Plus la change -- and Dominique Strauss-Kahn

[Laurence Horn]

At 10:48 AM -0400 5/17/11, Joel S. Berson wrote:
>At 5/17/2011 10:19 AM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>>>Maxim first seen in English by Google Books in
>>>1917, "The Life of the Grasshopper," by
>>>Jean-Henri Fabre, in a footnote translating from
>>>the French: "Pour vivre heureux, vivons caché!"
>>>
>>>(I do not have any quotation reference books to check.)
>>Me neither, but I suspect the last word would be
>>"cachés".  Or the next to last one "vive".  But
>>not both.
>
>Well, I do not know any more French than "La
>multiplication, sil vous plais", but I did
>transcribe accurately from page 302 of a 1917
>edition of Fabre NY: Dodd, Mead), translated by
>Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, Fellow of the
>Zoological Society of London. (GBooks, full view).
>
>Joel
>
We can take the plural version back a couple of centuries, first here:

http://books.google.com/books?id=w_4aAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA180&dq=%22vivons+cach%C3%A9s%22&hl=en&ei=qJDSTfjcOcbKsgaN3qW4CQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCsQ6AEwADha#v=onepage&q=%22vivons%20cach%C3%A9s%22&f=false

(Sorry, I don't know how to do the tinyURL bit.)

But you'll note that the proverb appears in the
above text as an epigraph attributed to Florian
(1755-1794), wikipedi-ized at
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Pierre_Claris_de_Florian,
who is indeed credited there with devising the
proverb in one of his celebrated fables.

LH

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