Book: Tales

Overview
Jean de La Fontaine’s Tales (Contes et nouvelles en vers, 1665) inaugurates his series of verse narratives for adult readers, parallel to but distinct from his moral Fables. The 1665 volume gathers short, independent stories rendered in supple rhymed verse, drawn from Italian novellieri, medieval French fabliaux, and courtly anecdote. La Fontaine relocates familiar plots, lovers outwitting guardians, duped husbands, compromised clerics, into a French idiom that mingles salon elegance with streetwise wit. The result is a theater of gallantry and ruse where appetite, ingenuity, and chance set the terms, and where conventional morality is teased more than taught.

Form and Voice
The tales are composed chiefly in light, rapid octosyllabic couplets, with occasional shifts that let the narrator linger, mock, or confide. La Fontaine’s speaking presence steers the reading: urbane, conspiratorial, and amused, he apostrophizes the audience, interrupts to gloss a proverb, or dilates on a character’s folly before snapping back to the plot. This mobile voice lets him pivot between playful indecency and polished restraint, borrowing the nimble turns of the fabliau while satisfying the seventeenth-century taste for measure and clarity. Morals appear only to be inverted or deflated; the poem often ends with a wink rather than a verdict.

Themes and Motifs
Desire is the engine: not tragic passion but quicksilver appetite, changing partners, costumes, and pretexts. Marital infidelity is a constant, yet the tone stays comic, even tender, toward human frailty. Authority figures, abbots, judges, physicians, become foils for resourceful servants and young women; sacred offices falter before secular wit. The bed-trick, the hidden observer, the swapped tokens, and the misdirected letter furnish machinery for reversals. Appearances deceive, and the shrewdest character is rarely the stern moralist but the one who reads signs, improvises, and lies gracefully. Pleasure is not opposed to reason; it is a form of practical reason about opportunity and risk.

Plots in Play
La Fontaine’s 1665 selection refashions well-traveled narratives with new tonal balances. From Ariosto’s "Joconde" he takes the sovereign’s anxious proof of universal inconstancy and turns it toward playful anthropology: a portrait of male jealousy repeatedly undone by cheerful evidence to the contrary. From Boccaccio’s vein comes "Le Faucon", in which costly sacrifice for love collides with timing’s irony; generosity remains admirable, but fortune, not virtue, decides outcomes. Elsewhere, in a piece like "Le Cocu, battu et content", the paradoxical title advertises the genre’s logic: the abused husband consoles himself with a specious gain, and the tale displays the comic commerce by which honor, vanity, and desire trade places.

Sources and Transformations
Rather than translate, La Fontaine compresses, re-keys, and decorates. He trims sprawling novelle to their nimblest incidents, adds asides that flatter the reader’s complicity, and sprinkles classical allusion without pedantry. Fabliau bluntness is softened by courtly diction; Italian cunning acquires French sociability. The verse form supplies a metronome that keeps even bawdy turns buoyant, while digressions court the reader’s smile and reinstall narrative as a polished social act. The interplay of learned and popular registers is part of the charm: a libertine anecdote can suddenly host a miniature rhetorical exercise, then return to the bedroom door.

Reception and Legacy
The 1665 Tales delighted salon audiences for their candor and craft, even as clerical and official readers recoiled at their irreverence. Their succès de scandale shadowed La Fontaine with periodic censorship, yet the pieces circulated avidly, fostering further installments. The collection shaped the French verse conte as a mode of elegant insolence, influencing the libertine tradition and feeding the later prose "philosophical tales" by showing how narrative could amuse while questioning authority. Often overshadowed by the Fables, these early Tales reveal La Fontaine’s most worldly instrument: a poetic storytelling that treats morals as provisional, intelligence as erotic, and storytelling itself as the most courtly of pleasures.