“John did no better than he had begun,
          Spent property and income both as one: 
          Of treasure saw small use in any way;
          Knew very well how to get through his day;
          Split it in two:  one part, as he thought best,
          He passed in sleep—­did nothing all the rest.”

He did not sleep, he dreamed.  One day dinner was kept waiting for him.  “I have just come,” said he, as he entered, “from the funeral of an ant; I followed the procession to the cemetery, and I escorted the family home.”  It has been said that La Fontaine knew nothing of natural history; he knew and loved animals; up to his time, fable-writers had been, merely philosophers or satirists; he was the first who was a poet, unique not only in France but in Europe, discovering the deep and secret charm of nature, animating it, with his inexhaustible and graceful genius, giving lessons to men from the example of animals, without making the latter speak like man; ever supple and natural, sometimes elegant and noble, with penetration beneath the cloak of his simplicity, inimitable in the line which he had chosen from taste, from instinct, and not from want of power to transport his genius elsewhither.  He himself has said,

“Yes, call me truly, if it must be said,
Parnassian butterfly, and like the bees
Wherein old Plato found our similes. 
Light rover I, forever on the wing,
Flutter from flower to flower, from thing to thing,
With much of pleasure mix a little fame.”

And in Psyche:—­

“Music and books, and junketings and love,
And town and country—­all to me is bliss;
There nothing is that comes amiss;
In melancholy’s self grim joy I prove.”

The grace, the naturalness, the original independence of the mind and the works of La Fontaine had not the luck to please Louis XIV., who never accorded him any favor, and La Fontaine did not ask for any:—­

“All dumb I shrink once more within my shell,
Where unobtrusive pleasures dwell;
True, I shall here by Fortune be forgot
Her favors with my verse agree not well;
To importune the gods beseems me not.”

Once only, from the time of Fouquet’s trial, the poet demanded a favor:  Louis XIV., having misgivings about the propriety of the Contes of La Fontaine, had not yet given the assent required for his election to the
French Academy, when he set out for the campaign in Luxemburg.  La
Fontaine addressed to him a ballad:—­

         “Just as, in Homer, Jupiter we see
          Alone o’er all the other gods prevail;
          You, one against a hundred though it be,
          Balance all Europe in the other scale. 
          Them liken I to those who, in the tale,
          Mountain on mountain piled, presumptuously
          Warring with Heaven and Jove.  The earth clave he,
          And hurled them down beneath huge rocks to wail: 
          So take you up your bolt with energy;
          A happy consummation cannot fail.