Literal translation
do good to Bertrand, he pays you back by shitting on it
Meaning
do good to Bertrand, he repays it with ill treatment
Explanation
The proverb, deliberately crude in its realism, contradicts in advance the optimistic saying that good deeds bring good returns: here, the kindness done to a certain Bertrand (a proper name used as a type, with no reference to any real person) comes back in a degrading, ungrateful form. The verb cagar (to shit), of which cagantant is the gerund, literally means to defecate, but is used figuratively in popular speech to mean spoiling, soiling, or treating what one has received with crude contempt. The saying thus illustrates, opposite to the previous one, a disillusioned wisdom about human ingratitude, in a frankly earthy, rural, and blunt register, where the crudeness of the image carries the whole point of the observation. This phrase belongs to the colorful stock of Provençal proverbs that do not shy away from bodily triviality to strike the mind and fix a lesson firmly in collective memory. It is quoted with a mix of amusement and fatalism to comment on ingratitude experienced or witnessed.