Generally, she did not reply, but still sulked, and looked miserable, at which her husband lost his patience, finding she would not tell him the cause of her grief. But he enquired so often that at last he learned partly what was the matter, for she told him that she was vexed because he was so poorly furnished with you-know-what—that is to say the stick with which you plant men, as Boccaccio calls it.
“Indeed!” said he, “and is that why you grieve? By St. Martin you have good cause! At any rate it cannot be other than it is, and you must put up with it, since you cannot change it.”
This condition of affairs lasted a long time, till the husband, tired of her obstinacy, one day invited to dinner a great number of her friends, and stated the facts which have been already related, and said that it seemed to him that she had no particular cause to grieve, for he believed he was as well furnished with a natural instrument as any of his neighbours.
“And that I may be the better believed,” he said, “and that you may see how wrong she is, I will show it you all.”
With that he laid his furniture on the table before all the men and women there assembled, and said; “There it is!” and his wife wept louder than ever.
“By St. John!” said her mother, her sister, her aunt, her cousin, and her neighbour, “you are wrong, my dear! What do you ask? Do you expect more? Who would not be satisfied with a husband so furnished? So help me God I should deem myself very happy to have as much, or indeed less. Be comforted and enjoy yourself in future! By God, you are better off than any of us I believe.”
The young bride, hearing all the women thus speak, replied, still weeping loudly.
“There is a little ass in the house, hardly half a year old, and who has an instrument as big, as thick, and as long as your arm,”—and so saying she held her arm by the elbow and shook it up and down—“and my husband, who is quite 24 years old has but that little bit he has shown you. Do you think I ought to be satisfied?” Everyone began to laugh, and she to weep the more, so that for a long time not a word was said by any of the company. Then her mother took the girl aside, and said one thing and another to her, and left her satisfied after a great deal of trouble.
That is the way with the girls in Germany—if God pleases it will soon be the same also in France.