The Third Lady proposes to her lover to marry him, and he thinks that she is merely jesting, seeing she is already married, but she assures him that she is quite in earnest, and even undertakes that her husband will give his consent. The lover is to come for her husband and take him to the house of Dan Eustace, where he has a fair niece, whom the lover is to pretend he wishes to espouse, if he will give her to him. The lady will go thither, and she will have made her arrangements with Dan Eustace before they arrive. Her husband cannot but believe that he has left her at home, and she will be so apparelled that he cannot recognise her. This plan is accordingly carried out. The lover asks the lady’s husband for the hand of his niece in marriage, to which he very willingly consents, and thus without knowing it makes him a present of his own wife. “All his life long the lover possessed her, because the husband gave and did not lend her; nor could he ever get her back.”[301]
“Now tell me true,” adds the poet, “without any lie, and if you would judge rightly and truly, which one of these three best deserved to have the ring?”
Le Grand, at the end of his modern French prose abridgment of this fabliau, says that it is told at great length in the tales of the Sieur d’Ouville, tome iv, p. 255. In the Facetiæ Bebelianæ, p. 86, three women make a wager as to which of them will play the best trick on her husband. One causes her poor spouse to believe he is a monk, and he goes and sings mass; the second husband believes that he is dead and allows himself to be carried on a bier to that mass; and the third sings in it stark naked, believing he is clothed. It is also found in the Convivales Sermones, t. i, p. 200; in the Délices de Verboquet, p. 166; and in the Facetiæ of Lod. Doménichi, p. 172. In the Contes pour Rire, p. 197, three women find a diamond, and the arbiter whom they select promises it to her who concocts the best device for deceiving her husband, but the ruses, according to Le Grand, are different from those in the fabliau. Possibly from this last mentioned version (if not from some old Morisco-Spanish tale, for the idea of the story is certainly of Eastern origin) Isidro de Robles, a Spanish novelist, who wrote about the year 1666, adapted his tale of ‘The Diamond Ring,’ of which a translation is given by Roscoe in his Spanish Novelists, 1832, vol. iii, pp. 163-214, and the outline of which is as follows:
In the fair city of Madrid there lived three ladies who were very intimate friends. One was the wife of Luca Morena, cashier to a wealthy Genoese merchant; the second was the wife of Diego de Morales, a painter, employed in decorating one of the monasteries; the third was the wife of Señor Geloso, an elderly ill-tempered curmudgeon. It happened one day, when the three ladies were standing near a fountain to see a grand public procession, that they simultaneously discovered a diamond ring which glittered under the water, and when one of them took it up, all three laid claim to it, on various grounds, and they squabbled for its possession till one of them proposed they should submit the matter to a count of their acquaintance whom they saw approaching, to which the others agreed. The count takes charge of the ring and says that it should be the prize of “whichever of you shall, within the space of the next six weeks, succeed in playing off upon her husband the most clever and ingenious trick—always having due regard to his honour.”
The Cashier’s Wife employs an astrologer to waylay her husband on his road home and tell him that he looks seriously ill; then to feel his pulse and declare that he will be a dead man within 24 hours, so he had better put his affairs in order. Somewhat alarmed, he reaches home, takes little supper and goes to bed, but only to toss restlessly about all the night. He is off to business earlier than usual next day, and coming home in the evening meets the vicar of the parish and some friends, who are also in the plot. They pretend not to see him, but talk to each other aloud of Luca Moreno’s sudden death, and express very uncomplimentary opinions as to his state in the other world. In great perplexity, he continues his way and meets the astrologer and the painter (the latter is the husband of the second lady, and, strange as it may seem, is also a party in the plot), talking likewise of his death. He can endure this no longer, and accosts them, saying that he is not dead, but they affect to take him for his own ghost and run away. Now he thinks he must be really dead, though when and how he died he cannot recollect. Arriving at his house, he finds it shut up, and knocks long and loudly at the door before the maidservant appears, who asks: “Who is it? You can’t come in, for master is dead.” “Why,” exclaims the poor cashier, “it is I myself, your master.” “Who calls at this hour? This is the house of mourning, for we are all in grief for the loss of our master.” “Hold your tongue, you jade, and let me in, for I am your master.” She replies that he, poor man, is now engaged counting money in another and a worse world. In his rage he bursts open the door and walks in. His wife on seeing him pretends to swoon, but leaving her in the care of the maidservant he goes down to the pantry to stay his ravenous appetite, and there indulges in a hearty supper, washed down with copious draughts of wine, and then goes to bed. In the morning his wife, in gala dress, awakes him, and he thinks that she is dead also, and asks her when he himself died and was buried. She says all that she knows is that he buried last night some of the best wine and dainties provided for the carnival—he must be still drunk to talk such nonsense. The astrologer and the painter come, and when they hear his story declare they had not seen him or been from home last night, and, the vicar and his friends making a similar statement, he is persuaded the whole affair was a dream, and promises to defray the cost of a feast on Shrove Tuesday.
It is now the turn of the Second Lady to play a trick upon her husband, the painter. “For this purpose she concerted a plan with a brother of hers, who possessed a fine genius for amusing himself at other people’s expense. In the first place they contrived to have a false door made at the entrance of the house, on such a plan (then frequently adopted) that it might be easily substituted for the real door at short notice. It was brought thither secretly one night, and concealed in a cellar, while the brother and two friends lay ready to carry on the intended plot in an upper chamber of the house.” The painter returns home as usual, and having supped retires to rest. About midnight he is roused from a deep sleep by the cries of his wife, who pretends to be dying, and implores him to go for her confessor, and her old nurse, who knew her constitution. He very reluctantly rises and dresses himself, and then sets out in quest of the nurse, who lived at the other end of the town. Meanwhile the old door is removed and the false one substituted, and above it a sign is placed bearing the words, “House of Public Entertainment.” Then, according to arrangement, friends of the lady and a party of musicians with their instruments arrive, in order to “make a night of it.” The poor painter, after plodding his weary way in quest of the old nurse, through wind and rain, and knocking at the wrong doors, at last returns home, drenched to the skin. But what must have been his amazement to find his house metamorphosed into a tavern and to hear sounds from within of mirth and revelry! He knocks at the door, however, and a head is thrust out of an upper window and a voice orders him to be off, for the house is full. When he says that the house is his own, he is told it has been a tavern for the last 15 years and is finally made to beat a retreat by two dogs being let loose on him. Betaking himself to his friend Señor Geloso (whose turn is yet to come), he relates to him all his strange adventures. His friend thinks he is drunk and accommodates him for the night in his house. Next morning they go to the painter’s house, which has been restored to its former appearance, and when he tells them of what had happened to him the previous night, his wife and her friends assure him that the affair must have been the effect of sorcery, at the same time his loving spouse reads him a severe lecture on his debauched way of life, staying out o’ nights and so forth. It is finally agreed to say no more about the matter.
The trick played on the jealous, ill-tempered husband of the Third Lady bears a striking resemblance to that of the Kutwál’s wife—mutatis mutandis. Having plied him with wine till he is “dead drunk,” she sends for her brother, prior of the convent of Capuchins, who comes (as arranged) with the lay brethren, and, after his head has been shaved and he has been dressed in the monastic garb, they carry him off to the convent and place him in a cell. When he awakes he is perplexed at the change that has taken place in his person and place of abode. In brief, he is flogged next day for contumacy and sentenced to eight days’ imprisonment, with bread and water. This term expired, he is sent out with one of the monks to beg alms, and in the course of their rounds they come to his own house, where seeing his wife at a window he rushes in and embraces her. The lady, of course, raises a great outcry, and the servants and neighbours hasten to her assistance. The monk explains that he is a crazy brother who fancies every pretty woman he sees is his wife, and leads him back to the convent, where he is again soundly flogged and put upon a new course of bread and water, so long that his hair and beard were grown again. One night he is treated to a fine supper and a bottle of wine containing an opiate, and, when he is asleep, is carried back to his house, and on awaking next morning and telling his wife of all that he had undergone as a monk, she persuades him that it was but a distempered dream, and he, glad to find himself in his own house, promises to treat her in future with all respect and full confidence in her virtue.
The three ladies proceed next day to the dwelling of the count and relate the tricks they had played their husbands. He says that he cannot possibly give the preference to any one of them—they are all equally clever—but as the ring is really one he had himself lost the very day when they found it, he must ask them to accept and divide amongst themselves a purse containing three hundred pistoles, and so the ladies take their leave of the count, in every way satisfied.
The Kázi and the Merchant’s Wife—p. [414].
The latter part of this story will at once remind the reader of the tale of Alí Khoja and the Merchant of Baghdád in our common English version of the Arabian Nights,[302] in which Alí Khoja, before setting out on the pilgrimage to Makka, places a thousand gold pieces in a jar and fills it up with olives, and gives it into the custody of a merchant with whom he was intimate, as a jar of olives merely; and the merchant after the Khoja had prolonged his absence far beyond the usual time opened the jar to take out of it some olives for his wife, who had wished for that fruit, and finding the gold underneath abstracted it, and substituted fresh olives. The story is too well known to require the repetition of the subsequent details—how judgment was at first given in favour of the merchant, but was afterwards reversed, as in our story of the Kází, by the acuteness of a boy.