LA FARCE DE MUNYER.
This farce, whose author was Andre de la Vigne, dates back, like preceding one, to the fourteenth century. The miller of the Middle Ages, the ancestor of our present Jack-pudding (French slang for miller), was in antique times the most rascally and cheating type of trader, from whence the old Gascon proverb, “One always finds a thief in a miller’s skin.”
In this farce we see the miller “lying in bed as though sick,” uttering long groans and sighing over the pains he professes to endure—groans, however, to which his wife appears insensible. He commences thus:
“Now am I in sore distress,
My sickness hard to cure,
My sore discomfort is not less.
Heart-ache I can’t endure.”
To this his wife responds indifferently, although the miller persists in asking for a bottle of good wine, saying that his “reins and belly need the supreme consolation of the bottle.” The wife obstinately refuses her husband the wine, remarking that he cannot “repair his stomach by filling the belly;” but, instead, she sends for the priest, who is, moreover, her lover, and carries on a flirtation with the holy man in the presence of her husband, for the purpose of making the invalid rise from his sick-bed; but, thinking his end near, the miller demands that he shall be permitted to die in the faith, or “mourir catholiquement.” He confesses to the priest, avowing all his thefts, his frauds, his falsification and amours, and is prepared to render his soul.
But the miller has absorbed some of the popular ideas of his day, professed by certain philosophers of the time; he believes that, at the moment of death, the soul of man escapes by his anus, and warns the priest to absolve him from his sins, saying:
“Mon ventre trop se determine.
Helas! Je ne scay que je face;
Ostez vous!”
The priest answers:
“Ha! sauf vostre grace!”
Then the miller remarks:
“Ostez vous, car je me conchye.”
The wife and the priest pull the sick man to the edge of the bed and place him in such a position that, if the doctrine of soul departure by the anus be true, they may witness the miller’s final performance. The phenomenon of rectal flatulence is now observed, when suddenly to the consternation of the wife and priest, a demon appears, and placing a sack over the dying miller’s anus catches the rectal gas and flies off in sulphurous vapor. In the next act we see the Devil appear before his patron Lucifer bearing the sack supposed to contain the damned soul of the miller received in the aforesaid sack at the moment it escaped from the anus. The devil is commanded by Lucifer to empty the sack at the feet of Proserpine who is busily engaged in cooking in Hell’s kitchen, but in place of the miller’s soul they only find spoiled bran; the rascal has cheated even in death.
It seems strange that earlier comedy writers all showed a tendency to make their principle scenes pathological burlesques. Thus in many plays the heroes and heroines were attacked by colic in order to excite the laughter of the audience, when the buffoon would imitate by signs the act of defecation. This peculiar French gayety and lack of prudery is fully evidenced in the comic effects of Pourceaugnac with the detersive, insinuative and carminative clysters of Moliere.
This farce, had in former days, an immense success, and is still occasionally played, being considered a chef d’œuvre of malice and humor by our best critics and most distinguished authors. In France the audience always laugh when a thief while plundering is suddenly taken with pains in his bowels and diarrhœa, while a rectal syringe flourished aloft as a weapon of defense will bring down the gallery in a storm of applause.