Jean de La Fontaine-Fables. Gift book bound in leather

The outstanding satirist and free-thinking thinker La Fontaine, was the best fabulist of Modern times. Borrowing stories from Aesop and other ancient authors, as well as from Eastern sages, he creates a bizarre menagerie that personifies the then French society of the era of Louis the Fourteenth. The crowned Lion, fierce and loving, is surrounded by flattering and obsequious courtiers, vassal animals flatter, ingratiate, intrigue, fight for a warm place at court. "Stop ruining each other, gentlemen!" the poet appeals to them.

At that time, in the house of every French peasant, there was certainly a Bible and the fables of La Fontaine, in France of the XXI century, one gets acquainted with the great fabulist already from the school bench. It is not for nothing that he was called the French Homer, and almost every Frenchman knows by heart his fables "The Crow and the Fox" and "The Dragonfly and the Ant" and many others.