Life & Wisdom Quote by Jean de La Fontaine

A clean little line that carries a blade. La Fontaine turns deception into a moral judo move: the act isn’t merely justified, it’s pleasurable twice over. First pleasure: you escape the trap. Second: you reverse the hierarchy, making the self-appointed manipulator taste the vulnerability they weaponize in others. The phrasing is surgical. “Double pleasure” sounds almost domestic, like dessert with coffee, which is exactly the point: he normalizes the thrill of retaliation while keeping his hands technically clean.

Subtext-wise, the quote flatters the reader’s inner cynic. It assumes a world where deceit is already in circulation, where innocence is less a virtue than a liability. That matters because La Fontaine’s fables were written for a courtly society steeped in performance, patronage, and strategic politeness. In Louis XIV’s France, survival often meant reading motives the way you’d read weather. The fable tradition lets him comment on power without naming names: animals and aphorisms stand in for courtiers and kings.

The line also smuggles in a moral distinction. Deceiving is not celebrated as a general talent; it’s framed as targeted, almost hygienic, like removing a thorn. That conditional ethics is why it works. It offers the audience a fantasy of justice that doesn’t require institutions, only wit. The catch is embedded too: once “deceivers” are your enemy category, it becomes easy to justify your own duplicity as righteous. La Fontaine knows revenge always likes to dress up as virtue; he just gives it a better costume.