But she, interrupting him, replied;
“Ah, my good friend, you loved me with a true and perfect love, and not dishonourably, as I dared to love you. Therefore I shall esteem you, as long as God gives life to me and to you, as my dearest and best friend, who protected, and taught me to protect, my chastity, and the honour and good name, of me, my husband, my relatives, and my friends. Blessed also be my dear husband, whose advice and counsels I have kept, to the great solace of my heart. But for you, my friend, I render you such thanks as I may, for your honourable conduct and your great kindness to me, for which I can never sufficiently requite you, nor can my friends.”
The good and wise clerk, seeing that he had achieved his object, took leave of the fair damsel, and gently admonished her and advised her that she should in future correct her body by abstinence and fasting whenever she felt any prickings of lust. By which means she lived chastely until the return of her husband, who knew nothing of the matter, for she concealed it from him—and so also did the clerk.
THE END. [ [!-- IMG --]
NOTES.
1 ([return])
[ This story is taken from an old fabliau entitled Les Deux Changeurs, and has been copied by Malespini, Straparolla, and other Italian writers. Brantôme, in Les Dames Galantes, records that, “Louis, Duc d’Orléans was a great seducer of Court ladies, and always the greatest. A beautiful and noble lady was sleeping with him when her husband came into the chamber to wish the Duke good-day. The Duke covered the lady’s head with the sheet, and uncovered the rest of her body, and allowed the husband to look and touch as much as he liked, but forbade him, as he valued his life, to uncover her head—And the best of it was, that the next night, the husband being in bed with his wife told her that the Duke had shown him the most beautiful naked woman that ever he saw, but as to her face he could not report, being forbidden to see it. I leave you to imagine what his wife thought!” The lady was,—scandal averred—Mariette d’Enghien, the mother of the brave and handsome Comte de Dunois, known in French history as “the bastard of Orléans.” In the M. S. discovered by Mr. Thomas Wright in the Hunterian Library at Glasgow, this story is ascribed to “Monseigneur le Duc,” as is also the following one.]