_A towns-woman of Tours returned so much good for all the
evil treatment she had received from her husband, that the
latter forsook the mistress whom he was quietly maintaining,
and returned to his wife_. (1)

1 It is probable that the incidents related in this tale
occurred between 1460 and 1470. They will be found recorded
in the _Ménagier de Paris_. (See Baron Pichon's edition,
1847, vol. i. p. 237). A similar narrative figures in some
editions of Morlini's tales, notably the _Novello, Fabello,
et Comedies, Neapoli_, 1520. We further find it in
Gueudeville's translation of Erasmus's Colloquies (_Dialogue
sur le mariage, collogues, &c., Leyden_, 1720, vol. i. p.
87), and Mr. Walter Keily has pointed out (the _Heptameron_,
Bohn, 1864) that William Warner worked the same incidents
into his poem _Albion's England_, his stanzas being
reproduced in Percy's _Reliques_ under the title of _The
Patient Countess_.--L. and Ed.

In the city of Tours there dwelt a chaste and comely townswoman, who, by
reason of her virtues, was not only loved but feared also and respected
by her husband. Nevertheless, with all the fickleness of men who grow
weary of ever eating good bread, he fell in love with a farm tenant (2)
of his own, and would oft-time leave Tours to visit the farm, where he
always remained two or three days; and when he came back to Tours he was
always in so sorry a plight that his wife had much ado to cure him, yet,
as soon as he was whole again, he never failed to return to the place
where pleasure caused him to forget all his ills.