John of La Fontaine
Poetic approaches to the Account of a journey from Paris to Limousin (1663)
Under the direction of Odile Richard
On August 23, 1663, Jean de La Fontaine accompanied Jacques Jannart, his wife’s uncle and Fouquet’s substitute, on his journey into exile in Limoges, where the disgraced man would languish for three years. Back in Paris the following January, La Fontaine left us six letters to his wife recounting this brief fifteen-day summer trip, which unfortunately lacked the arrival in Limoges, written in a graceful prosimeter (prose interspersed with verse).
“The first monument of tourist literature”, as Abbé Caudal wrote in one of the first scholarly editions of the text (1966), this impulsive tale from town to town (Clamart, Orléans, Blois, Richelieu, Poitiers, Bellac, etc.) follows an admittedly unconventional itinerary. Mysterious in its poetic project, it evokes a young La Fontaine trying his hand at several weapons, but already greedy for a simple and sensual life. Insufficiently known and poorly identified, this text seduced, a century later, great connoisseurs of the art of epistolary writing: on July 8, 1742, President Hénault (1685-1770) wrote to the famous Mme Du Deffand: “What amused me was the Account of a trip to Limoges written by Saint-Aulaire, in the form of letters, in 1663, that is to say, 79 years ago. I assure you there are some nice things.” Without knowing it, the president is talking about La Fontaine.
For our part, we would like to give readers some keys provided by the recent edition of Damien Fortin (2019), with the help of a few other enlightened amateurs who have redone, for the occasion, the trip to Limoges.
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