The Bear and the Travelers

[4] The late mediaeval chronicler Philippe de Commynes records that an embassy was sent by King Louis XI of France to the Emperor Frederick III in 1475 with a proposal to divide up the Burgundian territories.

This was titled De Cortario emente pellem Ursi a Venatore nondum capti (How a tanner bought a bear's skin from hunters before it was taken).

)[7] His version, L'ours et les deux compagnons, is much the same as that of Philippe de Commynes apart from the detail that only two men are involved, one of whom escapes up a tree (as in Aesop).

The composer Francis Poulenc included it as the second episode in his ballet suite Les Animaux modèles (1941)[8] and it was Plate 63 of the hundred fables illustrated by etchings heightened with watercolour by the artist Marc Chagall (1952).

[9] Among those drawing from Aesop's version, the young Scottish artist Martin Hill produced a large oil painting of the scene in 2009.