Beginnings
Imagery is vital to the set-up of these stories. As a result, the beginnings are often—thought not always—one in which the tangible assets are described in detail. Possession and ownership are concepts which lie at the heart of the conflict of many of the tales:
“There was once a rich peasant who was very avaricious and stingy. He was never without a plow, which he worked himself with the aid of a mare and an old nag; he had plenty of meat and bread and wine and whatever else he needed. But his friends and everyone else found fault with him because had no wife.”
Deception
A great deal of imagery in the stories which qualify to make into the fabliaux is devoted to deception. Lying lies at the heart of the twists and turns of the plots; without deception, a story simply doesn’t meet the standard bearing for categorization into fabliaux literature. Take, for instance, the whopper told by the unfaithful wife about how she conceived the titular bastard in “The Snow Baby.”
"Husband, once when I was looking out for you up there on the high balcony, all sad and sorrowful at your delay, I chanced to look up at the sky, and it being winter and the snow falling heavily, a little snow fell into my mouth. Before I was aware of it I swallowed it, and it was so sweet that from the little I swallowed I conceived this beautiful child. And this happened just as I have told it.”
Details
The introduction of detail is essential to the playing out of the narrative. Precision of detail is key because these stories tend to be short and to the point. As a result, everything include tends to be of significance and that which is significant becomes the centerpiece of description. The deception in the twist of “The Partridges” is dependent upon not the birds themselves, but how the birds appear to go missing:
“The wife set the spit and took a pinch of the skin, for she was very much given to gluttony whenever God provided something to eat. She did not seek after great wealth, but only to fulfill all her little desires. She rushed to attack the first partridge and ate both its wings. Then she went into the street to see if her husband was coming. When she saw that he wasn’t, she came back into the house and treated the rest of the bird in the same way. Woe to the piece which was left!”
Life Lessons
A common element to fabliaux is the issuance of a lesson in life. These lessons are often couched in the absurdity of irony and even sometimes the fulsome obscenity of pornographic plots, but that hardly means they cannot contain and dispense valuable instruction in morality:
“The habit does not make the monk. If a man dwells in a hermitage and wears the clothes that belong to it, I don’t care two straws for clothes and habit if he does not lead as pure a life as his clothes would indicate. But many people make a brave show and a great pretense to worth who are like those trees which bear no fruit but are very beautiful in bloom. Such folk well deserve to live in great misery and shame. As the proverb says, all that glitters is not gold.”
