There are those who take more delight in hearing jests and sly mockeries than they do in sermons. Therefore I am often asked to write of light matters, and I should like now to tell a true tale about a remarkable and quick-witted piece of deception.
The opening lines of this particular tale contains quite a bit of information about the conventions and typical content of that which qualifies for entry into the realm of the fabliaux. It immediately sets the stage that it will be comedic while underplaying its desire to teach a moral lesson. Nevertheless, it will proceed to attempt just that. These stories are really fables, but in order to lend them verisimilitude they are populated with human characters rather than animals and almost always seem to have exist on that level of this happened to a friend of a friend quality of factual accuracy. And, of course, almost as an element of design that simply cannot eschewed, the story must revolve around deception.
“For I will offer you a choice: either you must joust with me—and if you fall, I will have no mercy on you, but you shall lose your head at once, or else I shall get down on foot and bend over, and you shall kiss my arse, right in the middle, if you please. I order you to choose which you prefer.”
The person speaking here is a wife who has disguised herself as a knight in order to get her lazy slob of a husband to start acting like the knight he is, though, it must be, said he was only knighted as part of a pretty sick contractual agreement to marry off his daughter to the lazy son of a moneylender. What makes the fabliaux story fun to read is that they are filled with absurdities such as these. But wait, the absurdity gets even better. What is being presented here is an image of a woman disguised as a knight in armor wreaking her dominant will upon her husband who by humiliating him into kissing her behind which—it must be noted—she takes little pains to disguise considering that she is in knightly. Perhaps the husband was just so quaking with fear that he missed the painfully obvious flaw in this plan. Whatever the case, somehow he does managed to overlook what is missing from the picture when he bends down to apply his lips to his wife’s posterior—which he also doesn’t recognize despite having been married for ten years. That was one sad marriage, no doubt.
You who hear this tale may understand that such earnest jokes are worth nothing; few of them turn out well, and then only by chance, but most of them turn out badly. I know of few which have succeeded. I have put into new rhyme this story I have told. May God preserve those who have listened to it. Amen. Here ends my tale. May God grant you all a good end!
Another common unifying technique of the type of tale granted authority to enter into the fabliaux is the manner in which things are brought to a conclusion. The conventional application is for the author to bring things to a conclusion with a summing up that touches upon a lesson which one may wish to take from the story. More often than not—though certainly not universally applicable—is an ending such as this above in which the writer steps out of the narrative to make a direct address to the reader. Occasionally, in fact, the author actually becomes self-referential by name, inserting himself, in a manner, into the story as a character, the narrator thus becoming personal. This technique may be linked to the establishing conceit of insistence upon the story as having some basis of origin in fact. Regardless, the general motive at work in the conclusions of such stories actually has the effect of stepping outside such boundaries of realism to remind readers that it is a story which has been constructed in part to deliver a lesson, however whimsical that lesson may actually be.
