Les amours de Psyché et de Cupidon (The Loves of Psyche and Cupid) is a 1669 retelling of the ancient story of Cupid and Psyche, by the French author Jean de La Fontaine.
Fontaine began writing around 1665, and the work was first published in 1669. Unlike his popular Fables, which began publication the previous year, Les amours de Psyché was not a success and did not earn favour from the king.
Fontaine cites Apuleius's The Golden Ass, the first written version of a much older myth, as his source for the story of Cupid and Psyche. The literary scholar Michel Jeanneret describes his use of the myth as part of a seventeenth-century tendency to rewrite classical stories by "strip[ping] the pagan fable of its ethical or metaphysical value, to employ it as decoration and a cultural signifier." More generally, Jeanneret associates the work with a Baroque taste for luxury, beauty, and pleasure that characterized Louis XIV's court at the Palace of Versailles after 1661.
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