However this may be, there is no doubt as to where the Archpriest found his exemplo of the youth who wished to marry three wives, and thought better of it: this, as already stated, is a variant on the fableau known as Le Valet aux douze femmes. Sr. Puyol y Alonso hints at a Spanish origin for the story of the two sluggards who, when they went a-courting, tried to make a merit of their sloth; but Wolf notes the recurrence of something very similar in other literatures, and it most likely reached Ruiz from France in some collection of supposititious Æsopic fables. The Exemplo de lo que conteció á don Payas, pintor de Bretaña—an indecent anecdote which follows immediately on the tale of the rival sluggards—betrays its provenance in its diction. Note the Gallicisms in such lines as:—
Yo volo yr afrandes, portare muyta dona ...
Yo volo faser en vos vna bona fygura ...
Ella dis: monseñer, faset vuestra mesura ...
dis la muger: monseñer, vos mesmo la catat ...
en dos anos petid corder non se faser carner....
Can we doubt that these are free translations from a French original not yet identified? It is significant that, as the story of the Greek and the ribaldo reappears long afterwards in Rabelais, so the story of Don Payas reappears in Béroalde de Verville’s Le Moyen de parvenir and in La Fontaine’s salacious fable Le Bât:—
Un peintre étoit, qui, jaloux de sa femme
Allant aux champs, lui peignit un baudet
Sur le nombril, en guise de cachet.