Je leur laisse tous bons lopins,
A tous chopineurs et y vrongnes,
Notre vueil que je leur laisse
Toutes goutes, crampes et rongnes,
Au poing, au coste, a la fesse,” etc.
But enough of Master Pathelin. Let us now turn to the consideration of another curious farce.
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,