Chương Chương 125 · Rondibilis the physician’s c

Chapter 3.XXXIII.

Rondibilis the physician’s cure of cuckoldry.

At that time, quoth Rondibilis, when Jupiter took a view of the state of

his Olympic house and family, and that he had made the calendar of all the

gods and goddesses, appointing unto the festival of every one of them its

proper day and season, establishing certain fixed places and stations for

the pronouncing of oracles and relief of travelling pilgrims, and ordaining

victims, immolations, and sacrifices suitable and correspondent to the

dignity and nature of the worshipped and adored deity--Did not he do, asked

Panurge, therein as Tintouille, the Bishop of Auxerre, is said once to have

done? This noble prelate loved entirely the pure liquor of the grape, as

every honest and judicious man doth; therefore was it that he had an

especial care and regard to the bud of the vine-tree as to the

great-grandfather of Bacchus. But so it is, that for sundry years together

he saw a most pitiful havoc, desolation, and destruction made amongst the

sprouts, shootings, buds, blossoms, and scions of the vines by hoary frost,

dank fogs, hot mists, unseasonable colds, chill blasts, thick hail, and

other calamitous chances of foul weather, happening, as he thought, by the

dismal inauspiciousness of the holy days of St. George, St. Mary, St. Paul,

St. Eutrope, Holy Rood, the Ascension, and other festivals, in that time

when the sun passeth under the sign of Taurus; and thereupon harboured in

his mind this opinion, that the afore-named saints were Saint

Hail-flingers, Saint Frost-senders, Saint Fog-mongers, and Saint Spoilers of

the Vine-buds. For which cause he went about to have transmitted their

feasts from the spring to the winter, to be celebrated between Christmas and

Epiphany, so the mother of the three kings called it, allowing them with all

honour and reverence the liberty then to freeze, hail, and rain as much as

they would; for that he knew that at such a time frost was rather profitable

than hurtful to the vine-buds, and in their steads to have placed the

festivals of St. Christopher, St. John the Baptist, St. Magdalene, St. Anne,

St. Domingo, and St. Lawrence; yea, and to have gone so far as to collocate

and transpose the middle of August in and to the beginning of May, because

during the whole space of their solemnity there was so little danger of

hoary frosts and cold mists, that no artificers are then held in greater

request than the afforders of refrigerating inventions, makers of junkets,

fit disposers of cooling shades, composers of green arbours, and refreshers

of wine.

Jupiter, said Rondibilis, forgot the poor devil Cuckoldry, who was then in

the court at Paris very eagerly soliciting a peddling suit at law for one

of his vassals and tenants. Within some few days thereafter, I have forgot

how many, when he got full notice of the trick which in his absence was

done unto him, he instantly desisted from prosecuting legal processes in

the behalf of others, full of solicitude to pursue after his own business,

lest he should be foreclosed, and thereupon he appeared personally at the

tribunal of the great Jupiter, displayed before him the importance of his

preceding merits, together with the acceptable services which in obedience

to his commandments he had formerly performed; and therefore in all

humility begged of him that he would be pleased not to leave him alone

amongst all the sacred potentates, destitute and void of honour, reverence,

sacrifices, and festival ceremonies. To this petition Jupiter’s answer was

excusatory, that all the places and offices of his house were bestowed.

Nevertheless, so importuned was he by the continual supplications of

Monsieur Cuckoldry, that he, in fine, placed him in the rank, list, roll,

rubric, and catalogue, and appointed honours, sacrifices, and festival

rites to be observed on earth in great devotion, and tendered to him with

solemnity. The feast, because there was no void, empty, nor vacant place

in all the calendar, was to be celebrated jointly with, and on the same day

that had been consecrated to the goddess Jealousy. His power and dominion

should be over married folks, especially such as had handsome wives. His

sacrifices were to be suspicion, diffidence, mistrust, a lowering pouting

sullenness, watchings, wardings, researchings, plyings, explorations,

together with the waylayings, ambushes, narrow observations, and malicious

doggings of the husband’s scouts and espials of the most privy actions of

their wives. Herewithal every married man was expressly and rigorously

commanded to reverence, honour, and worship him, to celebrate and solemnize

his festival with twice more respect than that of any other saint or deity,

and to immolate unto him with all sincerity and alacrity of heart the

above-mentioned sacrifices and oblations, under pain of severe censures,

threatenings, and comminations of these subsequent fines, mulcts,

amerciaments, penalties, and punishments to be inflicted on the

delinquents: that Monsieur Cuckoldry should never be favourable nor

propitious to them; that he should never help, aid, supply, succour, nor

grant them any subventitious furtherance, auxiliary suffrage, or

adminiculary assistance; that he should never hold them in any reckoning,

account, or estimation; that he should never deign to enter within their

houses, neither at the doors, windows, nor any other place thereof; that he

should never haunt nor frequent their companies or conversations, how

frequently soever they should invocate him and call upon his name; and that

not only he should leave and abandon them to rot alone with their wives in

a sempiternal solitariness, without the benefit of the diversion of any

copes-mate or corrival at all, but should withal shun and eschew them, fly

from them, and eternally forsake and reject them as impious heretics and

sacrilegious persons, according to the accustomed manner of other gods

towards such as are too slack in offering up the duties and reverences

which ought to be performed respectively to their divinities--as is

evidently apparent in Bacchus towards negligent vine-dressers; in Ceres,

against idle ploughmen and tillers of the ground; in Pomona, to unworthy

fruiterers and costard-mongers; in Neptune, towards dissolute mariners and

seafaring men, in Vulcan, towards loitering smiths and forgemen; and so

throughout the rest. Now, on the contrary, this infallible promise was

added, that unto all those who should make a holy day of the above-recited

festival, and cease from all manner of worldly work and negotiation, lay

aside all their own most important occasions, and to be so retchless,

heedless, and careless of what might concern the management of their proper

affairs as to mind nothing else but a suspicious espying and prying into

the secret deportments of their wives, and how to coop, shut up, hold at

under, and deal cruelly and austerely with them by all the harshness and

hardships that an implacable and every way inexorable jealousy can devise

and suggest, conform to the sacred ordinances of the afore-mentioned

sacrifices and oblations, he should be continually favourable to them,

should love them, sociably converse with them, should be day and night in

their houses, and never leave them destitute of his presence. Now I have

said, and you have heard my cure.

Ha, ha, ha! quoth Carpalin, laughing; this is a remedy yet more apt and

proper than Hans Carvel’s ring. The devil take me if I do not believe it!

The humour, inclination, and nature of women is like the thunder, whose

force in its bolt or otherwise burneth, bruiseth, and breaketh only hard,

massive, and resisting objects, without staying or stopping at soft, empty,

and yielding matters. For it pasheth into pieces the steel sword without

doing any hurt to the velvet scabbard which ensheatheth it. It chrusheth

also and consumeth the bones without wounding or endamaging the flesh

wherewith they are veiled and covered. Just so it is that women for the

greater part never bend the contention, subtlety, and contradictory

disposition of their spirits unless it be to do what is prohibited and

forbidden.

Verily, quoth Hippothadee, some of our doctors aver for a truth that the

first woman of the world, whom the Hebrews call Eve, had hardly been

induced or allured into the temptation of eating of the fruit of the Tree

of Life if it had not been forbidden her so to do. And that you may give

the more credit to the validity of this opinion, consider how the cautelous

and wily tempter did commemorate unto her, for an antecedent to his

enthymeme, the prohibition which was made to taste it, as being desirous to

infer from thence, It is forbidden thee; therefore thou shouldst eat of it,

else thou canst not be a woman.