Strikingly similar to this story is the trick of the first lady on her husband in the “Fabliau des Trois Dames qui trouverent un Anel.”  Having made him drunk, she causes his head to be shaved, dresses him in the habit of a monk, and carries him, assisted by her lover, to the entrance of a convent.  When he awakes and sees himself thus transformed he imagines that God by a miraculous exercise of His grace had called him to the monastic life.  He presents himself before the abbot and requests to be received among the brethren.  The lady hastens to the convent in well-feigned despair, and is exhorted to be resigned and to congratulate her husband on the saintly vow he has taken.  “Many a good man, ’ says the poet, “has been betrayed by woman and by her harlotry.  This one became a monk in the abbey, where he abode a very long time.  Wherefore, I counsel all people who hear this story told, that they ought not to trust in their wives, nor in their households, if they have not first proved that they are full of virtues.  Many a man has been deceived by women and by their treachery.  This one became monk against right, who would never have been such in his life, if his wife had not deceived him.’’[FN#598]

The second lady’s trick in the fabliau is a very close parallel to the story in The Nights, vol. v. p. 96.[FN#599] She had for dinner on a Friday some salted and smoked eels, which her husband bade her cook, but there was no fire in the house.  Under the pretext of going to have them cooked at a neighbour’s fire she goes out and finds her lover, at whose house she remains a whole week.  On the following Friday, at the hour of dinner, she enters a neighbour’s house and asks leave to cook the eels, saying that her husband is angry with her for having no fire, and that she did not dare to go back, lest he should take off her head.  As soon as the eels are cooked she carries them piping hot to her own house.  The husband asks her where she has been for eight days, and commences to beat her.  She cries for help and the neighbours come in, and amongst them the one at whose fire the eels had been cooked, who swears that the wife had only just left her house and ridicules the husband for his assertion that she had been away a whole week.  The husband gets into a great rage and is locked up for a madman.

The device of the third lady seems a reflection of the “Elopement,” but without the underground tunnel between the houses of the wife and the lover.  The lady proposes to her lover to marry him, and he believes that she is only jesting, seeing that she is already married, but she assures him that she is quite in earnest, and even undertakes that her husband will consent.  The lover is to come for her husband and take him to the house of Dan Eustace, where he has a fair niece, whom the lover is to pretend he wishes to espouse, if he will give her to him.  The wife will go thither, and she will have done her business with Eustace before they arrive.  Her