“There lived near the palace a beautiful but very poor girl, and with her the young Boar fell desperately in love. So he asked her parents for her hand; but they, poor as they were, laughed at him, saying that their daughter should never marry a swine. But the young lady had well perceived that this was no common or lazy pig, such as never gets a ripe pear—porco pigro non mangia pere mature—as he had shown by wooing her; and, secondly, because she was poor and ambitious, and daring enough to do anything to become rich and great. [48b]
“Now she surmised that there were eggs under the chopped straw in this basket, or more in the youth than people supposed; and she was quite right, for on the bridal night he not only unclothed himself of silk and purple and fine linen, but also doffed his very skin or boar’s hide, and appeared as beautiful as a Saint Sebastian freshly painted.
“Then he said to her, ‘Be not astonished to find me good-looking at the rate of thirty sous to a franc, nor deem thyself over-paid, for if we had not wedded, truly I should have gone on pigging it to the end of my days, having been doomed—like many men—to be a beast so long as I was a bachelor, or
till a beautiful maid would marry me. Yet there is a condition attached to this, which is, that I can only be a man as thou seest me by night, for I must be a boar by day. And shouldst thou ever betray this secret to any one, or if it be found out, then I shall again be a boar all the time for life, and thou turn into a frog because of too much talking.
“Now as surely as that time and straw ripen medlars, as the saying is, just so surely will it come to pass that a woman will tell a secret, even to her own shame. And so it befell this lady, who told it as a great mystery to her mother, who at once imparted it under oath to all her dear friends, who swore all their friends on all their salvations not to breathe a word of it to anybody, who all confessed it to the priests. How much farther it went God knows, but by the time the whole town knew it, which was in one day of twenty-four hours, or ere the next morning, the bride had become a frog who lived in the spring, and the bridegroom a boar who every day went to drink at the water, and when there said:
“‘Lady Frog! lo, I am here!
He to whom thou once wert dear.
We are in this sad condition,
Not by avarice or ambition,
Nor by evil or by wrong,
But ’cause thou could’st not hold thy tongue;
For be she shallow, be she deep,
No woman can a secret keep;
Which all should think upon who see
The monument which here will be.’
“So it came to pass either that the boar turned into the great bronze maiale which now stands in the market-place, or else the people raised it in remembrance of the story—chi sa—but there it is to this day.
“As for the Signora Frog, she comforted herself by making a great noise and telling the tale at the top of her voice, having her brains in her tongue—il cervello nella lingua, as they say of those who talk well yet have but small sense. And that which you hear frogs croaking all night long is nothing but this story which I have told you of their ancestress and the bronze boar.”
This is, in one form or the other, a widely spread tale. As the voice of the frog has a strange resemblance to that of man, there being legends referring to it in every
language, and as there is a bold and forward expression in its eyes, [50] it was anciently regarded as a human being who was metamorphosed for being too impudent and loquacious, as appears by the legend of “Latona and the Lycian Boors” (Ovid, Metamorph., vi. 340). The general resemblance of the form of a frog to that of man greatly contributed to create such fables.