17th century AD

There are several explanations for the oversight; the principal one, undoubtedly, is that French literary critics have not until recently begun to study La Fontaine's tales in a serious way. In France, the Contes were neglected primarily because of their bawdy nature. Until not so long ago, the prevailing approach was a paradoxical silence: "En parler pour les blamer," commented the nineteenth-century critic Nisard, "serait pruderie; les louer, ils n'en ont pas besoin. Ces livresla ne font que trop leur fortune d'eux-memes; n'en rien dire est le plus sage" (Nisard 1863, 3:163) [It would be prudish to speak about them only to criticise; to praise them is unnecessary. Those books do only too well on their own; to say nothing about them is the wisest solution].(1) A popular success among readers, but a work not suitable for the serious perusal of scholars: such has been the judgement of historians and critics of classical French literature of the past few centuries. Fortunately, that situation has been reversed over the last twenty-five years and the Contes et nouvelles now take their rightful place in the literary canon as one of the masterpieces of the classical period of French literature.

A further reason for not paying attention to the Contes in folklore studies in the past was that they were considered to mark the end of a tradition. Now, however, there is an increasing awareness of the fact that when La Fontaine published his first volume of Contes et nouvelles in 1664, he actually began a new genre which was to play a vital role in preserving folklore material in France over the next two centuries. Despite the controversies and scandal they provoked, La Fontaine continued to compose and publish his tales until a few years before his death in 1695 (1665; 1666; 1667; 1669; 1671; 1674; 1685).(2) The Contes enjoyed great popularity; about seventy editions appeared in the eighteenth century and over a hundred editions were published in the nineteenth.(3) What is more, his tales spawned a host of imitators, some of whom were well known writers in more respectable genres: J.-B. Rousseau, Grecourt, Piron, Voltaire and Sedaine.

The folklore scholar Gershon Legman devoted several pages to the French conte-en-vers genre in an article entitled "Toward a Motif-Index of Erotic Humor." Legman underlined the significance of this genre in the context of folklore research:

The conte-en-vers is therefore the real connecting link between the earlier folktale collections and the modern scientific collections, and is the real repository of the native and original humorous material for nearly two centuries (1650-1850), where little of an original nature and almost nothing native will be found in the jestbooks. The entire literature of the conte-en-vers, whether dated from the burlesque and Aretinesque academies of the 1550's in Italy, or from La Fontaine's contes, "tires de Boccace" as he perfectly frankly admits, in the 1660's ... represents in sum an exceptionally large repertory of jokes and tales, purposely sought from the folk at a period when the jestbooks were already forgetful or contemptuous of folk sources, and far gone in sterile mutual plagiarism (Legman 1962, 237).

Legman noted at that time that "the conte-en-vers has never been seriously studied" (ibid.). This is still the situation. The only other study of the genre as such is, I believe, my article, "Le Jeu de l'imitation: un aspect de la reception des Contes de La Fontaine." The aim of that article was to define the genre and then to determine which works belong to the category; an appendix comprises a bibliography of seventy-seven authors who, over the two centuries following La Fontaine's death, composed contes-en-vers.

Characteristics of the Genre

It is important to be precise about defining the conte-en-vers genre because there are many other verse-tales that are not part of the Lafontainian tradition. Some are of a moralising nature, some relate a tale as a first-person autobiographical narrative; others still are simply amusing stories with no sexual overtones. Jean de La Fontaine defined the genre principally in the Prefaces to his Con res et nouvelles. Its major features are the licentious subject matter, the ludic intention, a free poetic style, and the primary importance given to its characteristic narrative situation. Those poets who subsequently wrote in the genre preserved the essential traits that La Fontaine had established. In order to understand more fully the nature of the Lafontainian conte-en-vers, let us delve further into these identifying characteristics.

La Fontaine considered the licentious subject matter as essential to the nature of the genre, as he stated in the Preface to the first part of the Contes: "la nature du conte le voulait ainsi" [the nature of the conte demanded it] (La Fontaine ed. Collinet 1992, 1:556). Towards the end of the eighteenth century Le Grand d'Aussy, by deploring what he considered to be the corruption of the medieval fabliau tradition by La Fontaine and his imitators, provided confirmation that the predominant feature of the genre was still considered to be its licentiousness: