"La Fontaine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... It was Jean de la Fontaine who was asking the questions. He was willing to make the most he could out of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... 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
... well back out of their shattered defenses. Within a few hours 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 into France and Flanders. Different estimates ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... 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 with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... anything by heart, not even fables such as those of La Fontaine, simple and charming as they are. For the words of fables are no more the fables themselves than the words of history are history itself. How can we be so blind as to call fables moral lessons for children? We do not reflect that while these stories amuse they also mislead children, who, carried ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... I abandoned the classes of the central school, where I was taught to admire Corneille, Racine, La Fontaine, Moliere, and attended only the mathematical course. This course was entrusted to a retired ecclesiastic, the Abbe Verdier, a very respectable man, but whose knowledge went no further than the elementary course of ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... La Fontaine, Two centuries or more ago, Describes some rats who would arraign A cat, their direst foe, Who killed so many rats And caused the deepest woe, This ...
— The Jingle Book • Carolyn Wells
... Mr. Waller has 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 was born ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... 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 ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... hearts, by means of the graver. Not a boy in his teens has read a line of Don Quixote or 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 in cuts ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... Max Mueller in his essay "On the Migration of Fables" (Chips from a German Workshop, iv., 145-209; it was thus a chip from another German's workshop). It came to Europe before the Arabian Nights and became popular in La Fontaine's fable of Perrette who counted her chickens before they were hatched, as the popular phrase puts it. In such a case one can only give a reproduction of the literary source, and it is a problem which of the various forms which appear ...
— Europa's Fairy Book • Joseph Jacobs
... face, and rendered his glorious eyes even more radiant. I stood before him in reverential awe, and he gazed upon me with a kindly smile. Then he commenced examining me about my studies, and finally he drew a volume of La Fontaine's 'Fables' from his pocket, opened the book and asked me to translate the fable on the page he showed me. I did so—but when he afterward was going to praise me for the skill with which I had rendered ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... faint idea of his industry. Besides those already mentioned are Montaigne, Dante, the Bible, Milton, Rabelais, Tennyson's "Idyls of the King," "The Ancient Mariner," Shakespeare, "Legende de Croquemitaine," La Fontaine's "Fables," and others still. ...
— The Dore Gallery of Bible Illustrations, Complete • Anonymous
... RATON, two personages in La Fontaine's fable of the Monkey and the Cat, of whom R. cracks the nut ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... flashes of a second, identify ourselves with the great unceasing, steady light which we and millions of myriads besides go to make up. Are we much surer of being alive to-morrow than of being dead in fifty years? "Is there any moment which can certify to its successor?" That is the answer to La Fontaine's octogenarian, planting his trees, despite the gibes of the little beardless boys whom, as is inevitable in such cases, ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... has developed to frightful proportions. Why should the sight of a bill put me in a rage? It verges on madness. Aisse has not made money. Dernieres Chansons has almost gotten me into a lawsuit. The story of la Fontaine is not ended. I am tired, ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... Bourrienne is his place of secretary to Napoleon, and who remained 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, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... wit,' says Landor, {7} 'require a sound and capacious mind, which is always a grave one. Rabelais and La Fontaine are recorded by their countrymen to have been reveurs. Few men have been graver than Pascal. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the 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 a mode created by himself, and stamped, like ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... indifference as if he had never heard Dryden's name; 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 ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... 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 ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... lived in Michel Leconte's house, called the Manoir de la Fontaine, which was disputed by the parishes of St. Lo and St. Herbland. In it was a little chapel very fashionable for private weddings, and a mysterious apartment which could be hired for honeymoons. The Manor was bought in 1429, for the convenience of ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... 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, ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... the National Councils of Women of Germany and The Netherlands by their presidents, Mrs. Marie Stritt and Miss Elizabeth Baelde; from Great Britain, France, Belgium, Norway and Sweden by fraternal delegates, Mrs. Fawcett, Miss Cecile Cahen, Miss Ida La Fontaine, Miss Thea Holst, Dr. Lydia Wahlstrom; from national organizations by Mrs. Elna Munck, Denmark; Dr. Phil. Kaethe Schirmacher, Germany; Miss Stepankova, Bohemia; Mrs. Lang, Austria; Miss K. Honegger represented the newly affiliated national association of Switzerland ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • 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
... not only a composer, but created his own orchestra, trained his artists in acting and singing, and was machinist as well as ballet-master and music-director. He was intimate with Corneille, Moliere, La Fontaine, and Boileau; and these great men were proud to contribute the texts to which he set his music. He introduced female dancers into the ballet, disguised men having hitherto served in this capacity, and in ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... Dorsenne very justly diagnosed there one of those hypnotisms of admiration such as artists, great or small, often inspire around them. But the author, who always generalized too quickly, had not comprehended that the admirer with Florent was grafted on a friend worthy to be painted by La Fontaine or by Balzac, the two poets of friendship, the one in his sublime and tragic Cousin Pons, the other in that short but fine fable, in which is this verse, one of the most ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... dew of Jean de la Fontaine Rabbit heard the hunt and clambered up the path of soft clay. He was afraid of his shadow, and the heather fled behind his swift course. Blue steeples rose from valley to valley as he descended and mounted again. His bounds curved the ...
— Romance of the Rabbit • Francis Jammes
... of 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 ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... fortress of Belle Isle, only to be overtaken by Colbert's boat with its twelve sturdy oarsmen. Whatever may have been the sins of Fouquet, he had so many charming traits and was so beloved by the great writers of France—Moliere, La Fontaine, Madame de Sevigne, Pelisson, and all the rest whom he gathered around him at his chateau—that our sympathies are with him rather than with the cold and calculating Colbert. Putting their hands into ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... and melancholy, my dear Camille! When will you cease your drooping airs? I cannot understand you. I do my best to be agreeable to you, to settle matters satisfactorily. Nothing seems to cheer you. You make me think of the hare in La Fontaine: ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... Neither 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, think ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... 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 Lui" and ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... half-humorous, half-tender ascription to horses and sheep of a quasi-human intelligence. Were we to indulge further our conjectures as to what Burns might have done under more favorable circumstances, it would be easy to argue that he could have ranked with Henryson and La Fontaine as a writer ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... souvent alloit a une belle fontaine au 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 ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... learning. At the early 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 ...
— Esther • Jean Racine
... The new Academy, founded to guard the purity of the French language, lent its weight to the precepts of the critics, who applied the rules of Aristotle, as commented by Longinus and Horace, to modern conditions. The appearance of a number of admirable writers—Corneille, Moliere, Racine, Bossuet, La Fontaine, La Bruyere—simultaneously with this critical movement, gave an authority to the new French literature which enabled it to impose its principles upon England and Germany for over a century. For the creative literature of France conformed its practice, in the main, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... two illustrious men about this time, made more noise than that of two of our grand ladies. The first of these men was La Fontaine, so well known by his "Fables" and stories, and who, nevertheless, was so heavy in conversation. The other was Mignard—so illustrious by his pencil: he had an only daughter—perfectly beautiful: she is repeated in several of those magnificent historical pictures which ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... 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 ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... Yes, yes, 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 ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... Une autre? Provided 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, ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... anecdotes, and prick slippery dates into their memories with a pin, know that there was in Paris, during the last century, about 1770, two attorneys at the Chatelet named, one Corbeau (Raven), the other Renard (Fox). The two names had been forestalled by La Fontaine. The opportunity was too fine for the lawyers; they made the most of it. A parody was immediately put in circulation in the galleries of the court-house, in verses that limped ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... is true, in 1961; but, 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
... that any special attention was given by printers to 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 ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... the lowest rank, or without any rank at all, takes off his hat to you, you should do the same in return. A bow, says La Fontaine, is a note drawn at sight. If you acknowledge it, you must pay the full amount. The two best-bred men in England, Charles the Second and George the Fourth, never failed to take off their hats to ...
— The Laws of Etiquette • A Gentleman
... Sevigne, summing up in a single word the philosophy of many French lives. We will sorrow to-morrow, if need be, and even then, if possible, without darkening our neighbours' day with any grief of ours. Let us retire from life, as from a drawing-room, discreetly, "as from a banquet," said La Fontaine.[66] And this good grace, which is not indifference, but which little resembles the anguish and enthusiasms of the North, is also in its way the mark of strong minds. For they were not made of insignificant beings, those generations who went to battle and left the world without a sneer ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... opening just on a line with the fountain, afford the exit and entrances so necessary for the dramatic masters and valets whose business it is either to meet or to avoid each other. At the corner of one of these streets, called the rue de la Fontaine, shone the notarial escutcheon of Maitre Lupin. The houses of Messieurs Sarcus, Guerbet the collector, Brunet, Gourdon, clerk of the court, and that of his brother the doctor, also that of old Monsieur Gendrin-Vatebled, the keeper of the forests and streams,—all these houses, kept ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... 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 ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... have been great "characters," the slightly monotonous good sense and refinement of French literary and artistic life is broken only by a few such massive or surprising figures as those of Rabelais, La Fontaine, Poussin, Rousseau, Flaubert, Cezanne—a formidable list but a short one, to which, however, a few names could be added. On the other hand, what France has lost in colour she has gained in fertility; and in a universal Honours List for intellectual and artistic prowess the number of French ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... 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 neighbor, ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... within a hundred miles of these peaceful walls (Miss Ferdinand, being apparently incorrigible, will have the kindness to write out this evening, in the original language, the first four fables of our vivacious neighbour, Monsieur La Fontaine) had been very grossly exaggerated by Rumour's voice. In the first alarm and anxiety arising from our sympathy with a sweet young friend, not wholly to be dissociated from one of the gladiators in the bloodless arena in question (the impropriety of Miss ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... 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
... covers the whole of the literary age of Louis XIV. Before 1660 the French had no literature worth preserving, except Rabelais, Montaigne, a few odes of Malherbe, a page or two of Marot, and the tragedies of Corneille. Pascal published the "Provincial Letters" in the year of Regnard's birth. La Fontaine had written a few indifferent verses; Moliere was almost unknown. In 1686, when Regnard became an author, the Voitures, Balzacs, and Benserades, the men of fantastic conceits, the vanguard of the grand army of French wits, had marched away ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... Ariosto, Petrarch and Tasso. These were followed, in France, by Racine, Corneille, Boileau, Voltaire, La Fontaine and Delille; in England, by Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Thomson, Young, Collins, Gray, Byron, Coleridge, &c; in Scotland, by Sir Walter Scott; in Ireland, by Thomas Moore; in Germany, ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... a la fontaine, je ne boirai pas de ton eau," his Eminence cautioned her, whilst the lines of humour about his mouth emphasised themselves, and his grey eyes twinkled. "Other things equal, marriage is as much the proper state for the laity, as celibacy ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... the Loiret, in its short course, suffers from injudicious ornament, yet are there spots to be found upon its banks as soothing as meditation could wish for: the curious traveller may meet with some of them where it loses itself among the mills in the neighbourhood of the villa called La Fontaine. The walks of La Source, where it takes its rise, may, in the eyes of some people, derive an additional interest from the recollection that they were the retreat of Bolingbroke during his exile, and that here it was that his philosophical works were chiefly ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... 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 ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... 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 that he feared no attempts ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Lower Canada was for 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 ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... La Fontaine, gave some public exhibitions in Manchester which attracted the attention of a physician by the name of James Braid. Through the aid rendered by Braid, animal magnetism blossomed into a science. He directed the subject into its proper field: he eschewed the ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... behaved to him in a very hospitable manner, and frequently conversed with him respecting the merits of our English poets, of whom, however, he affected to know but little, and for whom he pretended to care still less. Monsieur de la Fontaine was also at times one of their company, and always spoke in very respectful terms of the poetry of the sister nation. Boileau's pretending to be ignorant of Dryden 'argued himself unknown'; but, perhaps, ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... Rueckert is Adalbert von Chamisso (1781-1838). Though he was born in the Champagne in France, and was therefore a fellow-countryman of Joinville and La Fontaine, he became a German by education and preference, and his name is inseparably linked with German scholarship and letters. It is remarkable that Chamisso began to write German only after 1801 and is reported ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... clot la fontaine ou, par l'heure echauffee, Folatre, elle buvait en descendant des bois; Elle prenait de l'eau dans sa main, douce fee, Et laissait retomber des perles ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... jeux d'esprit of a similar sort followed. A 'Sermon on Painting,' which was preached before Sir Robert Walpole, in the gallery at Houghton, by his chaplain; 'Patapan, or the Little White Dog,' imitated from La Fontaine. No. 38 of the 'Old England Journal,' intended to ridicule Lord Bath; and then, in a magazine, was printed his 'Scheme for a Tax on Message Cards and Notes.' Next the 'Beauties,' which was also handed about, and got into print. ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... another attempt at Gil Blas. I believe I see its easy Grace, humour, etc. But it is (like La Fontaine) too thin a Wine for me: all sparkling with little adventures, but no one to care about; no Colour, no Breadth, like my dear Don; whom I shall resort ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... 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 of his weaknesses. If he had not been a great fool, he ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... - though 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 ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sheath intact, and a banquet of business men was held there to celebrate the beginning of reconstruction. When you think of the St. Francis you think of beautiful wall arrangements. Its Garden Court and Fable Room, where La Fontaine's diverting inventions serve as the motifs for murals, attract the younger set for dancing and tea. The Tapestry Room is a distinguished ...
— Fascinating San Francisco • Fred Brandt and Andrew Y. Wood
... and sunshine which one might say were thrown upon the cloth upon which Beroalde de Verville made his cherry-gatherer walk. Tasso, Cervantes, Boccaccio, Ariosto (Ariosto as he has drawn him, inspired by Love and Folly), it recalls all his genii of happiness. It laughs with the liberties of La Fontaine. It goes from Properce to Grecourt, from Longus to Favart, from Gentil-Bernard to Andre Chenier. It has, so to speak, the heart of a lover and the hand of a charming rascal. In it the breath of a sigh passes into a kiss and it is young with immortal youth: it is the poem of Desire, ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... who was deformed, was elected to succeed La Fontaine in the French Academy. On that occasion it was said that "La Fontaine was very properly succeeded ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various
... review on which Lucien had worked for almost nothing, and to which Blondet gave the benefit of his collaboration, of the wisdom of his suggestions and the depth of his views. Finot and Blondet embodied Bertrand and Raton, with this difference—that la Fontaine's cat at last showed that he knew himself to be duped, while Blondet, though he knew that he was being fleeced, still did all he could for Finot. This brilliant condottiere of the pen was, in fact, long to remain a slave. Finot hid a brutal strength of will under a heavy exterior, under polish ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... 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, think ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... one is the pedant who read Hannibal a lecture on the art of war; the other is the carrier who knows the road between London and York better than Humboldt, but a new road is prescribed to him and his knowledge becomes useless. This is the state of mind La Fontaine has described so perfectly in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... and not unlike it at a distance. On the branches were hanging the great mameis, just like the inside of cocoa-nuts when the inner shell has been cracked off. It appeared that Nature was not acquainted with M. De La Fontaine's works, or she would probably have got a hint from the fable of the acorn and the pumpkin, and not have hung mameis and cocoa-nuts at ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... the sections had quickly gathered them together. The battalions of the Butte des Moulins, Lepelletier, des Piques, de la Fontaine-Grenelle, who were the nearest, soon occupied the Carrousel and its principal avenues. The aspect of affairs then underwent a change; Legendre, Kervelegan, and Auguis besieged the insurgents, in their turn, at the head of the sectionaries. At first they ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... choice collection wrong With lines not written in the Frenchman's tongue. Had I a knowledge equal to my will, With airy Chansons I your leaves would fill; With Fabliaux, that should emulate the vein Of sprightly Cresset, or of La Fontaine; Or Scenes Comiques, that should approach the air Of your own favourite—renowned Moliere. But at my suit the Muse of France looks sour, And strikes me dumb! Yet, what is in my power To testify respect for you, I pray, Take in plain ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... were only for the reproduction of the sets of furniture of the style known as Louis XVI, the Beauvais loom would have sufficient reason for existing at the present day. Scenes from Don Quixote, however, and the pictured fables of La Fontaine which we see on old chairs, seem to need age to ripen them. These sets, when made new, shown in all the freshness and unsoiled colour, and unworn wool, and unfaded silk do ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth of March, meetings were held, as we have said, in the Bishop's house to consider what it would be well to do next, at one of which a select company of Inquisitors was chosen to carry on the examination in private. These were Jean de la Fontaine, a lawyer learned in canon law; Jean Beaupere, already her interrogator; Nicolas Midi, a Doctor in Theology; Pierre Morice, Canon of Rouen and Ambassador from the English King to the Council of Bale; Thomas de Courcelles, ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... not my wonder and joy at discovering in it a reflective side; and for half an hour I remained in a leafy alcove listening to her refined converse,—dealing with books like "Corinne," and "La Chaumiere Indienne,"—La Fontaine, Moliere, Montesquieu,—and especially interesting me in the society which moved around us, which as she touched it with her wand of history and eloquence, acquired an inconceivable interest for me, and I was for the first time proud ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... sister below. The only sad part of the view, was the slope of the hill alloted to the poor, where legions of plain black crosses are drawn up into solid squares on its side and stand alone gloomy—the advanced guard of the army of Death! I mused over the tombs of Moliere and La Fontaine; Massena, Mortier and Lefebre; General Foy and Casimir Perier; and finally descended to the shrine where Abelard reposes by the side of his Heloise. The old sculptured tomb, brought away from the Paraclete, still covers their remains, ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... my uncle, quoting from La Fontaine; and then, opening a pale-blue eye full on Alain, he delivered ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "Un mur clt la fontaine o, par l'heure chauffe, Foltre, elle buvait en descendant des bois; Elle prenait de l'eau dans sa main, douce fe, Et laissait retomber des ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... the meaning of old tales, skilfully disengaging the little parcel of truth which usually lies beneath a mass of incorrect or even false statements. He criticises La Fontaine, and questions the statements of Horus Apollo and Pliny. From a mass of undigested knowledge he has created the living science of entomology, which had received from Raumur a first breath of vitality, in such wise that each individual creature is presented in his work with its precise expression ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... 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 ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... inclines to the view that the stories as first published by Perrault were not really written by him, but by his little son of ten or eleven, to whom Perrault told the stories as he had gathered them up with the intention of rendering them in verse after the manner of La Fontaine. The lad had an excellent memory, much natural wit, and a great gift of expression. He loved the stories his father told him and thoroughly enjoyed the task his father set him of rewriting them from memory, as an exercise. This was so happily done, in such a fresh, artless, ...
— The Tales of Mother Goose - As First Collected by Charles Perrault in 1696 • Charles Perrault
... ages have handed down to us. Somewhat later, Clement Marot composed ballades of great precision of form, and the fashion culminated in the 17th century with those of Madame Deshoulieres, Sarrazin, Voiture and La Fontaine. Attacked by Moliere, and by Boileau, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... strange idea of prosody. In order to get lines of the same length he wrote his words between two parallel lines traced from the top to the bottom of the page. His system of versification seemed to be correct when applied to the Alexandrine verse of Racine; but when he saw the fables of La Fontaine, in which the lines are very irregular, he began to ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... have a false de-naturalized taste in the humorous, and as to the limits of the extravagant. We have formerly illustrated this point, and especially we noticed it as a case impossible to any nation but the French to have tolerated the pretended 'absences' of La Fontaine—as, for instance, his affecting to converse with his own son as an entire stranger, and asking the lady who had presented him what might be the name of that amiable young man. The incredulus odi faces one in ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... altogether another matter and belonged to another science, but whether one traced descent from the shark or the wolf was immaterial even in morals. This matter had been discussed for ages without scientific result. La Fontaine and other fabulists maintained that the wolf, even in morals, stood higher than man; and in view of the late civil war, Adams had doubts of his own on the facts of ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... 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, these two manifestations ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... 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 and ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... had 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 the wasted country at the front, might still describe Chateau-Thierry ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... toujours mal; vous en etes encore, une preuve evidente. J'ai vu en beaucoup d'endroits de votre Lettre, que vous avez voulu imiter Sterne;[4] qu'est-il arrive? Vous etes reste au-dessous de lui, comme tous les Imitateurs de notre bon La Fontaine sont restes en deca de l'immortel Fabuliste." p. 20. But most especially does the sensitive M. Lesne betray his surprise and apprehension, on a gratuitous supposition—thrown out by me, by way of pleasantry—that "Mr. Charles ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... 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 ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... de la Fontaine, M.A. He was Conseille d'Instruction during the trial. In the course of it he was threatened by Cauchon for having given some friendly advice to the prisoner, and escaped from Rouen before ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... the summer at his villa of Auteuil, which 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 ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... hear your laugh ring forth From corner of the wood?—Was your advice As to the thyrsis or the ivy asked, When, in grand ballet of fantastic form, God Phoebus, or God Pan, and all his court, Turned the fair head of the proud Montespan, Calling her Amaryllis?—La Fontaine, Flying the courtiers' ears of stone, came he, Tears on his eyelids, to reveal to you The sorrows of his nymphs of Vaux?—What said Boileau to you—to you—O lettered Faun, Who once with Virgil, in the Eclogue, held That ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo |
