The subject of each of the
Fables is often common property of many ages and ethnicities. What gives La Fontaine's
Fables their rare distinction is the freshness in narration, the deftness of touch, the unconstrained suppleness of metrical structure, the unfailing humor of the pointed moral, the consummate art of their apparent artlessness. Keen insight into the foibles of human nature is found throughout, but in the later books ingenuity is employed to make the fable cover, yet convey, social doctrines and sympathies more democratic than the age would have tolerated in unmasked expression. Almost from the start, the
Fables entered French literary consciousness to a greater degree than any other classic of its literature. For generations many of these little apologues have been read, committed to memory, recited, paraphrased, by every French school child. Countless phrases from them are current idioms, and familiarity with them is assumed. "La Fontaine's
Fables", wrote
Madame de Sévigné, "are like a basket of strawberries. You begin by selecting the largest and best, but, little by little, you eat first one, then another, till at last the basket is empty".
Silvestre de Sacy has commented that they supply delights to three different ages: the child rejoices in the freshness and vividness of the story, the eager student of literature in the consummate art with which it is told, the experienced man of the world in the subtle reflections on character and life which it conveys. Reception to the moral aspect has generally been positive, with exceptions such as
Rousseau and
Lamartine. The book has become a standard French reader both at home and abroad. Lamartine, who preferred classic regularity in verse, could find in the
Fables only "limping, disjointed, unequal verses, without symmetry either to the ear or on the page". But the poets of the
Romantic School Hugo,
Musset,
Gautier and their fellows, found in the popular favor these verses had attained an incentive to undertake an emancipation of French prosody which they in large measure achieved. ==Reaching children==