Volume 2 / Book 2 — Note on Chapter XIII.

With regard to the incident of the bitch and the pepper in the story of Devasmitá see the note in the 1st volume of Wilson’s Essays on Sanskrit Literature. He says: “This incident with a very different and much less moral dénouement is one of the stories in the Disciplina Clericalis, a collection of stories professedly derived from the Arabian fabulists and compiled by Petrus Alfonsus a converted Jew, who flourished about 1106 and was godson to Alfonso I, king of Arragon. In the Analysis prepared by Mr. Douce, this story is the 12th, and is entitled “Stratagem of an old woman in favour of a young gallant.” She persuades his mistress who had rejected his addresses that her little dog was formerly a woman, and so transformed in consequence of her cruelty to her lover. (Ellis’s Metrical Romances, I, 130.) This story was introduced into Europe, therefore, much about the time at which it was enrolled among the contents of the Vṛihat Kathá in Cashmir. The metempsychosis is so much more obvious an explanation of the change of forms, that it renders it probable the story was originally Hindu. It was soon copied in Europe, and occurs in Le Grand as La vieille qui séduisit la jeune fille. III. 148 [ed. III. Vol. IV. 50]. The parallel is very close and the old woman gives “une chienne à manger des choses fortement saupoudrèes de senève qui lai picotait le palais et les narines et l’animal larmoyait beaucoup.” She then shows her to the young woman and tells her the bitch was her daughter. “Son malheur fut d’avoir le cœur dur; un jeune homme l’aimait, elle le rebuta. Le malheureux après avoir tout tenté pour l’ attendrir, désespéré de sa dureté en prit tant de chagrin qu’il tomba malade et mourut. Dieu l’a bien vengè; voyez en quel état pour la punir il a reduit ma pauvre fille, et comment elle pleure sa faute.” The lesson was not thrown away. The story occurs also in the Gesta Romanorum as “The Old Woman and her Dog” [in Bohn’s edition it is Tale XXVIII], and it also finds a place where we should little have expected to find it, in the Promptuarium of John Herolt of Basil, an ample repository of examples for composing sermons: the compiler a Dominican friar, professing to imitate his patron saint, who always abundabat exemplis in his discourses.” [In Bohn’s edition we are told that it appears in an English garb amongst a translation of Æsop’s Fables published in 1658.] Dr. Rost refers us to Th. Wright, Latin Stories, London, 1842, p. 218. Loiseleur Deslongchamps Essai sur les Fables Indiennes, Paris, 1838, p. 106 ff. F. H. Von der Hagen, Gesammtabenteuer, 1850 I, cxii. ff and Grässe, I. 1, 374 ff. In Gonzenbach’a Sicilianische Märchen, No. 55, Vol. I, p. 359, Epomata plays some young men much the same trick as Devasmitá, and they try in much the same way to conceal their disgrace. The story is the second in my copy of the Śuka Saptati.