inite is the number of fools. From an infinity nothing can be deducted
or abated, nor yet, by the testimony of Aristotle, can anything thereto be
added or subjoined. Therefore were I a mad fool if, being a fool, I should
not hold myself a fool. After the same manner of speaking, we may aver the
number of the mad and enraged folks to be infinite. Avicenna maketh no
bones to assert that the several kinds of madness are infinite. Though
this much of Triboulet's words tend little to my advantage, howbeit the
prejudice which I sustain thereby be common with me to all other men, yet
the rest of his talk and gesture maketh altogether for me. He said to my
wife, Be wary of the monkey; that is as much as if she should be cheery,
and take as much delight in a monkey as ever did the Lesbia of Catullus in
her sparrow; who will for his recreation pass his time no less joyfully at
the exercise of snatching flies than heretofore did the merciless
fly-catcher Domitian. Withal he meant, by another part of his discourse,
that she should be of a jovial country-like humour, as gay and pleasing as a
harmonious hornpipe of Saulieau or Buzansay. The veridical Triboulet did
therein hint at what I liked well, as perfectly knowing the inclinations and
propensions of my mind, my natural disposition, and the bias of my interior
passions and affections. For you may be assured that my humour is much
better satisfied and contented with the pretty, frolic, rural, dishevelled
shepherdesses, whose bums through their coarse canvas smocks smell of the
clover grass of the field, than with those great ladies in magnific courts,
with their flandan top-knots and sultanas, their polvil, pastillos, and
cosmetics. The homely sound, likewise, of a rustical hornpipe is more
agreeable to my ears than the curious warbling and musical quavering of
lutes, theorbos, viols, rebecs, and violins. He gave me a lusty rapping
thwack on my back,--what then? Let it pass, in the name and for the love of
God, as an abatement of and deduction from so much of my future pains in
purgatory. He did it not out of any evil intent. He thought, belike, to
have hit some of the pages. He is an honest fool, and an innocent
changeling. It is a sin to harbour in the heart any bad conceit of him. As
for myself, I heartily pardon him. He flirted me on the nose. In that
there is no harm; for it importeth nothing else but that betwixt my wife and
me there will occur some toyish wan