The Mouse Metamorphosed into a Maid, by Jean de La Fontaine (IX.7)

Jean de La Fontaine‘s Cat Metamorphosed into a Woman (II.18) 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)

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.

La Souris métamorphosée en fille

ne, 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

Gerbil, by

Jacopo Ligozzi (1547–1627)

Photo Credit: Wikipedia

July 29, 2013

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“The Cat Metamorphosed into a Woman,” by Jean de La Fontaine (II.18)

28 Sunday Jul 2013

Posted by michelinewalker in Fables

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Aarne-Thompson-Uther, Aesop's Fables, folklore, Horace, La Fontaine, metamorphoses, motif, Nature will out, Perry Index, Venus

La Chatte métamorphosée en femme (II.18)

Aarne-Thompson-Uther type 2031

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. 18)

La Fontaine: The Cat Metamorphoses into a Woman (II. 18)

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: 18), The Cat Memorphosed 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 an Æsopic fable entitled Venus and the Cat and Æsop‘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 and Psyche.

Interestingly, in Jean de La Fontaine’s La Chatte métamorphosée en femme (II. 18), a metamorphosis is used to show that metamorphoses are not possible, at least not altogether. In other words, in The Cat Metamorphosed into a Woman, 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. 18), 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 Metamorphosed into a Woman

In The Cat Metamorphosed into a Woman (simply click on the title to read the fable) (La Chatte métamorphosée en femme II. 18), 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 Æsopica (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, Æsop 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 BCE)

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 Æsop’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 Woman 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.7), 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.