efore I shall esteem you, as
long as God gives life to me and to you, as my dearest and best friend,
who protected, and taught me to protect, my chastity, and the honour and
good name, of me, my husband, my relatives, and my friends. Blessed also
be my dear husband, whose advice and counsels I have kept, to the great
solace of my heart. But for you, my friend, I render you such thanks as
I may, for your honourable conduct and your great kindness to me, for
which I can never sufficiently requite you, nor can my friends."

The good and wise clerk, seeing that he had achieved his object, took
leave of the fair damsel, and gently admonished her and advised her that
she should in future correct her body by abstinence and fasting whenever
she felt any prickings of lust. By which means she lived chastely until
the return of her husband, who knew nothing of the matter, for she
concealed it from him--and so also did the clerk.

THE END.

[Illustration: footnotes.jpg Footnotes]

NOTES.

[Footnote 1: This story is taken from an old _fabliau_ entitled _Les
Deux Changeurs_, and has been copied by Malespini, Straparolla, and
other Italian writers. Brantome, in _Les Dames Galantes_, records that,
"Louis, Duc d'Orleans was a great seducer of Court ladies, and always
the greatest. A beautiful and noble lady was sleeping with him when
her husband came into the chamber to wish the Duke good-day. The Duke
covered the lady's head with the sheet, and uncovered the rest of her
body, and allowed the husband to look and touch as much as he liked, but
forbade him, as he valued his life, to uncover her head--And the best of
it was, that the next night, the husband being in bed with his wife told
her that the Duke had shown him the most beautiful naked woman that ever
he saw, but as to her face he could not report, being forbidden to
see it. I leave you to imagine what his wife thought!" The lady
was,--scandal averred--Mariette d'Enghien, the mother of the brave and
handsome Comte de Dunois, known in French history as "the bastard of
Orleans." In the M. S. discovered by Mr. Thomas Wright in the Hunterian
Library at Glasgow, this story is ascribed to "Monseigneur le Duc," as
is also the following one.]

[Footnote 3: Taken from the _Facetiae_ of Poggio. It has been imitated
by Straparolo, Malespini--whom it will be unnecessary to mention each
time as he has copied the whole of the _Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_ with
hardly one exceptio