The Monkey and The Cat - The Fable and Its History

The Fable and Its History

In La Fontaine's telling, Bertrand the monkey persuades Raton the cat to pull chestnuts from the embers amongst which they are roasting, promising him a share. As the cat scoops them from the fire one by one, burning his paw in the process, the monkey gobbles them up. They are disturbed by a maid entering and the cat gets nothing for its pains. It is from this fable that the French get their idiom Tirer les marrons du feu, meaning to act as someone's dupe or, deriving from that, to benefit from the dirty work of others. It is also the source of the English idiom 'a cat's paw', defined in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as 'one used by another as a tool'. There are earlier idiomatic allusions in 15th century Burgundian sources. Jean Miélot records the saying c’est un bon jeu de chat et singe (it's a cat and monkey game) in his Proverbes (1456) and there is another apparent reference to the story in a poem in Jean Molinet’s Faictz et dictz. In the following century, Jean-Antoine de Baïf has the version faire comme le singe, tirer les marrons du feu avec la patte du chat in his Mimes, enseignements et proverbes (1575) and John Florio includes the saying in his collection of idioms Second Frutes (1591).

However, the earliest surviving texts relating the story date from the mid-16th century and some of these have a puppy in place of a cat as the monkey's victim. Johannes Sambucus reports it as happening recently in the Dutch town of Bergen op Zoom in his Emblemata (1564). The Latin poem there continues, 'A small monkey gave us an example noteworthy and amusing for its cunning. For, when he saw the chestnuts buried in the hearth, he began to brush the ash aside but, afraid of the burning coals, he suddenly seized the foot of a sleeping puppy and stole it out.' The same story involving a sleeping dog appeared in other emblem books, including the Choice of Emblemes by the English poet Geoffrey Whitney (1586), who draws a political lesson from it in common with the other emblematists:

Which shewes, when as ambition fowle doth prick

The hartes of kinges, then there is no remorce,

But oftentimes, to aunswere theire desire,

The subjectes feele both famine, sworde and fire.

A version in which a cat figures is in Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder's illustrated book of fables, De warachtighe fabulen der dieren (True animal fables, Bruges, 1567), with Flemish verse provided by the foremost Netherlandic emblematist Edewaerd de Dene. A French version of the Fabulen was published in 1578 under the title Esbatement moral des animaux. Circular English engravings, intended to be used as trenchers, were made in 1630-36 based on twelve of Gheeraerts' illustrations, including one of this fable. The text around the edge of the picture reads: "The Monkey seing nuts in fire Doth force the Cat to plucke them neir; Which showeth the Envious doth not care, Whose House do burne so they have share". At the start of the 17th century the Dutch poet Joost van den Vondel published an emblematic collection also based on Marcus Gheeraerts' prints, Vorstelijke Warande der Dieren (Princely pleasure-ground of beasts, Amsterdam 1617), in which the poem Den aap en de katte appears.

Elsewhere in Europe, the monkey and cat version is found in Simone Majoli's Latin work Dies caniculares (1588), where it is told of the antics of the pet monkey of Pope Julius II at the start of the century; a little later the story appeared as Un Singe et un Chat in Philippe Deprez's collection of a hundred verse fables, Le Théâtre des animaux (Paris, 1595). It is from one or other of these last two that La Fontaine is said to have adapted his story. Even before he popularised it, the earlier version had been used by two artists: the Roman painter Tommaso Salini and the Dutch animal painter Abraham Hondius. Both of these illustrate the detail that La Fontaine chose to modify, in which the monkey uses the cat's paw to poke out the chestnuts against its will. A third version of the story, yet again quoted as happening recently, was contained in Gemelli Careri's Voyage round the world (1695) and related by 'the admiral of the Portuguese fleet in India' as witnessed by him.

One of the channels through which the fable was taken to be Aesop's was its inclusion among the hydraulic statues in the labyrinth of Versailles in 1669. These were accompanied by quatrains by Isaac de Benserade, which subsequently appeared in Les fables d'Ésope, mises en françois, avec le sens moral en quatre vers, & des figures à chaque fable (Aesop's fables in French,with a verse commentary and illustrations, 1709). Here the initial quatrain refers to the version where force is used ('The monkey looks sprightly/ but the cat doesn't take lightly/ having its paw acquired/ to pull chestnuts from the fire') while the prose telling which follows is of La Fontaine's version. The statue accompanied by De Benserade's verse is described in Daniel Bellamy's 18th century description of the labyrinth: ‘Upon a shell composed of brass, and supported by a column erected in the antique taste with the same metal, the spectator is amused with the resemblance of a large fire, from whence issues a torrent of water. Here a monkey appears with a smiling countenance, grasping a cat’s paw with his own, whilst the latter is seemingly struggling to get loose.’

It was a version in which the monkey uses force that was painted by Edwin Landseer in 1824 and by his 19th century imitator (see the gallery below). When the former painting was put up for auction in January 2011, U.S. Christie's recorded that 'The subject of the present painting is taken from the ancient fable traditionally ascribed to Aesop'. While this is far from true, the fable had been appearing in collections of Aesop's Fables since the 17th century. Where the story is ascribed to Aesop, it is in the version where the monkey forcibly uses the cat's paw. La Fontaine's modified version of 1679 can only be regarded as original for the detail of persuasion rather than compulsion. It was translated by neither of La Fontaine's main 18th century English translators, Bernard de Mandeville (1704) and Charles Denis (1754), but was ascribed to him in the verse Flowers of Fable in 1832. Charles H. Bennett also included the story in his The Fables of Aesop and Others, translated into Human Nature (1857) under the title of "The Cat's Paw". Referring back to the plot of Oliver Twist, Bennett's cat acts as thief's apprentice to the monkey.