verum and factum

LI lept, in our last post, upon Vico’s passage concerning the material transmission of the masterpieces. As I pointed out, it is an odder passage than it might at first appear. Consider – it sounds themes – notably, the warning that mechanization works against authenticity – which are distinctly post-revolutionary. Furthermore, the man writing this is the son of a bookstore owner, who – one can say, literally – owes his bodily being to the printing press. Furthermore, the chance to study came to him from a chance conversation in a bookstore with a Bishop, carefully recorded and placed in the autobiography.

The ancients versus the moderns was a battle of the books, as Swift puts it (at about the same time as Vico), but it is the making of books as well as their content that concern our man. While it may seem that the analysis of mechanization is far removed from Vico’s protest against the geometric method, in fact, it is part of the same problem of exteriority. Just as the deductive method, in philosophy and physics, is nothing more than a baroque ornament, expressing no intrinsic truth about philosophy or physics, the printing press is the extrinsic mechanism that gives us no information about the quality of the rhetoric and themes of the books it produces, as it deviates from the track of the word – the special art of Hermes. To put oneself, by copying, in the track of the writer is a form of ‘magical’ materialism, one that is hard – and perhaps impossible? – to entirely give up. LI, ever your man for tracks and paths, backwards and forwards, would link Vico’s words about copying with a more famous Viconian theme that is given to us a year later in his essay, “The wisdom of the ancient Italians. This is a passage translated from Michelet’s French translation:


The words verum and facturm, the true and the fact, are put in a relation one for the other by the Latins as inter-convertible, as the schoolmen say. For the latins, intelligere, understand, is the same thing as to read clearly and to know with evidence. They call cogitare what, in Italian, is called pensare et andar raccogliendo (ratio reason) designating among them a collection of numeric elements, and this gift proper to the human, distinguishing him from the beasts and constituting his superiority, which is why they call man an animal who participates in reason - rationis particeps – and who, consequently, doesn’t possess it entirely. Just as words are the signs of ideas, ideas are the signs and representations of things. Thus, as to read, legere, is to gather together the elements of writing out of which words are formed, intelligence, intelligere, consists in assembling all the elements of a thing from out of which emerges the perfect idea.

One is able thus to conjecture that the ancient Italians admitted the following doctrine on the true: the true is the fact (the made) itself, and by consequence God is the first truth because he is the first maker (factor), the infinite truth because he made all things and the absolute truth because he represents all the elements of things, external as well as internal, for he contains them. To know is to assemble the elements of things, from which it follows that the thought cogitatio is proper to the human spirit and intelligence to the divine spirit, for God unites all the elements of things, external as well as internal, since he contains them, and he disposes of them, while the human spirit is limited as it is, and outside of all of what is not of it can relate to the external points, but can never unite everything in such a way that it can think about things, but not understand them – this is why he participates in reason, but does not possess it.”

In the background, outside of the window of a bookstore in Naples, on the branch of a figtree, two birds have settled from the Rg Veda, “one of the twain eats the sweet Figtree’s fruitage; the other eating not regardeth only.”

the gay science

Thanks to printing, books are published everywhere; this is why, with the moderns, those are so numerous who, not content to know one or two authors, have an erudition which depends upon abundant, varied, and almost infinite reading. And finally we have universities, which are institutions organized in view of the study of all kinds of sciences and arts, thanks to which intelligence, esprit and language are carried to their perfection. And in almost all these studies a single end is aimed at today: the truth. To the point that if I undertook to make a speech in praise of the truth, I would deserve the fact that one would respond to me, with stupor: But who has ever thought to dispraise it? - Vico.

Foucault revivied Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the cultural causes and consequences of the Will to Truth in the sixties; the diagnosis has rapidly penetrated to every sphere of the discourses devoted to the social sciences, and to the humanities. One hundred fifty years before Nietzsche, Vico was expressing his own discomfort with truth as the ‘single end’ of study, for reasons that reappear in Nietzsche’s account. It is a protest, on Vico’s part, that is almost wholly prophetic – for though, as Fontenelle wrote, the new mechanical ingenuity was appearing under the very noses of the poets and philosophers, in trades and shops, without the poets and the philosophers being aware of it, certainly the great European metropoles – London, Paris, Naples – had not yet been wholly caught up in the great transformation that instituted monetized commodity markets and industry on a mass scale, the concomitants of the artificial paradise. Fontenelle, Nietzsche justly wrote in a passage in The gay science (a Viconian book), ‘grew after death” – ‘Those small, bold words over moral things, that Fontenelle threw out in his immortal eloges, seemed to his time to be paradoxes and games of a not inoffensive wit; even the highest judges of taste and reason didn’t see anything else in them – yes, including Fontenelle himself, perhaps. Now something unbelievable has happened: these thoughts become truths! Science proves them! The game becomes serious! And we read these dialogues with another feeling than that with which Voltaire and Helvetius read them, and lift their progenitor into another and highter rank of intellects, as these did – justly? Unjustly?”

Vico’s examination of the “method” of the ancients versus the moderns is, on its face, an examination of the most modern of methods, that of science- as we find it in Descartes – with the ancients. But there is another face of his essay. Perhaps the best way to approach it is to look at what Vico says about printing. Remember that Vico, in the smallest of parentheses in his autobiography, tells us that his father owned a bookshop. Remember that the great encounter in Vico’s life – with the Bishop of Ischia – occurred in another bookshop (Michelet mistranslates this as a ‘library”), where Vico seemed to charm the Bishop with his knowledge of canon law, and his latin. Vico’s autobiography mentions several incidences concerning finding books, which was of course the bookseller’s trade. LI could, if you like, find something a bit Oedipal, then, in Vico’s remarks about printing, and the preference for the quill – for copying.
At the same time, it is important to note the conjunction of the intellectual and the material here. Vico sees that matter is a matter of routine.
A long citation, and then to bed.

In fact, when books were written by hand, the copyists, in order to make their labors worth the pain, only transcribed authors who had a well established reputation, and, as they sold their copies dearly, the amateurs were sometimes constrained to copy them with their own hand. What admirable profit one takes from this kind of exercise! We better meditate a text that we write, and chiefly that we write in calmness, without precipitation, peacefully, and in always following the order. Thus is established between us and the authors not a tie of superficial acquaintance, but a long habit by which we finish purely and simply by identifying with them. It is for this reason that the bad authors, when one copied them by hand, knew disfavor, and the goood saw their works diffused for the great benefit of all. Bacon made proof of more cleverness than good sense when he remarked that, in the influx of barbarians, the authors with the most weight sank to the bottom, while the light ones swam on the surface. In all genres, the most important, the best authors have come down to us, thanks to writing, and if this or that author has disappeared, one must attribute it to chance. When I question my memory (I wrote this when I was still not an old man) I perceive that I have seen writers who enjoyed while alive such glory that their works had been printed twelve times or more, and who are now disdained and even held in contempt. Others, remaining too long in obscurity and indifference, now see their name celebrated by a change in circumstance by the greatest experts.”

Vico and the failure of the revolution of 1799

The Gnostic historian, like the universal historian, has a strong sense of epochs – which, as Bossuet pointed out in his essay on universal history, are stopping points, still moments that frame a sequence. They are in history and not in history. They are signaled by royal deaths, falls of empires, the rising of the son of god from the clutches of death, etc. Instead of the grand events that punctuate the march of universal history, however, the gnostic’s epochs happen in corner conversations, or in a glance at a sign in a window, or in the lyrics of a popular song. Herzen had a nose for these things – in his writing, one finds moments in which suddenly, the forces at dialectical play, usually disguised in a thousand blind intentions, suddenly become naked and twofold, under a harsh and unforgiving stage light. In his beautiful essay on Owen, the proto-socialist English radical, Herzen reports on a conversation Owen had with Gentz, in Herzen’s words, “the literary sycophant of Metternich”, who said to him, about his scheme for a socialist utopia at New Lanark:

“Suppose you had been successful, what would have been the outcome of it?”
“It’s very simple,’ Owen answered. ‘The outcome would have been that every man would have had enough to eat, would have been properly clothed, and would have been given a sensible education.”
“But that’s just what we don’t want,’ observed the Cicero of the Congress of Vienna. Gentz was frank, if nothing else.”

In one sense, this has a satisfying Voltarian sound – in the struggle of the ancients and the moderns, the ancients – representing the ancien regime – want to impose poverty and ignorance on the masses to uphold their hierarchy, and the moderns want to burst through these tired integuments, made of superstition and irrationality, to produce dignity and culture for every man – plus dinner.

In another sense, though, dinner and high culture are not really correlates. Herzen, in his letters to Turgenev, emphasized this point. Raymond Williams, in contrasting Burke and Cobbett in Culture and Society, makes the point that judging our usual political dualities (left or right, ancien regime or modernity) under the Enlightenment program is a more difficult game than it seems when we approach the matter simply by letting certain books talk. The books talk and talk, a cartoon bubble forms, and it fills with theory. Meanwhile, cartoon bubbles were everywhere coming out of the mouths of speculators in drained Fenland and alehouse keepers, lazzaroni and dairy maids. The moderns were of course busy imposing the benefits of a beneficient system on the people, and tearing up the texture of popular belief, for good and ill. This is really a post about Vico and his consideration of the competition between the ancients and the moderns, or rather, as is the way of LI, a flirtation with a topic that always seems to recede from out of the clumsy grasp of my paragraphs, but I want to get to him via these nineteenth century anecdotes – and, for instance, via his radical/conservative reader, Vincenzo Cuoco, who, in exile from the collapse of the revolutionary Parthenopean Republic of Naples, looked back at the mistakes of the Jacobins of 1799 and stressed their disconnect from the people. Cuoco’s history – about which I will have more to say later – has often been linked to the reaction in Europe – to Burke, or to Gentz. About the leader of the Jacobins, the Neapolitan radical Pagano, for instance, Cucio writes:

You wouldn’t say that the families of the Serras, the Colonnes, and of the Pignatellis were obscure, or that Pagano, Cirillo, Conforti were men without a name, but they had a name among the wise who do not make revolutions, and they were unknown to the people, without whom they are not made, because they were too superior. Paggio, the head of the Lazzaroni of the market, was without doubt a contemptible man in all respects, yet however it was Paggio and not Pagano who was loved by the people – the people who always insult those who are above their intelligence.”

But what looks like a standard, Gentzian account of the mob is, in fact, a more subtle critique of the men of theory who do not come out of the crowd – and who, out of an ignorance deriving from that part of knowledge that William James named acquaintance, are all the more ready to reduce all knowledge to what is demonstrable and can be driven to the sole standard of the true or the false. A standard that requires the atomization of culture to a vast mass of independent decision pairs.

But I’ll leave Cuoco and start with Vico – in the next post.

Vico and l'esprit geometrique

In the preface to his translation of Vico’s Le Méthode des études de notre temps, Alain Pons notices that Vico, in contrast to his opponent Descartes, recognizes the distinct cognitive and cultural and philosophical status of childhood and youth.

“. It is doubtlessly in their respective attitude to childhood that best reveals the depths that separate Vico from Descartes. Descartes could not console himself from the fact that “we have all been children before being men, from which it is almost impossible that our judgments are as pure and solid as they could have been, if we had had the entire use of our reason from the instant of our birth and had never been led but by it. The Research of the Truth is even more explicit: “One of the principle causes why we have so much pain in knowing” is that, with the child, “the best comes last, which is understanding”, and that before this, for years, we remain given to the senses, “which see nothing beyond the most vulgar and common of things,” to our natural inclination, which is “completely corrupted”, and to “impertinent nurses”. Vico, on the contrary, could be defined as the philosopher of childhood, of the world of the child as the childhood of the world. From his first inaugural discourse, he declares to the students, “Quivis vestrum puer maximo praelusit philosopho” – every child is the prelude to a great philosopher, because in him is spontaneously amassed a treasury of theoretical and practical wisdom that the speculative knowledge would have to “explain”, to deploy rationally. The child is not infans, he speaks, one must know how to listen to him. Vico reports, in the De Constantia philologiae, the phrase of one of his sons: My heart is always talking to me, and what a lot of things it tells me!” “

Pons is right to elevate the child – that evidence that maturity is, itself, but a phase – to the emblem of what Vico saw as the cultural decadence spread by the geometric spirit. He wrote his small tract on method at almost the same time Fontenelle was writing his on the utility of mathematics. It is a good contrast, since Fontenelle was resolutely on the side of the moderns, and Vico wanted to have his say about this quarrel. LI sees him as one of the primogenitive advocates of the imagination – leading the power of ingenium against a fundamental shift in the human limit. A shift that leads us, in the 19th century, into the building of the artificial paradise.

Pons quotes a letter Vico wrote to a friend concerning the education of the young man of his time: “It [Cartesianism] has filled their heads, Vico will say in a letter of 1729, “with such great words as ‘demonstrations’, ‘evidences’, ‘demonstrated truths’, thus preparing them to enter in a world of men who are composed of lines, of numbers, and of algebraic signs.”

That is our world now, of course, and we are ruled by those men.

Seeing the forest

I’m sorry for not blogging for a week, but I am overwhelmed with work and love at the moment.

However, I want to make a post continuing my forest thematic – or obsession.
In Language and Sensibility in the seventeenth century (1975), Pierre Dumonceaux points out that even as the French government rationalized its operations under Louis XIV, the texts of that rationalization were shot through with irrationality. Take, for instance, Colbert’s radical reconstruction of the system of forest maintenance. His order of 1669 not only contains prescriptions concerning the cutting and use of trees, according to a new categorization that recognized different kinds of timber trees and their biological life cycle, but it also contained this sentence: Défendons à toutes personnes de charmer our brûler les arbres, ni d’en enlever l’écorce, sous peine de punition corporelle.” Dumonceaux remarks: “In this phrase, the three terms charmer, brûler, enlever are situated on the same semantic level; each time, it is a purely natural action, punished in the same fashion, the crime being of the same nature. Besides, a commentary for water and forest masters of the 18th century makes not the least allusion to sorcery or to the memory of sorcery, it declares, simply, that it is a grave crime committed with the intent to make the tree perish, and to be able, subsequently, to appropriate it as dead wood. Basically, that use of “charmer” rejoins those which will be studied further on under the general name of invisible metaphors.”

That the invisible and the charm are linked here with the utmost rational blindness to their subliminal provinence is, well, charming – as though the Derridean demon were unloosed, here, quietly, and all unawares, to wreck the careful linearity that so confidently beckons us to what we will study ‘further on’ – plus loin. As if the charm, or witchcraft, had no economic effect or motive at all. But what if what is happening here is not just the instance of an invisible metaphor, but an instance of invisible metaphorization, a retrospective projection of rationality upon a document that carries a rather damning and to-be-explained term for an offense that, as Dumonceaux himself concedes, might have once occurred in a more superstitious era. A rationality shored up by a lacuna in a commentary from the 18th century, a charm – the charm of bureaucratic rationality – against the charm.

In a footnote, Dumonceaux refers to a certain maitre des eaux et forets, Lafontaine – but in his capacity as a poet. In Le gageur de trois commeres, a story taken from Bocaccio, a valet, who wishes to inspire in the husband the belief that a pear tree in their yard is ‘charmed’ – that is, that certain visions occur under it – in order to make love to the wife under the pear tree at his ease, with the husband looking on, thinking that he is not seeing what he is seeing.

Under the auspices of cuckoldry, the tree is disenchanted. Or, rather, there is a thematic of deceit – as though charms were the tools of scoundrels or, in the Enlightenment critique, of priests to deceive the populace – that shows its face here. With the promise that we do see what we see, every tree and branch, in the forest.

The woods

If I wereeeee kinggg of the foreeeesssst

A post that I will expand later:

The Europeans were amazed that Indians seemed to have no rules to limit the persons who could hunt. They believed that there was no order among the savage nations, and that a sing of this was that all males could hunt regardless of station. In Europe, of course, hunting had long been a militarized zone between the notables and the obscure – the rustic could not, legally, hunt. But such laws were as good as their enforcement, which was often ad hoc, and always corruptible.

My sense of the numerous small, seemingly discrete shifts in attitude and use that made the world, or nature, an object of use for “man” is not backgrounded by a nostalgic attitude attached to medieval common lands or the like. It is backgrounded, mostly, by the dream of Carpenter Shih, and similar moments in which the tears and breaks in the historical picture – in the canvas we think we know – let in unexepected lights, a steady small time dazzle. The knowledge that the intellectual history of the pre-modern is found as much in the thick underbrush of superstition, story and custom, protests to authority, letters, drawings, songs, as in philosophy or the writings of the Great Tradition.

When Marx saw that the forest laws around Koln were changing due to the pressure generated not within the state, but of powerful economic actors, he had the insight that this was a clue – a clue in a forest, a very Maerchen clue – to the changes wrought by the system of capitalism.

A similar change in forest customs swept through France in 1669, when Colbert reformed the laws on Eaux et Forets.

La Fontaine’s father had made his fortune, such as it was, as the superintendent of Eaux et Forets in Château-Thierry. Between the time of Francis I and King Louis XIV, the system of the masters of the forest – which rewarded the masters with a portion of the chopped down timber, as well as other lucrative rights – and regulations that had allowed for clearcutting regardless of the nature of the forest – had brought the forests of France into a sad state. Colbert, Louis’s minister, wanted oaks for the navy and reorganized the system. In this reorganization, communities and peasants lost out – as did the old, Falstaffian core of masters of the waters and woods. La Fontaine was one of them. By this time he was in his father’s post as Master of the waters and woods. In this position, he received a severe letter from Colbert on August 7, 1666, asking for an account of the wood being taken out of the wood for fuel and the ‘infinity of malversations’ happening in the forest. The tone was peremptory, and showed no sense at all that La Fontaine was anything more than a lazy, stupid, wayward servant of the King. And on all accounts, La Fontaine sold wood and took his share without much regard for the forest. Plus, like a good poet, he was perpetually on the run from creditors.
TBC

Travelling through the republic of wolves: Dom Juan and Little Red Riding Hood

Contra Deleuze, I am more interested in the tree than the rhizome, the tree that my ape ancestors climbed, and that my hominid ancestors, in Europe, worshipped, chopped down, feared when there was a mass of them stretching for hundreds of miles across the country, and went across the globe to encounter, Paul Bunyan axe in hand, on the shores of the New World. I myself, as a boy, was an ardent climber of trees. The bark that would come away, the ants you would find, the life of the thing, hiding in the top branches. I like to think that the way I misread the story of Fontenelle in the forested park at Mésangère is a deeper sign of the times: that Fontenelle, in explaining to Madame de la Mésangère the orbits of the planets, carved their figures into her beech trees. Not rhetorical figures.

Of course, the tenuous connection of friendship and family, the linking of one Rouennais to another, doesn’t quite explain or justify my sense that l’esprit geometrique and the Perrault’s tales, or the tale of Beauty and the Beast, form a dialectically joined complex.

And what are those tales? I want to go deeper in the woods with this question. Those who pursue literature, or intellectual history, seem to be going down a different track from those who pursue folklore, or ethnography. I like it when those tracks merge, or when you can’t tell if they have or not.

Jean Perrot makes a case, in his essay, L’appropriation et le jeu avec le conte, ou pourquoi
Le Petit Chaperon Rouge? that Perrault’s tale was overdetermined not only in being a mixture of the servant or peasant’s old tale and the courtly overlay, but, Perrot claims, also as a sort of suggestion that arose from Perrault’s rivalry with, and admiration for, La Fontaine. The latter was Boileau’s friend and thus would have been Perrault’s enemy, theoretically, in the battle between the ancients and the moders. Perrot’s case rests on a reading of the extraordinary travel letters that La Fontaine sent his wife in 1663, when he accompanied her uncle, Jacques Jennart, into internal exile in Limoge.

Perrot points to a parallel – a possible appropriation – between certain features of those letters and Perrault’s tale, which was published in 1697. The letters are Perrot’s third “tableaux”, pictures of situations that are not proofs, but suggestions. For Perrot, like Perrault’s heroine, does go down a trail of suggestions:

“Accompanying the uncle of his wife, exiled in Limousin, La Fontaine exhibits his impressions of the journey to his spouse in letters dated from 25 August to 19 September 1663. Significantly, he is going to cross the landscapes of Nivernais, the same in which Paul Delarue has gathered the popular version of Little Red Riding Hood. His confidences, which are far from being confessions and which participate more in the exchanges between Valmont and Merteuil, allow us to see a pronounced taste for the observation of pretty women. In the first letter he writes: “The tell us, among other marvels, that many of the first rank bourgeois women in Limousin wear capes of a dried rose color with hoods of black velour. If I find someone of those capes which cover a pretty head, I could amuse myself in passing, and solely for the sake of curiosity.”

Before I go further into Perrot’s comparison, let me present my own parti pris: I think the letters Perrot cites are much more likely connected to Moliere’s Dom Juan, which was first put on in 1665. As Perrot makes clear, the letters were written to be circulated among La Fontaine’s friends, which would certainly include Moliere and people in his circle. Perrot’s claim I think is a bit tenuous, hanging on that hood. And yet I like the idea that at the source of both Dom Juan and at least part of Little Red Riding Hood stands perhaps the finest, and surely the slyest, French poet of the 17th century.

To go forward, then, a bit with Perrot’s citation of the letters. The letters are written in a prose that often breaks into rhyme. In the first one, La Fontaine praises the woods of a property near Clamart where they stopped to rest, “with the darkness of a ten centuries old forest”. This wood, though, seems to have been very cultivated, and formed part of a landscape with a garden. Going through the alley in the woods, La Fontaine is filled with rococo visions of fauns, and of Pan – a domesticated savagery. The next letter, however, gives us a contrast – for here La Fontaine describes going through the valley of Tréfou. In the coach was a countess, La Fontaine, Jacques Jennart, another woman, and presumably some servants:

I can’t think about that valley of Trefou without trembling,
It is a dangerous passage too,
A site for thieves, for ambushes and to hide
On the left a woods, a mountain on the right side
Between the two
A path very narrow
The mountain is covered
with boulders like those
of our little Domaine.

Even though we were all humans in the coach, we climbed out, in order to relieve the horses. As long as we were on the road, I only talked about the usefulness of war: in effect, if it produces robbers, it occupies them too, which is of great benefit to the entire world – and particularly for me, who naturally feared to meet them. They say that they swarm in the woods we were passing through – this isn’t good. Really, they should burn it down.

Republic of wolves, asylum of brigands
Do you really have to exist in this world?
You favor the evil
By your thick, deep shadows
They cut the throats of he who Themis, or gain,
Or the sightseeing impulse, makes journey from his soil!”

Later, La Fontaine’s party passes into Estampes, which has been sacked in the wars of the Fronde and is still burnt out, although they find lodging. The next day they go through Beauce, and this happens:

“boring countryside, and which, outside of the inclination that I had to sleep, furnished us with a very pretty subject. In order not to go to sleep, we put an argument on the carpet: our countess was the cause, for she is of the Religion, and showed us a book of du Moulin; M. de Chateauneuf (this was the name of the footman) took it up, and told her that her religion was worthless for several reasons. First, Luther had I don’t know how many bastards, the Hugeuenots never go to mass: at last he advised her to convert, if she didn’t want to go to hell: for purgatory was not made for gentlefolk like her. The woman from Poitiers then began on the scripture, and asked for the passage in which Purgatory is mentioned. While all this was going on, the Notary was singing and Mr. Jannart and I were drowsing.”

Finally, there is this passage, which Perrot cites to find a parallel with the wolf in Perrault, and which I will cite for my own purposes – a passage much further on, in the letter written when they were approaching Limoges. Perrault tells his wife about the inn they enjoyed at Bellac:

‘Nothing pleased me as much as the daughter of the innkeeper, a pretty enough young person. I teased her about her coiffure: it was some kind of hood with ear flaps, the cutest thing with a border of gold ribbon about three inches wide. The poor girl, thinking that she was showing off, when to find immediately her ceremonial hood to show me. Once you pass Cavigny, they speak only quasi-French; however, that girl understood me without trying too hard. … As mean as was our niche, I allowed myself a very sweet night. My sleep was not interrupted by dreams as it usually is: however, if Morpheus had brought me the daughter of the innkeeper, I don’t think that I would have sent her back; but he didn’t do it, and so I passed.”

In my hasty researches, I have found nobody who has remarked upon the many elements here that find themselves in Moliere’s Dom Juan. There is, first, the marvelous girl who speaks quasi-French, much like the peasant speech in the play; there is the entrance into a dark forest, a republic of wolves; there is the dispute between the servant and the master – or in this case mistress – about religion. And there is the curious twist in the play, where Dom Juan and Sganarellle are violating a code even more sacred then marriage by fleeing a duel - this is the motivation for the trip through the woods. And yet, in the woods, when they come upon some robbers, Dom Juan shows extraordinary courage. Similarly, the trembling La Fontaine is, after all, accompanying a man in disgrace and writing letters about it that he knows will be read in the highest circles.

I have the highest regard for that play of Moliere’s – higher than most people. La Fontaine and Moliere both frequented circles in which libertine notions – Gassendi’s philosophy, and Epicurus’ – circulated. It is easy for me to believe that Moliere hid some jokes in this play, jokes that La Fontaine would discern. That, twenty years later, Perrault would recall those red hoods – that is, I think, a little harder to swallow. But it does make sense that the Red Riding Hood, La Fontaine, and Dom Juan would be joined together in traversing the wood of the Republic of Wolves. Which gets me, at last, to the woods.