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Who does not run after Fortune?
I would like to be in a place from which I could easily
Contemplate the importunate crowd
Of those who vainly seek
This daughter of fate from kingdom to kingdom,
Faithful courtiers of a fickle phantom.
When they are near the good moment,
The inconstant one immediately escapes their desires:
Poor people, I pity them, for one has for fools
More pity than wrath.
This man, they say, was a cabbage planter,
And now he has become pope:
Are we not worth him? – You are worth a hundred times more;
But what use is your merit to you?
Does Fortune have eyes?
And then is the papacy worth what one leaves,
Rest, rest, treasure so precious
That one once made it the share of the Gods?
Rarely does Fortune leave it to her hosts.
Do not seek this Goddess,
She will seek you; her sex uses this.
A certain couple of friends established in a village,
Possessed some property: one sighed constantly
For Fortune; he said to the other one day:
If we left our home?
You know that no one is a prophet
In his own country: let us seek our adventure elsewhere.
– Seek, said the other friend, for my part I wish
Neither climates nor better destinies.
Be content; follow your restless mood;
You will return soon. I vow however
To sleep while waiting for you.
The ambitious one, or, if you will, the miser,
Goes off by road and path.
He arrived the next day
In a place that the bizarre Goddess was bound
To frequent above all others; and that place is the court.
There therefore for some time he fixes his stay,
Finding himself at the coucher, at the lever, at those hours
That one knows to be the best; In short, finding himself at everything, and arriving at nothing.
What is this? he says, let us seek good elsewhere.
Fortune however dwells in these abodes.
I see her every day entering this one’s house,
That one’s; whence comes it that also
I cannot lodge this capricious one?
They had told me well, that of people of this place
One does not always love the ambitious mood.
Adieu Gentlemen of the court; Gentlemen of the court adieu:
Follow to the end a shadow that flatters you.
Fortune has, they say, temples in Surat;
Let us go there. It was one to say and embark.
Souls of bronze, humans, that one was without doubt
Armed with diamond, who attempted this route,
And the first dared to defy the abyss.
This one during his voyage
Turned his eyes toward his village
More than once, wiping out the dangers
Of pirates, winds, calm and rocks,
Ministers of death. With much pain
One goes to seek her on distant shores,
Finding her soon enough without leaving home.
The man arrives at the Mogul; he is told that in Japan
Fortune at that time was distributing her graces.
He runs there; the seas were weary
Of carrying him; and all the fruit
That he drew from his long voyages, Was this lesson that savages give:
Stay in your country, by nature instructed.
Japan was no more fortunate to this man
Than the Mogul had been;
Which made him conclude in sum,
That he had with great wrong left his village.
He renounces ungrateful courses,
Returns to his country, sees from afar his penates,
Weeps with joy, and says: Happy, who lives at home;
Of regulating his desires making all his employment.
He knows only by hearsay
What the court is, the sea, and your empire,
Fortune, who makes us pass before our eyes
Dignities, goods, that to the end of the world
One follows, without the effect matching the promises.
Henceforth I do not move, and will do a hundred times better.
While reasoning in this way,
And against Fortune having taken this counsel,
He finds her seated at the door
Of his friend plunged in a deep sleep.
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-man-who-runs-after-fortune-and-the-man-who-waits-for-her-jean-de-la-fontaine/