Straight from today’s Quotle — here’s who really said it, and the story behind it. Play again

Who really said it

It is double pleasure to deceive the deceiver

Not Machiavelli — actually Jean de La Fontaine Jean de La Fontaine 1621–1695 · French fabulist and poet
Disputed Free to reuse

The sentence is the closing moral of La Fontaine’s fable “Le Coq et le Renard” (The Cock and the Fox), Fables, Book II, fable 15, first published in 1668: “Car c’est double plaisir de tromper le trompeur.” Wikiquote files the English version under Machiavelli’s misattributed quotes ↗ and finds no origin for it in his texts.

Last verified 3 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

Put it on a slide

Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“It is double pleasure to deceive the deceiver” is not Machiavelli. The line is Jean de La Fontaine's — "Car c'est double plaisir de tromper le trompeur" — the closing moral of "Le Coq et le Renard," Fables, Book II, fable 15, first published 1668. Wikiquote lists the English version under Machiavelli's misattributed quotes. Via Quotle.info.

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Niccolò Machiavelli. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

Free to use, including in commercial and paid presentations — no permission or licence needed.

Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool

In context

Evoking the world of Jean de La Fontaine — French fabulist and poet. Theme: "It is double pleasure to deceive the deceiver". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "It is double pleasure to deceive the deceiver". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

The fable it actually ends

Work
Fables, Book II, fable 15 — “Le Coq et le Renard”
First published
1668 (Books I–VI); the digitised Thierry & Barbin printing linked here is 1678
Original line
Car c’est double plaisir de tromper le trompeur.
Translation
The English wording that circulates online carries no translator credit. Elizur Wright’s 19th-century verse translation renders the close as “’Tis doubly sweet deceiver to deceive.”

… Mal content de son stratagème.
Et notre vieux coq en soi-même
Se mit à rire de sa peur ;
Car c’est double plaisir de tromper le trompeur. closing lines

In the fable, a fox tries to coax an old cock down from his branch with news that universal peace has been declared. The cock says he is delighted — and adds that two greyhounds are running towards them, no doubt carrying the same happy news. The fox bolts. The English sentence people quote under Machiavelli’s name is a flat literal rendering of that last line; Wikiquote gives it as “It is a double pleasure to deceive the deceiver” ↗.

1678 printed edition (scan)
Read “Le Coq & le Renard” in the 1678 Thierry & Barbin edition
Elizur Wright’s English translation of “The Cock and the Fox” (Project Gutenberg)

How we traced it

Public domain

The fable was first published in 1668 and the 1678 Thierry & Barbin printing ↗ is long out of copyright, as is Elizur Wright’s English translation ↗, which that edition dates to 1841. The bare English sentence circulating online has no identified translator and no identifiable rights-holder.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

How Machiavelli got the credit

The thought is cynical, compact and about outfoxing a manipulator, which is more or less the job description the internet has assigned to Machiavelli. So the sentence gets dressed in his name — on quote aggregators, on posters, and even in the title of a peer-reviewed psychology paper.

Niccolò Machiavelli Misattributed

Wikiquote places it in the Misattributed section ↗ of his page, stating that it does not originate from his texts and is more than likely a variant of a line from La Fontaine’s Fables.

The Prince, chapter 18 Different thought

Machiavelli does have a famous sentence about deception, but it says the opposite thing — that deceivers never run short of victims: “he who seeks to deceive will always find someone who will allow himself to be deceived” (W. K. Marriott’s translation, Project Gutenberg ↗). That is about the gullible, not about the pleasure of turning the tables.

Quote aggregators Amplifier

BrainyQuote ↗ and AZQuotes ↗ both serve the sentence under Machiavelli’s name without naming a work, a chapter or a translator.

Academic literature Downstream

The wording is established enough to head a 2023 British Journal of Social Psychology paper by Christian Blötner and Sebastian Bergold on Machiavellianism and bullshit production (PubMed record ↗).

It is La Fontaine’s, written in French and in verse: “Car c’est double plaisir de tromper le trompeur” — the last line of “Le Coq & le Renard,” Fables, Book II, fable 15 ↗.

Context

Why the line has an ending’s shape

La Fontaine did not invent the story. A cock, a dog and a fox had been travelling together through Aesop, through the Buddhist Jataka tales, through the Thousand and One Nights, and into Renaissance Europe long before 1668. What he added was the exit line.

That is the trick of the Fables: the narrative is inherited, the epigram is his. Which is also why so many of his closing verses have escaped their fables and now circulate as free-floating aphorisms, ready to be pinned on whichever famous cynic the internet reaches for first.

Car c’est double plaisir de tromper le trompeur.

Read the full story

Wikipedia’s article on the fable ↗ notes that the story appeared in Guillaume Gueroult’s first book of emblems (1550), prefaced with the summary “A trompeur, trompeur et demi” — to the trickster comes a trickster and a half. La Fontaine, it says, underlined his use of Gueroult by closing on a moral that echoed that source.

The fable’s comedy is in the cock’s deadpan. The fox announces universal peace; the cock replies that he is delighted, and mentions that two greyhounds are sprinting towards them, presumably with the same wonderful news. The fox remembers a pressing errand.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Truth Justice

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Wikiquote: Niccolò Machiavelli (Misattributed)en.wikiquote.org

Files this sentence under Misattributed and says it does not come from Machiavelli's texts.
Wikiquote: Jean de La Fontaine (Fables, Book II)en.wikiquote.org

Sources the French original to Book II (1668), fable 15, "The Cock and the Fox."
Fables choisies, mises en vers (1678) — "Le Coq & le Renard"fr.wikisource.org

The Thierry & Barbin printing of the fable, tome premier, pp. 122–124.
Fables of La Fontaine, trans. Elizur Wrightwww.gutenberg.org

Public-domain English verse translation ending "'Tis doubly sweet deceiver to deceive."
The Cock, the Dog and the Foxen.wikipedia.org

Traces the fable from Aesop and the Jataka to Gueroult's 1550 emblem and La Fontaine's II.15.
The Prince, trans. W. K. Marriott (full text)www.gutenberg.org

Chapter 18 carries Machiavelli's actual deception line — about deceivers always finding victims.

The man who actually wrote it

Jean de La Fontaine

Jean de La Fontaine

1621–1695 · French fabulist and poet

La Fontaine spent three decades turning Aesop, Indian folklore and Renaissance emblem books into supple French verse, publishing his Fables in instalments from 1668 onward. His animals are courtiers in feathers: the fox flatters, the cock calculates, and the moral lands in a single closing line built to be memorised. That habit of ending on an epigram is exactly why so many of his last lines now float free of the fables they belong to.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source

Jean de La Fontaine, “Le Coq & le Renard,” in Fables choisies, mises en vers, Book II, fable 15 (Paris: Denys Thierry et Claude Barbin, 1678), tome premier, pp. 122–124; the fable first appeared in the 1668 collection of Books I–VI. English verse translation: Fables of La Fontaine, trans. Elizur Wright, new edition with notes by J. W. M. Gibbs (translation first published Boston, 1841; preface to this edition dated London, 1881), “The Cock and the Fox.”

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘It is double pleasure to deceive the deceiver’?” Last verified 3 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/it-is-double-pleasure-to-deceive-the-deceiver/

Something wrong on this page?

Tell us what’s off. A link helps but isn’t required — “this is the wrong person” is a useful report on its own. Nothing here changes the page directly; it goes to our review queue and a human checks it.

Only used to tell you if we act on your report. We never sell or share it.

Copied