“We were the Leopards and Lions”

“We were the Leopards and Lions” is Don Fabrizio’s compressed, elegiac account of political succession: the old ruling class may lose its place, but its successors will inherit a society in which little fundamentally changes. Spoken at the departure of Cavaliere Aimone Chevalley di Monterzuolo, the expression sets reformist hope against the Prince’s conviction that change will preserve, or worsen, Sicily’s familiar conditions.

Context and wording

The phrase comes at the end of Chevalley’s visit to Donnafugata. Early the next morning, Don Fabrizio accompanies him to the post station, with Don Ciccio Tumeo carrying both men’s shotguns. Before their farewells, Chevalley thinks that the existing state of things will not last and that a lively modern administration will change it. Don Fabrizio answers with a longer forecast: “We were the Leopards and Lions; those who’ll take our place will be little jackals, hyenas; and the whole lot of us, Leopards, jackals and sheep, we’ll all go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth.”

The animal images distinguish successive positions in the social order. Leopards and lions name the class to which Don Fabrizio belongs and evoke its former authority; jackals and hyenas characterize those who will take its place, while sheep widen the image to include the population beneath both groups. Yet the final clause draws the classes together: all will continue to regard themselves as the most important part of the world.

Change and continuity

The expression answers Chevalley’s confidence in administrative reform with a different measure of historical change. Don Fabrizio does not claim that the old order will remain literally untouched: he expects new groups to replace it. His pessimism lies in what he predicts will endure beneath that transfer of power. The “always” he describes is not an unchanging century without end, but a human span of a century or two, after which conditions will become different—and worse.

The exchange makes succession itself insufficient proof of transformation. The names of the ruling animals change, but self-importance survives across the hierarchy. The phrase therefore gives the political transition a double meaning: the Leopards and Lions are passing, yet their departure does not promise a more just or more enlightened social order.

Narrative significance

The saying gains force from the scene surrounding it. The farewell takes place at dawn in Donnafugata, amid refuse, hungry dogs, bereaved households, and men seeking work. After Chevalley leaves, he wipes a small patch on the carriage window with his saliva and looks out at a landscape the narration presents as irredeemable. That bleak departure image extends the contrast between his expectation of improvement and Don Fabrizio’s forecast of persistence and decline.

The expression is thus both a class image and a judgment on historical optimism. Its irony is that Don Fabrizio recognizes the old aristocracy’s displacement while imagining that every succeeding group will reproduce the same complacent sense of importance. The phrase’s recurring contrast—powerful beasts replaced by scavengers and sheep—makes political change visible, while its final emphasis on shared self-regard makes that change seem unable to escape the social pattern it inherits.