The Gout and the Spider by Jean de La Fontaine

Nature orders the spider and the gout, both regarded as plagues, to choose between mean huts and richly gilded palaces. The spider refuses the huts, while the gout refuses the palace because doctors go in and out of it. The gout settles in a poor man’s toe, expecting to thrive on his suffering without fear of being driven away by medical authority. The spider builds broad webs on a lofty ceiling and fills them with insects, but a maid repeatedly destroys them with her broom. Worn out by continual displacement, the spider seeks the gout and finds her starving in a field. The poor man’s hard labour has kept the gout’s host chopping, digging, and hoeing, so that the disease suffers even more than the spider. The gout proposes that they exchange places. The spider happily moves into the cabin, where she need not evade a tidy broom. The gout chooses the home of an ecclesiastic judge, becomes judge herself over him, and confines him to his couch. Salves and cataplasms fail to relieve his afflicted toes, while the gout steadily grows worse. Both sisters consider the exchange wise and fortunate.

By Jean de La Fontaine · First published 1679 · Genre: Fable, Didactic Poetry, Allegory · 637 words

First lines

When Nature angrily turn'd out / Those plagues, the spider and the gout, -- / 'See you,' said she, 'those huts so meanly built, / These palaces so grand and richly gilt? / By mutual agreement fix / Your choice of dwellings; or if not, / To end th' affair by lot, / Draw out these little sticks. ' / 'The huts are not for me,' the spider cried; / 'And not for me the palace,' cried the gout; / For there a sort of men she spied / Call'd doctors, going in and out, / From whom, she could not hope for ease. / So hied her to the huts the fell disease, / And, fastening on a poor man's toe, / Hoped there to fatten on his woe, / And torture him, fit after fit, / Without a summons e'er to quit, / From old Hippocrates. / The spider, on the lofty ceiling, / As if she had a life-lease feeling. / Wove wide her cunning toils, / Soon rich with insect spoils. / A maid destroy'd them as she swept the room: / Repair'd, again they felt the fatal broom. / The wretched creature, every day, / From house and home must pack away. / At last, her courage giving out, / She went to seek her sister gout, / And in the field descried her, / Quite starved: more evils did betide her / Than e'er befel the poorest spider -- / Her toiling host enslaved her so, / And made her chop, and dig, and hoe! / (Says one, "Kept brisk and busy, / The gout is made half easy. ") / 'O, when,' exclaim'd the sad disease, / 'Will this my misery stop? / O, sister spider, if you please, / Our places let us swop. ' / The spider gladly heard, / And took her at her word, -- / And flourish'd in the cabin-lodge, / Not forced the tidy broom to dodge / The gout, selecting her abode / With an ecclesiastic judge, / Turn'd judge herself, and, by her code, / He from his couch no more could budge. / The salves and cataplasms Heaven knows, / That mock'd the misery of his toes; / While aye, without a blush, the curse, / Kept driving onward worse and worse. / Needless to say, the sisterhood / Thought their exchange both wise and good.[1]

• Open reader

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Genres

• Fable — The poem uses personified figures, the Spider and the Gout, in a brief allegorical narrative that illustrates a practical moral about circumstances, labor, comfort, and suffering.
• Didactic Poetry — Its narrative is designed to instruct through an implied lesson: activity and hard work lessen the effects of gout, while sedentary comfort enables it to worsen.
• Allegory — The Spider and the Gout function as symbolic agents whose changes of dwelling represent broader contrasts between poverty and wealth, labor and idleness, and minor inconvenience and debilitating illness.
• Satire — The work humorously and critically targets social conditions, especially wealthy sedentary living, medical treatment, and the vulnerability of an idle ecclesiastical judge to gout.

Tags

French fable · seventeenth-century literature · verse narrative · allegory · personification · Nature · spider · gout · disease · poverty · wealth · palaces and huts

What this Textopian page supports

The Gout and the Spider is listed on Textopian as a fable by Jean de La Fontaine, dated 1679 CE.

This source record anchors work identity, reading entry points, and catalog context for checking claims about the work.

• Work type: Fable
• Author: Jean de La Fontaine
• Date: 1679 CE
• Language: English
• Genres: Fable, Didactic Poetry, Allegory, Satire, Narrative Poetry
• Length: 637 words
• Structure: 1 section, 2 paragraphs
• Reading fit: Fairly Easy (7th Grade)

Good citation fit

• Work identity for The Gout and the Spider by Jean de La Fontaine
• Canonical title URL and first readable passage URL
• Genre and topic classification from the Textopian catalog
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More by Jean de La Fontaine

• To Monseigneur the Dauphin (1668)
• The Grasshopper and the Ant (1668)
• The Raven and the Fox (1668)
• The Frog that Wished to be as Big as the Ox (1668)
• The Two Mules (1668)
• The Wolf and the Dog (1668)
• The Heifer, the Goat, and the Sheep, in Company with the Lion (1668)
• The Wallet (1668)
• All works by Jean de La Fontaine