Examples of the terrible fate that meets carping and critical wives are cited by the Ménagier and also by La Tour Landry, who tells how a husband, harshly criticized by his wife in public, “being angry with her governance, smote her with his fist down to the earth,” then kicked her in the face and broke her nose so that she was disfigured ever after and “might not for shame show her visage.” And this was her due “for her evil and great language she was wont to say to her husband.”
