The Two Pigeons

The Two Pigeons (original French title: Les deux pigeons) is a fable by Jean de la Fontaine (Book IX.2) that was adapted as a ballet with music by André Messager in the 19th century and rechoreagraphed to the same music by Frederick Ashton in the 20th.

La Fontaine ascribed the fable to the Persian author Bidpai and had found it in an abridged version titled "The Book of Enlightenment or the Conduct of Kings". The original is of some length, embroidered as it is with many an exquisite flower of rhetoric upon the trellis of its exposition. In essence it differs little from La Fontaine's abbreviated version. Two pigeons (or doves in Elizur Wright's American translation) live together in the closest friendship and 'cherish for each other/The love that brother hath for brother.' One of them yearns for a change of scene and eventually flies off on what he promises will be only a three-day adventure. During this time he is caught in a storm with little shelter, ensnared, attacked by predators and then injured by a boy with a sling, returning with relief to roam no more.

La Fontaine gives his text a Classical turn by alluding to a poem by Horace during its course. Horace's "Epistle to Aristus Fuscus" begins

Turtle doves are traditionally the symbol of close bonding and their appearance in Horace's poem would not be enough alone to constitute the intended allusion. But at the end of his poem La Fontaine returns to the Horatian theme of a preference for the country over life in the city. Reflecting on a youthful (heterosexual) love affair, he declares that he would not then have exchanged for a life at Court the woods in which his beloved wandered. It is this sentiment that has gained the fable the reputation of being La Fontaine's best and tenderest as it comes to rest on an evocation of past innocence:

Translations of the fable were familiar enough in Britain but the subject of male bonding left some readers uneasy (as it very obviously did Elizur Wright). Eventually there appeared an 18th-century version in octosyllabic couplets that claimed to be ‘improved from Fontaine’. Here the couple are a male and female named Columbo and Turturella. Apart from this, the only real difference is that, in place of an authorial narration, Columbo relates his misadventures to Turturella after his return and she draws the moral ‘Ere misfortunes teach, be wise’. The new version, also titled "The Two Doves", has been attributed to John Hawkesworth, one of the editors of The Gentleman's Magazine in which it first appeared (July 1748, p 326). Unascribed there, it remained so when reprinted in Thomas Bewick’s Select Fables of Aesop and others (1818).

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