This book is a compendium of many stories written over the course of nearly three centuries.
Gombert and the Two Clerks
In this tale, two traveling salesmen are staying at the house of a bad guy. They share the lodging with another family, Gombert, his wife who is very lovely, and their two children. Gombert and his wife have a teenage daughter and an infant.
One of the young salesmen seduces the teenage daughter with the promise of marriage, and they have sex in the night. The other salesman moves the baby so that Gombert goes to bed in the wrong bed. Meanwhile, the second salesman has sex with Gombert's wife. Gombert and the clerks fight, but they overwhelm him.
The Snow Baby
This dark comedy is about a man who comes home from two years of business to find that his wife has an infant with some other man. She tells him that she doesn't know how it happened—it must have been when she was outside eating the falling snow that she became pregnant.
He allows her this lie but when the son is 15, the merchant takes the young teen on one of his business trips, to Genoa. He sells the boy into slavery. When he returns, he explains to his wife that "The sun is hot in Italy," and the "snow baby" has melted.
Bérangier au long cul
This story actually appears twice in the book, by two authors, Guerin and an anonymous author.
A rich duke marries his daughter off to a peasant whom he knights. The knight quickly fails his role as knight and as husband, and he wastes ten years of his life. Eventually, he decides to make something of his knighthood. He goes into the forest on his trusty steed, and upon entering the dark woods, he beats up his shield on the trees, so that people will think he fought, when really, he didn't fight at all.
This trick works at first, but eventually his wife becomes suspicious because he is always perfectly healthy, but his armor is often beaten badly. When she offers him some company, he declines, so she herself dresses in armor and follows him. When she finds him beating his shield on the trees, she confronts him, completely anonymous in her armor. She threatens to kill him for his breach of honor. That, or he can kiss her butt (yes, literally) and she will spare him. Not knowing it is his own wife, he kisses her on the butt. He fails to recognize his own wife's private parts, and she teases him for being so stupid.
When she returns home, she finds a real, honest knight and she sleeps with him. When he confronts her for her affair, she says she met the knight who found him banging his shield. In order to spare his honor, he allows her to continue having sex with whomever she wants.
