TALE XXXVII.
The Lady of Loué so influenced her husband by her great
patience and longsuffering, that she drew him from his evil
ways, and they lived afterwards in greater love than
before.
There was a lady of the house of Loué (1) who was so prudent and virtuous, that she was loved and esteemed by all her neighbours. Her husband trusted her, as well he might, with all his affairs, and she managed them with such wisdom that his house came, by her means, to be one of the wealthiest and best appointed in either the land of Anjou or Touraine.
1 Loué is in Anjou, in the department of the Sarthe, being
the chief locality of a canton of the arrondissement of Le
Mans. The Lady of Loué referred to may be either Philippa de
Beaumont-Bressuire, wife of Peter de Laval, knight, Lord of
Loué, Benars, &c.; or her daughter-in-law, Frances de
Maillé, who in or about 1500 espoused Giles de Laval, Lord
of Loué. Philippa is known to have died in 1525, after
bearing her husband five children. She had been wedded fifty
years. However, the subject of this story is the same as
that of the Lady of Langallier, or Languillier (also in
Anjou), which will be found in chapter xvii. of Le Livre du
Chevalier de la Tour-Landry, an English translation of
which, made in the reign of Henry VI., was edited in 1868 by
Mr. Thomas Wright for the Early English Text Society.—See
also Le Roux de Lincy’s Femmes célèbres de l’ancienne
France, vol i. p. 356. Particulars concerning the Laval-
Loué family will be found in Duchesne’s Histoire de la
Maison de Montmorency.—L. and M.
In this fashion she lived a great while with her husband, to whom she bore several handsome children; but then, as happiness is always followed by its opposite, hers began to be lessened. Her husband, finding virtuous ease to be unendurable, laid it aside to seek for toil, and made it his wont to rise from beside his wife as soon as she was asleep, and not to return until it was nearly morning. The lady of Loué took this conduct ill, and falling into a deep unrest, of which she was fain to give no sign, neglected her household matters, her person and her family, like one that deemed herself to have lost the fruit of her toils, to wit, her husband’s exceeding love, for the preserving of which there was no pain that she would not willingly have endured. But having lost it, as she could see, she became careless of everything else in the house, and the lack of her care soon brought mischief to pass.
Her husband, on the one part, spent with much extravagance, while, on the other, she had ceased to control the management, so that ere long affairs fell into such great disorder, that the timber began to be felled, and the lands to be mortgaged.
One of her kinsfolk that had knowledge of her distemper, rebuked her for her error, saying that if love for her husband did not lead her to care for the advantage of his house, she should at least have regard to her poor children. Hereat her pity for them caused her to recover herself, and she tried all means to win back her husband’s love.
In this wise she kept good watch one night, and, when he rose from beside her, she also rose in her nightgown, let make her bed, and said her prayers until her husband returned. And when he came in, she went to him and kissed him, and brought him a basin full of water that he might wash his hands. He was surprised at this unwonted behaviour, and told her that there was no need for her to rise, since he was only coming from the latrines; whereat she replied that, although it was no great matter, it was nevertheless a seemly thing to wash one’s hands on coming from so dirty and foul a place, intending by these words to make him perceive and abhor the wickedness of his life. But for all that he did not mend his ways, and for a full year the lady continued to act in this way to no purpose.