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The Monkey and the Leopard
Were making money at the fair:
Each advertised his act apart.
One of them said: Gentlemen, my merit and my fame
Are known in good places; the King wanted to see me;
And, if I die, he wants to have
A muff of my skin; so dappled is it,
Full of spots, mottled,
And striped, and speckled.
Variegation pleases; so everyone came to see him.
But it was soon over, soon everyone left.
The Monkey for his part said: Come, if you please,
Come, gentlemen. I do a hundred sleight-of-hand tricks.
This diversity of which they speak to you so much,
My neighbor Leopard has only on himself;
I have it in my mind: your servant Gille,
Cousin and son-in-law of Bertrand,
Monkey of the Pope in his lifetime,
Freshly in this city
Arrived in three boats expressly to speak to you;
For he speaks, he is heard; he knows how to dance, to caper,
To do tricks of every kind,
To jump through hoops; and all for six blancs!
No, gentlemen, for a sou; if you are not pleased,
We will refund each his money at the door.
The Monkey was right: it is not in the clothes
That diversity pleases me, it is in the mind:
One always provides agreeable things;
The other in less than a moment wearies the onlookers.
Oh! how many great lords, like the Leopard,
Have only their clothes for all talents!
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-monkey-and-the-leopard-jean-de-la-fontaine/