The Justified Servant (La Fontaine, Contes) - Cochin

A master catches his beautiful servant making a bouquet for his mistress in the garden. She defends herself from his advances and falls. "A neighbor saw the mystery. / The husband saw her, I don't know how. " A double break-in: the neighbor on the second floor surprises the master and his maid just as the latter falls, spilling her basket on the ground at Cochin's instead of throwing her bouquet of flowers in his face. But the husband catches the neighbor surprising them, and repeats the scene with his wife, so that when the neighbor reports the maid's first scene to her, the mistress thinks she's hearing about the second with herself. Hence the famous dialogue, where to each new assertion by the neighbor, the wife replies "it was me ". The surprised secret becomes stale in the process of being reported: it retains its value only for the person who overheard it, and unravels in the discourse. Compare this with the scene between the Countess and the Chevalier (the false maid disguised as a man) reported by Trivelin to Lélio in La Fausse suivante.