I’ll tell you a story about a man who neglected his wife,
and if you think it’s a good joke you can tell me another as good. Pitas Payas,
a Breton painter, married a young girl and enjoyed it, but in less than a month
he said: ‘Look, love, I’ve got to go to Flanders, but I’ll bring you back lots
of presents.’
‘Right,’ she said, ‘off you go, but don’t forget your home
and don’t forget me.’
Then Pitas Payas said: ‘Darling, I want to paint a pretty picture
on you that will keep you from getting up to anything while I’m away.’
‘If you want to, that’s all right.’
He painted a little lamb on her belly, and went off on his
first business trip. He took a long time over it, and was away two years; each
month of his absence seemed like a year to his wife.
Since the girl was newly married, and had only lived with
her husband for a short time, she took a love to fill the empty house. The
lamb was rubbed away, and soon nothing was left of it. When she heard that her
husband was coming back, she hastily sent for her lover and told him to paint a
little lamb as best he could in that same place. In his haste, he painted a
fully-endowed ram, with a fine head of horns. The same day a messenger
announced that Pitas Payas was about to arrive.
When the painter, back from Flanders, reached home his wife
greeted him coldly. Indoors, alone with her, he remembered the picture he had
painted, saying: ‘Now, love, show me that picture and we can have some fun.’
‘See for yourself where it is,’ his wife said, ‘and do
whatever you fancy there, but do it with a will.’
Pitas Payas looked at her belly and saw a great horned ram.
‘What’s all this, love? How is it that I painted a lamb and
find this plate of meat instead?’
Since women are always crafty and cunning in this kind of
situation, she replied: ‘What, love, you don’t want a lamb to grow into a ram
in two years? If you’d come home sooner you’d have found your lamb.’
Notes
Taken from Medieval
Comic Tales, ed. D. Brewer (Cambridge, Boydell & Brewer Press: 1973) p.
39 and originally from Libro de Buen Amor,
by Juan Ruiz (Archpriest of Hita, c. 1330)
Lamb image: http://camartin.deviantart.com/art/Lamb-56005685
Ram image: Taken fro a woodcut in Sebastian Münster's (1489 - 1552) The Cosmographia via http://www.tablespace.net/maps/munsterimages.html
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