“Yes, yes; but you must do as I tell you. Send back the cow to its owner.”
The man hesitated; he did not wish to restore the cow.
“Then no absolution; no sacrament.”
The peasant still demurred.
“Think,” the priest then said, “of the day of judgment, when all the village will be assembled on the green, and you will be there holding the cow by the tail, and everybody will know you stole it. How ashamed you will be!”
“Really! but will the owner of the cow be there too?”
“Of course he will.”
“Well, if I see him, I will then give him back his cow.”
One more anecdote may be permitted in reference not indeed to the Paris markets, but to those by whom the Paris markets are supplied. Not only is the French peasant prudent and economical: he is also, as is shown by the story just told, very cunning. Equally so is the peasant woman. One day at a market in Normandy people were much surprised at seeing a woman offer an excellent horse for sale at the price of five francs, and still more astonished at her asking 500 francs for a dog she wished to dispose of. The two animals were to be sold together. They were ultimately got rid of on the terms demanded. The explanation of the mystery was this. The peasant woman was the widow of a man who in his will had directed that the horse was to be sold for the benefit of his own family and the dog for the benefit of his wife. She had so arranged matters that out of the joint sale 500 francs, the price of the dog, came to her, while five francs went to her husband’s relations.
