There was in the palace of the world a king who was very desirous of
seeing Khizr[504] (peace on him!), and he would even say, “If there be
any one who will show me Khizr, I will give him whatsoever he may wish.”
Now there was at that time a man poor of estate, and from the stress of
his poverty he said to himself, “Let me go and speak to the king, that
if he provide for me during three years, either I shall be dead, or the
king will be dead, or he will forgive me my fault, or I shall on
somewise win to escape, and in this way shall I make merry for a time.”
So he went to the king and spake these words to him.[505] The king said,
“An thou show him not, then I will kill thee,” and that poor man
consented. Then the king let give him much wealth and money, and the
poor man took that wealth and money and went to his house. Three years
he spent in merriment and delight, and he rested at ease till the term
was accomplished. At the end of that time he fled and hid himself in a
trackless place and he began to quake for fear. Of a sudden he saw a
personage with white raiment and shining face, who saluted him. The poor
man returned the salutation, and the radiant being asked, “Why art thou
thus sad?” But he gave no answer. Again the radiant being asked him and
sware to him, saying, “Do indeed tell to me thy plight, that I may find
thee some remedy.” So that hapless one narrated his story from its
beginning to its end, and the radiant being said, “Come, I will go with
thee to the king, and I will answer for thee.” So they arose.
Now the king wanted that hapless one, and while they were going some of
the king’s officers who were seeking met them, and they straightway
seized the poor man and brought him to the king. Quoth the king, “Lo,
the three years are accomplished; come now, and show me Khizr.” The poor
man said, “My king, grace and bounty are the work of kings—forgive my
sin.” Quoth the king, “I made a pact; till I have killed thee, I shall
not have fulfilled it.” And he looked to his chief vezír and said, “How
should this be done?” Quoth the vezír, “This man should be hewn in many
pieces and then hung up on butchers’ hooks, that others may see and lie
not before the king.” Said that radiant being, “True spake the
vezír;—all things return to their origin.” Then the king looked to the
second vezír and said, “What sayest thou?” He replied, “This man should
be boiled in a cauldron.” Said that radiant being, “True spake the
vezír;—all things return to their origin.” The king looked to the third
vezír and said, “What sayest thou?” The vezír replied, “This man should
be hewn in small pieces and baked in an oven.” Again said that elder,
“True spake the vezír;—all things return to their origin.” Then quoth
the king to the fourth vezír, “Let us see what sayest thou?” The vezír
replied, “O king, the wealth thou gavest this poor creature was for the
love of Khizr (peace on him!) He, thinking to find him, accepted it; now
that he has not found him he seeks pardon. This were befitting, that
thou set free this poor creature for the love of Khizr.” Said that
elder, “True spake the vezír;—all things return to their origin.” Then
the king said to the elder, “O elder, my vezírs have said different
things contrary the one to the other, and thou hast said concerning each
of them, ‘True spake the vezír;—all things return to their origin.’ What
is the reason thereof?” That elder replied, “O king, thy first vezír is
a butcher’s son; therefore did he draw to his origin. Thy second vezír
is a cook’s son, and he likewise proposed a punishment as became his
origin. Thy third vezír is a baker’s son; he likewise proposed a
punishment as became his origin. But thy fourth vezír is of gentle
birth; compassion therefore becomes his origin, so he had compassion on
that hapless one, and sought to do good and counselled liberation. O
king, all things return to their origin.”[506] And he gave the king much
counsel, and at last said, “Lo, I am Khizr,” and vanished.[507]
* * * * *
The discovery of the king’s illegitimate birth, which occurs in so many
versions, has its parallels in the story of the Nephew of Hippocrates in
the “Seven Wise Masters,” and the Lady’s 2nd Story in Mr. Gibb’s
translation of the “Forty Vezírs.” The extraordinary sensitiveness of
the third young Bráhman, in the Vetála story, whose side was scratched
by a hair that was under the seventh of the mattresses on which he lay,
Rohde (says Tawney), in his “Greichische Novellistik,” p. 62, compares
with a story told by Aelian of the Sybarite Smindyrides, who slept on a
bed of rose-leaves and got up in the morning covered with blisters. He
also quotes from the Chronicle of Tabari a story of a princess who was
made to bleed by a rose-leaf lying in her bed.[508]
* * * * *
The eleventh recital of the Vetála is about a king’s three sensitive
wives: As one of the queens was playfully pulling the hair of the king,
a blue lotus leaped from her ear and fell on her lap; immediately a
wound was produced on the front of her thigh by the blow, and the
delicate princess exclaimed “Oh! oh!” and fainted. At night, the second
retired with the king to an apartment on the roof of the palace exposed
to the rays of the moon, which fell on the body of the queen, who was
sleeping by the king’s side, where it was exposed by her garment blowing
aside; immediately she woke up, exclaiming, “Alas! I am burnt,” and rose
up from the bed rubbing her limbs. The king woke up in a state of alarm,
crying out, “What is the meaning of this?” Then he got up and saw that
blisters had been produced on the queen’s body. In the meanwhile the
king’s third wife heard of it and left her palace to come to him. And
when she got into the open air, she heard distinctly, as the night was
still, the sound of a pestle pounding in a distant house. The moment the
gazelle-eyed one heard it, she said “Alas! I am killed,” and she sat
down on the path, shaking her hands in an agony of pain. Then the girl
turned back, and was conducted by her attendants to her own chamber,
where she fell on her bed and groaned. And when her weeping attendants
examined her, they saw that her hands were covered with bruises, and
looked like lotuses upon which black beetles had settled.
To this piteous tale of the three very sensitive queens Tawney appends
the following note: Rohde, in his “Greichische Novellistik,” p. 62,
compares with this a story told by Timæus, of a Sybarite who saw a
husbandman hoeing a field, and contracted rupture from it. Another
Sybarite, to whom he told the tale of his sad mishap, got ear-ache from
hearing it. Oesterley, in his German translation of the Baitál Pachísí,
points out that Grimm, in his “Kindermärchen,” iii. p. 238, quotes a
similar incident from the travels of the Three Sons of Giaffar: out of
four princesses, one faints because a rose-twig is thrown into her face
among some roses; a second shuts her eyes in order not to see the statue
of a man; a third says, “Go away; the hairs in your fur cloak run into
me;” and the fourth covers her face, fearing that some of the fish in a
tank may belong to the male sex. He also quotes a striking parallel from
the “Elites des contes du Sieur d’Onville:” Four ladies dispute as to
which of them is the most delicate. One has been lame for three months
owing to a rose-leaf having fallen on her foot; another has had three
ribs broken by a sheet in her bed having been crumpled; a third has held
her head on one side for six weeks owing to one half of her head having
three or more hairs on it than the other; a fourth has broken a
blood-vessel by a slight movement, and the rupture cannot be healed
without breaking the whole limb. [Poor things!]
_THE PRINCE WHO FELL IN LOVE WITH THE PICTURE. Vol. I. p. 226._
In the Persian tales of “The Thousand and One Days,” a young prince
entered his father’s treasury one day, and saw there a little cedar
chest “set with pearls, diamonds, emeralds, and topazes;” on opening it
(for the key was in the lock) he beheld the picture of an exceedingly
beautiful woman, with whom he immediately fell in love. Ascertaining the
name of the lady from an inscription on the back of the portrait, he
sets off with a companion to discover her, and having been told by an
old man at Baghdád that her father at one time reigned in Ceylon, he
continued his journey thither, encountering many unheard-of adventures
by the way. Ultimately he is informed that the lady with whose portrait
he had become enamoured was one of the favourites of King Solomon. One
should suppose that this would have effectually cured the love-sick
prince; but no: he “could never banish her sweet image from his
heart.”[509]
Two instances of falling in love with the picture of a pretty woman
occur in the “Kathá Sarít Ságara.” In Book ix., chap. 51, a painter
shows King Prithvirúpa the “counterfeit presentment” of the beauteous
Princess Rapalatá, and “as the king gazed on it his eye was drowned in
that sea of beauty her person, so that he could not draw it out again.
For the king, whose longing was excessive, could not be satisfied with
devouring her form, which poured forth a stream of the nectar of beauty,
as the partridge cannot be satisfied with devouring the moonlight.” In
Book xii., chap. 100, a female ascetic shows a wandering prince the
portrait of the Princess Mandáravatí, “and Sundarasena when he beheld
that maiden, who, though she was present there only in a picture, seemed
to be of romantic beauty and like a flowing forth of joy, immediately
felt as if he had been pierced with the arrows of the god of the flowery
bow [_i.e._ Káma].” In chapter 35 of Scott’s translation of the
“Bahár-i-Dánish,” Prince Ferokh-Faul opens a volume, “which he had
scarcely done when the fatal portrait of the fair princess who, the
astrologers had foretold, was to occasion him so many perils, presented
itself to his view. He instantly fainted, when the slave, alarmed,
conveyed intelligence of his condition to the sultan, and related the
unhappy cause of the disorder.” In Gomberville’s romance of Polexandre,
the African prince, Abd-el-Malik, falls in love with the portrait of
Alcidiana, and similar incidents occur in the romance of Agesilaus of
Colchos and in the Story of the Seven Wazírs (vol. vi.); but why
multiply instances? Nothing is more common in Asiatic fictions.
_THE FULLER, HIS WIFE, AND THE TROOPER. Vol. I. p. 231._
In addition to the versions of this amusing story referred to on p.
231—all of which will be found in the second volume of my work on
“Popular Tales and Fictions,” pp. 212–228—there is yet another in a
Persian story-book, of unknown date, entitled “Shamsa ú Kuhkuha,”
written by Mirza Berkhorder Turkman, of which an account, together with
specimens, is given in a recently-published little book (Quaritch),
“Persian Portraits: a sketch of Persian History, Literature, and
Politics,” by Mr. F. F. Arbuthnot, author of “Early Ideas: a Group of
Hindoo Stories.”
This version occurs in a tale of three artful wives—or, to employ the
story-teller’s own graphic terms, “three whales of the sea of fraud and
deceit: three dragons of the nature of thunder and the quickness of
lightning; three defamers of honour and reputation; namely, three
men-deceiving, lascivious women, each of whom had from the chicanery of
her cunning issued the diploma of turmoil to a hundred cities and
countries, and in the arts of fraud they accounted Satan as an admiring
spectator in the theatre of their stratagems.[510] One of them was
sitting in the court of justice of the kazi’s embrace; the second was
the precious gem of the bazaar-master’s diadem of compliance; and the
third was the beazle and ornament of the signet-ring of the life and
soul of the superintendent of police. They were constantly entrapping
the fawns of the prairie of deceit within the grasp of cunning, and
plundered the wares of the caravan of tranquillity of hearts of
strangers and acquaintances, by means of the edge of the scimitar of
fraud. One day this trefoil of roguery met at the public bath, and,
according to their homogeneous nature they intermingled as intimately as
the comb with the hair; they tucked up their garment of amity to the
waist of union, entered the tank of agreement, seated themselves in the
hot-house of love, and poured from the dish of folly, by means of the
key of hypocrisy, the water of profusion upon the head of intercourse;
they rubbed with the brush of familiarity and the soap of affection the
stains of jealousies from each other’s limbs. After a while, when they
had brought the pot of concord to boil by the fire of mutual laudation,
they warmed the bath of association with the breeze of kindness, and
came out. In the dressing-room all three of them happened simultaneously
to find a ring, the gem of which surpassed the imagination of the
jeweller of destiny, and the like of which he had never beheld in the
storehouse of possibility. In short, these worthy ladies contended with
each other for possession of the ring, until at length the mother of the
bathman came forward and proposed that they should entrust the ring to
her in the meanwhile, and it should be the prize of the one who most
cleverly deceived and befooled her husband, to which they all agreed,
and then departed for their respective domiciles.”[511]
Mr. Arbuthnot’s limits permitted only of abstracts of the tricks played
upon their husbands by the three ladies—which the story-teller gives at
great length—and that of the kazi’s wife is as follows:
The kazi’s wife knows that a certain carpenter, who lived close to her,
was very much in love with her. She sends her maid to him with a message
to say that the flame of his love had taken effect upon her heart, and
that he must make an underground passage between his house and her
dwelling, so that they might communicate with each other freely by means
of the mine. The carpenter digs the passage, and the lady pays him a
visit, and says to him, “To-morrow I shall come here, and you must bring
the kazi to marry me to you.” The next day the kazi goes to his office;
the lady goes to the carpenter’s house, and sends him to bring her
husband, the kazi, to marry them. The carpenter fetches him, and, as the
kazi hopes for a good present, he comes willingly enough, but is much
surprised at the extreme likeness between the bride and his own wife.
The more he looks at her, the more he is in doubt; and at last, offering
an excuse to fetch something, he rushes off to his own house, but is
forestalled by his spouse, who had gone thither by the passage, and on
his arrival is lying on her bed. The kazi makes some excuses for his
sudden entry into her room, and, after some words, goes back to the
carpenter’s house; but his wife had preceded him, and is sitting in her
place. Again he begins the ceremony, but is attracted by a black mole on
the corner of the bride’s lip, which he could have sworn was the same as
that possessed by his wife. Making more excuses, and in spite of the
remonstrances of the carpenter, he hurries back to his house once more;
but his wife had again got there before him, and he finds her reading a
book, and much astonished at his second visit. She suggests that he is
mad, and he admits that his conduct is curious, and returns to the
carpenter’s house to complete the ceremony. This is again frequently
interrupted, but finally he marries his own wife to the carpenter, and,
having behaved in such an extraordinary manner throughout, is sent off
to a lunatic asylum.
For the tricks of the two other ladies, and for many other equally
diverting tales, I refer the reader to Mr. Arbuthnot’s pleasing and
instructive little book, which is indeed an admirable epitome of the
history and literature of Persia, and one which was greatly wanted in
these days, when most men, “like the dogs in Egypt for fear of the
crocodiles, must drink of the waters of information as they run, in
dread of the old enemy Time.”
* * * * *
I have discussed the question of the genealogy of this tale elsewhere,
but, after a somewhat more minute comparative analysis of the several
versions, am disposed to modify the opinion which I then entertained. I
think we must consider as the direct or indirect source of the versions
and variants the “Miles Gloriosus” of Plautus, the plot of which, it is
stated in the prologue to the second act, was taken from a Greek play.
It is, however, not very clear whether Berni adapted his story from
Plautus or the “Seven Wise Masters”; probably from the former, since in
both the lady is represented, to the captain and the cuckold, as a twin
sister, while in the S. W. M. the crafty knight pretends that she is his
leman, come from Hungary with tidings that he may now with safety return
home. On the other hand, in the S. W. M., as in Plautus, the lovers make
their escape by sea, an incident which Berni has altered to a journey by
land—no doubt, in order to introduce further adventures for the
development of his main plot. But then we find a point of resemblance
between Berni and the S. W. M., in the incident of the cuckold
accompanying the lovers part of their way—in the latter to the
sea-shore; while in Plautus the deceived captain remains at home to
prosecute an amour and get a thrashing for his reward (in Plautus,
instead of a wife, it is the captain’s slave-girl). It is curious that
amidst all the masquerade of the Arabian story the cuckold’s wife also
personates her supposititious twin-sister, as in Plautus and Berni. In
Plautus the houses of the lover and the captain adjoin, as is also the
case in the modern Italian and Sicilian versions; while in Berni, the S.
W. M., the Arabian, and the Persian story cited in this note they are at
some distance. With these resemblances and variations it is not easy to
say which version was derived from another. Evidently the Arabian story
has been deliberately modified by the compiler, and he has, I think,
considerably improved upon the original: the ludicrous perplexity of the
poor fuller when he awakes, to find himself apparently transformed into
a Turkish trooper, recalls the nursery rhyme of the little woman “who
went to market her eggs for to sell,” and falling asleep on the king’s
highway, a pedlar cut off her petticoats up to the knees, and when she
awoke and saw her condition she exclaimed, “Lawk-a-mercy me, this is
none of I!” and so on. And not less diverting is the pelting the
blockhead receives from his brother fullers—altogether, a capital story.
_TALE OF THE SIMPLETON HUSBAND.—Vol. I. p. 239._
The “curious” reader will find European and Asiatic versions of this
amusing story in “Originals and Analogues of some of Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales,” published for the Chaucer Society, pp. 177–188 and
(in a paper contributed by me: “The Enchanted Tree”) p. 341–364.
_TALE OF THE THREE MEN AND OUR LORD ISA. Vol. I. p. 250._
Under the title of “The Robbers and the Treasure-Trove” I have brought
together many European and Asiatic versions of this wide-spread tale in
“Chaucer Analogues,” pp. 415–436.
_THE MELANCHOLIST AND THE SHARPER. Vol. I. p. 264._
A similar but much shorter story is found in Gladwin’s “Persian
Moonshee,” and story-books in several of the Indian vernaculars which
have been rendered into English:
A miser said to a friend, “I have now a thousand rupees, which I will
bury out of the city, and I will not tell the secret to any one besides
yourself.” They went out of the city together, and buried the money
under a tree. Some days after the miser went alone to the tree and found
no signs of his money. He said to himself, “Excepting that friend, no
other has taken it away; but if I question him he will never confess.”
He therefore went to his (the friend’s) house and said, “A great deal of
money is come into my hands, which I want to put in the same place; if
you will come to-morrow, we will go together.” The friend, by coveting
this large sum, replaced the former money, and the miser next day went
there alone and found it. He was delighted with his own contrivance, and
never again placed any confidence in friends.
* * * * *
One should suppose a miser the last person to confide the secret of his
wealth to any one; but the Italian versions bear a closer resemblance to
the Arabian story. From No. 74 of the “Cento Novelle Antiche” Sacchetti,
who was born in 1335 and is ranked by Crescimbini as next to Boccaccio,
adapted his 198th novella, which is a most pleasing version of the
Asiatic story: