Grandville, whose pencil rivals the author’s pen, has fallen into the same error.  In his illustration to the fable we see the Ant dressed like a busy housewife.  On her threshold, beside her full sacks of wheat, she disdainfully turns her back upon the would-be borrower, who holds out her claw—­pardon, her hand.  With a wide coachman’s hat, a guitar under her arm, and a skirt wrapped about her knees by the gale, there stands the second personage of the fable, the perfect portrait of a grasshopper.  Grandville knew no more than La Fontaine of the true Cigale; he has beautifully expressed the general confusion.

But La Fontaine, in this abbreviated history, is only the echo of another fabulist.  The legend of the Cigale and the cold welcome of the Ant is as old as selfishness:  as old as the world.  The children of Athens, going to school with their baskets of rush-work stuffed with figs and olives, were already repeating the story under their breath, as a lesson to be repeated to the teacher.  “In winter,” they used to say, “the Ants were putting their damp food to dry in the sun.  There came a starving Cigale to beg from them.  She begged for a few grains.  The greedy misers replied:  ’You sang in the summer, now dance in the winter.’” This, although somewhat more arid, is precisely La Fontaine’s story, and is contrary to the facts.

Yet the story comes to us from Greece, which is, like the South of France, the home of the olive-tree and the Cigale.  Was AEsop really its author, as tradition would have it?  It is doubtful, and by no means a matter of importance; at all events, the author was a Greek, and a compatriot of the Cigale, which must have been perfectly familiar to him.  There is not a single peasant in my village so blind as to be unaware of the total absence of Cigales in winter; and every tiller of the soil, every gardener, is familiar with the first phase of the insect, the larva, which his spade is perpetually discovering when he banks up the olives at the approach of the cold weather, and he knows, having seen it a thousand times by the edge of the country paths, how in summer this larva issues from the earth from a little round well of its own making; how it climbs a twig or a stem of grass, turns upon its back, climbs out of its skin, drier now than parchment, and becomes the Cigale; a creature of a fresh grass-green colour which is rapidly replaced by brown.

We cannot suppose that the Greek peasant was so much less intelligent than the Provencal that he can have failed to see what the least observant must have noticed.  He knew what my rustic neighbours know so well.  The scribe, whoever he may have been, who was responsible for the fable was in the best possible circumstances for correct knowledge of the subject.  Whence, then, arose the errors of his tale?