Les amours de Psyché et de Cupidon

Les amours de Psyché et de Cupidon (The Loves of Psyche and Cupid) is a 1669 prose and verse work by the French author Jean de La Fontaine.^[1] It is his longest single work, extending to nearly 140 pages in the standard Bibliothèque de la Pléiade edition.^[1] The text is predominantly in prose but is framed as a prosimetric composition containing a number of inserted poems.^[2]

The work consists of two books that contain a significantly expanded version of the ancient story of Cupid and Psyche, drawn primarily from Apuleius's Metamorphoses.^[2] This central narrative is surrounded by a contemporary frame story.^[2]

The frame narrative follows four friends in contemporary Paris: Acante, Poliphile, Ariste, and Gelaste.^[2] They travel to the expanding palace and park of Versailles, where Poliphile recounts his version of the Cupid and Psyche myth.^[2] The opening sequence describes the gardens of Versailles, construction of which André Le Nôtre was overseeing at the time of the writing.^[2] La Fontaine praises the young King Louis XIV's project to remodel the royal palace, overseen by his chief minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert.^[3] Both the king and his minister are handsomely complimented in the text, with Louis XIV compared to the Sun god, Apollo, and Jupiter.^[4]

La Fontaine made several major additions and modifications to the Apuleian narrative, all reflecting 17th-century French cultural concerns; in his preface he listed some of them explicitly, inviting learned readers to compare his version with the original.^[5]

The most obvious change is one of scale and setting. La Fontaine's description of Cupid's palace is far longer than Apuleius's, enlarged with a park, corridors, rooms, and artworks that clearly mirror the account of Versailles already given in the frame narrative; the temple of Venus, similarly, is set in grounds of emerald-green grass cut by a canal as wide as a river, with a courtyard surrounded by porticoes and gilded apartments (more royal palace than shrine).^[6] Both passages invite the reader to compare Cupid with the young Louis XIV, who is elsewhere in the work likened to Apollo and Jupiter.^[6]

Near the end of the first book, La Fontaine breaks off the story for a learned discussion among the four friends on the merits of tragedy versus comedy, invoking Plato, Aristotle, Homer, and Longinus.^[7] The debate plays on the friends' names: Gélaste, whose name comes from the Greek for laughter, champions comedy, while Ariste, whose name suggests high rank, argues that weeping is the pleasure of the well-born.^[8] Harrison and May note a possible parallel with another debate placed at the end of a book (the discussion of pederasty and heterosexuality in book 2 of Achilles Tatius' Leucippe and Clitophon, a Greek novel available in French since 1568).^[9]

The largest addition is a pastoral episode drawn from canto VII of Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata (1581), in which the heroine Erminia takes refuge with a shepherd family.^[9] La Fontaine keeps the basic outline (Psyche takes up the life of a shepherdess and exchanges life stories with an old man) but makes pointed changes: the old man is not a gardener but a former court philosopher driven into retirement by the unwanted suit of a king's son for his widowed daughter, and his granddaughters debate the nature of love with Psyche after reading romantic novels, a knowing nod to the genre of La Fontaine's own work.^[10]

In Apuleius, Cupid and Psyche share very few scenes and their married life is largely silent; La Fontaine gives the lovers two long dialogues, placed symmetrically before and after the story's crisis, both set in caves (an artificial grotto in Cupid's park and a real cave in the countryside).^[11] This owes much to the tradition of lovers' dialogue in pastoral romance, above all Honoré d'Urfé's L'Astrée (1607–28) and the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), both well known to La Fontaine; the narrator's name Poliphile itself recalls the earlier novel's hero Poliphilo.^[11]

Beyond Apuleius and Tasso, La Fontaine drew on various vernacular and classical sources.^[2] The text shares elements with Italian works, including Giambattista Marino's poetry and the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.^[12] Scholars note possible subtle allusions to the three ancient Greek novels available in 17th-century France: Achilles Tatius' Leucippe and Clitophon, Heliodorus of Emesa' Aethiopika, and Longus' Daphnis and Chloe.^[9]

La Fontaine's retelling popularised the Cupid and Psyche story in 1670s France and prompted three stage adaptations within the decade.^[13] Jean-Baptiste Lully's Psyché (1671), a tragicomédie et ballet, had a libretto by Molière, Pierre Corneille, and Philippe Quinault.^[13] Thomas Shadwell produced an English Psyche in 1675, with music by Matthew Locke and Giovanni Battista Draghi.^[13] Lully returned to the subject in 1678 with a tragédie lyrique, again titled Psyché, on a text by Thomas Corneille.^[13] All three inherited changes La Fontaine had made to the Apuleian plot to suit 17th-century taste.^[14] In both French versions Psyche goes willingly to her fate, recalling the Iphigenia myth then current on the French stage; the lovers court each other through open conversation rather than in the darkness of the original; and references to Psyche's pregnancy were dropped as unsuitable for courtly entertainment.^[14]

Each adaptation was also shaped by its genre.^[14] The 1671 Psyché mixed ballet, comedy, mythological drama, and stage spectacle;^[15] the 1678 tragédie lyrique struck an elevated tragic tone and cut the subplot of Psyche's jealous sisters.^[16] Shadwell's semi-opera, by contrast, added soldiers and a hostile portrait of priests—touches that reflected the Third Anglo-Dutch War and his own anti-Catholic views.^[17]

La Fontaine's version of the Cupid and Psyche myth played a minor role in the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, a major European art dispute of the late 17th century concerning the relative value of classical versus modern literature.^[18] The French literary phase of this quarrel began with Charles Perrault's 1687 poem Le Siècle de Louis le Grand, which claimed that the modern world was more morally enlightened than antiquity.^[19] La Fontaine countered this by defending the superiority of ancient poets in his Épître à Huet.^[19] When Perrault published his Contes in 1694, the first major collection of French fairy tales, he explicitly attacked La Fontaine's classicism.^[19] Perrault argued that ancient fables like Cupid and Psyche were designed merely to entertain and lacked the moral edification present in his own modern tales.^[19]

Despite Perrault's criticisms, Les Amours de Psyché et de Cupidon became the starting point for the earliest versions of the "Beauty and the Beast" fairy tale in the 1690s.^[20] Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville (known as Countess d'Aulnoy), used La Fontaine's work as a model for her 1697 story Serpentin vert (Green Serpent).^[20] At the center of d'Aulnoy's tale is a princess who marries an invisible king later revealed to be a green serpent, with the structure, luxurious palace setting, and disastrous curiosity found in La Fontaine's narrative.^[21] D'Aulnoy even explicitly alluded within the tale to La Fontaine's book ("the story of Psyche [written by] one of the most fashionable authors"). The tale differs from La Fontaine's narrative, and the moralizing element that was sought by Perrault, is added: the heroine ultimately learns discretion and resists the fatal temptation that doomed Psyche (d'Aulnoy was on the side of the Moderns in the dispute).^[22]

D'Aulnoy's work, heavily indebted to La Fontaine, subsequently formed the basis for Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve's 1740 tale La Belle et la Bête.^[23] Villeneuve also drew details directly from La Fontaine, such as the descriptions of the beast's palatial gardens and the subplot of the heroine's envious sisters,^[24] thus the La Fontaine's retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth stands at the origin of the Beauty and the Beast fairy-tale tradition.^[25]

La Fontaine's version also reached Russia through Ippolit Bogdanovich's mock-epic poem Dushenka (1783), written for the Francophile court of Catherine the Great, in which Psyche becomes a modern girl of good family and the story is told with irony and elements of Russian folk tale.^[25] Traces of La Fontaine's influence have also been detected in Alexander Pushkin's poem Ruslan and Ludmila (1820).^[26]

La Fontaine's text also had a noticeable influence on French art during the 18th and early 19th centuries.^[25] Charles-Joseph Natoire's 1737-1739 painted panels for the Hôtel de Soubise drew specifically on episode of Psyche as a shepherdess added by La Fontaine.^[25] The design of Empire grisaille wallpapers (c. 1815) in the Prince's Palace at Bad Doberan were also inspired by the text and its illustrations.^[25]

• Harrison, Stephen; May, Regine (2024). Apuleius in European Literature: Cupid and Psyche since 1650. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oso/9780192862983.003.0002.
• Vipper, Yu. B. (1987). "Lafonten". Istoriya vsemirnoy literatury (in Russian). Vol. 4. Moscow: Nauka. pp. 152–159.