Nevertheless, so importuned was he by the continual supplications of Monsieur Cuckoldry, that he, in fine, placed him in the rank, list, roll, rubric, and catalogue, and appointed honours, sacrifices, and festival rites to be observed on earth in great devotion, and tendered to him with solemnity. The feast, because there was no void, empty, nor vacant place in all the calendar, was to be celebrated jointly with, and on the same day that had been consecrated to the goddess Jealousy. His power and dominion should be over married folks, especially such as had handsome wives. His sacrifices were to be suspicion, diffidence, mistrust, a lowering pouting sullenness, watchings, wardings, researchings, plyings, explorations, together with the waylayings, ambushes, narrow observations, and malicious doggings of the husband's scouts and espials of the most privy actions of their wives. Herewithal every married man was expressly and rigorously commanded to reverence, honour, and worship him, to celebrate and solemnize his festival with twice more respect than that of any other saint or deity, and to immolate unto him with all sincerity and alacrity of heart the above-mentioned sacrifices and oblations, under pain of severe censures, threatenings, and comminations of these subsequent fines, mulcts, amerciaments, penalties, and punishments to be inflicted on the delinquents: that Monsieur Cuckoldry should never be favourable nor propitious to them; that he should never help, aid, supply, succour, nor grant them any subventitious furtherance, auxiliary suffrage, or adminiculary assistance; that he should never hold them in any reckoning, account, or estimation; that he should never deign to enter within their houses, neither at the doors, windows, nor any other place thereof; that he should never haunt nor frequent their companies or conversations, how frequently soever they should invocate him and call upon his name; and that not only he should leave and abandon them to rot alone with their wives in a sempiternal solitariness, without the benefit of the diversion of any copes-mate or corrival at all, but should withal shun and eschew them, fly from them, and eternally forsake and reject them as impious heretics and sacrilegious persons, according to the accustomed manner of other gods towards such as are too slack in offering up the duties and reverences which ought to be performed respectively to their divinities--as is evidently apparent in Bacchus towards negligent vine-dressers; in Ceres, against idle ploughmen and tillers of the ground; in Pomona, to unworthy fruiterers and costard-mongers; in Neptune, towards dissolute mariners and seafaring men, in Vulcan, towards loitering smiths and forgemen; and so throughout the rest. Now, on the contrary, this infallible promise was added, that unto all those who should make a holy day of the above-recited festival, and cease from all manner of worldly work and negotiation, lay aside all their own most important occasions, and to be so retchless, heedless, and careless of what might concern the management of their proper affairs as to mind nothing else but a suspicious espying and prying into the secret deportments of their wives, and how to coop, shut up, hold at under, and deal cruelly and austerely with them by all the harshness and hardships that an implacable and every way inexorable jealousy can devise and suggest, conform to the sacred ordinances of the afore-mentioned sacrifices and oblations, he should be continually favourable to them, should love them, sociably converse with them, should be day and night in their houses, and never leave them destitute of his presence. Now I have said, and you have heard my cure.
Ha, ha, ha! quoth Carpalin, laughing; this is a remedy yet more apt and proper than Hans Carvel's ring. The devil take me if I do not believe it!
The humour, inclination, and nature of women is like the thunder, whose force in its bolt or otherwise burneth, bruiseth, and breaketh only hard, massive, and resisting objects, without staying or stopping at soft, empty, and yielding matters. For it pasheth into pieces the steel sword without doing any hurt to the velvet scabbard which ensheatheth it. It chrusheth also and consumeth the bones without wounding or endamaging the flesh wherewith they are veiled and covered. Just so it is that women for the greater part never bend the contention, subtlety, and contradictory disposition of their spirits unless it be to do what is prohibited and forbidden.
Verily, quoth Hippothadee, some of our doctors aver for a truth that the first woman of the world, whom the Hebrews call Eve, had hardly been induced or allured into the temptation of eating of the fruit of the Tree of Life if it had not been forbidden her so to do. And that you may give the more credit to the validity of this opinion, consider how the cautelous and wily tempter did commemorate unto her, for an antecedent to his enthymeme, the prohibition which was made to taste it, as being desirous to infer from thence, It is forbidden thee; therefore thou shouldst eat of it, else thou canst not be a woman.
