Perde 3
[Textpart 3]
I know that, who have had experience of it. Let’s go round them: let’s accost them, one on the one side, one on the other.
LIBANUS
Health to you, master. But is this female, smoke, that you are embracing?
LIBANUS
Because your eyes are filled with tears; ’twas for that reason I asked.
620
ARGYRIPPUS
One who would have been a protector to you, you have lost.
LIBANUS
I’ faith, I surely haven’t lost one; for this reason, be cause I never had one.
LEONIDA
Health to you, Philenium.
PHILENIUM
What you desire, the Gods will give you.
LIBANUS
I could desire your favours, and a cask of wine, if wishes were to come to pass.
ARGYRIPPUS
Whip-knave, beware how you speak a word.
625
LIBANUS
Why, ’tis for you, not for myself, I wish it.
625
ARGYRIPPUS
For that reason, then, say on what you please.
LIBANUS
Troth, I’d like to give him a beating.
LEONIDA
Who, pray, would allow you to do so, you frizzle- patedYou frizzle-pated: Calamistrate means dressed with the calamistrum, a crisping-pin, or iron tube with which the hair was curled. mountebank? Could you thrash me, you, who reckon as your daily food your own thrashings?
ARGYRIPPUS
How far superior, Libanus, are your lots to my own,
who never will live this day until the evening.
630
LIBANUS
For what reason, prithee?
630
ARGYRIPPUS
Because I’m in love with her, and she’s in love with me, and nowhere have I anything to bestow upon her; for that reason has her mother expelled me with all my affection from her house. The twenty minae of silver have brought me to my end, which the young man, Diabolus, declared that he would give her this day,
in order that she mightn’t send her anywhere, for this whole year, except to himself. Don’t you see of what force are twenty minae of silver, or what they can effect? The man who parts with them is happy; I, who part not with them, am undone.
635
LIBANUS
Has he already paidHas he already paid: Jam dedit argentum? This is curiously rendered by Gueudeville, Ce Monsieur le Diable a-t-il d£ejà donn£e son argent? which, literally translated, is, Has this Mister Devil already paid his money? He appears to have taken a rather unwarranted liberty in translating the name Diabolus by the term le Diable—neither more nor less than the French name of his Satanic Majesty the money?
