“No, you are a right loyal cousin, an honest man, and if you have ever to put an enemy out off the way, I am there, ready to kill even one of my own friends for you.  I am no longer your cousin, but your brother.  Ho there! sweetheart,” cried Mau-cinge to La Pasquerette, “put the tables straight, wipe up your blood, it belongs to me, and I’ll pay you for it by giving you a hundred times as much of mine as I have taken of thine.  Make the best of it, shake the black dog, off your back, adjust your petticoats, laugh, I wish it, look to the stew, and let us recommence our evening prayer where we left it off.  Tomorrow I’ll make thee braver than a queen.  This is my cousin whom I wish to entertain, even when to do so it were necessary to turn the house out of windows.  We shall get back everything tomorrow in the cellars.  Come, fall to!”

Thus, and in less time than it takes a priest to say his Dominus vobiscum, the whole rookery passed from tears to laughter as it had previously from laughter to tears.  It is only in these houses of ill-fame that love is made with the blow of a dagger, and where tempests of joy rage between four walls.  But these are things ladies of the high-neck dress do not understand.

The said captain Cochegrue was gay as a hundred schoolboys at the breaking up of class, and made his good cousin drink deeply, who spilled everything country fashion, and pretended to be drunk, spluttering out a hundred stupidities, as, that “tomorrow he would buy Paris, would lend a hundred thousand crowns to the king, that he would be able to roll in gold;” in fact, talked so much nonsense that the captain, fearing some compromising avowal and thinking his brain quite muddled enough, led him outside with the good intention, instead of sharing with him, of ripping Chiquon open to see if he had not a sponge in his stomach, because he had just soaked in a big quart of the good wine of Suresne.  They went along, disputing about a thousand theological subjects which got very much mixed up, and finished by rolling quietly up against the garden where were the crowns of the Lombard.  Then Cochegrue, making a ladder of Chiquon’s broad shoulders, jumped on to the pear-tree like a man expert in attacks upon towns, but Versoris, who was watching him, made a blow at his neck, and repeated it so vigorously that with three blows fell the upper portion of the said Cochegrue, but not until he had heard the clear voice of the shepherd, who cried to him, “Pick up your head, my friend.”  Thereupon the generous Chiquon, in whom virtue received its recompense, thought it would be wise to return to the house of the good canon, whose heritage was by the grace of God considerably simplified.  Thus he gained the Rue St. Pierre-Aux-Boeufs with all speed, and soon slept like a new-born baby, no longer knowing the meaning of the word “cousin-german.”  Now, on the morrow he rose according to the habit of shepherds, with the sun, and came into his uncle’s