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Our eyes are not proof against beauty,
Nor our hands against gold:
Few people guard a treasure
With sufficiently faithful care.
A certain Dog, who carried the food home,
Had made a collar of his master’s dinner.
He was more temperate than he would have wished to be
When he saw some exquisite dish:
But in the end he was, and all of us, as many as we are,
We let ourselves be tempted at the approach of goods.
Strange thing! we teach temperance to dogs,
And we cannot teach it to men.
This Dog then, being thus attired,
A mastiff passes by, and wants to take his dinner from him.
He did not have all the joy of it
That he hoped for at first: the Dog dropped his prey,
To defend it better, no longer being burdened with it.
Great combat: other dogs arrive;
They were of those who live
On the public, and fear blows little.
Our Dog, seeing himself too weak against them all,
And that the meat ran a manifest danger,
Wanted to have his share; And he, wise: he said to them:
No wrath, Gentlemen, my portion is enough for me:
Make your profit from the rest.
At these words he is the first to snatch a morsel.
And each of them to pull, the mastiff, the rabble;
Vying with one another; they all made merry;
Each of them had a share of the cake.
I think I see in this the image of a Town,
Where the coins are put at the mercy of people.
Aldermen, Provost of Merchants,
Everything takes its hand: the most skillful
Gives the others the example; And it is a pastime
To see them clean out a heap of pistoles.
If some scrupulous man by frivolous reasons
Wants to defend the money, and says the least word,
They show him that he is a fool.
He has no trouble yielding:
He is soon the first to take.
Jean de La Fontaine
Translation generated by Poésies 123 with assistance from the deepseek-chat artificial-intelligence model.
Text published on Poésies 123: https://www.poesies123.com/en/fable-the-dog-who-carried-his-masters-dinner-around-his-neck-jean-de-la-fontaine/