The animals suffering from plague
The animals suffering from plague (French: Les Animaux malades de la Peste ) is the 1st fable from the seventh book of the Fables Choisies collection , Mises En Vers by Jean de La Fontaine .
The fable tells how once almost all animals were carried away by a plague epidemic and the king of animals, the lion, saw this as a punishment from the gods, which should be atoned for. The lion decides that each of the animals should confess its sins and that the animal with the greatest sins should be sacrificed. The Leo demands absolute sincerity from his subjects while confessing their crimes. He begins first and confesses how he had killed innocent sheep and even the shepherd without them ever harming him. When it is the fox's turn, he excuses the lion's guilt by presenting the sheep as a mean pack that deserves nothing better. The other animals follow his example and cannot be said to be wrong. Only the donkey confesses that it has forbidden to eat grass by the roadside. The wolf then makes a diatribe about the donkey and makes him a scapegoat. The animals condemn the donkey to death because it was the only one to plead guilty. The fable ends with the moral: depending on whether you are powerful or low / the judgments will make you white or black.
By switching between two types of discourse, La Fontaine shows the unpredictability of the sovereign , because ultimately the power of the lion over his subjects confirms that it is he who officially sanctions both types; it is he who works out the rules of both, and it is he who changes those rules at will. For this reason, it is often difficult to see what may or may not be an appropriate speech within a courtly setting.
Individual evidence
- ^ Collection Brandes / La Fontaine, Jean de: Fables Choisies: Mises En Vers: / Par J. De La Fontaine. Suffer. Leiden: Luzac, 1764. Retrieved December 20, 2019 .
- ↑ Anne Lynn Birberick: Reading Undercover: Audience and Authority in Jean de La Fontaine . Bucknell University Press, 1999, ISBN 978-0-8387-5388-0 , pp. 119–122 ( google.de [accessed December 22, 2019]).