A fabliau (French pronunciation: [fabljo]; plural fabliaux) is a comic, often anonymous tale written by jongleurs in northeast France between c. 1150 and 1400.
[2] Some nineteenth-century scholars, most notably Gaston Paris, argue that fabliaux originally came from the Orient and were brought to the West by returning crusaders.
[3] The fabliau is defined as a short narrative in (usually octosyllabic) verse, between 300 and 400 lines long,[4] its content often comic or satiric.
"[6] The fabliau is remarkable in that it seems to have no direct literary predecessor in the West, but was brought from the East by returning crusaders in the 12th century.
[12] When the fabliau gradually disappeared, at the beginning of the 16th century, it was replaced by the prose short story, which was greatly influenced by its predecessor.
[13] Famous French writers such as Molière, Jean de La Fontaine, and Voltaire owe much to the tradition of the fabliau.
[14] Typical fabliaux contain a vast array of characters, including cuckolded husbands, rapacious clergy, and foolish peasants, as well as beggars, connivers, thieves, and whores.
Joseph Bédier suggests a bourgeois audience, which sees itself reflected in the urban settings and lower-class types portrayed in fabliaux.
[17] The subject matter is often sexual: fabliaux are concerned with the elements of love left out by poets who wrote in the more elevated genres such as Ovid, who suggests in the Ars Amatoria (II.704–5) that the Muse should not enter the room where the lovers are in bed; and Chrétien de Troyes, who maintains silence on the exact nature of the joy discovered by Lancelot and Guinevere in Le Chevalier de la Charrette (4676–4684).
Two traveling clerks (students) take up lodging with a villain, and share the bedroom with Gombert, his beautiful wife, and their two children—one teenage girl, and one baby.
When the first clerk returns to his bed where he thinks his friend still is, he tells Gombert all about his adventure: "je vien de fotre / mes que ce fu la fille a l'oste" ("I've just been fucking, and if it wasn't the host's daughter", 152–53).
In "L'enfant de neige" ("The snow baby"), a black comedy, a merchant returns home after an absence of two years to find his wife with a newborn son.
On his return, he explains to his wife that the sun burns bright and hot in Italy; since the boy was begotten by a snowflake, he melted in the heat.
In summary, the story begins when a rich earl marries his daughter off to a "young peasant" and deems him a knight.
Once in the forest, he hangs his shield on the lowest branch of a tree and beats it until it looks as if it endured a great battle.