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[Illustration:  073a.jpg The Lady of Loue bringing her Husband the Basin of Water]

[The Lady of Loue bringing her Husband the Basin of Water]

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TALE XXXVII.

The Lady of Loue so influenced her husband by her great patience and longsuffering, that she drew him from his evil ways, and they lived afterwards in greater love than before.

There was a lady of the house of Loue (1) who was so prudent and virtuous, that she was loved and esteemed by all her neighbours.  Her husband trusted her, as well he might, with all his affairs, and she managed them with such wisdom that his house came, by her means, to be one of the wealthiest and best appointed in either the land of Anjou or Touraine.

1 Loue is in Anjou, in the department of the Sarthe, being the chief locality of a canton of the arrondissement of Le Mans.  The Lady of Loue referred to may be either Philippa de Beaumont-Bressuire, wife of Peter de Laval, knight, Lord of Loue, Benars, &c.; or her daughter-in-law, Frances de Maille, who in or about 1500 espoused Giles de Laval, Lord of Loue.  Philippa is known to have died in 1525, after bearing her husband five children.  She had been wedded fifty years.  However, the subject of this story is the same as that of the Lady of Langallier, or Languillier (also in Anjou), which will be found in chapter xvii. of Le Livre du Chevalier de la Tour-Landry, an English translation of which, made in the reign of Henry VI., was edited in 1868 by Mr. Thomas Wright for the Early English Text Society.—­See also Le Roux de Lincy’s Femmes celebres de l’ancienne France, vol i. p. 356.  Particulars concerning the Laval- Loue family will be found in Duchesne’s Histoire de la Maison de Montmorency.—­L. and M.

In this fashion she lived a great while with her husband, to whom she bore several handsome children; but then, as happiness is always followed by its opposite, hers began to be lessened.  Her husband, finding virtuous ease to be unendurable, laid it aside to seek for toil, and made it his wont to rise from beside his wife as soon as she was asleep, and not to return until it was nearly morning.  The lady of Loue took this conduct ill, and falling into a deep unrest, of which she was fain to give no sign, neglected her household matters, her person and her family, like one that deemed herself to have lost the fruit of her toils, to wit, her husband’s exceeding love, for the preserving of which there was no pain that she would not willingly have endured.  But having lost it, as she could see, she became careless of everything else in the house, and the lack of her care soon brought mischief to pass.

Her husband, on the one part, spent with much extravagance, while, on the other, she had ceased to control the management, so that ere long affairs fell into such great disorder, that the timber began to be felled, and the lands to be mortgaged.