This farce, whose author was Andre de la Vigne, dates back, like
preceding one, to the fourteenth century. The miller of the Middle
Ages, the ancestor of our present Jack-pudding (French slang for
miller), was in antique times the most rascally and cheating type of
trader, from whence the old Gascon proverb, “One always finds a thief
in a miller’s skin.”
In this farce we see the miller “lying in bed as though sick,” uttering
long groans and sighing over the pains he professes to endure—groans,
however, to which his wife appears insensible. He commences thus:
“Now am I in sore distress,
My sickness hard to cure,
My sore discomfort is not less.
Heart-ache I can’t endure.”
To this his wife responds indifferently, although the miller persists
in asking for a bottle of good wine, saying that his “reins and belly
need the supreme consolation of the bottle.” The wife obstinately
refuses her husband the wine, remarking that he cannot “repair his
stomach by filling the belly;” but, instead, she sends for the priest,
who is, moreover, her lover, and carries on a flirtation with the holy
man in the presence of her husband, for the purpose of making the
invalid rise from his sick-bed; but, thinking his end near, the miller
demands that he shall be permitted to die in the faith, or “_mourir
catholiquement_.” He confesses to the priest, avowing all his thefts,
his frauds, his falsification and _amours_, and is prepared to render
his soul.
But the miller has absorbed some of the popular ideas of his day,
professed by certain philosophers of the time; he believes that, at the
moment of death, the soul of man escapes by his anus, and warns the
priest to absolve him from his sins, saying:
“Mon ventre trop se determine.
Helas! Je ne scay que je face;
Ostez vous!”
The priest answers:
“Ha! sauf vostre grace!”
Then the miller remarks:
“Ostez vous, car je me conchye.”
The wife and the priest pull the sick man to the edge of the bed and
place him in such a position that, if the doctrine of soul departure by
the anus be true, they may witness the miller’s final performance. The
phenomenon of rectal flatulence is now observed, when suddenly to the
consternation of the wife and priest, a demon appears, and placing a
sack over the dying miller’s anus catches the rectal gas and flies off
in sulphurous vapor. In the next act we see the Devil appear before his
patron Lucifer bearing the sack supposed to contain the damned soul of
the miller received in the aforesaid sack at the moment it escaped from
the anus. The devil is commanded by Lucifer to empty the sack at the
feet of Proserpine who is busily engaged in cooking in Hell’s kitchen,
but in place of the miller’s soul they only find _spoiled bran_; the
rascal has cheated even in death.
It seems strange that earlier comedy writers all showed a tendency to
make their principle scenes pathological burlesques. Thus in many plays
the heroes and heroines were attacked by colic in order to excite the
laughter of the audience, when the buffoon would imitate by signs the
act of defecation. This peculiar French gayety and lack of prudery
is fully evidenced in the comic effects of Pourceaugnac with the
detersive, insinuative and carminative clysters of Moliere.
This farce, had in former days, an immense success, and is still
occasionally played, being considered a _chef d’œuvre_ of malice and
humor by our best critics and most distinguished authors. In France
the audience always laugh when a thief while plundering is suddenly
taken with pains in his bowels and diarrhœa, while a rectal syringe
flourished aloft as a weapon of defense will bring down the gallery in
a storm of applause.