The Gout and the Spider by Jean de La Fontaine

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]

[1]: The story of this fable is told in Petrarch, (Epistles, III. 13) and by others.