Save a thief from the gallows, and he will be the first to cut your throat.
The galley-slaves whom Don Quixote rescued repaid the favour by pelting him and his squire with stones, and stealing Sancho's ass. The French have two parallels for the English proverb. "Take a churl from the gibbet, and he will put you on it;"[431] and, "Unhang one that is hanged, and he will hang thee."[432] Observe the comprehensiveness of this second proposition: it seems to embody an old superstition not yet quite extinct, for it warns us against the danger of rescuing any man from the rope, no matter how he may have come to have his neck in the noose. An incident curiously illustrative of this doctrine was thus narrated in a Belgian newspaper, the Constitutionnel of Mons, of July 4th, 1856:—
"The day before yesterday a man hanged himself at Wasmes. Another man chanced to come upon him before life was extinct, and cut him down in a state of insensibility. Presently up came some women, who clamorously protested against the rashness, not of the would-be suicide, but of his rescuer, and assured the latter that his only chance of escaping the dangers to which his imprudent humanity exposed him was to hang the poor wretch up again. The man was so alarmed that he was actually proceeding to do as they advised him, when fortunately the burgomaster arrived just in time to prevent that act of barbarous stupidity."
This incident will at once remind the reader of the wreck scene in The Pirate. Mordaunt Merton is hastening to save Cleveland, when Bryce Snailsfoot thus remonstrates with him:—"Are you mad? You that have lived sae lang in Zetland to risk the saving of a drowning man? Wot ye not, if you bring him to life again, he will be sure to do you some capital injury?"
Put a snake in your bosom, and when it is warm it will sting you.
"Bring up a raven, and it will peck out your eyes" (Spanish, German).[433] "Do good to a knave, and pray God he requite thee not" (Danish).[434]
I taught you to swim, and now you'd drown me.
A's tint that's put into a riven dish.—Scotch.
All is lost that is put into a broken dish, or that is bestowed upon a thankless person. The Arabs say, "Eat the present, and break the dish" (in which it was brought). The dish will otherwise remind you of the obligation.
Eaten bread is soon forgotten.
"A favour to come is better than a hundred received" (Italian).[435] Who was it that first defined gratitude as a lively sense of future favours? "When I confer a favour," said Louis XIV., "I make one ingrate and a hundred malcontents."
