The miller, his son and the donkey

In Mediaeval Europe it is found from the 13th century on in collections of parables created for inclusion in sermons, of which Jacques de Vitry's Tabula exemplorum is the earliest.

Titled "What happened to a good Man and his Son, leading a beast to market" (story 23), it is included in his Tales of Count Lucanor (1335).

The moral given is: In this version the episode of the two carrying the ass is absent, but it appears in Poggio Bracciolini's Facetiae (1450), where the story is related as one that a papal secretary has heard and seen depicted in Germany.

[10] The same story is told among the "100 Fables" (Fabulae Centum) of Gabriele Faerno (1564)[11] and as the opening poem in Giovanni Maria Verdizotti's Cento favole morali (1570).

[12] It also appeared in English in Merry Tales and Quick Answers or Shakespeare's Jest Book (c. 1530) with the same ending of the old man throwing the ass into the water.

In drawing the lesson that one should stick to one's decisions despite what the world says, Sachs refers to the story as an 'old fable', although it is obviously not the one with which Poggio's fellow secretary was acquainted.

The order of the episodes are radically altered, however, and the story begins with the father and son carrying the ass between them so that it will arrive fresh for sale at market.

The laughter of bystanders causes him to set it free and subsequent remarks have them changing places until the miller loses patience and decides he will only suit himself in future, for "Doubt not but tongues will have their talk" whatever the circumstances.

[26] It is now on exhibition at the Musée Jean de La Fontaine at Château-Thierry, as well as Hortense Haudebourt-Lescot's oil painting of the father riding through the town with the son holding onto the bridle.

[31] This shows a group of three women turning back to mock the miller and son as they cross the end of the street; but another version has them watched by a woman and her children as they take the road round the edge of the town.

[32] Another such artist was the American Symbolist painter Elihu Vedder, whose nine scenes from the story (dating from 1867/8) are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and follow the donkey's course through an Italian hill town until it topples over a bridge into a ravine.

[33][34] European Symbolist painters who treated the subject include the French Gustave Moreau, who made it part of a set of watercolours dedicated to La Fontaine's fables,[35] and the Swiss Ferdinand Hodler (1853–1918).