“Eh! gossip, eh!” the good woman replied, “‘twas myself.”
“Nay, gossip,” said the other, “I saw them afterwards doing something in the snow that to my mind is neither seemly nor right.”
“Gossip,” returned the good woman, “I have told you, and I tell you again, that it was myself and none other who did all that you say, for my good husband and I play thus familiarly together. And, I pray you, be not scandalised at this, for you know that we are bound to please our husbands.”
So the worthy gossip went away, more wishful to possess such a husband for herself than she had been to talk about the husband of her friend; and when the upholsterer came home again his wife told him the whole story.
“Now look you, sweetheart,” replied the upholsterer, “if you were not a woman of virtue and sound understanding we should long ago have been separated the one from the other. But I hope that God will continue to preserve us in our mutual love, to His own glory and our happiness.”
“Amen to that, my dear,” said the good woman, “and I hope that on my part you will never find aught to blame.” (3)
3 This tale is accounted by most critics and commentators
to be the best in the Heptameron. Dunlop thinks it may
have been borrowed from a fabliau composed by some
Trouvère who had travelled in the East, and points out
that it corresponds with the story of the Shopkeeper s
Wife in Nakshebi’s Persian Tales (Tooti Nameh). Had it
been brought to France, however, in the manner suggested it
would, like other tales, have found its way into the works
of many sixteenth-century story-writers besides Queen
Margaret. Such, however, is not the case, and curiously
enough, so far as we can find, the tale, as given in the
Heptameron, was never imitated until La Fontaine wrote his
Servante Justifiée (Contes, livre ii. No. vi.), in the
opening lines of which he expressly acknowledges his
indebtedness to the Queen of Navarre.—Ed.
“Unbelieving indeed, ladies, must be the man who, after hearing this true story, should hold you to be as crafty as men are; though, if we are not to wrong either, and to give both man and wife the praise they truly deserve, we must needs admit that the better of the two was worth naught.”
“The man,” said Parlamente, “was marvellously wicked, for he deceived his servant on the one side and his wife on the other.”
“Then you cannot have understood the story,” said Hircan. “We are told that he contented them both in the same morning, and I consider it a highly virtuous thing, both for body and mind, to be able to say and do that which may make two opposites content.”