agne,
son of the "maitre des eaux et forets." His education was less of
a scholastic kind than an education derived from books read for his
own pleasure, and especially from observation or reverie among the
woods and fields, with their population of bird, beast, and insect,
so dear to his heart and his imagination. Slipping away from theology
and law, he passed ten years, from twenty-three to thirty-three, in
seeming indolence, a "bon garcon," irreclaimably wayward as regards
worldly affairs, but already drawing in to himself all that fed his
genius, all sights and sounds of nature, all the lore of old poets,
story-tellers, translators, and already practising his art of verse.
Nothing that was not natural to him, and wholly to his liking, would
he or could he do; but happily he was born to write perfect verses,
and the labour of the artist was with him an instinct and a delight.
He allowed himself to be married to a pretty girl of fifteen, and
presently forgot that he had a wife and child, drifted away, and agreed
in 1659 to a division of goods; but his carelessness and egoism were
without a touch of malignity, those of an overgrown child rather than
of a man.

In 1654 he published a translation of the _Eunuch_ of Terence of small
worth, and not long after was favoured with the patronage of Fouquet,
the superintendant of finance. To him La Fontaine presented his
_Adonis_, a narrative poem, graceful, picturesque, harmonious,
expressing a delicate feeling for external nature rarely to be found
in poetry of the time, and reviving some of the bright Renaissance
sense of antiquity. The genius of France is united in La Fontaine's
writings with the genius of Greece. But the verses written by command
for Fouquet are laboured and ineffective. His ill-constructed and
unfinished _Songe de Vaux_, partly in prose, partly in verse, was
designed to celebrate his patron's Chateau de Vaux.

Far happier than this is the poem in dialogue _Clymene_, a dramatic
fantasy, in which Apollo on Mount Parnassus learns by the aid of the
Muses the loves of Acante (La Fontaine) and Clymene (Madame X ...),
a rural beauty, whom the god had seen wandering on the banks of
Hippocrene. On the fall of his magnificent patron La Fontaine did
not desert him, pleading in his _Elegie aux Nymphes de Vaux_ on behalf
of the disgraced minister. As a consequence, the poet retired for
a time from Paris to banishment at Limoges. But in 1664 he is again
in Paris or a