The Wolf, the Mother, and the Child

Fable by Jean De La Fontaine Collection The FablesThemes Animals, Childhood, FearPeriod 17th century

The Goat, going to fill her trailing udder
And graze on the new grass,
Closed her door with the latch,
Not without saying to her Kid:
Guard yourself upon your life
From opening unless someone tells you,
As sign and watchword:
Fie on the Wolf and his race!
As she was saying these words,
The Wolf by chance passes by;
He picks them up at the right moment,
And keeps them in his memory.
The Goat, as one may believe,
Had not seen the glutton.
As soon as he sees her gone, he counterfeits her tone,
And in a wheedling voice
He asks that the door be opened, saying Fie on the Wolf,
And thinking to enter all at once.
The suspicious Kid looks through the crack.
Show me a white paw, or I shall not open,
He cried at once. (A white paw is a point
With Wolves, as one knows, rarely in use.)
This one, quite surprised to hear such language,
As he had come, went back home.
Where would the Kid be had he added faith
To the watchword, which by chance
Our Wolf had heard?
Two safeguards are worth more than one,
And too much in this was never lost.

Jean de La Fontaine

Translation generated by Poésies 123 with assistance from the deepseek-chat artificial-intelligence model.

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