The other brother goes there, and perceives that their mother is quite dead. He did not know what to do. They both go into the garden, and there they make a great hole and bury her.
They then burn the house, go into the woods, see the witches, cure the king’s daughter, whom one of them marries, and they live happily.[5]
It is possible that this first part may be a narrative of fact. We knew at Asté, near Bagnères de Bigorre, a brother, an idiot “crétin,” who deliberately began to chop up his sister (also an idiot and “crétin”), who offered no resistance. He had chopped off several of her fingers, when they were accidently interrupted. In spite of the blood and pain, she was only laughing at it.
We have another tale of this kind, which may be also founded on fact, so sad is often the condition of the crétins in the mountains. It is of a mother and her imbecile son; he nearly kills himself by chopping off the branch of the tree on which he was sitting. Then he believes himself dead, and commits various other follies. His mother thinks a wife might be able to take care of him, and tells him to cast sheeps’ eyes at the young girls coming out of church after mass. He takes this literally, cuts out the eyes of all their flock, and so kills their sheep, the only thing they had, and throws these at the girls, who are disgusted, and quarrel with him. He goes home, and mother and son end their lives together in wretchedness.
The Witch and the New-Born Infant.
Like many others in the world, there was a man and woman, labourers, who lived by their toil. They were at ease. They had a mule, and the man lived by his mule carrying wine. Sometimes he was a week away from home. He always went to the same inn, where there was a woman and her daughter. One day the labourer sets off with his loaded mule, and his wife was very near her confinement. She was expecting it hourly; but, as he had orders upon orders, he was obliged to set off. He goes then, and comes to this inn. It was a market-day, and they had not kept a bedroom for him as usual, because there were so many people there, and he is put into a dark room without windows near the kitchen. He had not yet gone to sleep, when he hears the woman say to her daughter,
“You are not aware that the wife of the man who is there is confined? Go and see if he is asleep.”
When the man heard that, he began to snore; and when the young girl heard through a slit in the door that he was snoring, she said to her mother,