“A million and a half,” Pelisson grumbled out; “now I happen to know an Indian fable—”
“Tell it to me,” said La Fontaine; “I ought to know it too.”
“Tell it, tell it,” said the others.
“There was a tortoise, which was, as usual, well protected by its shell,” said Pelisson; “whenever its enemies threatened it, it took refuge within its covering. One day some one said to it, ‘You must feel very hot in such a house as that in the summer, and you are altogether prevented showing off your graces; there is a snake here, who will give you a million and a half for your shell.’”
“Good!” said the superintendent, laughing.
“Well, what next?” said La Fontaine, more interested in the apologue than in the moral.
“The tortoise sold his shell and remained naked and defenseless. A vulture happened to see him, and being hungry, broke the tortoise’s back with a blow of his beak and devoured it. The moral is, that M. Fouquet should take very good care to keep his gown.”
La Fontaine understood the moral seriously. “You forget Aeschylus,” he said, to his adversary.
“What do you mean?”
“Aeschylus was bald-headed, and a vulture—your vulture, probably—who was a great amateur in tortoises, mistook at a distance his head for a block of stone, and let a tortoise, which was shrunk up in his shell, fall upon it.”