Jean de la Fontaine, Les Amours de Psyché et de Cupidon, 1814

Cupid and Psyche with its fairy-tale like plot is often treated as a merely entertaining story, but was equally often modernised, or placed within an updated, contemporary setting rather than the original story of a young Greek turned into a donkey.

Jean de la Fontaine’s (1621-1695) Les Amours de Psyché et de Cupidon was first printed in 1669 and was much used in later adaptations of the story. There are several editions of La Fontaine’s version of Cupid and Psyche in the Brotherton; this specific edition contains a biography of  La Fontaine by the French literary critic and playwright Louis-Simon Auger (1772-1829).

La Fontaine, famous for his fables, translated other Latin texts into French, for instance Terence’s comedy The Eunuch, and formed a literary circle with his contemporaries Racine, Molière and Boileau in Paris. Later in life, he took the side of the Ancients in the Quarrel between Ancients and Moderns in the Académie Française under Boileau’s lead. They claimed that it was best for modern literature to imitate the far superior texts from antiquity, whereas the Moderns preferred the enlightened stance of more modern 17th century literature. The story of Cupid and Psyche became a battleground in this dispute, as can be seen from the preface to the Contes of Charles Perrault (1697). La Fontaine’s Les Amours de Psyché et de Cupidon is a short prosimetric novel: the frame narrative places the story in the garden of Versailles. The story itself begins with four friends, which in many ways recalls La Fontaine’s own literary circle. The friends set out to visit the garden of Versailles, and its lavish surroundings are the setting where one of the friends tells the story of Cupid and Psyche to the others.

La Fontaine’s dedication to his patroness the Duchess of Bouillon (Marie-Anne Mancini, 1649-1714) makes the story a suitable one for female readers. His preface sets out his difficulties with the genre: prose and poetry, a fable related in prose. He admits to adding some episodes of his own to the story, and to have made changes to make the characters psychologically more easily comprehensible.

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