ans allow the very same
horoscope to princes and to sots. Whereof a right pregnant instance by
them is given in the nativities of Aeneas and Choroebus; the latter of
which two is by Euphorion said to have been a fool, and yet had with the
former the same aspects and heavenly genethliac influences.
I shall not, I suppose, swerve much from the purpose in hand, if I relate
unto you what John Andrew said upon the return of a papal writ, which was
directed to the mayor and burgesses of Rochelle, and after him by Panorme,
upon the same pontifical canon; Barbatias on the Pandects, and recently by
Jason in his Councils, concerning Seyny John, the noted fool of Paris, and
Caillet's fore great-grandfather. The case is this.
At Paris, in the roastmeat cookery of the Petit Chastelet, before the
cookshop of one of the roastmeat sellers of that lane, a certain hungry
porter was eating his bread, after he had by parcels kept it a while above
the reek and steam of a fat goose on the spit, turning at a great fire, and
found it, so besmoked with the vapour, to be savoury; which the cook
observing, took no notice, till after having ravined his penny loaf,
whereof no morsel had been unsmokified, he was about decamping and going
away. But, by your leave, as the fellow thought to have departed thence
shot-free, the master-cook laid hold upon him by the gorget, and demanded
payment for the smoke of his roast meat. The porter answered, that he had
sustained no loss at all; that by what he had done there was no diminution
made of the flesh; that he had taken nothing of his, and that therefore he
was not indebted to him in anything. As for the smoke in question, that,
although he had not been there, it would howsoever have been evaporated;
besides, that before that time it had never been seen nor heard that
roastmeat smoke was sold upon the streets of Paris. The cook hereto
replied, that he was not obliged nor any way bound to feed and nourish for
nought a porter whom he had never seen before with the smoke of his roast
meat, and thereupon swore that if he would not forthwith content and
satisfy him with present payment for the repast which he had thereby got,
that he would take his crooked staves from off his back; which, instead of
having loads thereafter laid upon them, should serve for fuel to his
kitchen fires. Whilst he was going about so to do, and to have pulled them
to him by one of the bottom rungs which he had caught in his ha
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