He lived in other people's houses: seven years with Fouquet, to whom he stayed loyal after his disgrace, then twenty years with Madame de la Sablière. Elected to the Académie in 1683 against the candidate of Louis XIV, he did penance for having written the Contes. Two fables are carved on his sarcophagus.
The story
Born at Château-Thierry in 1621, La Fontaine owed his career to Fouquet, who paid him a pension of a thousand livres against a few lines of verse each quarter. When the superintendent of finances fell from favour, he stayed loyal at his own risk and pleaded the man's cause in verse before the king.
All his life he lived in other people's houses: twenty years with Madame de la Sablière, then with Monsieur d'Hervart. From 1668 the twelve books of the Fables appeared, where court and common people alike recognised themselves behind the masks of animals.
On 15 December 1683 the Académie française elected him to Colbert's chair, over Boileau, whom Louis XIV preferred. The king suspended the admission until the next vacancy, then approved both men in April 1684: La Fontaine was received on 2 May.
In 1693, gravely ill, he gave way to his confessor and made, before a delegation from the Académie, his act of contrition for having written the Contes. He died in Paris on 13 April 1695 and was buried in the cimetière des Innocents.
In 1817 his presumed remains were moved to Père-Lachaise at the same time as Molière's, in a ceremony meant to give the young cemetery its letters of nobility. Here too the bones are of uncertain authenticity: the Friends of the cemetery speak of supposed remains. Visitors sometimes leave a line learned at school.
The grave
A stone sarcophagus, twin to Molière's, on the same plinth, adorned with unsigned bronze bas-reliefs depicting two fables: The Wolf and the Lamb and The Fox and the Stork. The Latin inscription, engraved at the request of the prefect Chabrol de Volvic, names him “re-creator of the fables of Aesop, alone among the moderns, victor rather than rival”, dead in 1695 after seventy-four years of life, and states that his body was “transferred from another place” in 1817. The plot is maintained free of charge by the City.
On site, do not miss
Look for the two fables on the stone: they are not in the same place, and one of them almost always escapes the first glance. That is the little game this tomb has been offering for two centuries.
Visitors' questions
Where is La Fontaine's tomb at Père-Lachaise?
In Division 25, on the same base as Molière, just steps from the main avenue. His is the sarcophagus whose stone carries carved animals — a fox, a stork — straight out of the Fables.
Molière, Division 25What can be seen on La Fontaine's sarcophagus?
Bas-reliefs depicting the animals of his Fables, which set his tomb apart from Molière's, left bare. It is the only monument in the cemetery where a literary work can be read in pictures carved into the stone itself.
Lachambeaudie, fabulist, Division 48Are his remains authentic?
No one knows. Buried in 1695 at the Cimetière des Saints-Innocents and then moved, La Fontaine followed the same uncertain path as Molière: the bones transferred here in 1817 have never been formally identified.
The first plots of 1804Why are Molière and La Fontaine together?
Because the 1817 transfer was conceived as a prestige operation: bringing together the two great names of the age of Louis XIV on a single base struck the public imagination far more than two scattered graves would have. The calculation worked.
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