“Ah! little one,” cried the good man, “why did you make so much fuss that we only came to an understanding close to Azay?”

“Ah!” said she, “I belong to Bellan.”

To be brief, I must tell you that when this good man died in his vicarage there was a great number of people, children and others, who came, sorrowful, afflicted, weeping, and grieved, and all exclaimed, “Ah! we have lost our father.”  And the girls, the widows, the wives and little girls looked at each other, regretting him more than a friend, and said, “He was more than a priest, he was a man!” Of these vicars the seed is cast to the winds, and they will never be reproduced in spite of the seminaries.

Why, even the poor, to whom his savings were left, found themselves still the losers, and an old cripple whom he had succoured hobbled into the churchyard, crying “I don’t die!  I don’t!” meaning to say, “Why did not death take me in his place?” This made some of the people laugh, at which the shade of the good vicar would certainly not have been displeased.

THE REPROACH

The fair laundress of Portillon-les-Tours, of whom a droll saying has already been given in this book, was a girl blessed with as much cunning as if she had stolen that of six priests and three women at least.  She did not want for sweethearts, and had so many that one would have compared them, seeing them around her, to bees swarming of an evening towards their hive.  An old silk dyer, who lived in the Rue St. Montfumier, and there possessed a house of scandalous magnificence, coming from his place at La Grenadiere, situated on the fair borders of St. Cyr, passed on horseback through Portillon in order to gain the Bridge of Tours.  By reason of the warmth of the evening, he was seized with a wild desire on seeing the pretty washerwoman sitting upon her door-step.  Now as for a very long time he had dreamed of this pretty maid, his resolution was taken to make her his wife, and in a short time she was transformed from a washerwoman into a dyer’s wife, a good townswoman, with laces, fine linen, and furniture to spare, and was happy in spite of the dyer, seeing that she knew very well how to manage him.  The good dyer had for a crony a silk machinery manufacturer who was small in stature, deformed for life, and full of wickedness.  So on the wedding-day he said to the dyer, “You have done well to marry, my friend, we shall have a pretty wife!”; and a thousand sly jokes, such as it is usual to address to a bridegroom.

In fact, this hunchback courted the dyer’s wife, who from her nature, caring little for badly built people, laughed to scorn the request of the mechanician, and joked him about the springs, engines, and spools of which his shop was full.  However, this great love of the hunchback was rebuffed by nothing, and became so irksome to the dyer’s wife that she resolved to cure it by a thousand practical jokes.