The animals sick of the plague (in French Les animaux malades de la peste) [1] is a dark fable by Jean de la Fontaine about the inequality of justice. It was published in 1678 at the head of his second volume of Fables (VII.1) and is generally considered one of his best. [2]
A mortal plague has struck the animal kingdom and their ruler, the Lion, calls a general council to consider a remedy. Following a Classical precedent, [3] the heavenly scourge requires an expiatory sacrifice and the Lion proposes a general confession to identify the culprit. He begins himself by confessing to killing lambs that have never harmed him and sometimes their shepherd as well. The Fox replies that this is a minor fault: the Lion confers honour on those he deigns to eat and punishes the shepherd for his human pride in believing himself chief of beasts. Taking heart, the Tiger, the Bear and other animals admit to similarly violent crimes. In the eyes of their consenting peers, such behaviour is all but saintly. Following them, the Ass relates how hunger once led him to snatch a bite of grass from a monastery meadow as he was passing and is immediately condemned for his double crime against property and religion.
From this story, La Fontaine draws the satirical conclusion that power, being reliant on property, makes victims of those without it: "Depending on your power or lack,/ Judgement will paint you white or black" [4] - or, as a later English translator prefaced his own version of the fable, "The laws on little culprits fall;/ Great criminals escape them all." [5]
Commentators point out several similar stories to La Fontaine's fable in the century before he composed it. [6] One of the earliest appears in a sermon of Jean Raulin (1443-1514) against ecclesiastical misuse of the sacrament of confession. The Lion, acting as confessor, absolves the Wolf and the Fox, but not the Donkey's encroachment on a monastic meadow. [7] An Italian parallel appeared in The Facetious Nights of it: Giovanni Francesco Straparola (1553), where the Wolf, Fox and Ass are on their way to Rome to confess their sins but decide to save themselves the journey by a mutual confession. On hearing that the Ass once nibbled some straw from his master's shoes, his unforgiving companions devour him. [8] Yet another version is told in the first book of emblems by fr:Guillaume Guéroult. There the Lion, as Father Confessor, excuses the crimes of the Wolf, but the two eat the Ass after his admission that he had eaten his master's straw sandals. [9]
A slightly expanded English version of La Fontaine's fable appeared a quarter century later in Bernard de Mandeville's misleadingly titled Aesop Dress’d (1704). It keeps La Fontaine's title of "The Plague among the Beasts", however, and the socio-economic focus of his moral: "The Fable shews you poor Folk's fate/ Whilst Laws can never reach the Great". [10] The next appearance was the prose version in the Modern Fables section of Robert Dodsley's Select Fables of Esop and Other Fabulists (1761), in which once again the details are slightly altered. [11] In this the animals, meeting in a general assembly, appoint the fox as father confessor "and the lion with great generosity condescended to be the first in making public confession", followed by "the Tyger, the Leopard, the Bear and the Wolf". But the Ass is condemned to be sacrificed in expiation for its sacrilegious mouthful of the parson's meadow "and the rest of the beasts went to dinner on his carcase".
La Fontaine's poem continued to be translated in later miscellanies of fables. Brooke Boothby condenses it in the second volume of his Fables and Satires (1809); [12] George Linley the Younger also gives an abridged version in his Old Saws Newly Set (1864), but at the end draws out the social moral to some length:
In judging great and small transgressor,
We laud the large, condemn the lesser…
Stern Justice, blinking giant vices,
The petty culprit sacrifices. [13]
Naturally, the fable also featured in translations of the complete fables that followed from the 19th century onwards. Among these may be mentioned the first U. S. collection in verse by Elizur Wright in 1841 [14] and Frederick Colin Tilney's prose version in The Original Fables of La Fontaine (1913). [15] Later complete collections in verse have contained notable translations by Marianne Moore [16] and Norman R. Shapiro (1930-2020). [17]
There were also adaptations of La Fontaine's version of the fable that altered significant details of its plot. Jonathan Swift's extended and satirical "The Beasts' Confession to the Priest" (1732) was the most radical of these. [18] There the Lion demands that all the beasts confess their sins to a priest, but as they do so each pleads underlying virtues: the wolf his basic harmlessness; the ass his wit and sweet voice; though the pig admits pride, it is in its moderate appetite; the ape argues its strict morality, the goat its chastity. Swift then compares this to the denial of their common reputations by lawyers, political and clerical place-seekers, doctors, statesmen and gamesters, concluding his satire by condemning fabulists for unrealistically endowing innocent animals with human characteristics. [19] The main target of the satire is the individual capacity for self-delusion, which is contained in the work's sub-title, "on observing how most men mistake their own talents".
The start of Ivan Krylov's plague fable differs less widely from La Fontaine's, but at the end wolves are added to the Tiger and Bear as joining in confession. They are followed by an Ox who admits that five years past he had nibbled a whisp from a priest's haystack and for this impiety is condemned by the others as the real culprit. Krylov also shifts from emphasising lack of means in his conclusion; in the eyes of the world, he ends, "The man that's meekest is the man to blame". [20]
Editions of the Fables were issued with individual illustrations of each, starting with those of François Chauveau in the 17th century and extending through engravings based on the work of such recognised masters as Jean-Baptiste Oudry in the 18th century and Gustave Doré in the 19th. [21] The majority of these portray the apologetic ass facing a semicircle of hostile beasts. The same scene was also used by Charles Virion in his bronze medal of 1940. [22]
A more exotic illustration is provided by the miniature commissioned from the Indian painter Imam Bakhsh Lahori (active 1825-45), now at the Musée Jean de La Fontaine. [23] This shows the lion sitting in judgement and the slaughter of the ass, a theme pictured by later illustrators such as Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard Grandville. Grandville's print takes up the fable's satirical undercurrent of a corrupted society swayed by the powerful, in which the lion sits at ease in the court and the wolf is dressed in a prosecutor's robes, with a blind mole swinging a priestly censer at his side.
As the 20th century approached, Auguste Vimar (1851-1916) crammed his foreground with many additional animals from the tropics and relegated the attack on the condemned donkey to the background (see above). Salvador Dali's lithograph of about 1974 takes its departure from another common theme of previous illustrators based on the fable's opening, with the animals collapsed on the ground, exhausted by the plague's attack, and here sprayed by a skeletal elephant. [24] Later still, Yves Becquet (b.1944), an inhabitant of La Fontaine's birthplace, [25] seizes on the fable's social message in his lithograph. Here the lion declaims from a political podium, guarded by a rank of uniformed security men and adulated by sycophantic supporters, condemning the violence of birds against worms. In the foreground the sick ass is receiving a blood transfusion. [26]
Fable is a literary genre defined as a succinct fictional story, in prose or verse, that features animals, legendary creatures, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature that are anthropomorphized, and that illustrates or leads to a particular moral lesson, which may at the end be added explicitly as a concise maxim or saying.
Ivan Andreyevich Krylov is Russia's best-known fabulist and probably the most epigrammatic of all Russian authors. Formerly a dramatist and journalist, he only discovered his true genre at the age of 40. While many of his earlier fables were loosely based on Aesop's and La Fontaine's, later fables were original work, often with a satirical bent.
Aesop's Fables, or the Aesopica, is a collection of fables credited to Aesop, a slave and storyteller who lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 564 BCE. Of varied and unclear origins, the stories associated with his name have descended to modern times through a number of sources and continue to be reinterpreted in different verbal registers and in popular as well as artistic media.
Reynard the Fox is a literary cycle of medieval allegorical Dutch, English, French and German fables. The first extant versions of the cycle date from the second half of the 12th century. The genre was popular throughout the Late Middle Ages, as well as in chapbook form throughout the Early Modern period.
"The Tortoise and the Hare" is one of Aesop's Fables and is numbered 226 in the Perry Index. The account of a race between unequal partners has attracted conflicting interpretations. The fable itself is a variant of a common folktale theme in which ingenuity and trickery are employed to overcome a stronger opponent.
The lion's share is an idiomatic expression which now refers to the major share of something. The phrase derives from the plot of a number of fables ascribed to Aesop and is used here as their generic title. There are two main types of story, which exist in several different versions. Other fables exist in the East that feature division of prey in such a way that the divider gains the greater part - or even the whole. In English the phrase used in the sense of nearly all only appeared at the end of the 18th century; the French equivalent, le partage du lion, is recorded from the start of that century, following La Fontaine's version of the fable.
The Lion and the Mouse is one of Aesop's Fables, numbered 150 in the Perry Index. There are also Eastern variants of the story, all of which demonstrate mutual dependence regardless of size or status. In the Renaissance the fable was provided with a sequel condemning social ambition.
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The Fox and the Crow is one of Aesop's Fables, numbered 124 in the Perry Index. There are early Latin and Greek versions and the fable may even have been portrayed on an ancient Greek vase. The story is used as a warning against listening to flattery.
The Wolf and the Crane is a fable attributed to Aesop that has several eastern analogues. Similar stories have a lion instead of a wolf, and a stork, heron or partridge takes the place of the crane.
The Ass in the Lion's Skin is one of Aesop's Fables, of which there are two distinct versions. There are also several Eastern variants, and the story's interpretation varies accordingly.
The miller, his son and the donkey is a widely dispersed fable, number 721 in the Perry Index and number 1215 in the Aarne–Thompson classification systems of folklore narratives. Though it may have ancient analogues, the earliest extant version is in the work of the 13th-century Arab writer Ibn Said. There are many eastern versions of the tale and in Europe it was included in a number of Mediaeval collections. Since then it has been frequently included in collections of Aesop's fables as well as the influential Fables of Jean de la Fontaine.
Jean de La Fontaine collected fables from a wide variety of sources, both Western and Eastern, and adapted them into French free verse. They were issued under the general title of Fables in several volumes from 1668 to 1694 and are considered classics of French literature. Humorous, nuanced and ironical, they were originally aimed at adults but then entered the educational system and were required learning for school children.
The Dog and the Wolf is one of Aesop's Fables, numbered 346 in the Perry Index. It has been popular since antiquity as an object lesson of how freedom should not be exchanged for comfort or financial gain. An alternative fable with the same moral concerning different animals is less well known.
The Fox and the Weasel is a title used to cover a complex of fables in which a number of other animals figure in a story with the same basic situation involving the unfortunate effects of greed. Of Greek origin, it is counted as one of Aesop's Fables and is numbered 24 in the Perry Index.
The Fox and the Mask is one of Aesop's Fables, of which there are both Greek and Latin variants. It is numbered 27 in the Perry Index.
The Ape and the Fox is a fable credited to Aesop and is numbered 81 in the Perry Index. However, the story goes back before Aesop’s time and an alternative variant may even be of Asian origin.
The Heron and the Fish is a situational fable constructed to illustrate the moral that one should not be over-fastidious in making choices since, as the ancient proverb proposes, 'He that will not when he may, when he will he shall have nay'. Of ancient but uncertain origin, it gained popularity after appearing among La Fontaine's Fables.
"The Lion Grown Old" is counted among Aesop’s Fables and is numbered 481 in the Perry Index. It is used in illustration of the insults given those who have fallen from power and has a similar moral to the fable of The dogs and the lion's skin. Parallel proverbs of similar meaning were later associated with it.
The Wolf and the Shepherds is ascribed to Aesop’s Fables and is numbered 453 in the Perry Index. Although related very briefly in the oldest source, some later authors have drawn it out at great length and moralised that perceptions differ according to circumstances.
