There was in the palace of the world a king who was very desirous
of seeing Khizr[FN#503] (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.[FN#504] 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 vez�r and said, "How
should this be done?" Quoth the vez�r, "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 vez�r;--all things return to their origin." Then
the king looked to the second vez�r and said, "What sayest thou?"
He replied, "This man should be boiled in a cauldron." Said that
radiant being, "True spake the vez�r;--all things return to their
origin." The king looked to the third vezir and said, "What
sayest though?" The vez�r replied, "This man should be hewn in
small pieces and baked in an oven." Again said that elder, "True
spake the vez�r;--all things return to their origin." Then quoth
the king to the fourth vez�r, "Let us see what sayest thou?" The
vez�r 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 vez�r;--all
things return to their origin." Then the king said to the elder,
"O elder, my vez�rs have said different things contrary the one
to the other, and thou hast said concerning each of them, 'True
spake the vez�r; - all things return to their origin.' What is
the reason thereof?" That elder replied, "O king, thy first
vez�r is a butcher's son; therefore did he draw to his origin.
Thy second vez�r is a cook's son, and he likewise proposed a
punishment as became his origin. Thy third vez�r is a baker's
son; he likewise proposed a punishment as became his origin.
But thy fourth vez�r 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."[FN#505] And he gave the king much
counsel, and at last said, "Lo, I am Khizr," and
vanished.[FN#506]
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 Vez�rs." The
extraordinary sensitiveness of the third young Br�hman, in the
Vet�la 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 "Griechische 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.[FN#507]
The eleventh recital of the Vet�la 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 "Griechische
Novellistik," p. 62, compares with this a story told by Tim�us,
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 Bait�l Pach�s�, 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 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. XI. 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 set off with a
companion to discover her, and having been told by an old man at
Baghdad 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 his would have effectually
cured the love-sick prince; but no: he "could never banish her
sweet image from his heart."[FN#508]
Two instances of falling in love with the picture of a pretty
woman occur in the "Kath� Sar�t S�gara." In Book ix., chap. 51,
a painter shows King Prithvir�pa the "counterfeit presentment" of
the beauteous Princess Rapalat�, 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 Mand�ravat�, "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. K�ma]." In chapter 35 of Scott's
translation of the "Bah�r-i-D�nish," 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 Waz�rs (vol.
vi.); but why multiply instances? Nothing is more common in
Asiatic fictions.
THE FULLER, HIS WIFE, AND THE TROOPER.--Vol. XI. 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 � 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.[FN#509] 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 caravans 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 jeweler 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.[FN#510]
Mr. Arbuthnot's limits pertained 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. XI. 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 XI. 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. XI. 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: