Le Grillon

In 1792, Florian published a collection of one hundred fables in five books (twelve more fables would be published posthumously). This became his principal claim to fame and the reason for his lasting literary reputation: his fables are commonly regarded as the finest after those of Jean de La Fontaine. Although Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian invented some subjects of his own, he drew mainly on the common stock of fables found in Aesop and the German fabulists, carefully avoiding subjects already treated by La Fontaine.

The morals of several of his fables are still commonly quoted, such as “Chacun son métier, les vaches seront bien gardées” (Le Vacher et le Garde-chasse), “L’asile le plus sûr est le sein d’une mère” (La Mère, l’Enfant et les Sarigues), “éclairer sa lanterne” (Le Singe qui montre la lanterne magique), “rira bien qui rira le dernier” (Les Deux Paysans et le Nuage), as well as expressions such as “larmes de crocodile,” “réveiller le chat qui dort” and even “aller se faire tondre,” all of which have passed into everyday French.

The final line of Le Grillon is not the least famous of them: “Pour vivre heureux, vivons caché.”

Florian’s art, poised between narrative and moral, fragility and regret, could not fail to appeal to Benjamin Rabier. Unlike his earlier illustrations, the drawings made here accompany the fables not as illustrated scenes but as illuminations, using close-ups and visual shortcuts that lend a more modern note to his work — this from an artist who had already illustrated La Fontaine’s Fables thirty years earlier, in 1904, but in a more conventional manner.