'swimming against the current', used of just such characters as the contrary wife is said to be. Folk variants with similar pay-off lines were recorded from several European countries in the 19th century. Asian variants include a Pakistani version and another told of the Turkish Nasreddin Hodja. In the 20th century a Ukrainian variant was recorded. Artistic uses Pictures of the fable in books for some centuries usually depicted a group of men pointing opposite ways by the stream-side, following the emblematic lead of the German illustrator of Fearno's Centum Fabulae (1590) and of François Chauveau, the original illustrator of La Fontaine's Fables. It was only much later that attention switched to a compassionate view of the drowned woman, as in Gustave Doré's illustration of the fable (above) and Marc Chagall's 1952 etching. These follow in the wake of sympathetic treatments of the subject like the "Ophelia" (1852) of John Everett Millais and "A Christian martyr drowned in the Tiber during the reign of Diocletian" (1855) by Eugène Delacroix. The fable was set for solo voice as the sixth piece in Six Fables de La Fontaine (1861) by Pauline Thys. In 1954 Florent Schmitt included it in his Fables sans morales for mixed choir or four soloists (Op. 130). It was also among the four pieces in Isabelle Aboulker's Femmes en fables (1999). References Drowned Woman ATU 1350-1439