The Conclusion synthesizes and expands on the findings of preceding chapters by comparing the fates of two different non-human animal characters who pledge their word of honor: a bat in a twelfth-century fable by Marie de France and a grasshopper in a seventeenth-century fable by Jean de La Fontaine. It argues that that despite sharing the ostensibly similar narrative premise of a non-human animal who offers her foi in a fable, these texts highlight a change at the intersection between authorial speech and species identity that took place between the Middle Ages and early modernity. For Marie’s bat, the problem revolves around the inability of her society’s species lexicon to express or “contain” her nature. By the time La Fontaine’s grasshopper offers her pledge, the problem is precisely that the grasshopper has become pigeonholed into a Cartesian term – animal – that she cannot hope to transcend.