"I would wish," commented the poet Jules Renard, "[that my animal poems] be pleasing to the animals themselves. Were they able to read my miniature Histoires naturelles, I should wish that it would make them smile." Ravel perhaps had similar aims in composing his musical setting of five of Renard's poems, creating a cycle whose wit and charm has made it a favorite in the repertoire of twentieth century French song.

Ravel's cycle Histoires naturelles (1906) traces its inspiration to the same-titled 44-volume zoological treatise by French naturalist and mathematician Georges Louis Leclerc de Buffon (1707-1788). Renard wrote a series of lighthearted poems based on Buffon's work and published them in 1895. They became quite popular and were no doubt familiar to those in attendance at the 1907 premiere of Ravel's cycle. The wry humor of the settings was not wholly appreciated at the first performance; one observer recalled that the audience interrupted the long pauses in the middle of "Grillon" (The Cricket) with derisive laughter, and read an ironic twist into the opening lines of "Martin-pêcheur" (The Kingfisher): "Ça n'a pas mordu, ce soir…" ("No luck this evening…").

Perhaps the audience rolled their eyes at Ravel's pictorialisms, which sometimes lend the songs an air of caricature. Still, in the spirit of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition (which Ravel later orchestrated), some of these renderings, either in their affective or their literal representation, are delightfully accurate. Anyone familiar with the harsh, unmelodious song of the guinea hen will chuckle at the burbling beginning of "La Pintade"; likewise, the chirps that decorate "Le Grillon" are strikingly cricketish, but artfully and seamlessly blended into the musical texture.

However, Ravel's musical interpretation of Renard's texts goes much deeper than these surface felicities might suggest. Despite their subject matter, Ravel's and Renard's portraits tell deeply and profoundly human stories. Certainly, the grouchy, paranoid, and ever-confrontational guinea hen is a familiar social archetype, one meant to resonate cleverly and knowingly with the listener. Ravel's depiction follows Renard's, accompanying the unfriendly fowl with nervous vamps and answering her outbursts with broad pianistic flourishes; though a caricature, it does reserve a hint of sympathy for the miserable creature. The grandiose music to which the peacock struts has a kind of unresolved, pathetic buffoonery to it. Reading Renard's poem, one laughs at the proud bird; in Ravel's setting, one feels just a little sorry for the poor groom, waiting in ignorance and in vain for a bride that never arrives. The story of the swan is the most hopeful: Despite the graceful bird's unsuccessful attempts to capture the reflection of the clouds in the water, Renard in the end points out that, with each try, he pulls up a worm and gets as "fat as a goose." Ravel's music follows this epigrammatic turn with an optimistic change of tempo and a happy conclusion.

In setting Renard's poetry, Ravel renders it as a dramatic reading. Phrases are built around the semantic and dramatic contours of the poems, creating a fluid and breathable structure. Pauses, as if in thought, are not uncommon, and the action proceeds sporadically according to the alternating phases of rumination, observation, and action in the text. This makes the cycle a very singable one, and one in which the music enhances, rather than encumbers, the poetry.

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