“Thou sly wench! Thou hast been in mischief with that man above! Idiot! Little hussy! What hast been about up there?”
“Naught, madam. Be not wroth; ‘tis as I shall tell thee.”
“Thou hast been after no good with that man above.”
“Nay, madam, thou dost him wrong; he is the most honest man in the world. I had eggs in my belly, and he broke them for me.”
“Eggs, thou slut! what eggs?”
“Behold, madam, if ‘tis not so; I will lift my smock; thou canst see my front part, which is yet all damp with the white of the eggs, which came out when he broke them.”
EXCURSUS to THE BREAKER OF EGGS.
Le Moyen de Parvenir of Béroalde de Verville, Canon of St. Gatien at Tours, once a Hugenot, then a Catholic, finally “neither one nor the other,”[123] is a work little known to the English reader, be he student or bibliophile. The cause is not far to seek; no complete and unexpurgated English translation of this much censured book exists. Machen’s rendering, while claiming to be the first in our language, is in no sense full and literal, although free and full-flavoured; the translator, as he admits in his humourous preface, “has been forced, much to his sorrow, to weed out some strongly-scented flowers from this Canonical Garden.” His text, indeed, shows many notable omissions, in particular the more licentious asides and interjections which have no actual bearing on the stories; further, there are sundry additions not found in the old French text—“odd scraps from his own workshop,” as Machen terms them.
For the student, then, there are: Machen’s delightful (but partial) translation, limited to 500 numbered copies and now a rare book,[124] and numerous editions in old French, some expurgated, and all difficult of understanding where the average English reader is concerned. As we note in the preface to Garnier’s latest issue, the work, for the greater part, “is an enigma to modern readers and contains a crowd of obscurities ... it would need volume after volume to explain and comment upon everything that calls for explanation and comment.”