Puis ay mes talons estenduz De mon roucin, le serray près, Lors sault, si furent espanduz; Delez Granson fut mes retrais Là ne me vault treves ne pais, De paour la face me ride, De tel amour ma mort me cuide; Au derrain leur dist: "Je l'adveue." "Chien, faisoit l'un, vez vous vo guide?" Lors dis: "Oil, je voy vo queue!"[321] Another writer of the same period, Olivier Basselin, refers to the Englishmen's tails in a satirical poem, in which he alleges this physical deformity as his reason for not wishing to live in their country:-- "Do you think it's a joke that I never would dwell 'Mongst the English, as oft I declare? Nay, believe me, my friend, 'tis the truth that I tell, For I hate the long tails that they wear."[322] In one of his minor poems, Jean Molinet, part-author of the _Roman de la Rose_, who also belongs to the fifteenth century, humorously goes one step further than his fellow satirists, and gives even animals of English race a share in the distinctive peculiarity which birth in England entailed on the human Islanders. Of a certain tom-cat he says:-- "This Cat for his mother had Cathau the Blue, To Calais he does not belong; There's something about him of English breed, too, And that's why his tail is so long."[323] About the beginning of the sixteenth century, Crétin, a Norman poet, combines encouragement of the French with the usual abuse of the English:-- "Praise shall reward the doughty deeds you do, And store of crowns, and golden angels, too; And, in the ransom of the 'long-tailed' crew, Their flesh and bone shall be as gold to you."[324] As late as the seventeenth century, an echo of the gibe may still be heard. Larivey, in one of his comedies, _Les Tromperies_, makes a swaggering captain boast of the reputation which he has acquired by valiantly charging the English "tailards" when they attempted to land at Dieppe.[325] Still nearer our own day, Saint-Amant, who, indeed, is so modern that he was one of the original members of the French Academy and figures in Boileau's satires, has a reference to the English longtails in his _Rome Ridicule_. He incidentally claims for the French the strange merit of having rid their country of the goitre and of the king's evil by making carrion of the English invaders:-- "The goitre now we never see, And cruels, too, have ceased to be, E'er since we slew our 'tailard' foes And made them food to gorge the crows".[326] By this time, however, the tradition had ceased to be popular; for in a note on this passage, Saint-Amant's contemporary, Conrart, thought it necessary to give an explanation of the epithet "quouez". According to him, it was justified by the fact that, in the case of the majority of Englishmen, the end of the os sacrum, called _coccyx_, actually protrudes and forms a tail![327]