have for certain a veritable fay, and that he would yet gain the fief.  The king was too courteous and gallant a knight to refuse this request, and even made a pretty and right royal speech, intimating his desire to lose the wager.  Then, after vespers, the guard passed fresh and warm into the king’s chamber, a lady most dazzlingly white—­most delicately wanton, with long tresses and velvet hands, filling out her dress at the least movement, for she was gracefully plump, with a laughing mouth, and eyes moist in advance, a woman to beautify hell, and whose first word had such cordial power that the king’s garment was cracked by it.  On the morrow, after the fair one had slipped out after the king’s breakfast, the good captain came radiant and triumphant into the chamber.

At sight of him the prisoner then exclaimed—­

“Baron de la Ville-aux-Dames!  God grant you joys like to mine!  I like my jail!  By’r lady, I will not judge between the love of our lands, but pay the wager.”

“I was sure of it,” said the captain.

“How so?” said the King.

“Sire, it was my wife.”

This was the origin of Larray de la Ville-aux-Dames in our country, since from corruption of the names, that of Lara-y-Lopez, finished by becoming Larray.  It was a good family, delighting in serving the kings of France, and it multiplied exceedingly.  Soon after, the Queen of Navarre came in due course to the king, who, weary of Spanish customs, wished to disport himself after the fashion of France; but remainder is not the subject of this narrative.  I reserve to myself the right to relate elsewhere how the legate managed to sponge the sin of the thing off the great slate, and the delicate remark of our Queen of Marguerites, who merits a saint’s niche in this collection; she who first concocted such good stories.  The morality of this one is easy to understand.

In the first place, kings should never let themselves be taken in battle any more than their archetype in the game of the Grecian chief Palamedes.  But from this, it appears the captivity of its king is a most calamitous and horrible evil to fall on the populace.  If it had been a queen, or even a princess, what worse fate?  But I believe the thing could not happen again, except with cannibals.  Can there ever be a reason for imprisoning the flower of a realm?  I think too well of Ashtaroth, Lucifer, and others, to imagine that did they reign, they would hide the joy of all the beneficent light, at which poor sufferers warm themselves.  And it was necessary that the worst of devils, id est, a wicked old heretic woman, should find herself upon a throne, to keep a prisoner sweet Mary of Scotland, to the shame of all the knights of Christendom, who should have come without previous assignation to the foot of Fotheringay, and have left thereof no single stone.

THE MERRY TATTLE OF THE NUNS OF POISSY