December 8, 2020
Today we have the story of another unfaithful husband reformed by his wife. This wife, concerned that her husband catches a cold every time he visits a woman who farms his lands, goes to visit the woman and finds her home “cold, dirty, and ill-kept.” She promptly sends the woman a fine bed, bedding, decorations, tapestries, dishes, wine, and sweets. When her husband learns what she has done, he is so touched by her goodness that he gives up his lover (first giving her enough money to live “like a decent woman”) and lives from then on in perfect harmony with his wife. Longarine, who tells this tale, praises the woman’s use of patience and love to bring her husband back to her, but Parlamente declares that she had “no heart and no backbone.”
Here’s a photo of a (restored and renovated) house built in the seventeenth-century on a métairie in the countryside near Tours.
