According to whether you are powerful or wretched, the judgments…

These are the last two lines of “The Animals Sick of the Plague”, the fable that opens Book VII, at the start of the second collection of 1678. The plague is ravaging the animals; the lion proposes that each confess his faults so as to designate the culprit to be sacrificed. He admits having devoured sheep; the fox reassures him, “and the flatterers applaud”. Then comes the donkey: in a monks’ meadow he cropped “the breadth of his tongue”. “At these words, they raised a hue and cry against the donkey”; a wolf “something of a scholar” proves that “this mangy, scabby creature” must be sacrificed. The moral follows.

La Fontaine, who dedicated this second collection to Madame de Montespan, included more political fables in it. This one is a satire of the justice of the powerful: the great devour the sheep and the small pay for a tuft of grass.

The two lines are among the most quoted formulas on inequality before the law, and “crier haro sur le baudet”, to raise a hue and cry against the donkey, has passed into the French language to describe the hounding of a scapegoat.

Fables, “The Animals Sick of the Plague”, Book VII, fable 1 (last lines), 1678

Original text checked word for word in the work; the translation is by quotesay.

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