Life & Wisdom Quote by Jean de La Fontaine

A neat little blasphemy that doubles as a professional bio: if you make your living by telling stories about people, you are already in the devil's economy. La Fontaine, the great fabulist of 17th-century France, understood how power works in a court culture where reputation is currency and the most dangerous truths have to travel disguised. Calling the journalist indebted to "the evil one" isn’t theology; it’s a sly admission that the trade runs on temptation: curiosity, scandal, envy, the itchy pleasure of exposure.

The line works because it flips the usual moral hierarchy. Journalism likes to present itself as purification - sunlight, accountability, the civic sacrament. La Fontaine suggests the opposite: that the craft succeeds by exploiting the very impulses polite society pretends to have outgrown. The devil here is less horned villain than patron saint of disclosure, the figure who whispers what everyone suspects and no one can safely say. Tribute is the price paid for access, for attention, for the circulation of rumors that become "news" once printed.

Placed against La Fontaine's own method, the jab sharpens. His fables smuggle social critique past censors by putting it in animals' mouths; journalists do the inverse, putting animal appetites into public figures and calling it reportage. Either way, the writer profits from the friction between virtue as performed and vice as practiced. The quote’s cynicism isn’t nihilism; it’s a warning: the storyteller can serve the public and still be complicit in the darker fuel that keeps the public watching.