The Fox and the Grapes

There are several Greek versions as well as one in Latin by Phaedrus (IV.3) which is terse and to the point: Driven by hunger, a fox tried to reach some grapes hanging high on the vine but was unable to, although he leaped with all his strength.

[4]In her version of La Fontaine's Fables, Marianne Moore underlines his ironic comment on the situation in a final pun, "Better, I think, than an embittered whine".

[5] Although the fable describes purely subjective behaviour, the English idiom "sour grapes", which derives from the story, is now often used also of envious disparagement of something to others.

While "Green are the grapes" (Зелен виноград) has become the response to disparagement,[11] Krylov's earlier exposition, "Eye may see but tooth not taste" (Хоть видит око, да зуб неймет), is now proverbial.

A century after its publication, this was the tale with which the sculptor Pierre Julien chose to associate its creator in his statue of La Fontaine (commissioned in 1782), now in the Louvre.

From this emerges the story's subtext, of which a literal translation reads: The gallant would gladly have made a meal of them But as he was unable to succeed, says he: 'They are unripe and only fit for green boys.'

The phrase there is "όμφακες εισίν" (omphakes eisin), the word omphax[14] having both the literal meaning of an unripe grape and the metaphorical usage of a girl not yet ripe for marriage.

The first of these is a quatrain by Aphra Behn appearing in Francis Barlow's illustrated edition of the fables (1687): The fox who longed for grapes, beholds with pain The tempting clusters were too high to gain; Grieved in his heart he forced a careless smile, And cried, 'They’re sharp and hardly worth my while.

'[19] The fable was also one that the French poet Isaac de Benserade summed up in a single quatrain, not needing to go into much detail since his verses accompanied the hydraulic statue of it in the labyrinth of Versailles.

But Benserade then adds another quatrain, speculating on the fox's mental processes; finally it admits that the grapes really were ripe but 'what cannot be had, you speak of badly'.

These stayed in production for some forty years and were imitated by other factories in France and abroad,[22] being used not just as wall hangings but for chair covers and other domestic purposes.

[23] The Sèvres porcelain works used the fables on their china as well as reproducing Pierre Julien's statue from a preliminary model in 1784, even before the finished product was exhibited.

[29] Series based on Aesop's fables became popular for pictorial tiles towards the end the 19th century, of which Minton Hollins produced a particularly charming example illustrating "The Fox and the Grapes".