“Au quatre convens aussi, Cordeliers, Carmes, Augustins, Jacobins, soient ors, on Soient ens, Je leur laisse tous bons lopins, A tous chopineurs et y vrongnes, Notre vueil que je leur laisse Toutes goutes, crampes et rongnes, Au poing, au coste, a la fesse,” etc. But enough of Master Pathelin. Let us now turn to the consideration of another curious farce. LA FARCE DE MUNYER. This farce, whose author was Andre de la Vigne, dates back, like preceding one, to the fourteenth century. The miller of the Middle Ages, the ancestor of our present Jack-pudding (French slang for miller), was in antique times the most rascally and cheating type of trader, from whence the old Gascon proverb, “One always finds a thief in a miller’s skin.” In this farce we see the miller “lying in bed as though sick,” uttering long groans and sighing over the pains he professes to endure—groans, however, to which his wife appears insensible. He commences thus: “Now am I in sore distress, My sickness hard to cure, My sore discomfort is not less. Heart-ache I can’t endure.” To this his wife responds indifferently, although the miller persists in asking for a bottle of good wine, saying that his “reins and belly need the supreme consolation of the bottle.” The wife obstinately refuses her husband the wine, remarking that he cannot “repair his stomach by filling the belly;” but, instead, she sends for the priest, who is, moreover, her lover, and carries on a flirtation with the holy man in the presence of her husband, for the purpose of making the invalid rise from his sick-bed; but, thinking his end near, the miller demands that he shall be permitted to die in the faith, or “_mourir catholiquement_.” He confesses to the priest, avowing all his thefts, his frauds, his falsification and _amours_, and is prepared to render his soul. But the miller has absorbed some of the popular ideas of his day, professed by certain philosophers of the time; he believes that, at the moment of death, the soul of man escapes by his anus, and warns the priest to absolve him from his sins, saying: “Mon ventre trop se determine. Helas! Je ne scay que je face; Ostez vous!” The priest answers: “Ha! sauf vostre grace!” Then the miller remarks: “Ostez vous, car je me conchye.”