which a vine with grapes is climbing. On his knee is the manuscript of the poem; at his feet, a fox is seated on his hat with its paw on a leather-bound volume, looking up at him. Gustave Doré's illustration of the fable for the 1870 edition pictures a young man in a garden who is looking towards the steps to a mansion in the distance on which several young women are congregated. An older man is holding up his thumb and forefinger, indicating that they are only little girls. The meaning of this transposition to the human situation hinges on the double meaning of 'unripe' (vert) in French, which could also be used of a sexually immature female. From this emerges the story's subtext, of which a literal translation reads: There is the same sexual ambiguity in the Greek of Babrius. The phrase there is "" (), the word having both the literal meaning of an unripe grape and the metaphorical usage of a girl not yet ripe for marriage. Cognitive dissonance Rather than admit his failure to reach the grapes, the fox rationalises that they are not really desirable. One commentator argues that the story illustrates the state of cognitive dissonance. The fox is taken as attempting to hold incompatible ideas simultaneously, desire and its frustration. In that case, the disdain expressed by the fox at the conclusion to the fable serves at least to reduce the dissonance through criticism. Jon Elster calls this pattern of mental behaviour "adaptive preference formation". Concise translations Many translations, whether of Aesop's fable or of La Fontaine's, are wordy and often add details not sanctioned by the original. Two English authors have produced short poetical versions which still retain both the general lines of the story and its lesson. The first of these is a quatrain by Aphra Behn appearing in Francis Barlow's illustrated edition of the fables (1687): The second also accompanies an illustrated edition, in this case the work of Walter Crane in Baby's Own Aesop (1887). Each fable has been reduced to a limerick by W.J. Linton and is enclosed within the design. "The Fox and the Grapes" has been given the moral 'The grapes of disappointment are always sour' and runs as follows: By comparison, the Phaedrus version has six pentameter lines, of which two draw the moral, and Gabriele Faerno's Latin reworking has five lines and two