La tour d’ivoire : sixième tentation de La Fontaine ?

Abstract

According to Giraudoux, La Fontaine had to overcome five temptations – bourgeois life, women, high society, etc. – before discovering his true vocation as a fabulist. Could the ivory tower have been a sixth temptation that seduced him just before the fall of Fouquet? La Fontaine’s career would then be divided into two periods: the period of “gallant” disengagement and the period of the discovery, with the Fables, of an “impure” poetry that combined different kinds of knowledge and dialogued with the society of his time. This chronological perspective is not wrong, but it needs to be qualified. It is less a question of evolution than of a double postulation that animated La Fontaine’s career, torn between lightness and seriousness, between the cult of form and scholarly innutrition, between the temptation of confinement and openness to the world.

Keywords

• commitment
• La Fontaine (Jean de)
• galanterie
• ivory tower
• Fables
• literary autonomy