one's class reappears in a Romanian folk variant in which a rat sets out to pay God a visit. He applies to the sun and to clouds for directions, but neither will answer such a creature; then he asks the wind, which picks him up and flings him on an ant-heap - 'and there he found his level', the story concludes. A less harsh judgement is exhibited in Japanese and Korean variants where the father seeking a powerful match for his daughter is sent round the traditional characters of sun, cloud and wind, only to discover that he too has his place on the ladder of power. All these are animal fables that lack the transformation theme. In the Japanese case a rat is involved and in the Korean a mole. The later version in La Fontaine's Fables, "The Mouse Metamorphosed into a Maid" (IX.7), acknowledges the story's Indian origin by making it a Brahmin who fosters the mouse and gives it back the body it had in a former birth. La Fontaine feigns shock at all this and finds at the story's culmination, in which the girl falls in love with the burrowing rat at the mere mention of its name, an argument to confound the Eastern fabulist's beliefs: In all respects, compared and weigh'd, The souls of men and souls of mice Quite different are made - Unlike in sort as well as size. Each fits and fills its destined part As Heaven doth well provide; Nor witch, nor fiend, nor magic art, Can set their laws aside. The fable’s philosophical theme inspired the American poet Marianne Moore to a wry and idiosyncratic recreation in her version of La Fontaine (1954): We are what we were at birth, and each trait has remained in conformity with earth's and with heaven's logic: Be the devil's tool, resort to black magic, None can diverge from the ends which Heaven foreordained. This in turn was set for unaccompanied soprano by the British composer Alexander Goehr in 1993 (Opus 54). The fable was also the subject of Print 90 in Marc Chagall's set of 100 etchings of La Fontaine's work executed between 1927 and 1930. Venus and the Cat The Indian fable's western equivalent is the story of "Venus (or Aphrodite) and the Cat", which goes back to Classical times and is given the moral that nature is stronger than nurture. It