And so much for what--considering that, logically, though not quite chronologically, Vauvenargues belongs with them--we may call the seventeenth-century group of French _pensee_-writers. A nineteenth-century group of the same literary class will form the subject of a chapter in due course to follow. VI. LA FONTAINE. 1621-1695. La Fontaine enjoys a unique fame. He has absolutely "no fellow in the firmament" of literature. He is the only fabulist, of any age or any nation, that, on the score simply of his fables, is admitted to be poet as well as fabulist. There is perhaps no other literary name whatever among the French by long proof more secure than is La Fontaine's, of universal and of immortal renown. Such a fame is, of course, not the most resplendent in the world; but to have been the first, and to remain thus far the only, writer of fables enjoying recognition as true poetry--this, surely, is an achievement entitling La Fontaine to monumental mention in any sketch, however summary, of French literature. Jean de La Fontaine was humbly born, at Chateau-Thierry, in Champagne. His early education was sadly neglected. At twenty years of age he was still phenomenally ignorant. About this time, being now better situated, he developed a taste for the classics and for poetry. With La Fontaine the man, it is the sadly familiar French story of debauchee manners in life and in literary production. We cannot acquit him, but we are to condemn him only in common with the most of his age and of his nation. As the world goes, La Fontaine was a "good fellow," never lacking friends. These were held fast in loyalty to the poet, not so much by any sterling worth of character felt in him as by an exhaustless, easy-going good-nature that, despite his social insipidity, made La Fontaine the most acceptable of every-day companions. It would be easy to repeat many stories illustrative of this personal quality in La Fontaine, while to tell a single story illustrative of any lofty trait in his character would be perhaps impossible. Still, La Fontaine seemed not ungrateful for the benefits he received from others; and gratitude, no commonplace virtue, let us accordingly reckon to the credit of a man in general so slenderly equipped with positive claims to admiring personal regard. The mirror of _bonhomie_ (easy-hearted good-fellowship), he always was. Indeed, that significant, almost untranslatable, French word might have been coined to fit La Fontaine's case. On his amiable side--a full hemisphere or more of the man--it sums him up completely. Twenty years long this mirror of _bonhomie_ was domiciliated, like a pet animal, under the hospitable roof of the celebrated Madame de la Sabliere. There was truth as well as humor implied in what she said one day: "I have sent away all my domestics; I have kept only my dog, my cat, and La Fontaine."