Ten Years Later: Louise de la Valliere by Alexandre Dumas Chapter 46 Page 8

“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.”