By Messire Timoleon Vignier.
Of a good wife who pretended to her husband that she was going on a pilgrimage, in order to find opportunity to be with her lover the parish-clerk—with whom her husband found her; and of what he said and did when he saw them doing you know what.
Whilst I have a good audience, let me relate a funny incident which happened in the district of Hainault.
In a village there, lived a married woman, who loved the parish clerk much more than she did her own husband, and in order to find means to be with the clerk, she feigned to her husband that she owed a pilgrimage to a certain saint, whose shrine was not far from there; which pilgrimage she had vowed to make when she was in travail with her last child, begging the saint that he would be content that she should go on a certain day she named. The good, simple husband, who suspected nothing, allowed her to go on this pilgrimage; and as he would have to remain alone he told her to prepare both his dinner and supper before she left, or else he would go and eat at the tavern.
She did as he ordered, and prepared a nice chicken and a piece of mutton, and when all these preparations were complete, she told her husband that everything was now ready, and that she was going to get some holy water, and then leave.
She went to church, and the first man she met was the one she sought, that is to say the clerk, to whom she told the news, that is to say how she had been permitted to go on a pilgrimage for the whole day.
“And this is what will occur,” she said. “I am sure that as soon as I am out of the house that he will go to the tavern, and not return until late in the evening, for I know him of old; and so I should prefer to remain in the house, whilst he is away, rather than go somewhere else. Therefore you had better come to our house in half an hour, and I will let you in by the back door, if my husband is not at home, and if he should be, we will set out on our pilgrimage.”
She went home, and there she found her husband, at which she was not best pleased.
“What! are you still here?” he asked.
“I am going to put on my shoes,” she said, “and then I shall not be long before I start.”