01 Wednesday Dec 2021
Posted in Animals in Literature, Æsop, Illustrations
—ooo—
We are leaving language laws and medicine in Quebec. My next post is about French illustrator Félix Lorioux (1872–1964).
I wanted to publish it today, but my current illness is stubborn. I must spend a week or so in Sherbrooke, but I will be returning to my friend’s home. The company of friends and readers is precious. So is the magic of this season.
Love to everyone 💕
© Micheline Walker
1 December 2021
WordPress
23 Friday Aug 2019
Tags
archetype, Boasting, Cycles and Motifs, Dom Juan, Grenouille et Boeuf, La Fontaine, Molière, The Frog and the Ox
John Ray [EBook #24108]
A few days ago, I attempted to write a short post on Jean de La Fontaine‘s La Grenouille qui se veut faire aussi grosse que le bœuf (The Frog Who Wished To Be As Big As The Ox). Although the genre and length differ, in both cases, boasting leads to devastating consequences. La Fontaine’s Site officiel no longer provides the text, in French and in English, of La Fontaine’s twelve books of fables. The new site may still be under construction, but it will be mostly for visitors to the Musée. At any rate, I decided to use les moyens du bord, sites such as Project Gutenberg, Internet Archive, Wikisource, and other sources. I will update all my posts featuring a fable by La Fontaine.
La Fontaine’s La Grenouille qui se veut faire aussi grosse que le bœuf is one of Æsop’s Fables. It is number 376 in the Perry Index. Now, The Frog and Ox is, in its broadest terms, a fable version of Dom Juan. Fables often have a farcical ending. They tell us to think of the consequences, but wrap the truth in a lie: animals do not speak, yet they do. Animals speak, yet they don’t.
Wikipedia’s entries on La Fontaine’s fables often contain not only a translation, but also images. Gutenberg’s [EBook #24108] was illustrated by John Rae. The fables were translated by W. T. (William Trowbridge) Larned. It is an edition for children and it is beautiful!
John Ray [EBook #24108]
John Ray [EBook #24108]
A Frog had an Ox in her view;
His bulk, to her, appeared ideal.
She, not even as large, all in all, as an egg hitherto,
Envious, stretched, swelled, strained, in her zeal
To match the beast in overall size,
Saying, “Sister, lend me your eyes.
Is this enough? Am I not yet there, in every feature?”
“Nope.” “Then now?” “No way.” “There now, as good as first?”
“You’re not anywhere near.” The diminutive creature
Inflated still more, till she burst.
The world is full of folk who are as far from being sages.
Every city gent would build chateaux like Louis Quatorze;
Every petty prince names ambassadors,
Every marquis wants to have pages.
credit
http://lafontaine.mmlc.northwestern.edu/fables/grenouille_boeuf_en.html
Une Grenouille vit un Bœuf
Qui lui sembla de belle taille.
Elle qui n’était pas grosse en tout comme un œuf,
Envieuse s’étend, et s’enfle, et se travaille
Pour égaler l’animal en grosseur,
Disant : « Regardez bien, ma sœur,
Est-ce assez ? dites-moi : n’y suis-je point encore ?
— Nenni. — M’y voici donc ? — Point du tout. — M’y voilà ?
— Vous n’en approchez point. » La chétive pécore
S’enfla si bien qu’elle creva.
Le monde est plein de gens qui ne sont pas plus sages :
Tout Bourgeois veut bâtir comme les grands Seigneurs,
Tout petit Prince a des Ambassadeurs,
Tout Marquis veut avoir des Pages.
credit: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Grenouille_qui_se_veut_faire_aussi_grosse_que_le_b%C5%93uf
La Fontaine and Molière were contemporaries and friends, close friends, it would seem. La Fontaine was a pallbearer when Molière was buried under cover of darkness. Comedians were excommunicated. La Grange (Charles Varlet, sieur de la Grange) kept the books, le registre. We know, therefore, what fabric was used to make certain costumes, but we do not know why Jean-Baptiste Poquelin chose the name Molière. There are so many names. Molière did not say much about himself, nor did La Fontaine.
However, Dom Juan boasts, as does La Fontaine’s frog. No frog can be as large as an ox. It therefore bursts as do the bombastic characters of the commedia dell’arte and those of Greek and Latin comedy. The alazṓn of ancient Greece could be a senex iratus, an angry old man, or a miles gloriosus, a boastful character. Dom Juan is a miles gloriosus, un fanfaron.
Molière also depicted his century in a natural fashion, using correct but ordinary French. French is called “la langue de Molière.” As well, Alceste (The Misanthrope) is an atrabilaire amoureux. There were four temperaments or humeurs. When discussing medicine and Molière, I mentioned the four temperaments or humeurs. Philinte is flegmatique. As for Dom Juan, who is “jeune encore” (still young), I believe he would be a sanguine temperament. These words are still used. I was told about the four “temperaments” as a child.
The Four Temperaments (Psychologia.co)
Moreover, these characters, including our boastful frog, are archetypes. The miles gloriosus is an archetype. We associate archetypes with Jungian psychology, but the stock characters of the commedia dell’arte are also archetypes, as is Æsop/La Fontaine’s boastful frog. Literature has its genres, archetypes, themes, motifs, cycles, etc.
However, until André Villiers, Molière was seldom looked upon as a philosopher, or philosophe (thinker). The philosophes of the French Enlightenment discussed individual rights versus collective rights and other subjects. This discourse, freedom mostly, begins in ancient Greece, if not earlier. Montaigne takes it up. It crosses the seventeenth century in France and elsewhere. It includes le libertinage érudit (Dom Juan). It finds an apex in John Locke (see the Age of Enlightenment), and is finely articulated in the writings of the philosophes of the French Enlightenment, such as Montesquieu and Voltaire, who met in the Salons. Rousseau‘s Le Contrat social was published in 1762. Freedom demands that certain freedoms be denied and some restored or instituted.
Dom Juan XII par Claude Weisbuch, circa 1990 (Galerie 125)
It is unlikely that in “Elfland”[1] a husband can abandon his wife. There may not be husbands and wives in Elfland. A small, but boastful frog is not a Dom Juan defying God, the devil according to some critics.[2] However, fables are anthropomorphic. So, boastful frogs are used to depict boastful human beings. Both our frog and Dom Juan pit themselves against the impossible, including Heaven … and burst. Bursting is a motif.
Our next play is Les Fourberies de Scapin (Scapin the Schemer). Scapin is the most ingenuous zanni before Figaro.
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[1] G. K. Chesterton, “The Ethics of Elfland,” Orthodoxy (New York: Dood, Mead and Company, 1943 [1908]), pp. 81-118.
[2] Claude Reichler, La Diabolie: la séduction, la renardie, l’écriture (Paris : Éditions de Minuit, 1979), p. 17.
P. S. Please see David Nicholson’s comment, below. The remains, or what are believed to be the remains, of La Fontaine and Molière are side by side in the Père Lachaise cemetery
Love to everyone 💕
Hank Knox – Rameau, La Poule
Le Musée du Château Dufresne, Montréal, QC
Crispin et Scapin peinture d’Honoré Daumier, XIXe siècle.
© Micheline Walker
23 August 2019
WordPress
28 Saturday Sep 2013
Posted in Æsop, Fables, French Literature, Jean de La Fontaine
Tags
Achille Michallon, Avianus, Æsop, Elizur Wright, Jean de La Fontaine, l'honnête homme, Le Chêne et le Roseau, Louis XIV, Maëlle Doliveux, Perry Index, The Oak and the Reed, Vaux-le-Vicomte
Achille Michallon (1796-1822; aged 26)
(For Michallon, the “Oak and the Reed” could be used to describe the fate of Napoleon I.)
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The Oak and the Reed
Jean de La Fontaine (Wikipedia)
The Oak and the Reeds (Wikipedia)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oak_and_the_Reed
http://mythfolklore.net/aesopica/index.htm (texts, etc.)←
Aesop’s Fables
Perry Index (#70)
“That proud, old, sky-encircled head,
Whose feet entwined the empire of the dead!”
The Reed and the Oak Tree
Maëlle Doliveux
(Please click on the image to enlarge it.)
In an earlier post on the “The Oak and the Reed,” I commented on this line, the moral of the “The Oak and Reed:” ‘Je plie, et ne romps pas.’ (‘I bend, and do not break.’) This line illustrates La Fontaine’s uncanny ability to tell what he is not telling (dire-sans-dire). In fact, it was long believed that this fable expounded the importance of humility and little else:
“Written in the autocratic time of Louis XIV of France, this was so successfully achieved that it appeared to teach the value of humility at the same time as suggesting that rulers may not be as powerful as they think themselves.” (“The Oak and the Reed” [I.22], Wikipedia)
La Fontaine had been a protégé of Nicolas Fouquet/Foucquet (January 27, 1615 – March 23, 1680), the Superintendant of Finances, from 1653 until 1661, the year Louis XIV became King of France. After 17 August 1661, the day Louis XIV attended a fête at Vaux-le-Vicomte, Fouquet’s magnificent castle, Louis XIV accused Fouquet of embezzlement. Fouquet was convicted and condemned to banishment, a sentence Louis XIV himself, then aged 22, commuted to life imprisonment, at Pignerol (now Pinerolo, Italy), a sadder fate than banishment. La Fontaine had written his “Élégie aux Nymphes de Vaux,” in the vain hope of obtaining a degree of clemency towards his former patron, Nicolas Fouquet. He also wrote “Le Songe de Vaux.”
The Oak and the Reed
(Photo credit: oldbookillustrations.com)
As a university teacher, I often taught La Fontaine’s “Chêne et Roseau” and would ask my students to provide a moral for La Fontaine’s fable. What did “Je plie, et ne romps pas” (I bend, and do not break) mean?
However, they did not see that “The Oak and the Reed” was about human behaviour and, in particular, about the importance of flexibility. He who bends does not break. The meaning of La Fontaine’s fables does not jump off the page.
Earlier in the history of this fable, this moral, “I bend but do not break,” was expressed more explicitly. According to Wikipedia, such was the moral of Avianus‘ (400 CE) telling of this fable, and the moral of earlier Greek retellings. It is the moral expressed in Geoffrey Chaucer‘s (c. 1343 – 25 October 1400) Troilus and Criseyde, (II.1387-9) [EBook #257].
A reed before the wind lives on, while mighty oaks do fall.
In footnote 28 of Gutenberg’s version of La Fontaine’s Fables, classified as [EBook #7241], American translator Elizur Wright and J. W. M. Gibbs, editor, state that “[t]he groundwork of this fable is in Æsop, and also in the Fables of Avianus.” Flavius Avianus lived in the 5th century CE (the 400s) and translated 42 Æsopic fables. Famous translator and printer William Caxton (ca. 1415~1422 – ca. March 1492), translated “The Fables of Avian” into “Englyshe.”[i]
Yet, it should be pointed out that, although Flavius Avianus‘ translation was in Latin verse, his main source had been Babrius who translated Æsop’s Fables into Greek. It could be, therefore, that Babrius’ moral was more explicit. European sources of Æsopic fables were either the Latin translation by Phædrus‘ (c. 15 BCE – c. 50 CE) or Babrius‘ Æsop’s Fables. In fact, Avianus became a source to fable writers as did Névelet, whose Latin translation of Æsopic fables La Fontaine used, the Mythologia Æsopica Isaaci Nicolai Neveleti, Frankfurt, 1610. (See lafontaine.net.)
According to Wikipedia’s entry on “The Oak and the Reed,” flexibility was the teaching of the Rabbinic Talmud and the moral of earlier versions of “The Oak and the Reed,” all of which are rooted in “Near Eastern dispute poems.” The Talmud‘s “Be pliable like a reed, not rigid like a cedar” is attributed to Rabbi Simeon ben Eleazar. The same moral is expressed in a Chinese proverb “A tree that is unbending is easily broken,” and the saying goes back to the Tao Te Ching. (See The Oak and the Reed, Wikipedia.)
Moreover, this moral, “[h]e who bends does not break,” could be associated with a French seventeenth-century ideal, that of l’honnête homme. “L’honnête homme” or the concept of “honnêteté” was first described in Baldassare Castiglione‘s Il Cortegiano (1528), The Book of the Courtier, but Castiglione’s courtier underwent changes in Paris salons and in the works of the Chevalier de Méré, Nicolas Faret and Guez de Balzac.
In France, l’honnête homme is the perfect gentleman and courtier and he is, furthermore, as he seems. There is very little, if any, sprezzatura, a form of studied carelessness, about “l’honnête homme.” “Honnêteté,” in its literal sense, that of “honesty,” militates against the idea of a mere façade. I should think there were exceptions, but, in theory, l’honnête homme was well-educated (but not pedantic), had fine manners, dressed well, spoke well, never boasted and avoided all extremes, favouring modération.[ii]
Bernard Salomon‘s woodcut of “The olive tree and the reed” from a French collection of Æsop’s Fables in rhyme (Lyon 1547)
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Trees have been rigid for a very long time, but they have not been oak trees consistently. The Talmud features a cedar and fabulists Gilles Corrozet (1547), Gabriele Faerno (1564) Giovanni Maria Verdizotti used an olive tree. As for Swabian translator Heinrich Steinhöwel, he also used an olive tree. His 1480 translation of Æsopic fables is rooted in Avianus, Babrius (Greek) and Romulus (a 5th-century Latin-language fabulist). Romulus may be a legendary figure, which may also be the case with respect to Æsop himself.
I must close, but the above illustrates the depth of “The Oak and the Reed,” its age, not to mention its universality. It is not only about the doomed pride of the mighty, but also about the flexibility humans require to function in society, under Louis XIV especially. As for the ambiguity of its moral, it illustrates La Fontaine’s mute eloquence and may point to the Latin source of this fable. However talkative animals, trees and willows can be in literature, they do not speak. La Fontaine himself gave everyone the impression he was absent-minded and he was often referred to as a “bonhomme.” After Vaux-le-Vicomte, the fall of Nicolas Fouquet, he let animals, trees, willows and, at times, humans retell a fable that had been told for centuries and, perhaps, millennia.
RELATED ARTICLES
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[i] [EBook #7241], Elizur Wright (translator), J. W. M. Gibbs (editor)
[ii] If you can read French, you may wish to visit Larousse’s site: honnête homme.
La Fontaine’s Fables
1. A Hundred Fables of La Fontaine, Percy J. Billinghurst http://www.gutenberg.org/files/25357/25357-h/25357-h.htm http://www.gutenberg.org/files/25357/25357-h/25357-h.htm#Page_60 [EBook #25357] 2. The Fables of La Fontaine, Elizur Wright, J. W. M. Gibbs, 1882 [1841] http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/8ffab10h.htm [EBook #7241] 3. The Fables of La Fontaine, Walter Thornbury, Gustave Doré http://www.gutenberg.org/files/50316/50316-h/50316-h.htm [EBook #50316] 4. Fables in Rhyme for Little Folks, From the French of La Fontaine John Rae & W.T. (William Trowbridge) Larned http://www.gutenberg.org/files/24108/24108-h/24108-h.htmÆsop’s Fables
1. V. S. Vernon Jones, (tr) G. K. Chesterton, Arthur Rackham (ill) http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11339/11339-h/11339-h.htm http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11339/11339-h/11339-h.htm#030-2 http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11339/11339-h/11339-h.htm#THE_OAK_AND_THE_REEDS [EBook #11339] 2. George Fyler Townsend, translator http://www.gutenberg.org/files/21/21-h/21-h.htm#link2H_4_0210 http://www.gutenberg.org/files/21/21-h/21-h.htm#link2H_4_0128 (The Oak and the Reeds) [EBook #21] 3. Harrison Weir, John Tenniel and Ernest Griset, illustrators http://www.gutenberg.org/files/18732/18732-h/18732-h.htm http://www.gutenberg.org/files/18732/18732-h/18732-h.htm (The Oak and the Reeds) [EBook #18732] 4. Milo Winter (illustrator) The Æsop for Children http://www.gutenberg.org/files/19994/19994-h/19994-h.htm [EBook #19994] 5. The Baldwin Project: The Tree and the Reeds http://www.mainlesson.com/display.php?author=baldwin&book=fables&story=tree
The Reed and the Oak Tree
Maëlle Doliveux
23 Friday Aug 2013
Posted in Æsop, Fables, Jean de La Fontaine
Tags
anthropomorphism, AT 298, Gutenberg [EBook #19994], La Fontaine VI.3, Milo Winter, Phébus et Borée Vl.3
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Milo Winter
(Photo credit: Gutenberg)
This seems a very innocent fable to which La Fontaine has given a lovely moral: “Plus fait douceur que violence.” (“Gentleness does more than violence.”)
“The North Wind and the Sun” is not so innocent a fable and it constitutes good advice to parents, to individuals who interact with other individuals, i.e. all of us, and to nations. It is the diplomatic approach. According to Wikipedia, South Korea’s Sunshine Policy was rooted in this Æsopic fable. I rather like Walter Crane‘s “True strength is not bluster.” (See The North Wind and the Sun, Wikipedia)
But in Wikipedia, one can also read a story according to which Sophocles (497/6 BC – winter 406/5 BC) asked a boy to have sexual intercourse with him. The boy did as he was told. He laid on his cloak but, after the act, he fled with Sophocles’ cloak which Sophocles had used to cover himself and the boy.[ii] Euripides (c. 480 – 406 BC), who had also engaged in sexual intercourse with the same boy, made a joke out of this event. The joke reached Sophocles who ridiculed Euripides in an epigram mentioning Euripides’ indiscretions with a woman other than his wife and alluding to the North Wind (Borée FR), and the Sun (Phébus FR).
It was the Sun, and not a boy, whose heat stripped me naked; As for you, Euripides, when you were kissing someone else’s wife The North Wind screwed you. You are unwise, you who sow In another’s field, to accuse Eros of being a snatch-thief.[iii]The above story is probably apocryphal. But given that Sophocles and Euripides, two dramatists, lived in the 5th century BCE, we know that “The North Wind and the Sun” is an old fable. Æsop lived in c. 620–564 BCE. This fable is probably of Eurasian provenance.
As for the illustrations, they provide us with a good example of anthropomorphism. The elements, the wind and the sun, are humans in disguise. They speak.
Phébus et Borée, by Jean-Baptiste Oudry
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Professor D. L. Alishman lists five tellings of this fable, under Wind and Sun (ATU type 298)
© Micheline Walker
23 August 2013
WordPress
Micheline's Blog 
