Thieves and the Donkey

Jean de La Fontaine published this fable in 1668. Two thieves come to blows over a donkey they have stolen, and while they fight a third thief makes off with it. La Fontaine's own moral turns it into politics. The donkey, he wrote, is sometimes a poor province, and the thieves are princes squabbling over it. Daumier painted the scene in 1858 and gave almost all of it to the fight. One man has the other pinned to the ground, and the face of the man underneath is twisted into a grimace. The animal and the third thief are only roughly sketched into the shadows at the back. The painting belonged to the sculptor Geoffroy-Dechaume, a friend of Daumier's, and at his sale in 1893 the French state bought it, with help from an anonymous Paris collector, for the Musée du Luxembourg, then the state's museum of modern art.