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The tale had become almost a fabliau, but any one who reads the amusing chapter will see that it is based on a belief in disturbances like those familiar to Glanvill and the Misses Fox. 'At dinner, when he would lay his hand on a trencher, it was carried off elsewhere, and the wineglass, when he was about drinking, was snatched from his hand. So Mr.
This story of the basket became very popular; it was introduced into a well known French fabliau ; and Bulwer worked it, with slight changes, into his novel of "Pelham," where Monsieur Margot experiences the same sad reflections concerning the deceitfulness of woman, which had long before passed through the mind of Virgil.
The story seems to be rather mediaeval French than Celtic a mingling of the spirit of fabliau and popular fairy tale. The poet has added to its lightness, almost frivolity, the description of the unreal city of Camelot, built to music, as when "Ilion, like a mist, rose into towers." He has also brought in the allegory of Death, which, when faced, proves to be "a blooming boy" behind the mask.
The other instance is that of the "Pardoner's Tale," which would appear to have been based on a fabliau now lost, though the substance of it is preserved in an Italian novel, and in one or two other versions. For the purpose of noticing how Chaucer arranges as well as tells a story, the following attempt at a condensed prose rendering of his narrative may be acceptable:
"Here is another chattering jay to deal with," thought the smith; "but I have a hank over him too. The minstrels have a fabliau of a daw with borrowed feathers why, this Oliver is The very bird, and, by St. Dunstan, if he lets his chattering tongue run on at my expense, I will so pluck him as never hawk plumed a partridge. And this he knows."
It was in a promotion of this sort that she exalted Henri IV. It was thus that the people's king, purified by M. Legouvé, found his "ventre-saint-gris" ignominiously banished from his mouth by two sentences, and that he was reduced, like the girl in the old fabliau, to the necessity of letting fall from those royal lips only pearls and sapphires and rubies: the apotheosis of falsity, in very truth.
Even in the passage of the old fabliau of the "King and the Hermit" the latter, instead of admitting us to a cottage interior, has a servant to wait on him, brings out a tablecloth, lights two candles, and lays before his disguised guest venison and wine. In most of our own romances, and in the epics of antiquity, we have to be satisfied with vague and splendid generalisations.
In Powell and Magnusson's Legends of Iceland (Second Series, p. 627), a woman makes her husband believe that he is dressed in fine clothes when he is naked; another persuades her husband that he is dead, and as he is being carried to the burying-ground, he perceives the naked man, who asserts that he is dressed, upon which he exclaims, "How I should laugh if I were not dead!" And in a fabliau by Jean de Boves, "Le Villain de Bailleul; ali
Whether they dealt with "matter of France," or "matter of Brittany," whether a brief "lai" or a complicated cycle of stories like those about Charlemagne or King Arthur, whether a merry "fabliau" or a beast-tale like "Reynard the Fox," all the Romances allow to the author a margin of mystery, an opportunity to weave his own web of brightly colored fancies.
In an old French fabliau, for instance, we read how a certain highway-robber was always careful to address his prayers to the Blessed Virgin, before going out to murder and steal; and found the practice pay him well.
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