La Revue française de Généalogie: "The family history of La Fontaine".

Is Jean de la Fontaine 400 years old today, July 8, 2021? Not necessarily...! In fact, the document on which all historians and biographers rely is his baptismal certificate, preserved in the Archives Départementales de l'Aisne, in the parish registers of the Saint-Crépin parish of Château-Thierry, but which does not indicate the precise date of birth of the baptized, who may well have been born the day before or the day before...

Be that as it may, this deed provides a solid genealogical foundation, stating that he was the son of Me Charles DE LA FONTAINE, King's Counselor and Master of Waters and Forests, and Françoise PIDOU, with "honorable homme Jehan DE LA FONTAINE", his grandfather, as godfather. A man whom this prefix shows to be of more modest means than his son, who had in fact just bought a position as triennial master of the waters and forests of the duchy of Château-Thierry and Châtillon-sur-Marne thanks to his wife's personal fortune, which also enabled him to acquire a handsome house in the town of Châtillon-sur-Marne.The house still stands on the hillside between the Marne and the castle of the Merovingian king Thierry IV, after whom the town is named.

The fabulist's paternal and maternal branches therefore belong to two very different backgrounds. The first belonged to the upwardly mobile petty bourgeoisie, but with perhaps higher origins; the second to the nobility.

The paternal branch

The origins of the LA FONTAINE family are poorly known. The "honorable man" grandfather, who was a merchant, was the son of Nicolas de LA FONTAINE (baptized May 10, 1547 in the same parish of Saint-Crépin and died in in 1592), whose wife's name is unknown, but who is known to have been comptroller of the "tailles et aides", and son of the couple Pierre de LA FONTAINE, cloth merchant / Martine JOSSE, who were therefore the fabulist's great-great-grandparents. Although the family genealogy can't be traced back any further, there's every reason to believe that this lineage was a younger branch of a family of the same name, well known in the region in the past, whose ancestors, seigneurs des Fontaines, had been captains for several generations.They included Pierre I° de LA FONTAINE, father of Jean I°, living in 1472 and panetier to the Duke of Orléans, husband of Jeanne RÉMOND, dame de Bertinval, and father of Pierre II, living in 1490, husband of Jeanne de BAUDRY, father in turn of Jean II, himself father of Artus de LA FONTAINE, Grand Master of Ceremonies under Henri II and Françoise II, ambassador to Constantinople, France.ois II, ambassador to Constantinople and Vienna and lieutenant-general in the government of Ile-de-France, married Catherine de LYONS and father of François de LA FONTAINE (° 1566), married in 1593 to Charlotte de SOYECOURT. A well-established family, bearing the arms of 6 bendlets, 3 argent and 3 chequy or and gules.

The maternal branch

The maternal family is much better known, as Françoise PIDOUX, widow of honorable man Louis de JOUY, also a merchant, and remarried to Charles de LA FONTAINE on January 13, 1617, was born in Coulommiers on October 14, 1582. She was also a very wealthy woman, bringing her husband a dowry of 30,000 livres , of which 20,000 were paid in cash. Françoise PIDOUX was the daughter of Jean PIDOUX, écuyer, seigneur de la Maduère and physician to King Henri IV, and Françoise BOBÉE, daughter of a Coulommiers bailiff. Known to have introduced the shower to France, Jean PIDOUX was himself the son of François, seigneur de La Maduère and successive physician to kings Henri II, François II and Charles IX, and came from a family ofHe came from a noble family of the Bas-Poitou region, ennobled in 1551 and descended from Gabriel Pidoux, sieur de la Fouchière, tax prosecutor of the seneschal of Saont-Loup-sur-Thouet, in the Deux-Sèvres region.

Part of the fabulist's ancestry is given on Geneanet in the Pierfit database, with various additions, notably on Henri Jeannequin's online tree.

La Fontaine's descendants

As for his descendants, also present on the Pierfit database, please refer to a site proposed by Jean-Marc Bassetti, an enthusiastic schoolteacher, who describes them in some detail.The site also includes an article published in Héraldique et Généalogie in 1993, which can be accessed via the Geneanet library.

The poet had only one son, Charles, father of five children: three unmarried daughters, a son who died young, and another, Charles-Louis, father of a son Charles-Hugues (who died in 1824 in Château-Thierry, célibataire, and with whom the family line died out), a daughter with no descendants, and another, married in 1876 to Charles Etienne Marie MARIN de MARSON, with three children:

• a daughter born in Pamiers and died in 1802 in Draveil (Essonne), at her mother's home ;
• a son, Antoine Hugues Charles, born in Châlons-en Champagne in 1777, owner in Vitry-sur-Seine, in 1825 and apparently deceased with no descendants (inventory after Antoine-Hugues-Charles-Marin Delafontaine de Marson's death in Château Thierry on January 5, 1831);
• a daughter, Jeanne Françoise, born (where?) on September 5, 1777, whose fate no-one has yet been able to trace, the only hope that La Fontaine has any living descendants... A bon chercheur, salut!