The Lion, the Bear and the Fox

In his 1692 retelling, Sir Roger L'Estrange anglicizes the conclusion as 'Tis the Fate of all Gotham Quarrels, when Fools go together by the Ears, to have Knaves run away with the Stakes'.

La Fontaine draws a political moral, likening the dispute to a contemporary war between Hungary and Turkey over the province of Transylvania.

In the Walloon dialect imitation made by François Bailleux in 1851, Lès voleûrs èt l'ågne,[7] that author likens the dispute between the thieves to two lovers fighting over a girl while a third has his way with her.

The 'application' for the fable of "The Lion, the Bear and the Fox" reflects on the foolishness of applying to lawyers in disputes over property: 'When people go to law about an uncertain title, and have spent their whole estates in the contest, nothing is more common than for some little pettifogging attorney to step in, and secure it to himself.

There the preface to Fable 20, titled "The Lion, the Tyger and the Fox", warns that 'The intemperate rage of clients gives the lawyer an opportunity of seizing the property in dispute'.

He cuts it into two unequal halves and has to nibble first one then the other to get them equal until the cats beg him to stop; claiming it as his fee, the monkey gobbles the remainder and leaves them nothing.

[15] The same story reappears in Alfred de Saint-Quentin's poem in Guyanese creole, Dé Chat ké Makak (The Two Cats and the Monkey)[16] and also makes an early English appearance in Jefferys Taylor's Aesop in Rhyme.

The painter emphasises the fight between the thieves in the foreground, standing out against the over-all dark colouring, while in the background, hidden in the shadows, the flight of the third thief on the ass is roughly sketched in.

Cézanne's later painting (1879/80) has a group of four thieves struggling in one corner of a dynamic seaside landscape over which loom cliffs and pines; the ass is peaceably wandering downhill towards two seated characters, one of whom is smoking.