| Notes: Printed in Germany, no date or publisher listed. Edge wear with minor loss along top edge, ink name on frontispiece, minor ink marks throughout. Unpaginated. French text. Front cover depicts a fox and a stork drinking at a table. 4 color plates. The Selected Fables, put into verse by M. de La Fontaine, simply called Fables de La Fontaine, are three collections bringing together two hundred and forty-three allegorical fables published by Jean de La Fontaine between 1668 and 1694 . Most, inspired by the fables of Aesop, Babrius and Phaedrus, feature anthropomorphic animals and contain an explicit (presented at the beginning or end of the poem) or implicit moral. The author invents a genre breaking with the Aesopic, evangelical and humanist traditions, where the style and spirit more than the subject are intended to be didactic. A model of classical French, these apologues were used from the beginning of the 18th century as a teaching aid by the Jesuits, the main teaching body in France until 1763, and by family tutors, then became, under the Third Republic and until ' post-war, a staple of primary school . |