Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 3.djvu/92

 NOTES AND QUERIES. [io i " s. in. JAX. 28, iocs.

that when he approaches the king he must hold his sleeve to his mouth, as the king dislikes the smell of garlic.

Similarly it is told of the King of Africa and his vezirs in Clouston's ' Persian Tales,' 1892, p. 49, taken from ' Mahbub al Kalub,' or ' Delight of Hearts.' Here also the king is told by a dervish that his vezir says he (the king) has foul breath, and the vezir is given a dish of garlic and told to keep at a distance from the king because he dislikes garlic.

According to Clouston ('Popular Tales,' &c., vol. ii. p. 44), the tale is also found orally in North Africa in the ' Contes de la Kabillie ' (Riviere's French collection).

There is an Indian version given by Ver- niew in his 'The Hermit of Motee Jhurna, also Indian Tales and Anecdotes,' Calcutta, 1873 (Clouston's 'Persian Tales,' 124, and his 'Popular Tales,' &c., ii. 450). In this a fakir is told he must not approach his face too near the king when speaking to him as it is disrespectful, and the king is informed the fakir averts his face so that the king should not observe his drunken habits.

In all the above tales the incident forms part of the story of how it is sought to encompass the disgrace of a favourite. In the following it is a device of a wife to obtain, at her lover's bidding, a token from her husband as a proof of her affection for her lover. In this form it seems to be first found in the ' Exempla ' of Jacques de Vitry, who was born before 1180, and died in 1240. The story is exempla ccxlviii., and according to the analysis given by Mr. Crane in his admirable edition of the 'Exempla,' published for the Folk-Lore Society in 1890, it is as follows : A wicked woman, when she wished to see her lover, used to tell her husband that he was ill and must not leave his bed until she returned. The husband believed every- thing she said and obeyed her. One day she told her lover that she was more fond of him than of her husband. The lover demanded as the proof of this that she should bring him her husband's best tooth. On her return to her home she began to weep and feign sadness. When her husband asked her what was the matter she said she did not dare to^tell him. Finally she yielded to his entreaties and told him she could not endure his foul breath. He was surprised and grieved, and said, " Why did you not tell me ? Is there any remedy for it 1 " She replied that the only remedy was to have the tooth from which the offensive odour proceeded extracted. He followed her advice, and had drawn a good and sound tooth, which

she pointed out, and which she took at once and carried to her lover. This story, it may be mentioned, is one of those given by Wright in his 'Latin Stories' (Camden Society), although he does not mention Vitry as the author.

The story of the extraction of the tooth by a ruse of the wife also forms the subject of the well-known " cycle " story, the framework of which is that three women find a ring or a- jewel, and agree that it shall belong to the one that plays the best trick on her husband. In the ' Mambriano ' of Francesco Bello, called " II Cieco da Ferrara," who flourished at the end of the fifteenth century and the begin- ning of the sixteenth, it forms the trick of the second woman in canto xxv. stanza 7, canto xxv. stanza 92, and this is followed by Malespini in his ' Ducento Novelle,' part iii. No. 95. (See the excellent monograph on this subject, "Novelle del Mambriano del Cieco da Ferrara, esposte ed illustrate da Giuseppe Rua, Torino, 1888," 105 ; also Lieb- recht, 'Zur Volkskunde,' Heilbronn, 1879, p. 124 et seq.) It also occurs in a 'Favola' of Flaminion Scala ('Theatro delle Favolfr Rappresentative,' &c., Venezia, MDCXI., gior- nata xx., ' Li Duo Fidi Notari ' (quoted by Rua, op. cit., 116).

This cycle story has also passed into the- popular fiction of Italy, and can be found in " Fiabe, Novelle e Racconti Popolari, raccolti ed illustrati da G. Pitre," Palermo, 1875, vol. iii. p. 255, No. clxvi., under the title of 'Li Tri Cumpari' ('The Three Gossips '), where it also forms one of the three tricks- played by the women on their husbands.

The story from Vitry bears a striking likeness to the ninth of the seventh day of Boccaccio's 'Decameron,' where one of the promises made by Lidia to her lover Pyrrhus was to obtain one of her husband's teeth, which she accomplishes by telling his page* to turn away their heads when serving him as he disliked their bad breath, and then telling the husband they did so on account of his bad breath caused by a decayed tooth.

There is a Latin poem called ' Comedia Lidise,' which is attributed to Matthieu de- Vendome (who flourished at the end of the- twelfth century) and which is very similar to the tale in the 'Decameron,' as it con- tains not only the above ruse of the wife, but also the other tests imposed on the wife by her lover which are contained in the- ' Decameron,' but which do not, however, oncern us here. It will be found printed in Edelestand du Meril, ' Poesies Inedites du Moyen Age,' Paris, 1854, p. 350 else/]., from a MS. in the Royal Library of Vienna,