uthor of _Psyche_, named happily
Polyphile (for he loved many things, and among them his friends),
will read his romance for his literary comrades.

"_J'aime le jeu, l'amour, les livres, la musique,
La ville et la campagne, enfin tout: il n'est rien
Qui ne me soit souverain bien
Jusq'aux sombres plaisirs d'un coeur melancolique._"

Some of his friends before long had passed away, but others came to
fill their places. For many years he was cared for and caressed by
the amiable and cultivated Mme. de Sabliere, and when she dismissed
other acquaintances she still kept "her dog, her cat, and her La
Fontaine." The Academy would have opened its doors to him sooner than
to Boileau, but the King would not have it so, and he was admitted
(1684) only when he had promised Louis XIV. henceforth to be _sage_.
When Mme. de Sabliere died, Hervart, maitre des requetes, one day
offered La Fontaine the hospitality of his splendid house. "I was
on my way there," replied the poet. After a season of conversion,
in which he expressed penitence for his "infamous book" of _Contes_,
the _bonhomme_ tranquilly died in April 1693. "He is so simple," said
his nurse, "that God will not have courage to damn him." "He was the
most sincere and candid soul," wrote his friend Maucroix, who had
been intimate with him for more than fifty years, "that I have ever
known; never a disguise; I don't know that he spoke an untruth in
all his life."

All that is best in the genius of La Fontaine may be found in his
_Fables_. The comedies in which he collaborated, the _Captivite de
Saint Malc_, written on the suggestion of the Port-Royalists, the
miscellaneous poems, though some of these are admirable, even the
_Contes_, exhibit only a fragment of his mind; in the _Fables_ the
play of his faculties is exquisite, and is complete. His imagination
was unfitted for large and sustained creation; it operated most
happily in a narrow compass. The _Fables_, however, contain much in
little; they unite an element of drama and of lyric with narrative;
they give scope to his feeling for nature, and to his gift for the
observation of human character and society; they form, as he himself
has said--

"_Une ample comedie a cents actes divers
Et dont la scene est l'univers._"

He had not to invent his subjects; he found them in all the fabulists
who had preceded him--Greek, Latin, Oriental, elder French
writers--"j'en lis qui sont du Nord et qui so