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Folk Tales of France, Part Eight — five tales from the Contes divers, last division of Sébillot's first Breton volume, in a fresh translation; what the gate and the scan kept back is declared below.

The Legend of Saint Mauron. A shepherd lad who will not miss mass walks the bounds of the moor with his spade, and a thorn hedge rises behind him — the Arm of Saint Mauron at Livré. The birds shut themselves in his barn while he hears mass; long after his death, a thief who comes by night for the grain in his chapel finds the saint keeps his word, and keeps him too, until the farmer prays him loose.

The Death of the Rat. The rat climbs for the salt, slips, and falls into the boiling buckwheat porridge, dead before his wife sits to eat — and the house takes up the news: the table sings, the bench dances, the cupboard jumps, the door leaves its hinges, the plough ploughs, the girl breaks her pitcher, the fountain overflows, the geese fly away. The death is the tale's reported premise, in its refrain; no hand is laid on him.

The Legend of Saint Lénard. A mischief-maker, converted by a sermon about an apple sweet within and ugly without, goes to help a carter he once tormented — and is killed by him, in a single clause. The peasants canonize him themselves, and his tomb outdraws the licensed shrines: a road-mender who doubts him is struck lame, and healed on his vow. The killing stands at source weight, one clause, as the book tells it.

Vadoyer. A grain of wheat, a hen, a cow, a daughter: Vadoyer's goods keep dying in others' keeping, and each time the law is threatened and the next thing taken in payment. The hen is kicked dead by the cow, the cow struck dead by the milkmaid's stool in a temper — each in a single clause, as the book has them — and for the cow Vadoyer takes the girl herself, in a sack on his back. Her godmother, and a big dog, have the last word.

The Little Girl in a Well. Oudelette lives in a well, prays every day, and wishes — a house, a cow, a dress the colour of her cow, a husband. Pride in the dress undoes her: too pleased to say her prayer, she wakes where she began, all vanished like a dream.

The tellers, as Sébillot prints them: Saint Mauron by Jean Bouchery, of Dourdain, who learned it at Livré from his father; The Death of the Rat by Jean-Marie Hervé, of Pluduno, 1879; Saint Lénard without a teller's name; Vadoyer by Marie X, of Évran, 1878; The Little Girl in a Well by Virginie Hervé, of Évran, 1880.

What stands around these five is not hidden. Saint Pierre en voyage is held for the owner's ruling: its enriched hostess beats the sleeping travellers with a stick, three times over — the beatings are the tale's hinge. The Wolf and the Fox is held likewise (a red-hot iron to the wolf's tail; a strangling), and so is The Blackbird and the Fox (a strangling by arrangement). Three tales stand stopped at the gate: The Red Shoes (a mother cuts her little son in two and cooks him; his bones, made a dove, kill his parents); Élisabotte (the Devil eats her at midnight); The Crêpe Thief (a cut-off hand; a cut throat). Three more wait on the book itself: The Cat and The Little White Ewe, whose second pages are illegible in the only surviving scan, and The Three Fiddlers in Paradise, whose first page is too faint to certify.

Chapters

00:09 The Legend of Saint Mauron

03:27 The Death of the Rat

07:06 The Legend of Saint Lénard

10:21 Vadoyer

14:56 The Little Girl in a Well

From Paul Sébillot, Contes populaires de la Haute-Bretagne, Tome I (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1880), public domain; told in a fresh in-house rendering from the French.

Folk Tales of France is one shelf of the KacheliTV world folk tale library — new parts told from the public-domain colle