SOURCE: "Pleasures and Pains, Lessons and Revelations of Travel in La Fontaine," in Dalhousie French Studies, Vol. 36, Fall 1996, pp. 23-37.

In the essay that follows, Sweetser argues that La Fontaine used metaphors of travel in several of his Fables to reflect on the direction of his own life and to counsel the future king of France on the need for and direction of social reforms.

In a recent study on "Voyage et commerce," JOrgen Grimm includes in the title of his essay a La Fontaine quotation from the fable "Le chartier embourbe" (Book VI, Fable 18, line 8), the humorous exclamatory phrase "Dieu nous preserve du voyage!" (Grimm 84-86). Of course, the cart driver, stuck in the mud, had a good reason to curse and bemoan his difficult task. La Fontaine himself had a very limited experience of travel, apart from covering the relatively short distance between Chfteau-Thierry and Paris...