FABLES CHOISIES, MISES EN VERS (4 Volumes, Complete); (4 tomes, Complet)

A. Bouillon: Aux Depens De La Societe Typographique, 1776. Leather-bound. Fair. IN FRENCH. Francais. Octavos. Tree calf with gilt-roll border to both boards. NOTE: Considerable scuffing, wear, rubbing to extremities, bent corners, flaking and cracking to surface leather on spines. Front board of Volume I detaching, (but still attached). For all this, the set is still solidly bound. Marbling to all edges. Red stone marbled endpapers with deep blue veining. Elaborate ex-libris affixed to each pastedown endpaper: "Ex-Libris de M.elle Charlotte Warren."
250 separate fables, in verse and 248 lovely, intricate engravings throughout the four volumes.

The set belonged to Charlotte Augusta Greenough (Tooker?) Warren (1885 - 1957) "...Charlotte was a director of the Redwood Library. She devoted herself to finding and returning books that had been brought from England in 1747 for the library's first collection. Her own interest was in French books and manuscripts, and she built one of the most extensive collections in the United States..." (Geni Genealogical site)

Printed on lovely, thick, laid paper, in large font. At the rear of each volume are listings for fable numbers and pages. First volume has an essay on Fabulists and Fables in general and De La Fontaine in specific. Then a lengthy biographical sketch of De La Fontaine, followed by an essay about Aesop's fables, and their adaptation here. Jean de la Fontaine (1621-1695) was a poet whose FABLES rank among the great masterpieces of French literature. Often he held up a mirror to the social hierarchy of his day. Intermittently he seems inspired to satire, but, sharp though his thrusts are, he had not enough of the true satirist's indignation to press them home. The Fables occasionally reflect contemporary political issues and intellectual preoccupations. Some of them, fables only in name, are really elegies, idylls, epistles, or poetic meditations. But his chief and most comprehensive theme remains that of the traditional fable: the fundamental, everyday moral experience of mankind throughout the ages, exhibited in a profusion of typical characters, emotions, attitudes, and situations... (Britannia).