The Way to Attain or The Right Way with Women (the title of de Verville’s book has suffered various translations) would seem to have a dual personality; one: a clear-cut collection of stories, witty, realistic, free, Rabelaisian, or obscene as you choose to term them; another: the same stories, enmeshed in a mass of innuendo, obscure sayings, licentious and scatalogical asides, and—sometimes—almost meaningless phraseology. The trouble is to separate the grain from the chaff, the stories from the irrelevant verbiage—not that the latter is not often highly entertaining. Bernard de la Monnoye, in his Dissertation (cit. sup.), bears out our criticism when explaining the plan of the book. “The author supposes a sort of general banquet,” he writes, “where, without regard for rank or degree, he introduces persons of every kind and age, scallawags for the most part, who, with no object but their own amusement, talk with the utmost freedom, and passing almost imperceptibly from subject to subject, cause the stories to be lost to sight. In fact, they are so jumbled up in the book that one is hard put to find them....”
Both extracts from The Way to Attain given in this volume (Coypeau and His Thread and The Breaker of Eggs) are told without interruption in the original French text, but each is introduced in the most haphazard fashion, preceded and followed by a veritable welter of inconsequent remarks; if Machen found it necessary to weed out the most strongly scented flowers from the Canonical garden, the student will find it equally necessary to dig before he finds the best.
There are other good things, however, besides the stories in The Way to Attain. While many of the asides and interjections are gross, vulgar, and, seemingly, pointless, others show a pretty and pungent wit. The canon is for ever having a thrust at his cloth, the monks, and the nuns, and some of his criticisms are worth repeating:—
“Where there are no monks there can be no shamelessness.”
“None sit more at their ease than monks, ministers, and consecrated folk, who, in the place of keeping the holy orders that have been given them, make them into ordure, and leaving the orders of God take the orders of the devil, who giveth them grace to be more lewd and whorish than other men.”
“The women that frequent the abodes of churchmen are not their wives, ... they are first maids, then mates, then mistresses.”
“It is better to have in one’s house a wench with whom one can disport theologically than to go about wandering from pillar to post like a high-toby, and run the risk of getting a nip, like Cornu, who sighed as he lay a-dying of the pox: ‘Now I begin to appreciate the beauties of domesticity.’”
“Once on a time he was prebendary of Chartres, but he left his stall to marry a pretty lass, and the morning after the wedding, as they lay in bed, he said to her: ‘Now, sweetheart, thou dost see how well I love thee, for I left my fair prebend that I might have thee.’ She replied: ‘Then thou wast a fool; thou shouldst have kept thy prebend, and had me also.’ ... It would appear that she knew that some canons are given to waggery.”
“Such cloisterlings, who love not women, are always ready to fish up some ancient, stinking heresy under the pretence of discoursing against the Reformation, talking of vices they impute to others, the which are more tolerable than their own.... It is better to keep a wench than to trouble the peace of Christendom, and to do the work is true godliness, which is the reason why bishops are called fathers-in-God, ... fathers-in-God sounds better than fathers-in-law. And they are certainly godly, that is happy; for happy, thrice happy is the father who hath not the trouble of feeding his children.”
“He was as liberal as our bishop, who had rather give a crown to a wench than a groat to a poor man.”