Les Miettes d'Ésope: Fables
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Authors
Roussel, Auguste
Issue Date
1866
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Abstract
Miettes are crumbs. Roussel here presents 79 newly created verse fables in the Aesopic tradition, grouped in six books on 278 pages, as the closing T of C shows. There are eight full-page illustrations on separate pages plus a frontispiece. As Bodemann indicates, these are stereotypical portraits of contemporary human beings. A typical example is “The Peasant and the Mannequins” (197). Tried several sample fables. The first fable uses the ever-expanding worlds of a young gnat as an image of the human being. “However expansive your world, it is but a speck in the universe.“ Fable V in Book 1 has a blind horse turning a grinding wheel all day long. He thinks that he traverses wide spaces and enjoys his travels. A fellow horse with slightly more vision enlightens him that he is going nowhere. Men are the same: turning constantly, they do not advance. Fable XL at the beginning of Book 4 uses the central image of a man crossing a field of chirping crickets. Frustrated by the overwhelming noise, he apparently attacks them, but they only sing louder and he wastes time and effort. A week later, he crosses the same field. There is no noise because they have all died. “If I had only known that they would die, I would have saved myself time.” Roussel here addresses “divine poets.” “Do not bother yourself with their cricket-like chirped critiques of you. Wait a few days and these creatures of a day will have passed away.”
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Furne, Jouvet et Cie.
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12570 (Access ID)