“If you know any such instance,” said Oisille, “I give you my vote that you may relate it.”

“I know one,” said Dagoucin, “which is so strictly true that you will needs hear it with pleasure.  I will tell you, ladies, when it is that a close friendship is most easily severed; ’tis when the security of friendship begins to give place to suspicion.  For just as trust in a friend is the greatest honour that can be shown him, so is doubt of him a still greater dishonour.  It proves that he is deemed other than we would have him to be, and so causes many close friendships to be broken off, and friends to be turned into foes.  This you will see from the story that I am minded to relate.”

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[Illustration:  195a.jpg The Young Man beating his Wife]

[The Young Man beating his Wife]

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TALE XLVI.(B).

     Concerning a Grey Friar who made it a great crime on the
     part of husbands to beat their wives. (1)

In the town of Angouleme, where Count Charles, father of King Francis, often abode, there dwelt a Grey Friar named De Valles, (2) the same being a learned man and a very great preacher.  At Advent time this Friar preached in the town in presence of the Count, whereby his reputation was still further increased.

     1 This is the tale inserted in Gruget’s edition in lieu of
     the previous one.—­Ed.

2 We had thought that Friar Valles might possibly be Robert de Valle, who at the close of the fifteenth century wrote a work entitled Explanatio in Plinium, but find that this divine was a Bishop of Rouen, and never belonged to the Grey Friars.  In Gessner’s Biographia Universalis, continued by Frisius, mention is made of three learned ecclesiastics of the name of Valle living in or about Queen Margaret’s time:  Baptiste de Valle, who wrote on war and duelling; William de Valle, who penned a volume entitled De Anima Sorbono; and Amant de Valle, a Franciscan minorite born at Toulouse, who was the author of numerous philosophical works, the most important being Elucidationes Scoti.—­B.  J.

It happened also that during Advent a hare-brained young fellow, who had married a passably handsome young woman, continued none the less to run at the least as dissolute a course as did those that were still bachelors.  The young wife, being advised of this, could not keep silence upon it, so that she very often received payment after a different and a prompter fashion than she could have wished.  For all that, she ceased not to persist in lamentation, and sometimes in railing as well; which so provoked the young man that he beat her even to bruises and blood.  Thereupon she cried out yet more loudly than before; and in a like fashion all the women of the neighbourhood, knowing the reason of this, could not keep silence, but cried out publicly in the streets, saying—­