If the matter is carefully weighed and well examined, those people are not properly to be called fools who have a dull and feeble understanding and a worm-eaten wit. No: the ones who deserve to be scolded as great fools are those who do evil and sin, as Holy Scripture says: “He that deviseth to do evils, shall be called a fool.”1 On which the holy Doctor of the Church Jerome writes: “Lest you think that the man to be reckoned a fool is the one you see to be dull and slow of wit, he shows plainly that the one to be called a fool is he who consents to the suggestion of sin, even in thought, however sharp of wit he may seem.”2
Yet the topsy-turvy world of today commonly cries down simple folk like these as fools. Truly, a man has every reason to give the highest thanks to our most gracious God for granting him a sound mind. David did not thank the Lord God so much for the strength to tear lions and bears apart; nor so much for raising him from the shepherd’s crook to the sceptre, from the greasy herdsman’s cap to the crown; as he thanked Him for the understanding that the divine bounty had given him: “I will bless the Lord, who hath given me understanding.”3 Of course there are very clever and sensible people in every corner of the world; but one sees, too, that you do not meet a Cato everywhere. You meet a Mato as well.4 A simple enough fellow was that peasant in France.
A King of France once lost his courtiers while out hunting. When he had found the right road again and was riding back to Paris all alone, he met a peasant who was also on his way to the city. To pass the time the King fell into conversation with him, and among other things the peasant said how dearly he would like to see the King: what sort of state he kept, and what he looked like.
“Well then,” said the King, “come along with me. I am riding to the King myself; you shall see him this very day.”
“But how,” said the peasant, “am I to know which one is the King?”
“I’ll tell you what,” said the King. “When we come into the city before the King, watch carefully which man keeps his hat on his head while all the others stand bareheaded. That one is the King.”
Talking in this way they came in under the city gate, and behold, all the King’s servants were waiting for the King and received him with uncovered heads. But the peasant, knowing no better, kept his hat on beside the King. The King turned to him and said, “Now do you see who is King?”
The peasant answered, “I still don’t rightly know. But it must be one of us two, no doubt about that.”
The King had to laugh from his heart at the peasant’s simplicity.
Soon after came a carriage with several ladies in it. The peasant stood gaping at them and at last asked the coachman what kind of animals these were.
“Calicut hens,” said the coachman.5
“What the devil!” answered the peasant. “They wear their tails on their heads!”
“To be sure,” said the coachman. “Some years ago, it’s true, they dragged their tails along behind them. But since people took them for street-sweepers, the noble Madame Fontange prevailed on Jupiter to let the hens’ tails grow out of their heads instead.”
“That’s another matter,” said the peasant. “No Malicut hens like those scratch about on my dunghill.”6
A simple fool indeed!
Prov. 24:8. Abraham: qui cogitat male facere, stultus vocabitur.↩︎
Given by Abraham as St. Jerome on Proverbs 24: Ne putares stultum aestimandum fuisse eum, quem hebetem, tardum ingenio videres, palam ostendit, quia ille stultus sit vocandus, qui vel cogitatione peccati suggestioni consentit, tametsi acer ingenio videtur existere.↩︎
Ps. 15:7. Abraham: Benedicam Dominum, qui tribuit mihi intellectum.↩︎
Cato, the byword for Roman wisdom and gravity; Mato is a coinage on the Italian matto, “madman, fool.”↩︎
Calecutische Hennen, “hens from Calicut”: the old German name for turkeys, then believed to come from India. The “tails on their heads” are the fontange, the tall wired lace headdress named after Mademoiselle de Fontanges, mistress of Louis XIV, and in fashion across Europe around 1700; the “street-sweepers” are the long trailing skirts it displaced. The simpleton is the fool of the chapter, but the joke is on the ladies.↩︎
The peasant mangles Calecutisch into Malecutisch, with a hint of Latin malus, “bad.”↩︎