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Jane Eyre vocabulary
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Jean de La Fontaine
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tags: [poet]
► definition
Definition:[1621 - 1695]A French poet best known for his fables. He also wrote numerous tales and some other works. He was a contemporary of Molière.
portrait: By Hyacinthe Rigaud, around 1580, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12211238
► uses
Uses:
Was ask'd, by certain delegates
That came from Rat-United-States,
For some small aid, for they
To foreign parts were on their way,
For succour in the great cat-war.
Ratopolis beleaguer'd sore,
Their whole republic drain'd and poor,
No morsel in their scrips they bore.
La Fontaine. The Rat Retired from the World.
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I bought the two rats, and a big cage was built for them, with inner stairs leading to the different stories, eating-places, bedrooms, and trapezes for gymnastics. They were unquestionably happier and better off there than La Fontaine’s rat in his Dutch cheese.
Théophile Gautier. My Private Menagerie / from The Works of Theophile Gautier Volume 19
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Assuming an attitude, she began, “La Ligue des Rats: fable de La Fontaine.” She then declaimed the little piece with an attention to punctuation and emphasis, a flexibility of voice and an appropriateness of gesture, very unusual indeed at her age, and which proved she had been carefully trained.
Charlotte Brontë. Jane Eyre (1847)
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Joconde— La Fontaine’s first Contes in verse, which are considered improper.— A.M.
Leo Tolstoy. War and Peace: With bonus material from Give War and Peace A Chance by Andrew D. Kaufman (footnote)
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This story was not merely utterly distasteful to me, who knew the impossibility of my dear M. de Nassau’s writing to the grandfather of his wife (whose fortune, moreover, he was expecting to inherit) and addressing him as ‘Miller’; but furthermore its stupidity became glaring from the start, the word ‘Miller’ having obviously been dragged in only to lead up to the title of La Fontaine’s fable.
Marcel Proust. In Search of Lost Time [volume 3]
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