Thus spake the good, the ardent, and the gay among the ladies of amorous life.
But there were others of them with narrow faces, lean shoulders, who made of their bodies a shop for savings, and liard by liard harvested the price of their thin flesh. And these were fuming among themselves: “It is very foolish for us to refuse payment in this fatiguing trade, for these ridiculous whimsies running in the heads of girls that are wild over men. If they have a cantle of the moon in their heads, we have none, and prefer not to have to drag around in our old age like them, in rags in the gutter, but to be paid since we are for sale. A straw for this gratis! Men are ugly, stinking, grumbling, greedy, drunken. It is nothing but them that turns poor women to ill!”
But the young and beautiful ones did not hear these speeches, and all in their pleasure and drinkings said: “Do you hear the passing bells ringing in Notre Dame? We are on fire! Who will go and waken the graveyards?”
Lamme seeing so many women all at once, brunette and fair, fresh and withered, was ashamed; lowering his eyes he cried out: “Ulenspiegel, where are you?”
“He is dead and gone, my friend,” said a great stout girl taking hold of his arm.
“Dead and gone?” said Lamme.
“Aye,” said she, “three hundred years ago, in the company of Jacobus de Coster van Maerlandt.”
“Let me go,” said Lamme, “and do not pinch me. Ulenspiegel, where are you? Come and save your friend! I am going away immediately if you do not let me go.”
“You will not go away,” they said.
“Ulenspiegel,” said Lamme, again, piteously, “where are you, my son? Madame, do not pull my hair in this way; it is not a wig, I assure you. Help! Do you not think my ears red enough, without your bringing the blood to them besides? There is that other one filliping me all the time. You are hurting me! Alas! what are they rubbing my face with now? A looking glass! I am black as the jaws of an oven. I will be angry in a minute if you do not stop; it is ill done of you to torment a poor man like this. Let me go! When you have tugged me by my breeches to right, to left, from all sides, and have made me go like a shuttle, will you be any the fatter for it? Aye, I shall get angry without a doubt.”