#miketuan
rain heron
frail dust
Okay, so from what I'm looking at, each paragraph describes a 'timeframe' of the story with the first being the oldest and the third being the most recent. When it comes to stories, we usually have a bit of background that explains the backstory and the world before the story starts. That bit is always in imparfait so for the first paragraph is great. Once you get into the story, usually marked with « un jour (one day) », that's where the other tenses come into play.
Weirdly, the second paragraph is still part of that backstory since the main story is with the third but that's fine. Because the second paragraph is still past of the third one, we would expect to see tenses that describe something more distant than passé composé/passé simple, so any instance of passé composé in the second paragraph is wrong.
Un jour, la lionne mère n'avait pas pu attendre l'arrivée du roi car elle devait (1) nourrir son lionceau qui venait (2) juste de naître.
(1) This clause explains the context of the first; why couldn't the Lion Mother wait? Because she was supposed to care for her cub. Remember that the passé composé and plus-que-parfait are for actions whereas the imparfait are for background events and overall context? This is it.
(2) This is the recent past structure, « venir de faire qqch ». In this case, « venir » can only be described in the simple tenses so présent or imparfait. « Elle venait tout juste d'arriver quand j'y suis allé. »
Alors qu'il était devenu (3) si fort et si puissant, il est sorti de sa cachette et est allé voir le roi Dankele. Voyant que le roi ne se souvenait (4) pas de sa maman la lionne, le grand lion a décidé de la venger et il s'est jeté sur le roi Dankélé. Il a libéré tous les animaux de ce roi injuste et est devenu le roi des animaux.
This is the main timeframe of the story so our main tense here is either the passé composé or the passé simple.
(3) We use the plus-que-parfait here to mark a change and specifically a change that happened before the main clause which is « il est sorti … est allé ».
(4) This provides context for the main clause, « le grand lion a décidé … s'est jeté ». Both the passé composé and plus-que-parfait describe a change-in-state; it's a past actions whose consequences remain until the most recent timeframe. If we were to use the passé composé here, it would imply the king forgot the lioness. Something happened which caused him to forget, basically.
austere yew
I can understand pretty much your explanation and its helpful, but in (4), is it "both the passé composé and plus-que-parfait"? 'cause I don't see any plus-que-parfait
frail dust
The paragraph before used the plus que parfait
I added it because the same idea applies to (1) where the imparfait gives context to the main clause
austere yew
so for past action whose consequences remain, we use passé composé or plus-que-parfait? It sounds like present perfect in English also has the same usage
frail dust
so for past action whose consequences remain, we use passé composé or plus-que-p...
Passé composé, plus-que-parfait is used when the main timeframe is in the past
It sounds like the present perfect because passé composé was originally French's present perfect
It's just that, over the years, the passé composé took over the functions of the simple past tense, the passé simple
Same thing happened to the past version of the passé simple, the passé antérieur. The plus-que-parfait gobbled it up.
frail dust
Back in the 16th or 17th century, French grammarians had described something called « la règle des vingt-quatre heures (the 24 hour rule) » where something that happened within 24 hours of the present got the passé composé and the rest got the passé simple. This is similar to English's present perfect and simple past where, if the time adverb is not relevant to the present, the simple past will be used. This wasn't a rule that came out of no where but it was more of an observation. The timeframe then got 'stretched': this day became these two days which became this week which became this month, until it all melded