1895 Complete Jeu des Fables Game
1895 "Le Jeu des Fables." (The game of fables.) Publisher Leon Saussine. Complete with 9 cards 7" x 7½" and 72 tokens. $216 in a French auction purchase mediated by Bertrand Cocq, August, 2020.
This is the most complete presentation of French La Fontaine Lotto games in our collection. The nine cards include each eight fable titles and lottery numbers, with two of them illustrated at the top of the card , with a palm tree separating and arching over them. The 72 "tokens" offer a fable moral with the mention of one or two points "won" or "lost."Apparently, each player received a number of the lovely cards. The paper tokens involve a quotation from the moral of a specific numbered fable, with a gain or loss of one to three points each. Were players challenged perhaps to guess the fable of origin for this short quotation? The instructions I received suggest that the appropriate card holder had only to read the title next to the number to receive the card – and then had to pay or collect. That part of the game remains mysterious to me. It seems likely that the player first to cover all eight of the numbers on one of his cards is the winner.
