Re-reading, reading thoroughly and in sequence, the fables of Jean de La Fontaine in the Classiques Larousse edition, with all the footnotes, Documentation The'matique, Jugements, and Sujets de Devoirs et d'Exposés; just for pleasure, and for the special joy of acquainting myself with one of those authors so seldom met with outside of French literature whose every thought is exactly my own, or would be if I had the same exquisitely sensitive and cultivated humanist philosophy, and the same perfect felicity of language and expression. And wouldn't you just know, there in the Jugements, is a long, nasty animadversion of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (from Emile) upon some of the fables that I like best, giving exactly the contrary of why I believe that children understand them best and profit from them most: "Les enfants se moquent du corbeau, mais ils s'affectionnent tous au renard...Vous croyez leur donner la cigale pour exemple; et point du tout, c'est la fourmi qu'ils choisissent...dans la fable du loup maigre et du chien gras...la pauvre enfant qu'on avait désolée (!) avec cette fable tout en lui prêchant toujours la docilité(!!)...s'ennuyait d'être à la chaine, elle se sentait le cou pelé; elle pleurait de n'être pas loup." So very serious is maître Jean-Jacques--'Tis but a step from him through the nasty muck of the "divine marquis" to Robespierre, and on through the dual, amusingly rivalrous, frauds of Freud and Jung to the summum bonum of fascism in Hitler. That way madness did indeed lie--and indeed nothing could lie further from the sublime commonsense of La Fontaine. Funny how it is, that I so thoroughly and absolutely detest the (immodest, hypocritical) person that Jean-Jacques Rousseau basically was, that I cannot read patiently his most unexceptionable writings (e.g., du Contrat Social), and certainly could not abide a paragraph or a page of, say La Nouvelle Heloise or Emile; while, at the same time, I adore Bernardin de St.-Pierre, Rousseau's admirer and close friend, and I love without reservation the quintessentially romantic and Rousseauvian Paul et Virginie. I think Napoleon (of all people) had much the same dichotomous dislike of the one and admiration of the other. Which troubles me: When you start agreeing with Napoleon (in matters of taste at least), you know you're in loony-land.  Or maybe there's more to Napoléon than we had heretofore allowed ourselves to think about....