'tel bec came li plereit E cum li Huite cox aveit.'
The Huite cox is an English word, woodcock, in disguise. The husband, in a rage, wished his wife a woodcock's beak also, and there they sat, each with a very long bill, and two wishes wasted. There Marie leaves them—
'Deus Oremanz unt ja perduz Que nus n'en est a bien venuz,'
'with two wishes lost, and no good gained thereby.' Manifestly the third wish was expended in a restoration of human noses to each of them. The moral is that ill befalls them—
'qui trop creient autrui parole.'
We naturally wonder whether this version was borrowed from one or other shape of Syntipas. If it was, did the change come in the Latin handling of it, or in the English? Or is it not possible that the version worked on by Marie had a popular origin, whether derived by oral transmission from some popular Indian shape of the story, which had filtered through to the West, or the child of native Teutonic wit? There seems to be no certain criterion in a case like this. Certainly no mediæval wag was likely to alter, out of modesty, the form of the tale in Syntipas and its derivatives, though Marie would not have rhymed that offensive conte if she had met with it in the English collection. Unluckily one is not acquainted with any version of The Three Wishes among backward and remote races, American or African. If such a version were known (and it may, of course, exist), we might argue that the tale was 'universally human.' There is nothing in it, as told in Pantschatantra, to make it seem essentially and peculiarly Indian, and incapable of having been invented elsewhere.
A fourteenth-century version (quoted by M. Deulin from Fabliaux et Contes published by St. Méon, vol. iv. p. 386) amplifies all that is least refined in Sendabar and in Sindibad. St. Martin grants the wishes, there are four of them, and nobody is one penny the better. With Philippe de Vigneules (1505-1514, the seventy-eighth of his hundred Nouvelles), God grants three wishes to a wedded pair. The woman wishes a new leg for her pot, the man wishes her le pied au ventre, and then wishes it back again. M. Deulin found this form in living popular tradition, at Leuze in Hainaut.
The Souhaits of La Fontaine (Fables, vii. 6) has this peculiarity, that the giver of the wishes, as in Marie de France and in Sindibad, is a Follet or brownie, or familiar spirit, obliged to leave his friends. He offers them three wishes; first, they ask for wealth and are embarrassed by their riches, then for a restoration of their mediocrity, then for wisdom.
'C'est un trésor qui n'embarrasse point.'
La Fontaine's source is obscure; had he known Syntipas, he might (or might not) have introduced the story among his Contes. Perhaps it was too rude even for that unabashed collection.