Generations of children have been brought up on La Fontaine’s Fables . Only an absent-minded or perversely liberal parent, however, would leave the same author’s Contes et nouvelles en vers lying around the nursery. The first volume was published three years before the Fables started to appear. They were the fruit of his wicked delight in the tales he found in Boccacio’s Decameron , Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso , Rabelais and elsewhere. Marital misdemeanours, resourceful females, addled males, proved the inspiration for some richly inventive plotting. He retold the stories in his own words, commenting on them wryly as he went along.