Mark Fumaroli. The Poet and the King: Jean de la Fontaine and His Century.

Trans. Jane Marie Todd. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002. viii + 536 pp. index. $49.95. ISBN: 0-268-03877-5.

In his L'Age de l'eloquence, Marc Fumaroli was one of the first and most forceful voices urging sharper focus on the figures of rhetoric favored by French writers from the late Renaissance through the birth of neoclassicism. The Poet and the King is a polemical biography of France's greatest poet from that time, which places the grace for which he is known firmly in the context of the classical and Renaissance texts from which it sprang. Fumaroli ends up calling La Fontaine France's Petrarch, but the critic works hardest to tease out the political signification of La Fontaine's poetic practices, to the point of making his own prose verge occasionally on the tendentious.

He makes a convincing case that La Fontaine's career, and the character of Louis XIV's long reign as well, turned on the night of 17 August, 1661, when superintendent of the King's finances Nicholas Fouquet held a festival for the entire court at his castle at Vaux-le-Vicomte. Fouquet's plan had been to sign the castle over to his king along with an allegorical poem, Le Songe de Vaux, written by La Fontaine for the occasion, but he was arrested before he could do so.

I recall this episode being presented during the sixties as an illustration of the vagaries of absolute power, an assessment with which Fumaroli appears to be in agreement, but he does not stop there. He sees the incident as enacting nothing less than the birth of the bureaucratic and totalitarian state, embodied in the bellicose and megalomaniacal person of the Sun King himself. Fumaroli makes his case persuasively; my principal quarrel with this book is that he makes it so many times that the reader cannot help wondering what contemporary resonances he finds in the incident. He does not customarily deprive himself of the opportunity to follow whatever associations are evoked by a given strand of thought or narrative; I wish he had been more explicit about the larger issues the blighting of La Fontaine's career obviously evokes for him.

Fumaroli might, on the other hand, profitably have been less prolix about his homophobia. The combination of knowing laughter and scorn with which he treats Jean Baptiste Lully, in particular, doubtless plays quite differently at the College de France or the Academie Francaise than it does in the U.S. Jane Marie Todd did the best she could to attenuate Fumaroli's vitriol (420), but it bears no apparent relationship to his principal argument, and so relies on the same sort of unquestioned unanimity among his readers which he so eloquently charges Louis the Great and his agents with instilling in his subjects.

This is nonetheless an original and largely persuasive presentation of the reign of Louis XIV as the end of the Renaissance, and as the inauguration of the modern insistence on mobilization of the intellectual resources of the state for its political ends. La Fontaine was for Fumaroli one of the last holdovers from the Renaissance: along with the Corneille brothers and Gassendi's publisher, he belonged to a "youth academy" assembled by Fouquet, parallel to the official Academie Francaise founded by Richelieu and turned by Colbert into a tireless manufacturer of panegyrics to the king. Fumaroli sees Pierre Corneille, at least up to his Oedipe in 1661, as harking back to a more aristocratic, and therefore less ordered state, allowing more freedom to its intellectuals and writers. Even the "Querelle des anciens et des modernes" at the end of La Fontaine's career was, for Fumaroli, yet another struggle to determine whether court intellectuals had any business searching for sources of validation anywhere other than in the person of their king. Let me conclude with a quotation which will allow the reader to judge the strengths of this book: the roots of La Fontaine's Fables "fed on everything germinal and vital in the literature of Old France: Roman poetry, medieval romances and fables, the Renaissance of Rome and Touraine, the cultured Catholicism of Francis of Sales and Port-Royal, liberal and humanistic Calvinism, Cornellian generosity, the libertinage of skeptical and Epicurean scholars, the poets' lyricism and science of form, in short everything that could nurture man's knowledge of himself and free him from the power of darkness within himself" (348).

EDWARD BENSON

University of Connecticut