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 misdemean-ours, resourceful females and addled males, inspire some richly inventive plotting. He retold the stories in his own words, commenting on them wryly as he went along.

France has over the centuries produced notable comic geniuses. The best known are Rabelais and Moliere. On the evidence of these hitherto neglected Tales In Verse, for which the author was severely censured by the authorities and even by Louis XV in his own time, La Fontaine clearly deserves a place among them. French readers certainly thought so the unofficial pirated editions kept the presses busy it was the cult book of its day.

This is the first complete verse translation of the Tales to be published since the nineteenth century.