“Vit au depens de celui qui l’ecoute” ("Lives at the expense of the person who listens to his flattery").—­No child of ten ever understood that.

“Ce lecon vaut bien un fromage, sans doute” ("No doubt this lesson is well worth a cheese").—­This is intelligible and its meaning is very good.  Yet there are few children who could compare a cheese and a lesson, few who would not prefer the cheese.  You will therefore have to make them understand that this is said in mockery.  What subtlety for a child!

“Le corbeau, honteux et confus” (The crow, ashamed and confused).—­A nothing pleonasm, and there is no excuse for it this time.

“Jura, mais un peu tard, qu’on ne l’y prendrait plus” (Swore, but rather too late, that he would not be caught in that way again).—­“Swore.”  What master will be such a fool as to try to explain to a child the meaning of an oath?

What a host of details! but much more would be needed for the analysis of all the ideas in this fable and their reduction to the simple and elementary ideas of which each is composed.  But who thinks this analysis necessary to make himself intelligible to children?  Who of us is philosopher enough to be able to put himself in the child’s place?  Let us now proceed to the moral.

Should we teach a six-year-old child that there are people who flatter and lie for the sake of gain?  One might perhaps teach them that there are people who make fools of little boys and laugh at their foolish vanity behind their backs.  But the whole thing is spoilt by the cheese.  You are teaching them how to make another drop his cheese rather than how to keep their own.  This is my second paradox, and it is not less weighty than the former one.

Watch children learning their fables and you will see that when they have a chance of applying them they almost always use them exactly contrary to the author’s meaning; instead of being on their guard against the fault which you would prevent or cure, they are disposed to like the vice by which one takes advantage of another’s defects.  In the above fable children laugh at the crow, but they all love the fox.  In the next fable you expect them to follow the example of the grasshopper.  Not so, they will choose the ant.  They do not care to abase themselves, they will always choose the principal part—­this is the choice of self-love, a very natural choice.  But what a dreadful lesson for children!  There could be no monster more detestable than a harsh and avaricious child, who realised what he was asked to give and what he refused.  The ant does more; she teaches him not merely to refuse but to revile.

In all the fables where the lion plays a part, usually the chief part, the child pretends to be the lion, and when he has to preside over some distribution of good things, he takes care to keep everything for himself; but when the lion is overthrown by the gnat, the child is the gnat.  He learns how to sting to death those whom he dare not attack openly.