Tag Archives: Horace

The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse

18 Sunday Aug 2013

Posted by in Art, Fables, Literature

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Town_Mouse_and_the_Country_Mouse_2 
The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse, by Milo Winter, from
The Æsop for Children
(Photo credit: The Gutenberg Project [EBook #19994])
 
Classification  
Texts 
8,1
The Town and Country Mouse, by John Rae
Fables in Rhyme for Little Folks
(Photo credit: The Project Gutenberg [EBook #24108])
 

The Town Mouse and The Country Mouse

Style, rather than Subject Matter

There are folk tellings of this fable (the oral tradition), but when Jean de La Fontaine (8 July 1621 – 13 April 1695) wrote Le Rat de ville et le rat des champs (The City Rat and the Country Rat), The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse entered the learned tradition. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, La Fontaine’s Fables “rank among the greatest masterpieces of French literature.”[i]

However, the mostly Aesopic Town Mouse and Country Mouse entered literature long before La Fontaine was introduced to Aesop’s Fables. Horace (8 December 65 BCE – 27 November 8 BCE) could be credited with giving this folktale its literary status. It is one of his Satires (book 2, number 6, lines 77-115) and it resembles La Fontaine’s City Rat and Country Rat. Interestingly, La Fontaine’s fable features two rats rather than mice. It would be my opinion that he chose to feature rats to embellish his fable. The word “rat” is shorter (one syllable or pied) than the word “sou-ris” (two syllables). Be that as it may, in both retellings of the narrative, the rustic mouse or rat decides to return to his humble but peaceful country life, when “a sudden banging of the doors” (Horace) forces our fellows to hide. Horace’s country mouse does not want to live in fear.

Then says the rustic: “It may do for you,
This life, but I don’t like it; so adieu:
Give me my hole, secure from all alarms,
I’ll prove that tares and vetches still have charms.”  
Horace (scroll down to “One day…)
 

Sources and Dissemination

There have been many retellings of Aesop’s Fables, beginning with Roman fabulist Phaedrus (c. 15 BCE – c. 50 CE).[ii] Aesop was also retold in Greek, by Babrius. As for The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse in particular, it appears we owe its dissemination throughout Europe to 12th-century Anglo-Norman writer Walter of England‘s translation of the fable into Latin.[iii] Fabulist Odo of Cheriton [iv] (c. 1185 – 1246/47, Kent) also contributed to the spread of the fable to various European countries.Spanish author Juan Ruiz inserted a Town Mouse and Country Mouse in his Libro de Buen Amor or Book of Good Love. Walter of England may also have inspired several manuscript collections of Aesop’s fables in Italian, including the Esopi fabulas by Accio Zucca. (See The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse, Wikipedia)

La Fontaine’s Sources

La Fontaine, however, seems to have drawn his material from Swiss writer Névelet whose Mythologia Aesopica Isaaci Nicolai Neveleti was published in Frankfurt in 1610.  Névelet was La Fontaine’s usual source. Moreover, given his knowledge of Latin and resemblances between the two texts, we can assume La Fontaine was familiar with Horace’s The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse. In both fables, our two country fellows, a rat and a mouse, flee when they hear “fearful knocking” at the door (La Fontaine).

La Fontaine: Twelve Books of Fables in three Collections (recueils)  

Le rat de ville et le rat des champs is the ninth fable of La Fontaine’s first book of fables (1.I.9) La Fontaine wrote twelve short books of fables which he published in three collections (recueils): 1668 (six books), 1678 (five books), 1694 (twelfth book). His first recueil, or collection, contains mainly Aesopic fables transmitted from generation to generation in an oral tradition until, as mentioned above, Latin author Phaedrus translated Aesop’s fables into Latin and author Babrius, into Greek. Phaedrus’ book of fables is a Project Gutenberg publication [EBook #25512].

D. L. Alishman gives us a list of retellings of the Aesopic Town Mouse and Country Mouse:

141
The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse, by Arthur Rackham, 1902
(Photo credit: The Project Gutenberg [EBook #11339])
 

La Fontaine’s The City Rat and The Country Rat

A city rat, one night,
Did, with a civil stoop,
A country rat invite
To end a turtle soup.
 
On a Turkey carpet
They found the table spread,
And sure I need not harp it
How well the fellows fed.
 
The entertainment was
A truly noble one;
But some unlucky cause
Disturbed it when begun.
 
It was a slight rat-tat,
That put their joys to rout;
Out ran the city rat;
His guest, too, scampered out.
 
Our rats but fairly quit,
The fearful knocking ceased.
“Return we,” cried the city,
To finish there our feast.
 
“No,” said the rustic rat;
“Tomorrow dine with me.
I’m not offended at
Your feast so grand and free,
 
“For I have no fare resembling;
But then I eat at leisure,
And would not swap, for pleasure
So mixed with fear and trembling.”
La Fontaine (I.ix) or (I.9)
 

Horace’s version can be read by clicking on The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse. La Fontaine’s version and translation can also be read by clicking on the appropriate title: Le Rat de ville et le rat des champs, or The City Rat and the Country Rat (1.I.9).

Other Versions

Variants listed above by D. L. Alishman differ from one another. For instance, in some retellings of the Town Mouse and Country Mouse, a cat, rather than dogs or a noise at the door, scares the mice away. But the moral of the fable is almost the same in all its retellings, that moral being that it is best to eat more frugally if the cost of eating finer and more abundant meals is a source of endangerment. Neither the country mouse nor the country rat want to eat watching their back. I like the wording Odo of Cheriton has given the moral of his Town Mouse and Country Mouse:

“I’d rather gnaw a bean than be gnawed by emotional fear.”

Philosophical Fables

La Fontaine’s City Rat and Country Rat could be considered as “philosophical,” or meditative, which the word “philosophical” meant in 17th-century France. For example, this fable could describe the fate of aristocrats under absolutism. After the Fronde (1648-1653), Court was no longer a “natural” environment for aristocrats who nevertheless spent a great deal of money to keep a house and carriage near Versailles. They hoped to be noticed and, consequently, be invited to attend the king’s lever (getting out of bed) and coucher (getting into bed). But Louis XIV feared aristocrats and would not give them power.  Therefore, their best option was to return to their home away from Versailles and its intrigues, which they seldom did.

However, as told by La Fontaine, the fable does not reflect in any direct way the circumstances of French aristocrats after the Fronde (1648 and 1653).

But his chief and most comprehensive theme remains that of the traditional fable: the fundamental, everyday moral experience of mankind throughout the ages, exhibited in a profusion of typical characters, emotions, attitudes, and situations.[v]

Horace: a Carpe Diem

Horace’s telling of The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse is more overtly “philosophical” than La Fontaine’s City Rat and Country Rat. For instance, Horace, who coined the term carpe diem, has included a “gather ye roses while ye may” in his Town Mouse and Country Mouse:

Come down, go home with me: remember, all
Who live on earth are mortal, great or small:
Then take, good sir, your pleasure while you may;
With life so short, ’twere wrong to lose a day.
Horace, Satires, book 2, no. 6, pp. 84-86            
 

Conclusion

The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse can be read at several levels.It is a palimpsest.  Surprisingly, fables often possess an unsuspected depth, especially if they have an Eastern origin, which is the case with many of Aesop’s fables and fables published in La Fontaine’s second collection of fables (1678). According to Wikipedia’s entry on The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse, it resembles a fable by Bidpai entitled The Lean Cat and the Fat Cat (The Baldwin Project). La Fontaine’s second collection of fables (1678) was written after he had read the Fables of Bidpai, published in France as the Livre des lumières ou la Conduite des roys, 1644). La Fontaine’s second collection, five short books, therefore reflects an Eastern source.

However, La Fontaine’s one wish was to create little comedies.

But the predominant note is that of la gaieté, which, as he says in the preface to the first collection, he deliberately sought to introduce into his Fables. “Gaiety,” he explains, is not that which provokes laughter but is “a certain charm . . . that can be given to any kind of subject, even the most serious.”[vi]

La Fontaine was a loyal friend, but he was not a crusader. He knew from experience that “might is right.” He had been a protégé of disgraced Nicolas Fouquet, the Superintendent of Finances in France from 1653 until 1661. Consequently, although La Fontaine’s fables have depth, the language he uses is light-hearted.

To the grace, ease, and delicate perfection of the best of the Fables, even close textual commentary cannot hope to do full justice. They represent the quintessence of a century of experiments in prosody and poetic diction in France.[vii]

Tiny Gallery

Gustave Doré (6 January 1832 – 23 January 1883)
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Milo Winter  (7 August 1888 – 15 August 1956) 
(The Project Gutenberg [EBook #19994])
 
476px-Rat-ville-champs-2 zpage018
zpage058zpage060
The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse
(Photo credit: The Baldwin Project)  
 

Sources

The Baldwin Project (excellent) 
Gutenberg (EBook #11339], Æsop’s Fables, translated by V. S. Vernon Jones, introduction by G. K. Chesterton, illustrations by Arthur Rackham  
Gutenberg [EBook #19994], The Æsop for Children, adapted by W. T. (William Trowbridge) Larned, illustrated by Milo Winter
Gutenberg [EBook #24108] Fables in Rhyme for Little Folks, adapted by W.T. (William Trowbridge) Larned, illustrated by John Rae 
Joseph Jacob‘s translation
Névelet: Isaaci Nicolai Neveleti’s (Frankfurt, 1610)
Townsend, George Fyler: (Gutenberg [EBook #21]), 2013 [2007]
Victoria and Albert Museum, “The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse”
 
_________________________
[i] “Jean de La Fontaine“. Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.
Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2013. Web. 16 Aug. 2013
<http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/326307/Jean-de-La-Fontaine>.
[ii] The Fables of Phaedrus are a Project Gutenberg publication [EBook #25512] (2008)
[iii] Gualterus Anglicus is Walter of England’s Latin name.  
[iv] Odo of Cheriton‘s fables are an online publication.  The “House Mouse and the Field Mouse” is number 26, p. 87.
[v] “Jean de La Fontaine“. Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.
Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2013. Web. 17 Aug. 2013
<http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/326307/Jean-de-La-Fontaine>.
[vi] Britannica, loc. cit.
[vii] Britannica, loc. cit.
 
8,6
The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse, by John Rae
(Photo credit: The Project Gutenberg [EBook #24108])
 
Jacques Offenbach (20 June 1819 – 5 October 1880)
Jacqueline’s Tears
Jacqueline Dupré OBE (26 January 1945 – 19 October 1987), cello
 
8,4The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse, by John Rae
(Photo credit: The Project Gutenberg [EBook #24108])
 
© Micheline Walker
17 August 2013 
WordPress
 
 
 
 

The Mouse Metamorphosed into a Maid, by Jean de La Fontaine

30 Tuesday Jul 2013

Posted by in Fables, Literature

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RP496_1L
The Cat Metamorphosed into a Woman, by Arthur Rackham
 
(Photo credit: The Project Gutenberg [EBook #11339]) 
Aarne-Thompson (Aarne-Thomson-Uther) type 2031C.
 
Aesop’s Fables: Venus and the Cat (The Project Gutenberg [EBook #11339])
Fables d’Ésope: La Chatte et Aphrodite 
La Fontaine: La Chatte métamorphosée en femme (II.xviii)
La Fontaine: The Cat Metamorphosed into a Woman (II.xviii)
La Fontaine: La Souris métamorphosée en fille (IX.vii)
La Fontaine: The Mouse Metamorphosed into a Maid (IX.vii)
 

La Souris métamorphosée en fille

La Fontaine’s First Collection of Fables (1668)

Jean de La Fontaine‘s Cat Metamorphosed into a Woman (II.xviii) belongs to the second of six books of fables he published in 1668. As we have seen, it is a Aesopic fable. However, La Fontaine’s immediate source was Névelet’s 1610 Latin edition of Aesop’s Fables, the Mythologia Æsopica Isaaci Nicolai Neveleti (Frankfurt, 1610) where the same fable, by Aesop, is entitled Venus and the Cat. The moral of The Cat Metamorphosed into a Woman is Horatian:

The Delights of Nature (Horace, Epistles, Book I. x, lines 1-25)
Drive Nature off with a pitchfork, she’ll still press back,
And secretly burst in triumph through your sad disdain.
(lines 24-25) 
or 
Limit your desires (Horace, Epistles, Book I, ii, lines 55-71)
A jar will long retain the odor of what it was
Dipped in when new.
(lines 69-70)
 

La Fontaine’s Second Collection of Fables (1678)

In Book IX:vii of his second volume of fables (1678), Jean de La Fontaine published La Souris métamorphosée en fille (The Mouse Metamorphosed into a Maid). The Mouse Metamorphosed into a Maid is not rooted in the Aesopic corpus, but finds its origin in the Panchatantra (3rd century BCE, or earlier), where it is entitled The Mouse Turned into a Maid or The Transformed Mouse Seeks a Bridegroom.

SOURIS-METAMORPHOSEE

Photo credit: La Fontaine’s Official Website

With respect to La Fontaine, he drew his fable[i] from Le Livre des lumières ou la conduite des roys (The Book of Enlightenment or the Conduct of Kings), published in 1644 by Gilbert Gaulmin (1585-1665) who used a pseudonym. He called himself David Sahid d’Ispahan. Le Livre des lumières ou la conduite des roys contains fables by storyteller Bidpai or Pilpay (FR), the storyteller featured in both the Sanskrit Panchatantra, by Vishnu Sharma, and its Arabic version, Kalīlah wa-Dimnah, written by Persian scholar Ibn Al-Muqaffa’. The Panchatantra was well-known and it migrated to both Eastern and Western countries. According to Edgerton (1924), who translated the Panchatantra into English,

…there are recorded over two hundred different versions known to exist in more than fifty languages, and three-fourths of these languages are extra-Indian. As early as the eleventh century this work reached Europe, and before 1600 it existed in Greek, Latin, Spanish, Italian, German, English, Old Slavonic, Czech, and perhaps other Slavonic languages. Its range has extended from Java to Iceland… [In India,] it has been worked over and over again, expanded, abstracted, turned into verse, retold in prose, translated into medieval and modern vernaculars, and retranslated into Sanskrit. And most of the stories contained in it have “gone down” into the folklore of the story-loving Hindus, whence they reappear in the collections of oral tales gathered by modern students of folk-stories.
(See Panchatantra, Wikipedia.)
 

Although both The Cat Metamorphosed into a Woman (II.xviii) and The Mouse Metamorphosed into a Maid feature a metamorphosis gone awry. Yet, not only are their source different, but so are their narratives. La Fontaine’s La Souris métamorphosée en fille (The Mouse Metamorphosed into a Maid) is a rather long fable. One may read it in full by clicking on the title on the fable. However, I will provide a summary.

A mouse falls from an owl’s mouth. The storyteller does not pick her up, but a Brahmin does and this Brahmin knows a sorcerer. The sorcerer transforms our mouse into a Maid. She grows up as a maid, but when she turns fifteen and time has come for her to marry, the Brahmin seeks a husband for her. Suddenly problems arise. The girl wants a powerful husband but she is rejected by the son of Priam, the Sun, a Cloud, the Wind, and a Mountain. However, our lovely maid is not disappointed because she herself is not interested in the suitors who have rejected her. She finally expresses a degree of satisfaction when she hears the word “rat.”  The rat rejects her as do a cat, a dog, a wolf… The sorcerer reappears, nearly fifteen years later, and states that one chooses a mate among one’s kind and one’s kind share the same soul. Consequently, metempsychosis, the migration of a soul, is not possible. In other words, as is the case in The Cat Metamorphosed into a Woman, although the mouse has grown into a beautiful girl, her human form is skin-deep. She has the soul of a mouse, not that of a human being.
 

La Fontaine does not tell us what happens to the mouse metamorphosed into a maid (she is turned back into a mouse), but here is his moral:

In all respects, compared and weighed,
The souls of men and souls of mice
Quite different are made,
Unlike in sort as well as size.
Each fits and fills its destined part
As Heaven does well provide;
Nor witch, nor fiend, nor magic art,
Can set their laws aside.
La Fontaine (IX.vii)
 
Parlez au diable, employez la magie,
Vous ne détournerez nul être de sa fin [destined part].
La Fontaine (IX.vii)
 

As mentioned above, The Mouse Metamorphosed into a Maid is rooted in the Panchatantra and its Arabic version, Kalīlah wa-Dimnah. It has the same moral as The Cat Metamorphosed into a Woman: “Nature will out.” But its narrative differs, to a greater than lesser extent, from that of The Cat Metamorphosed into a Woman (II.xviii). Finally, both are listed as Aarne-Thompson type 2031C. However, Professor D. L. Ashliman does not include La Fontaine’s two fables in his list of “cumulative tales.”

Aarne-Thompson or Aarne-Thompson-Uther types 2000-2100 are all cumulative or chain tales. As indicated above, when writing The Mouse Metamorphosed into a Maid, La Fontaine drew his material from the Sanskrit The Mouse Turned into a Maid or The Transformed Mouse Seeks a Bridegroom, which is a cumulative tale and is listed under: Chains Involving Other Events 2029-2075. According to D. L. Ashliman, The Mouse Turned into a Maid or The Transformed Mouse Seeks a Bridegroom (The Panchatantra, India) shares affinities with the following stories or narratives:[ii]

The Husband of the Rat’s Daughter or The Rats and Their Daughter (Japan)
A Bridegroom for Miss Mole (Korea)
The Story of the Rat and Her Journey to God (Romania)
The Most Powerful Husband in the World (France and French North Africa)
 

Conclusion

Reason vs Instinct

La Fontaine’s moral is very clever. He does not deny that animals have a soul, but he states clearly that animals have a soul, but that it is a soul of their own.

The souls of men and souls of mice
Quite different are made[.]
 

The Primacy of Reason challenged

The primacy of reason was challenged almost as soon as René Descartes published his Discourse on Method (Discours de la méthode) in 1637.[iii] According to Descartes, animals function much as clocks do. They were looked upon as machines. But, Blaise Pascal (19 June 1623 – 19 August 1662) argued that humans are endowed with both reason and instincts: Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point. (Les Pensées, published posthumously). Instincts are a characteristic humans share with animals, yet it was Pascal’s conviction that reason needed the support of instincts or le coeur, the heart: c’est sur ces connaissances du coeur et de l’instinct qu’il faut que la raison s’appuie (reason must lean on knowledge gleaned from the heart and instinct). See Pierre Magnard. In my opinion, such was also La Fontaine’s view. I have written a post on this subject: The Two Rats, Fox and Egg: The Soul of Animals.

So two little fables about a cat and a mouse transformed into a woman or girl contain the wisdom of their century as does The Two Rats, Fox and Egg: The Soul of Animals. Moreover, both the The Cat Metamorphosed into a Woman and The Mouse Metamorphosed into a Maid deny metempsychosis by featuring an attempted and partly successful metamorphism or metempsychosis.

From Mouse to Mouse

Ironically, the sorcerer is the character who says that sorcery does not work fully, which is contrary to his transforming the mouse into a maid. The structure of this fable therefore resembles that of The Cat Metamorphosed into a Woman (II.xviii) and Venus and the Cat. So the moral of La Fontaine’s The Mouse Metamorphosed into a Maid is expressed not only in words, but through form.

The very thing the wizard did
Its falsity exposes
If that indeed were ever hid.
 

In other words, the story or narrative could be summed up in a short phrase. It is “from mouse to mouse” as it is “from ashes to ashes.” As powerful as he was, Louis XIV could no more escape death than the humblest of his nation’s impoverished peasants: memento mori.

______________________________
[i] He acknowledged he did, see Bidpai (Wikipedia). 
[ii] Different folktales may have the same title and the same folktale may have different tiles. Moreover, a folktale (fables, fairy tales, etc.) may belong to more than one AT type. Finally, various animals can play the same role. That role is then called a function.
[iii] The Discours de la méthode (1637) is The Project Gutenberg’s [EBook #13846].
 
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (27 January 1756 – 5 December 1791)
Variations in C Major on the French Song “Ah! vous dirai-je, Maman,” K. 265 
Walter Klien, piano
 
 
nature2Gerbil, by
Jacopo Ligozzi (1547–1627)
Photo Credit: Wikipedia 
 
© Micheline Walker
July 29, 2013
WordPress

“The Cat Metamorphosed into a Maid,” by Jean de La Fontaine

28 Sunday Jul 2013

Posted by in Fables

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RP496_1L

La Chatte métamorphosée en femme

Aarne-Thompson-Uther type 2031C
The Perry Index (#050)
Æsop’s Fables: Venus and the Cat (The Project Gutenberg [EBook #11339])
Fables d’Ésope: La Chatte et Aphrodite 
La Fontaine: La Chatte métamorphosée en femme (II. xviii)
La Fontaine: The Cat Changed into a Woman (II. xviii)
Photo credit: The Project Gutenberg [EBook #25433], p. 46
 
 

Metamorphoses: Ovid, Horace, Apuleius and Æsop

According to the editors[i] of my collection of La Fontaine‘s Fables, the moral this fable (Book II: xviii), The Cat Changed into a Woman  (La Chatte métamorphosée en femme), finds its roots in Horace‘s (8 December 65 BCE – 27 November 8 BCE) Epistles, Book I. ii, lines 69-71.[ii] The moral is Horatian, but the source of La Fontaine’s fable is a Aesopic fable entitled Venus and the Cat and Aesop‘s (c. 620 – 564 BCE) Fables predate Horace’s Epistles. However, metamorphoses are a theme linked with Ovid (20 March 43 BC – AD 17/18), the author of Pygmalion, one of the metamorphoses, and with Lucius Apuleius (c. 125 – c. 180 CE), the author of The Golden Ass, an entertaining story, which contains the Tale of Cupid ans.

Interestingly, in Jean de La Fontaine’s La Chatte métamorphosée en femme, a metamorphosis is used to show that metamorphoses are not possible, at least not altogether. In other words, in The Cat Metamorphosed into a Maid, La Fontaine uses a metamorphosis, his exemplum, to demonstrate that nature is mostly immutable. A cat is cat and remains a cat, despite appearances, and a woman is a woman and remains a woman, despite appearances.

Seventeenth-Century France

In seventeenth-century France, particularly after the Fronde, the aristocrats and honnêtes hommes[iii] who gathered in the salons of refined women gave free rein to fantasy and would eventually create children’s literature, but nature reigned supreme, not to mention Cartesian reason and absolutism. Absolutism had taken their power away from the highest ranked aristocrats. It was a time when one had to heed Horace’s advice: “Limit your desires” (Epistles, Book I, ii, lines 55–71), but the cast of our fable seems not to have known Horace.

La Fontaine’s fable, entitled La Chatte métamorphosée en femme (II. xviii), is about a metamorphosis — a cat is “successfully” transformed into a woman — the purpose of which, i.e. the metamorphosis, is to tell that a metamorphosis is not possible, which is somewhat paradoxical. The metamorphosis that has occurred goes amiss. In other words, the exemplum shows that, if taken away, what nature has ordained, le naturel, will always return. As the French proverb goes: Chassez [chase away] le naturel, il revient au galop [it comes galloping back]. So our cat has been turned into a woman, but the woman’s instincts, the core, are those of a cat. Let us read the fables.

La Fontaine: The Cat Changed into a Woman

In The Cat Changed into a Woman (simply click on the title to read the fable) (La Chatte métamorphosée en femme), a man so loves his cat that he wants to transform her into a woman using every trick: from tears and prayers, to charms and magic. This man succeeds in transforming his cat into a woman, but the moment she hears mice, our newly fashioned woman is crawling on the floor chasing them, but without instilling fear in the mice. Our former cat looks like a woman, so the mice have no reason to fear her in the least. Appearances are deceptive.

La Fontaine, however, does not tell us the rest of the story, i.e. what happens to the cat-woman. He simply writes a moral according to which one cannot change: “Old habits die hard.” It is as Horace wrote:

Limit your desires (Horace, Epistles, Book I, ii, lines 55-71)
A jar will long retain the odor of what it was
Dipped in when new.
(lines 69-70)
 
The Delights of Nature (Horace, Epistles, Book I. x, lines 1-25)
Drive Nature off with a pitchfork, she’ll still press back,
And secretly burst in triumph through your sad disdain.
(lines 24-25)
 

Æsop: Venus and the Cat

La Fontaine’s narrative resembles its source, Æsop‘s fable entitled Venus and the Cat or The Cat and Venus. This time, however, the cat herself wishes to be metamorphosed into a woman because she is in love with a man. Roles have therefore been reversed: the man is a cat. Consequently, La Fontaine’s fable is a mirror image of its sources which would be, first, Névelet or Isaaci Nicolai Neveleti’s Mythologia Aesopica (Frankfurt, 1610), a retelling of Æsop, and, second, Æsop’s own Venus and the Cat.

In Venus and the Cat, our enamoured cat so wishes to become a woman that she asks Venus, the goddess of love, called Aphrodite in Roman mythology, to turn her into a woman. The goddess Venus obliges but, when night falls or “one day,” curiosity leads her to the bride’s chamber where she places a mouse in the middle of the room. The woman leaps out of bed and goes chasing after the mouse. Contrary to La Fontaine, Aesop provides a full narrative, leaving little to the imagination. A disappointed Venus turns the woman back into a cat, which seems a form of punishment. V. S. Vernon Jones’ translation of Venus and the Cat is as follows:

Æsop: Venus and the Cat 

Gutenberg (EBook #11339) 
V. S. Vernon Jones, Translator
G. K. Chesterton, Introduction
Arthur Rackham, Illustrator
 
“A Cat fell in love with a handsome young man, and begged the goddess Venus to change her into a woman. Venus was very gracious about it, and changed her at once into a beautiful maiden, whom the young man fell in love with at first sight and shortly afterwards married. One day Venus thought she would like to see whether the Cat had changed her habits as well as her form; so she let a mouse run loose in the room where they were. Forgetting everything, the young woman had no sooner seen the mouse than up she jumped and was after it like a shot: at which the goddess was so disgusted that she changed her back again into a Cat.”
Æsop (c. 620–564 BC)
 

La Fontaine’s Moral: Horace, Epistles Book I. x, 1-25

The editor of my copy of La Fontaine, Fables et Contes is quite right. The moral of La Fontaine’s fable is linked with Horace’s first book of Epistles or Letters. However, it is related to both Book I, ii, 55-71, and Book 1, x, 1-25. We may in fact have a translation for “Chassez le naturel, il revient au galop[,]” which would be: “Drive Nature off with a pitchfork, she’ll still press[.]” (Horace Epistles, Book I, x, line 24). The two relevant morals are the above-mentioned Horatian:

A jar will long retain the odor of what it was
Dipped in when new.
 
Drive Nature off with a pitchfork, she’ll still press back,
And secretly burst in triumph through your sad disdain.
 

Æsop’s Moral: “Nature will out”

In La Fontaine’s version of Æsop’s Venus and the Cat or The Cat and Venus, the moral is largely implicit, yet clear. However, some translations of Aesop’s version and the source of La Fontaine’s fable end with an explicit moral. As he concludes his 1887 Cat and Venus, author-translator George Fyler Townsend writes that “Nature exceeds nurture.” Similarly, Joseph Jacobs‘ 1894 The Cat-Maiden ends on the proverbial: “Nature will out.”[iv]

Aarne-Thompson type 2031C

Alishman does not include La Fontaine’s Cat Metamorphosed into a Maid in his list of fables classified as Aarne-Thompson-Uther Type 2031. Type 2031’s chief fable is The Mouse Who Was to Marry the Sun. La Fontaine’s cat is changed into a woman and the mouse, into a woman, but this motif is that of another fable by entitled The Mouse metamorphosed into a Girl (IV:vii), published in La Fontaine’s 1678 collection of fables, his second volume of fables a volume that reflects the influence of Le Livre des lumières ou la conduite des roys (The Book of Enlightenment or the Conduct of Kings), a French translation of fables by Bidpai, originating in the Sanskrit Panchatantra (Pañcatantra) and Arabic Kalīlah wa Dimnah, written by Persian scholar Ibn al-Muquaffa’. This one fable is in fact taking us all the way to Japan.  

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[i] René Groos et Jacques Schiffrin, La Fontaine, Fables et Contes (Paris: Gallimard, collection La Pléiade, 1954), p. 688.
[ii] Epistles are letters. Horace was born on 8 December 65 BC and died on 27 November 8 BC. 
[iii] “honnête homme.” Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2013. Web. 27 Jul. 2013.
<http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/271056/honnete-homme>.
[iv] To read other translations of Aesop’s fable, click on The Cat and Venus.
 
Arthur Rackham (19 September 1867 – 6 September 1939)    

 

002tBook cover, 1912 edition, by Arthur Rackham
Photo credit: The Project Gutenberg
 
© Micheline Walker
17 July 2013
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