g this, the good constable rubbed his
hands thinking how nicely the provost would catch the pair. He
instantly sent word to him, that by the king's express commands he was
to return to town, in order that he might seize at the said lord's
house an English nobleman, with whom he was vehemently suspected to be
arranging a plot of diabolical darkness. But before he put this order
into execution, he was to come to the king's hotel, in order that he
might understand the courtesy to be exercised in this case. The
provost, joyous at the chance of speaking to the king, used such
diligence that he was in town just at that time when the two lovers
were singing the first note of their evening hymn. The lord of
cuckoldom and its surrounding lands, who is a strange lord, managed
things so well, that madame was only conversing with her lord lover at
the time that her lord spouse was talking to the constable and the
king; at which he was pleased, and so was his wife--a case of concord
rare in matrimony.

"I was saying to monseigneur," said the constable to the provost, as
he entered the king's apartment, "that every man in the kingdom has a
right to kill his wife and her lover if he finds them in an act of
infidelity. But his majesty, who is clement, argues that he has only a
right to kill the man, and not the woman. Now what would you do, Mr.
Provost, if by chance you found a gentleman taking a stroll in that
fair meadow of which laws, human and divine, enjoin you alone to
cultivate the verdure?"

"I would kill everything," said the provost; "I would scrunch the five
hundred thousand devils of nature, flower and seed, and send them
flying, the pips and apples, the grass and the meadow, the woman and
the man."

"You would be in the wrong," said the king. "That is contrary to the
laws of the Church and of the State; of the State, because you might
deprive me of a subject; of the Church, because you would be sending
an innocent to limbo unshriven."

"Sire, I admire your profound wisdom, and I clearly perceive you to be
the centre of all justice."

"We can then only kill the knight--Amen," said constable, "Kill the
horseman. Now go quickly to the house of the suspected lord, but
without letting yourself be bamboozled, do not forget what is due to
his position."

The provost, believing he would certainly be Chancellor of France if
he properly acquitted himself of the task, went from the castle into
the town, took his men, arrived