7.11 La Cigale et la Fourmi, and two more fables — Epoché
What you will be able to do Read three fables by Jean de La Fontaine in the original verse: La Cigale et la Fourmi , Le Corbeau et le Renard and Le Loup et l'Agneau . Follow French verse: lines of different lengths, rhyme, and a story told in a few dozen lines. Recognise the moral of a fable, stated at the beginning or the end, and the irony with which La Fontaine states it. Know three texts that every French schoolchild learns by heart, and the phrases from them that are still quoted every day. Sentences from this text, before the notes. Read the French aloud; all of them come back below. French English La cigale, ayant chanté The cicada, having sung La priant de lui prêter Begging her to lend her Tenait en son bec un fromage. Held a cheese in his beak. Apprenez que tout flatteur Learn that every flatterer Le corbeau, honteux et confus The crow, ashamed and embarrassed Il ouvre un large bec, laisse tomber sa proie. He opens his beak wide and lets his prey fall. Prerequisites : 7.10 — this reading follows 7.10 Reading . You read a fable retold in prose, Le Lièvre et la Tortue , in 7.5 Reading , and you need the literary past of 3.15 Conjugation . About this text Jean de La Fontaine (1621–1695) published his Fables in three collections between 1668 and 1694, twelve books in all. He took most of his stories from older sources, above all the Greek fables attributed to Aesop, and retold them in French verse with a lightness and irony that made them classics at once. The three fables here come from his first book: the cicada and the ant is fable 1, the crow and the fox fable 2, the wolf and the lamb fable 10. French schoolchildren still learn them by heart, and many of their lines have become proverbs. The text is that of an edition of the Fables published in Paris in 1874, as transcribed in French Wikisource, about 460 words in all. Each line of verse is a paragraph in the companion document. One old word is glossed in that edition: l'oût , in the first fable, is an old form of août , August, here meaning the harvest. Below each section of commentary you will find an English prose translation, written for this course. Read the French first, then the translation, then the French again. French verse in a few words Lines are counted in syllables. French verse is measured by the number of syllables, not by stresses as in English. The commonest long line is the alexandrine, twelve syllables, as in La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure . La Fontaine mixes lines of different lengths, from three syllables to twelve, to follow the movement of the story. The silent e can count. In verse, an e at the end of a word that is followed by a consonant is pronounced and counts as a syllable, although it is silent in speech. Before a vowel it is elided. This is why verse read aloud sounds slower and fuller than prose. Rhyme is everywhere. Every line rhymes with another: chanté with été , perché with alléché . Rhyme in French depends on the last pronounced vowel and what follows it. The first fable: the cicada and the ant The cicada has sung all summer and has nothing to eat when winter comes. She asks the ant, her neighbour, for a loan. The ant asks her what she did in summer, and dismisses her with a cruel joke. The verbs of the story are in the literary past, se trouva , alla , dit ; the dialogue in the present, future and imperfect. Que faisiez-vous au temps chaud ? and je chantais are imperfects of habit. The ant's last line, eh bien ! dansez maintenant , is one of the most quoted in French. Translation. The cicada, having sung all summer long, found herself quite destitute when the north wind came: not a single scrap of fly or grub. She went to cry famine at the ant's, her neighbour, begging her to lend some grain to live on until the new season. "I will pay you," she said, "before the harvest, on my word as an animal, interest and principal." The ant is not a lender: that is the least of her faults. "What were you doing in the warm weather?" she said to this borrower. "Night and day, to all comers, I sang, if you please." "You sang? I am delighted! Well then, dance now." Notice the irony of c'est là son moindre défaut , that is the least of her faults : La Fontaine does not take the ant's side. The second fable: the crow and the fox A crow holds a cheese; a fox flatters him into singing, and the cheese falls. The fox addresses the crow with vous and the polite monsieur du corbeau , a mock aristocratic title. The present tense takes over in the middle of the story, le corbeau ne se sent pas de joie , il ouvre un large bec , to make the decisive moment vivid, as in 7.9 Reading . The moral is put in the fox's mouth: tout flatteur vit aux dépens de celui qui l'écoute . Translation. Master Crow, perched on a tree, held a cheese in his beak. Master Fox, drawn by the smell, spoke to him more or less in these words: "Why, good day, Sir Crow! How handsome you are! How fine you look to me! Truly, if your song matches your feathers, you are the phoenix of all who live in these woods." At these words the crow is beside himself with joy, and to show his fine voice he opens his beak wide and lets his prey fall. The fox seizes it and says: "My good sir, learn that every flatterer lives at the expense of the one who listens to him. This lesson is well worth a cheese, no doubt." The crow, ashamed and embarrassed, swore, but a little late, that he would not be caught that way again. The third fable: the wolf and the lamb The moral comes first: la raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure , the argument of the strongest is always the best . A hungry wolf accuses a lamb drinking downstream of muddying his water; the lamb answers each accusation politely and logically; the wolf eats him anyway. The lamb calls the wolf Sire and Votre Majesté , and uses the subjunctive of a polite wish, que Votre Majesté ne se mette pas en colère . The wolf says tu . The edition notes that the moral is meant ironically. Translat