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We meet our destiny
Often by the paths we take to avoid it.
A father had as his whole lineage
A son he loved too much, to the point of consulting
On the fate of his offspring
The tellers of fortunes.
One of these people told him that he should above all
Keep the child away from Lions up to a certain age;
Until twenty years, no more.
So the father, to achieve
A precaution on which depended the life
Of the one he loved, forbade that ever
He be allowed to pass the threshold of his Palace.
Without going out he could satisfy his desire,
With his companions all day frolic,
Jump, run, take walks.
When he reached the age where the hunt
Pleases young minds most,
This exercise with contempt
Was described to him: but, whatever one does,
Talk, counsel, teaching,
Nothing changes a temperament.
The young man, restless, ardent, full of courage,
Had scarcely felt the boiling of such an age,
When he sighed for that pleasure.
The greater the obstacle, the stronger the desire.
He knew the cause of the fatal prohibitions;
And as this dwelling, full of magnificence,
Abounded everywhere in paintings,
And as wool and brushes
Traced on all sides hunts and landscapes,
Here animals, there
Personages,
The young man was stirred, seeing a Lion painted.
Ah! monster, he cried, it is you who make me live
In shadow and in chains. At these words, he gives himself
To the violent transports of indignation,
Strikes his fist on the innocent beast.
Under the tapestry a nail was met. This nail wounds him; it pierced
To the very springs of the soul; and that dear head
For which the art of Aesculapius in vain did all it could,
Owed its loss to those cares taken for its salvation.
The same precaution harmed the poet Aeschylus.
Some Soothsayer threatened him, it is said,
With the fall of a house.
At once he left the city,
Put his bed in the open field, far from roofs, under the Heavens.
An Eagle, carrying a Tortoise in the air,
Passed by there, saw the man, and on his bare head,
Which appeared to its eyes a piece of rock,
Being destitute of hair,
Let fall its prey, in order to break it:
The poor Aeschylus thus knew how to advance his days.
From these examples it follows
That this art, if it is true, makes one fall into the evils
That the one who consults it fears;
But I acquit it of this, and maintain that it is false.
I do not believe that nature
Has bound its hands, and still binds ours,
To the point of marking our fate in the heavens.
It depends on a conjunction
Of places, persons, times;
Not on the conjunctions of all these charlatans.
This Shepherd and this King are under the same planet;
One of them bears the scepter and the other the crook:
Jupiter willed it so.
What is Jupiter? a body without knowledge.
How does it come about, then, that its influence
Acts differently on these two men?
Then how to penetrate as far as our world?
How to pierce the deep countryside of the airs?
Pierce Mars, the Sun, and endless voids?
An atom can divert it on the way:Where will the makers of horoscopes go to find it?
The state in which we see Europe
Deserves that at least one of them should have foreseen it;
Why then did he not say so? But none of them knew it.
The immense distance, the point, and its speed,
That also of our passions,
Do they permit their weakness
To follow step by step all our actions?
Our fate depends on it: its course, following one another,
Goes, no more than we do, ever at the same pace;
And these people want with a compass
To trace the courses of our life!
One must not stop
At the two ambiguous facts I have just told.
This too-cherished Son, nor goodman Aeschylus,
Prove nothing in it. However blind and lying this art may be,
It can hit the target once in a thousand;
These are effects of chance.
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-horoscope-jean-de-la-fontaine/