Jean de La Fontaine

1621–1695 · French fabulist and poet

La Fontaine spent three decades turning Aesop, Indian folklore and Renaissance emblem books into supple French verse, publishing his Fables in instalments from 1668 onward. His animals are courtiers in feathers: the fox flatters, the cock calculates, and the moral lands in a single closing line built to be memorised. That habit of ending on an epigram is exactly why so many of his last lines now float free of the fables they belong to.

Traced to source

1 quote we’ve traced

“It is double pleasure to deceive the deceiver”

Disputed

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