Because I am of the generation that grew up on Looney Tunes and the All-Conquering Mouse, when I encountered the tales of Aesop and La Fontaine as serious literary works, it was with a feeling of startled recognition. Since antiquity we have ventriloquized the beasts to point to a moral. What would sound censorious or self-righteous in our own mouths comes out with a saving pinch of the satiric when a benighted bear or all-too-clever fox pronounces it. Animals, turned articulate, distance the force of a precept even as they redouble its twinge. Despite ourselves, we look down on them, for their muteness tacitly exalts us, and so rebuke of our foibles at their paws becomes almost tolerable.

The animal fable seems so firmly to belong to childhood that we forget how subversive it can be. Such camouflaged naivete alone is what enabled Jean de La Fontaine, fabulist supreme, to evade the ire of the Sun King, whose court and protocols – and very person – he satirized, over decades, with sly savagery. Wasn’t a story about a grandiloquent lion or a diplomatic barn-rat really too infra dig for Louis XIV to notice, let alone suppress? It would have made the monarch look absurd to come down hard on a blithe spinner of kiddie tales, somewhat like summoning a bulldozer to squash a flea. From 1668, when the first book of the “Fables” appeared, until 1693, when the 12th and final book was published, La Fontaine got away with it. Was there ever – to give but one example – a more caustic portrait of a court than that in “The Lion Holds Court?”

So to the Louvre came the beasts as they were bade. Lovely Louvre! Pardon his palace,
That slaughterhouse, stinking of dark bloody malice.
Bear, a hapless vegetarian, held his nose –
A fatal error; Lion, roaring fury, rose
And smote him; Bear next sniffed the atmosphere in hell.
Monkey tried praise: he praised it all, the place, the smell,
The murder, too. ‘True majesty does all things well –
Even your air is rich! Like ambergris, perhaps?
Garlic buds? Lilies!’ ‘You lie! Though fools are courted
With lies, I’m not!’ Lion snorted,
Sideswiping Monkey who fell in mortal collapse.
The King’s will, like Caligula’s, was full of traps …

Louis XIV got the message loud and clear. In 1683, the King blocked La Fontaine’s election to the newly formed but immensely prestigious French Academy (this decision was later reversed). As the poet well knew, the king’s anger was not to be excited with impunity. In 1672 he had had La Fontaine’s patron, his extravagant finance minister Fouquet, arrested and imprisoned for life in a remote citadel, where he languished in solitary confinement for the rest of his life. La Fontaine remained forever suspect to the royal eye, and it took not only wit but terrific courage to keep on confecting his acidulous cartoons.

The fables are more than satire on the court; they are satires on us all. For years I resisted their spell, maybe because they struck home so unerringly. I’d been raised on some, as a foil to Shakespeare, who commanded my London-born grandmother’s imagination. Her mother had been born in Le Mans, and so vinegar French was constantly being distilled as a domestic antidote against the exuberant mead of the Bard. Throughout my grandmother’s – and my own – childhood, the acerbic Gallic ant was regularly pitted against the sublime sleaze of Falstaff and his cronies. That battle became part of my own makeup, too.

Speaking of that famous ant – to some the epitome of frugality, to others a monster of meanness – the fracas over her character continues apace. For example, in “Le Tablier,” the journal of the Society of Friends of La Fontaine (an eccentric mix of lovers of great verse and ancien regime nostalgists, of which I’m proud to be a member), I was amused recently to read a fiery denunciation of the ant and her treatment of the feckless grasshopper (actually, a cicada). The grasshopper has spent all summer at his song, and when winter comes, he finds himself homeless and hungry. He begs the ant for food but she refuses.

“What did you do last season?”
Ant asked. “I sang with the breeze,
Sang by choice and sang by chance,
Please ma’am, as grasshoppers do.”
“As they do. How nice for you.
You sang,” said Ant. “Now go dance!”

“Eh bien, dansez maintenant.” The phrase has become proverbial in French. How many times in childhood, after some real or imagined imprudence, was I advised to “go dance now!” or, even more annoyingly, was exhorted to “turn to the ant, thou sluggard, and consider her ways.” I’m still squarely in the grasshopper’s camp, but am I right to be there? Is the ant mean-spirited or farsighted? Is the grasshopper the figure of the poet or an irresponsible ne’er-dowell? La Fontaine’s protagonists look one-dimensional; they are not, not even his much lampooned lion, the king himself.

The translations I’ve quoted come from a selection made by the poet Marie Ponsot; they were published by the New American Library in 1966 as “Selected Fables and Tales of La Fontaine” (this edition is out of print but available on the internet). Though Marianne Moore’s complete translation remains the classic version in English, Ms. Ponsot’s are often superior. She captures the deceptively casual music of the original, often lacing French elegance with bluff American locutions. To give but one example, consider “The Fox and the Portrait Head” in its entirety in Ms. Ponsot’s version:

Grecian actors wore masks – and so do most great men.
Fools are impressed by any gaudy specimen;
A donkey will judge by what stands before his eyes.
A fox, however, insists that he must first know;
He sees all angles shrewdly, and should he surmise
A fine facade is just for show,
He will quote (though modest about fox culture)
A fox anecdote on sculpture:
A fox saw a hollow hero’s bust, twice life size.
Knowing where the line between art and subject lies,
“A splendid head,” he sighed. “Pity it has no brain.”
Many figures are, like that bust, inane.

This week marks the birth, on July 8, 1621, of this incomparable poet and moralist. For me – and this is not, I think, an eccentric minority opinion – La Fontaine’s “Fables,” for all its seeming modesty, represents one of the supreme summits of literature, and the poet himself can stand unblushingly beside Dante or Shakespeare or Goethe. True, his subjects are small – can a talking frog take a place beside Farinata or Hamlet or Mephistopheles? – but don’t be misled. We are all small Sun Kings in our secret hearts; it is only the vanity of our pretensions that’s immeasurable. Now more than ever we require the delicate lancet of La Fontaine’s art to keep us the sane and modest mammals we should be.