sshopper. 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?

Less excusably than La Fontaine, the Greek fabulist wrote of the Cigale
of the books, instead of interrogating the living Cigale, whose cym