the greed of the fisherman’s wife in the Grimm story, culminating in her demand that she be made pope, which undoes the miracle of untold wealth granted to the fisherman by the talking flounder whose life he once spared. Everything vanishes—the palace, the jewels, the gold—and the fisherman and his wife are returned to the hovel (actually, the word used in the Grimm tale is “pisspot”) in which they formerly lived.
