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La Fontaine stole one of Grattelard's dialogues bodily, and converted it into the celebrated fable of The Acorn and the Pumpkin. Grattelard was contemporary with Tabarin, as remarked above: he and his partner, Désidério Descombes, sold quack medicines at the north end of the Pont Neuf.
D. D. Yes indeed, Grattelard: you would have cut a fine figure drinking out of a bottle with your nose in a sling. Grat. By the Georgics of Virgil, 'twould be all up with spectacles for my old age. Tabarin was the first of the series of clowns that enlivened the streets of Paris for two hundred years, or, at any rate, the first to attain celebrity: Bobèche in our own century was the last.
The dialogue in question follows, at least so much of it as is in point, and will serve as tailpiece to the specimens of Tabarin's wit: Grat. I had a great discussion this morning with a philosopher, trying to prove to him that Nature often makes great mistakes. D. D. No, no, Grattelard: everything that Nature does is done for the best. Grat. Just wait now: let me tell you how I had to give in.
Tabarin's pleasantries, as jotted down by members of his audiences, have been given to the world at divers times in various forms, and have latterly been collected and published in a body with those of his less successful rival Grattelard; but very few of them are suited to nineteenth-century taste, and most of them are gross to the last degree.
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