Note 3 — Chapter I · THE FABLE OF THE CICADA AND THE ANT
Alexander Teixeira de Mattos translation
Grandville,3 whose drawings have the same delicious spice of malice as the text itself, falls into the same error. In his illustration, we see the Ant arrayed like an industrious housewife. Standing on her threshold, beside great sacks of wheat, she turns a contemptuous back on the borrower, who is holding out her foot, I beg pardon, her hand. The second figure wears a great cartwheel hat, with a guitar under her arm and her skirt plastered to her legs by the wind, and is the perfect picture of a Grasshopper. Grandville no more than La Fontaine suspected the real appearance of the Cicada; he reproduced magnificently the general mistake.