about you, and will ask an explanation of acts which you never ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac
... La Fontaine and Kung the philosopher are right: life is a serious matter, which it will not do to throw away into the first bush by the roadside like a useless garment. We must look upon it not as a pleasure, nor yet as a punishment, but as a duty of which we have to acquit ourselves as well as we can until ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... that in his dreams Goethe solved many weighty scientific problems and put into words many most beautiful verses. So also La Fontaine (The Fable of Pleasures) and Coleridge and Voltaire. Bernard Palissy had in a dream the inspiration for one of ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... pensive—melancholy air. He was sitting on his bed, only half-dressed, and with legs dangling over the edge, contemplating a host of garments, which with their fringes, lace, embroidery, and slashes of ill-assorted hues, were strewed all over the floor. Porthos, sad and reflective as La Fontaine's hare, did not observe D'Artagnan's entrance, which was, moreover, screened at this moment by M. Mouston, whose personal corpulency, quite enough at any time to hide one man from another, was effectually doubled ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... spend in it will be sweet to look back upon," he said. "To live as I like, to work in my own way, to go to sleep conjuring up the future, which I imagine beautiful, to have Rousseau's Julie as a sweetheart, La Fontaine and Moliere as friends, Racine as a master, and Pere Lachaise as a promenade ground! Ah! if it could only last for ever!" His dreaming led him on to wider anticipations even than those of literary glory. "If I am to be a grand ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... pese tant qu'un secret Le porter loin est difficile aux dames: Et je scais mesme sur ce fait Bon nombre d'hommes qui sont femmes." —LA FONTAINE. ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... attached to the Emperor until the end, says of Josephine (tome i. p. 227), "Josephine was irresistibly attractive. Her beauty was not regular, but she had 'La grace, plus belle encore que la beaute', according to the good La Fontaine. She had the soft abandonment, the supple and elegant movements, and the graceful carelessness of the creoles.—(The reader must remember that the term "Creole" does not imply any taint of black blood, but only that the person, of European family, has been born in ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... have, one and all, an air of dignity and prosperity which gives animation to the landscape. The very names are among the most pleasant to the ear, and often among the most illustrious in the language. Our great men of letters, La Fontaine and Racine, Pope Urban II, who preached the First Crusade, and other statesmen and princes, all born in the province, had already made it a genuinely historic spot; and the memory of the battles fought ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... as I found all the letters and sounds described in the book. Of course this was tasking slender powers for great ends; but it gave me something to do on a rainy day, and I acquired a sufficient knowledge of French to read with pleasure La Fontaine's "Fables," "Le Medecin Malgre ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... is a form of fiction in which the French have always delighted and in which they have always excelled, from the days of the jongleurs and the trouveres, past the periods of La Fontaine and Voltaire, down to the present. The conte is a tale, something more than a sketch, it may be, and something less than a short story. In verse it is at times but a mere rhymed anecdote, or it may attain almost to the direct swiftness of a ballad. The Canterbury Tales are contes, ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... who was deformed, was elected to succeed La Fontaine in the French Academy. On that occasion it was said that "La Fontaine was very ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various
... La Fontaine has done it in his fables and Perrault in his tales. George Sand has her place, in this race of ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... said my uncle, quoting from La Fontaine; and then, opening a pale-blue eye full on Alain, he ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... la Fontaine who was asking the questions. He was willing to make the most he could out of what she ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... anecdotes illustrates this. To point an anecdote or a repartee, there is no extravagance of falsehood that the French will not endure. What nation but the French would have tolerated that monstrous fiction about La Fontaine, by way of illustrating his supposed absence of mind—viz. that, on meeting his own son in a friend's house, he expressed his admiration of the young man, and begged to know his name. The fact probably may have been that La Fontaine was not ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... the lines beginning, "How doth the little crocodile" are a parody on "How doth the little busy bee," a song which a French child has, of course, never heard of. In this case Bue gave up the idea of translation altogether, and, instead, parodied La Fontaine's "Maitre Corbeau" as follows:— ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... First Portion of Seventeenth Century: Intellectual and Brilliant Poets: Malherbe, Corneille; Great Prose Writers: Balzac, Descartes. Second Portion of Seventeenth Century: Poets: Racine, Moliere, Boileau, La Fontaine; Prose Writers: Bossuet, Pascal, ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... when it came to be reprinted with "Les Souhaits Ridicules" and "Peau d'Asne" in 1695, they were entrusted to the firm of Coignard and described as being by "Mr Perrault, de l'Academie Francoise." La Fontaine had made a fashion of this ...
— The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault • Charles Perrault
... best poetry is prose. He was born in the ancient Danish city of Odense, on April 2d, 1805, of poor and shiftless parents. He had little regular instruction, and few childish associates. His youthful imagination was first stimulated by La Fontaine's 'Fables' and the 'Arabian Nights,' and he showed very early a dramatic instinct, trying to act and even to imitate Shakespeare, though, as he says, "hardly able to spell a single word correctly." It was therefore natural that the visit of a dramatic company ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... La Fontaine tells us this, and the Pope proves it to us. In spite of the attention paid to religious instruction, the sermons, the good books, the edifying spectacles, the lottery, and so many other good things, faith is departing. ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... mythology. Putois is a mythical personage, the most obscure, I grant you, and of the lowest order. The coarse satyr, who in olden times sat at the table with our peasants in the North, was considered worthy of appearing in a picture by Jordaens and a fable by La Fontaine. The hairy son of Sycorax appeared in the noble world of Shakespeare. Putois, less fortunate, will be always neglected by artists and poets. He lacks bigness and the unusual style and character. He was conceived by minds too reasonable, ...
— Putois - 1907 • Anatole France |
