The Mountain in Labour
The earliest surviving version of the tale is in a four-line Latin poem by Phaedrus:[2] But the most well-known mention of the fable appears in Horace's epistle on The Art of Poetry.
"[10] The verse is discussed in an article by Howard Jacobson (2007), in which he argues that the original proverb may have meant "she was in labour with a mountain, but in the end produced only a mouse".
One of the Anglo-Latin prose collections going under the name Romulus gives a more extended interpretation, commenting that it warns one not to believe big talk, "for there are some who promise many more things than they deliver, and some who threaten much and perform least".
[20] The words on which he closed, La montagne en travail enfante une souris (The mountain in labour gives birth to a mouse), soon became proverbial and were applied to any great hope that came to nothing.
[21] In the version of the tale published in 1668 in La Fontaine's Fables (V. 10),[22] the first six lines are given to an updated relation in which it is imagined that the mountain is about to be delivered of a city bigger than Paris.
[26] Samuel Croxall, in his prose retelling of the fable, cites "Great cry and little wool" as a parallel English proverb and applies the story to the empty promises of politicians.
[28] Following the removal of Louis Philippe in 1848 and the declaration of a French Second Republic, the new political situation was again satirised in a one-act vaudeville, titled after the fable and written by Varin and Arthur de Beauplan.
[29] La Fontaine had emphasised the satirical intent in Horace's original allusion to the fable of the mountain in labour, amplifying the ridiculousness of the situation.
Jean-Baptiste Oudry's print of 1752 balances the agitated folk scurrying over the mountain slopes to the right with the mouse creeping warily over the rock face opposite.
[31] Ernest Griset's print of 1869 brings the satire up to date by picturing a crowd of pedants equipped with telescopes, measuring instruments and a primitive camera, all focussed into the distance on the minuscule mouse on the peak.
[32] An 1880 grisaille by Louis Eugène Lambert (1825–1909) unites Horace's interpretation of turbulence within the mountain as volcanic activity with the fable's association with literary criticism.
[34] Edward Julius Detmold, on the other hand, reverses the scale in his Aesop's Fables (1909) by picturing a huge mouse crouched upon a mountain outcrop.
The agitation that greeted the British Roman Catholic Relief Act in 1829 was satirised in a contemporary print by Thomas McLean (1788–1875) with the title "The Mountain in Labour – or much ado about nothing".
