The following day, the ceremony joining these two unlikely persons together having been performed, they repaired to the bridal chamber. They both disrobed and climbed into bed. And for the first time in his life the judge, either because he decided he should make haste slowly and take the time to educate his young pupil or because he was afraid of the possible sarcastic remarks his young bride might make if he were to make untoward demands upon her that first night, had resigned himself to culling naught but legitimate pleasures. But Mademoiselle de Fréval, who had paid the strictest attention to her mother’s admonitions, and remembering clearly her sound advice that she should refuse whatever her husband’s initial request might be, did exactly as she had been told. So as they lay in close embrace and the old judge began to make his intentions clear, she protested:
“No, Monsieur, under no circumstances will I consent to your doing that. Anywhere else you like, but most certainly not there.”
“Madame,” the judge retorted, completely taken aback, “I assure you … I take full responsibility… if you must know, what I’m suggesting comes as a result of a great deal of self-control on my part… in fact, I might term it an act of virtue.”
“No, Monsieur, you can try as long and as hard as you like to talk me into doing that, but the answer is still no. And always will be.”
“Well, in that case, Madame, I’ll have to do my best to please you. As they say, your wish is my command,” sighed the elderly judge. And seizing that part of her anatomy he loved most dearly he went on: “The last thing in the world I want to do is displease you, especially on our wedding night, but you should be well aware, Madame, that in the future, no matter how hard you try to make me change my course, I shall always refuse to say no.”
“That’s fine with me,” said the young girl, “and you need have no fear that I shall ever ask you to change your ways.”
“All right, then,” he said resignedly, and following in the well-worn footsteps of Ganymede and Socrates, he murmured, “as you like it.”
AN EYE FOR AN EYE
A solid, upstanding bourgeois, a native of Picardy who may well have been a descendant of one of those illustrious troubadours who dwelt along the banks of the Oise and Somme rivers some centuries back and who, a scant ten or twelve years ago, had been dragged back out of oblivion by one of this era’s great writers,1 this good and decent bourgeois, as I was saying, lived in the city of St. Quentin, renowned for the many famous men it has given to Literature.2 He lived there with his wife and a female third cousin, the latter a nun in a local convent. This third cousin was a small, dark-haired young lass, with a mischievous face, flashing eyes, a turned-up nose, and a trim little figure. She was twenty-two years old and had been a nun for four. Sister Petronille—for that was her name—had a lovely voice and a temperament more inclined toward the profane than the sacred.
As for our Monsieur d’Escaloponville, for such was the name of our worthy bourgeois, he was a stout, good-natured fellow of twenty-eight, who happened to find his cousin far more enticing than Madame d’Escaloponville, with whom he had been sharing a bed for ten years, and as is well-known such a ten-year habit is bound to douse the fires lit by Hymen.
Madame d’Escaloponville—for it is our bounden duty to depict her, what would they think of us if we failed to give you an accurate portrait in an age when portraits are all the rage, when even a tragic play would be turned down for performance if it did not contain at least six subjects the merchants could seize upon and exploit3—Madame d’Escaloponville, I repeat, was a slightly lusterless blonde, with a porcelain skin, pretty eyes, on the plumpish side, and the kind of well-filled-out cheeks that lead people to comment on “how good you look.”
Up till now, Madame d’Escaloponville had been completely unaware that there is a way to take revenge on an unfaithful husband. As virtuous as her mother had been before her—and that dear lady had lived with the same man for eighty-three years without ever being unfaithful to him4—she was still naive enough, still innocent enough in the ways of the world, not to have even the slightest suspicion of this crime that the casuists have dubbed “adultery” and those of a less rigorous nature, who filter everything through a softer lens, simply refer to as “dalliance.” But the resentment that a woman betrayed feels soon cries out for revenge, and since no one likes to be accused of being negligent, there is nothing in her power she won’t do to exact her revenge in such a way that she will be viewed as blameless.
Finally, Madame d’Escaloponville’s eyes were opened to the fact that her dear husband was spending more time with his third cousin, at which point her heart and soul were in thrall to the green-eyed monster, jealousy. She spied on him, made inquiries, and before long discovered what everyone else in St. Quentin seemed to know, namely that her husband and Sister Petronille were having an affair. Feeling herself now on solid ground, Madame d’Escaloponville duly informed her husband that his untoward behavior was more painful to her than she could say, adding that her own conduct did not warrant such treatment, and begged him to mend his wicked ways.
“My wicked ways?” he responded matter-of-factly. “Are you unaware that by sleeping with my cousin the nun I am helping to save my soul? Such a holy affair cleanses one’s soul, brings one closer to the Supreme Being, makes us one with the Holy Ghost. With people who have given themselves to God, my dear wife, there can be no sin. Everything one does with them purifies, opens one to the path of heavenly bliss.”
Madame d’Escaloponville, more than slightly unhappy at her lack of success in confronting her husband, said nothing, but in her heart of hearts vowed that she would find some way to seek revenge that was as convincing as it was irreproachable. The devilish thing about such decisions is that women can somehow always find a way: even if they are not overly attractive, they have but to snap their fingers and avengers flood in on all sides.
In this same town there was a certain curate of the parish, a man named Abbé du Bosquet, a tall man, about thirty, of decidedly lecherous tendencies, who had hotly pursued every woman in town and caused a veritable forest of horns to sprout upon the brows of St. Quentin’s husbands. Madame d’Escaloponville introduced herself to the curate. Little by little the curate got to know Madame d’Escaloponville better, until there came a point when it is safe to say that they knew each other so perfectly that each could have painted a full-length portrait of the other in such intimate detail that anyone viewing them would have identified them immediately.
At the end of a month, people began congratulating poor Monsieur d’Escaloponville, who till then had been wont to claim that he and he alone had escaped the curate’s formidable amorous assaults, and he and he alone in all of St. Quentin had the good fortune of not having his brow sullied by the scoundrel’s exploits.
“That surely can’t be,” said d’Escaloponville to one of those who had come to speak to him about the matter. “My wife is as chaste as Lucretia.5 I don’t care if you tell me the same thing a hundred times over, I still won’t believe it.”
“Seeing’s believing,” said the friend. “Come and see for yourself. And then we’ll talk about doubts.”
D’Escaloponville reluctantly agreed to follow his friend, who led him to a place about half a league out of town, a secluded spot where the Somme River, flanked on both banks by newly flowering hedgerows, forms a lovely pool where the townspeople were in the habit of coming to bathe. But since the hour when the two lovers had agreed to meet was earlier than the time people came to bathe, our poor husband had the misfortune of seeing first his honest wife then his rival, without anyone there to disturb them.
“What do you say?” d’Escaloponville’s friend whispered. “Your forehead beginning to itch?”
“Not yet,” the lady’s husband responded, nonetheless letting his hand stray to his brow to check it out, “maybe she’s come here to say confession.”
“In that case, I suggest we stay to the bitter end.”
They did not have long to wait.
Scarcely had the two arrived in the shade of the sweet-smelling hedges than Abbé du Bosquet set about removing everything that stood in the way of the voluptuous fondling he had in mind, whereupon he proceeded, perhaps for the thirtieth time that month, to relegate piously good, honest d’Escaloponville to the ranks of the town’s other husbands.
“Well,” his friend said, “now do you believe?”
“Let’s get out of here,” d’Escaloponville said bitterly. “Not only do I believe, but I’m so convinced I wouldn’t mind killing this vile priest. The only problem is, if I did the price I’d have to pay would be far more than he’s worth. Let’s go, my friend. And remember: mum’s the word, I beg of you.”
D’Escaloponville returned home upset and perplexed, and shortly thereafter his wife appeared and sat down to supper at his chaste side.
“Just a moment there, my pretty one,” her husband said, in a state of rage. “Since I was a child I swore to my father I’d never dine with whores.”
“With whores?” Madame d’Escaloponville replied with an air of innocence. “I’m surprised by your words, dear friend. Could you tell me what you blame me for?”
“What?” he sputtered. “What do I blame you for? Why, for doing what you did with our curate this afternoon at the bathing spot, that’s what!”
“Oh, Good Lord!” the sweet woman replied. “Is that all? Is that all you have to say to me, my good fellow?”
“Good God, what do you mean, ‘is that all?”’ d’Escaloponville managed.
“But my friend, all I did was follow your good advice. Didn’t you tell me there was nothing wrong in sleeping with a member of the clergy, that such a holy affair had the virtue of cleansing one’s soul, that it brought a person closer to the Supreme Being, that in so doing one was made flesh with the Holy Ghost; in short, that it opened the path to heavenly grace? And so, my friend, all I have done is what you told me to do, and far from being a whore I consider myself a saint! And I’ll say this: if any one of those men of God has the means of finding, as you yourself put it, the path to heavenly grace, I assure you it’s our curate, for I swear I’ve never seen a bigger key!”
THE WINDBAGS OF
PROVENCE
During the reign of Louis XIV an ambassador to France from Persia appeared on the scene, as everyone knows.1 The Sun King loved to entice to his court foreigners from every nation on the face of the earth, who would be so impressed by the court’s incomparable glitter they would return home bearing a few beams from those glorious rays that covered the earth from one end to the other.
The ambassador duly landed in Marseilles, where the city fathers greeted him with great pomp and circumstance. Hearing which, the gentleman judges of the city of Aix-en-Provence resolved not to be outdone when the ambassador paid a visit to their city by a place which, in their erroneous estimation, was far less important than their own.
As a result, they set as the first of their many projects a welcome speech delivered directly in Persian. It would have been simple to greet him in Provençal, but the ambassador would not have understood a single word. This weighty problem gave them great pause. The City Council sat in grave deliberation—it must be said that it has never taken very much for that august body to find an excuse to deliberate: a dispute between peasants, some fuss or other about the local theater, and above all any case involving whores2—all these subjects are so much grist to these judges’ mills, for indeed they have been an indolent lot ever since the time of François I, when they put the region to fire and sword, then watered it with the blood of the unfortunate people who dwelt there.3
Thus did they deliberate in plenary session. But no matter how long and hard they discussed the matter, they simply could not come up with a solution to the burning question: how could they find a way of delivering the welcoming speech in Persian? Was it even possible, in that Society of Fishmongers, who just happened to be garbed in judicial black robes, that one of them could speak Persian (especially considering that not a man amongst them could even speak proper French)?
Nonetheless, the speech was written: three famous lawyers had labored over it for six weeks. Finally, either from within their own ranks or somewhere in the town of Aix, they tracked down a sailor who had lived for several years in the Near East and who spoke Persian almost as fluently as he spoke his native tongue. He was duly informed about what was expected of him, and accepted to play the role. He learned the speech by heart and translated it into Persian without a hitch.
When the appointed day arrived, they clothed him in the black cassock of a high court judge, loaned him the most august wig of the entire magistrates’ court, and followed by the entire corps of judges he made his way toward the ambassador. They had rehearsed to the letter the roles each should play, and the orator had stressed to those personages in his wake that they should keep their eyes glued upon him and, no matter what, emulate his every move, without fail.
The ambassador advanced to the center of the courtyard where, he had been instructed, he would be greeted by the welcoming committee. The sailor made a deep bow, and, unaccustomed as he was to wearing a wig, at the nadir of his bow it fell and landed at the ambassador’s feet. The retinue of members of the bench, who had promised to imitate the sailor’s every move, promptly bowed just as deeply and also shed their respective wigs, casting them at the ambassador’s feet, thus exposing their bald, and in some cases quite mangy, heads. Nonplussed, the sailor plucked his wig from the floor, put it back on his head, and, in ringing tones, began to deliver the welcoming speech, in such excellent Persian that the ambassador was sure the orator was one of his countrymen. The very thought sent him into a rage.
“Miserable creature!” he shouted, putting his hand threateningly on his sword. “There’s no way you could speak my native tongue so fluently unless you are a renegade, someone who has renounced his religion and turned his back on the Prophet. Infidel! you must pay for your sins. Off with your head!”
The poor sailor did his best to defend himself, to no avail. He waved his arms up and down and from side to side; he swore up a storm till he was blue in the face. All of which the Areopagitic4 troupe behind him energetically emulated to the letter, gesture for gesture, word for word. Finally, not knowing how else to extricate himself from this pretty pickle, he thought of a stratagem that he deemed would be irrefutable, namely to unbutton his trousers and produce for the ambassador proof positive that he never in his life had been circumcised. This latest gesture on his part was immediately emulated by the full magisterial troupe, as a result of which there were suddenly some forty or fifty Provençal judges with their flies open and foreskins in hand, proving, as had the sailor before them, that there was not one amongst them who was any less Christian than Saint Christopher himself. It is not difficult to imagine that the ladies viewing the ceremony from their windows above were highly amused by the pantomime taking place below.
Finally, the ambassador, convinced by such irrefutable evidence, realized that the orator was guiltless and that, for better or worse, he had landed in what, in his mind, he dubbed “The City of Trousers.”
He also decided not to make any further issue, shrugged, and said (doubtless to himself): “I’m not surprised that people such as these keep a gallows always at the ready, for closed minds, which are the other side of the coin of incompetence, must be the basic characteristic of these barely human creatures.”
News of the event having been bruited abroad, it was thought that this new manner of proclaiming one’s faith should be immortalized, and in fact a young painter who had been present at the spectacle had already made some preliminary sketches from life. But the court banned the work, consigned it to flames, and banished the painter from the province. In doing so it never even crossed their minds they were burning themselves, since they were all very clearly portrayed in the sketches.
“We don’t mind being taken for imbeciles,” the judges said in all seriousness. “Even if we did, it wouldn’t matter, for we have
made fools of ourselves for a very long time now, as anyone in France can attest. What we do mind, however, is a painting depicting our stupidity for future generations. Posterity will soon forget this little incident, and will remember it no more than it does Mérindol and Cabrières.5 For the honor of the bench, ‘tis much better to be murderers than to be remembered as asses.”
ROOM FOR TWO
There lived on the rue Saint-Honoré in Paris the very pretty wife of a bourgeois, a young woman of twenty-two. Slightly on the plump side, her body was nonetheless as charming as it was appetizing, though as I said a tad generous in its contours. In addition to all these charms, she was possessed of a divine bosom, and to these physical attributes was joined a quick wit, viva-ciousness, and a most lively taste for all the worldly pleasures that are forbidden by the strict rules of marriage. Roughly a year earlier, she had made up her mind to hire two assistants for her husband, who, being both ugly and old, not only displeased her greatly but acquitted himself of his husbandly duties only rarely, and when he did he performed them poorly. In fact, had he fulfilled them a trifle better, chances are he would have appeased his demanding wife, Dolmene, for such was our pretty young lady’s name.
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