CHAPTER III

INTELLECTUAL INFLUENCE

Women approached intellectual questions in the same dilettante spirit as questions of affairs; and this dilettantism was their chosen method. It was waste of time to speak to them of discoveries, creations, speculations, ventures, struggles—of the scientific furniture of life, of all the irksome material tasks on which the intellectual existence itself is based. They sought only to crown the edifice with happiness, which does not concern those who clear the ground.[348] La Bruyère fancied he was saying a very cutting thing when he declared that “women are cured of idleness by means of vanity and love”; it is really very amiable; would to heaven the same might be said of certain men! Women are cured of idleness by sentiment; they reason with their feelings. You must not ask them to pry and delve into the stubborn heart of things; they look at the bright surface, and penetrate what yields to the touch. And by this simple method they perceive things that escape the microscope, things that defy analysis, thanks to an intuitive impressionability which enables them to see rather than to know, and which would be wholly admirable if it were never misused. Further, they have a marvellous and mysterious talent for expressing their enthusiasm; a phrase feelingly quoted by a lady strikes our mind with a quite peculiar force when we afterwards come upon it in the pages of a book. Again, they love the men who love what they love. How strong and firm a bond is a common love! And how delightful to make mind the handmaid of love, and perhaps even to make love the handmaid of mind! To live happy, what does it matter whether you have an exact knowledge of a peacock’s or a nightingale’s anatomy? Similarly women do not want you to pull words to pieces and set them in accurate alphabetical order, but to place them in a living order, so as to draw from them their vital force. As they ascribe everything to love, and believe the establishment of a balance in human affairs absolutely necessary, so they think also that their duty in intellectual matters is to foster men’s productivity, their beautiful art is concerned with men. Hence they do not trouble to investigate very profoundly the secret significance of surrounding nature; it is of little moment to them whether an artist seeks to reproduce natural forms with photographic fidelity—which is in any case impossible—but they insist on a general resemblance, they require the artist to indicate how a tree or a landscape reflects itself in man, and what impression it produces. In a word, they charge themselves with the mission of elevating our views, whether by developing by means of artistic sensibility the ideas that lie in germ in material nature, or by constantly renewing our thoughts by means of a liberal philosophy.

The Italian women who at the end of the 15th century devoted themselves to this intellectual programme were legion; or rather, they all did so. There was no maiden, however modest her station, who did not consider herself in a measure responsible for the future, and who did not make real preparation for becoming the intellectual queen of a salon, or of some sort of home of her own, while her husband attended to his external occupations. And when her parents were happy enough to detect in their little daughter the mysterious spark of the beautiful, far from mistrusting it, they welcomed it with rapture as a sacred gift of Providence and left nothing undone to develop it. Signorina Trivulzi, a spoilt child of fortune, was in all seriousness thus “consecrated” to the Muses at the age of fourteen.

Impressionability is a gift of nature; but that does not imply that there is no need to strengthen it by means of an earnest intellectual culture. People were only too well convinced of the necessity of this precaution when they saw women who were impressionable and nothing else spinning round like weathercocks. The Italian ladies of the classic generation had known how to take a firm stand and a steady hold on life, so that they united to perfection the eminently becoming qualities of solid intelligence and modesty with an ardent impulse towards beauty in its philosophic, religious, or artistic form.

If examples were necessary, our only difficulty would be to choose among women like Cassandra Fideli, Costanza Varano, Isotta Nugarola, and many another worthy of honour. There is little risk in our indicating among the queens of the period Isabella d’Este, marchioness of Mantua.

Isabella, who was born in 1474, and died in 1525, belongs in time to the earlier generation, of whose characteristics she was thoroughly representative; that is to say, along with a transparent soul, a heart full of passion, and a quick intelligence, she retained virtues which were to become rare—individuality of mind and sureness of taste. She was not one of those impressionable women who are inevitably caught by the glamour of established reputations, and who urge men on to achieve a noisy notoriety; she could form her own estimate of things, and become the originator rather than the follower of a movement. She travelled frequently and to good purpose; her friends and agents, scattered as far as the East, kept her informed of every event which might have any bearing on the cult of beauty, such as the bringing-out of notable books or fine editions, the works issued from great studios, excavations, sales of collections. At the sale of the celebrated Vianelo collection at Venice in 1505, she followed with the liveliest emotion the bidding for a certain _Passage of the Red Sea_ by Jean de Bruges, which she passionately coveted, and which Andrea Loredano remorselessly ran up to a hundred and fifteen ducats. An antique Venus which much occupied her thoughts happened unluckily to be in too good hands—those of Caesar Borgia; but Caesar was not immortal, and one day the Venus rejoiced the heart of a new owner, the duke of Urbino. Before long Cardinal d’Este had willy-nilly to gird up his loins in pursuit of it. (What a lucky windfall the sack of Rome in 1527 was to collectors!) The marchioness, at the moment, emptied her purse, indeed, rather more than emptied it,—always pretty easy to her; she had to charter a boat to carry off all her treasures, but alas! the boat was seized by some rascally pirates, and was never heard of again! For all these little vexations, those were glorious days! One person’s calamity was another’s opportunity, and as the result of the growth of culture, a stone newly unearthed, a well-turned verse seemed diamonds of happiness.

Isabella was a royal, frank, delicate patroness of the human intellect. She cherished in undisturbed harmony around her the _Sleeping Cupid_ of Michelangelo and a choice collection of antique statues; she covered her walls with the works of Mantegna, Costa, and Correggio; Leonardo da Vinci and Titian were her portrait painters; she herself painted her soul in two words: “Neither by hope nor by fear.” As an ideal for life and an emblem for her house, she commissioned of the great idealist master Perugino a _Combat between Love and Chastity_,[349] and wished to arrange its composition to the minutest details; but poor Perugino, whose soul was as simple and unspoiled as his head was thick, got a little befogged in so intricate a scheme, so utterly unlike his usual Madonnas; and for all his good will, perhaps he did not on that occasion produce his masterpiece.

In France, the notable women of the generation of Isabella d’Este did not plume themselves on playing a similar part; they rather avoided it, whether because as partisans of physical activity they feared to carry too much dilettantism into life, or because circumstances did not strike them as favourable. Queen Anne of Brittany, in spite of her surname of “refuge of learned men,” never regarded art as anything but a royal and magnificent superfluity. Anne of France made her court a veritable nursery-garden of literary men and artists; many works of real magnificence were added to the library at Moulins; but Moulins did not radiate an influence like Mantua. It was only the next generation that saw the appearance of women of the Italian type, those queens of the intellect of whom Mary Stuart was to leave us the enchanting memory—Mary, to whom Ronsard could say without undue exaggeration—

Le jour que vostre voile aux vagues se courba, Et de nos yeux pleurans les vostres deroba, Ce jour, la mesme voile emporta loin de France Les Muses qui souloient y faire demourance. Depuis, nostre Parnasse est devenu stérile; Sa source maintenant d’une bourbe distile ... Son laurier est séché, son lierre est destruit![350]

Then the taste for pure art and the influence of the South towards preciosity came in with a flourish of trumpets. The first French Renaissance, in close contact with rural traditions, had devoted itself mainly to the development of force of intellect. It had attached only a secondary value to the worship of form and to external beauty; persons who composed verses, like Charles of Orleans, did not proclaim the fact. Classical relations were established with ancient Rome, the city which drove its iron into the soul and left indestructible landmarks on the soil of France. A ready assent would have been given to the saying of Seneca: “There is only one art that is truly liberal and makes a man free, and that is the study of wisdom; all other arts are base and puerile.... I cannot give the name of liberal arts to painting, statuary, and the decorative arts.”

This prejudice was persistent, with the result that, even while yielding unreservedly to the religion of beauty, people could not bring themselves to grant the plastic arts the same pre-eminence as in Italy. Moreover, even in Italy, painting had had much difficulty in securing a footing: many people at any rate gave sculpture the preference, that being plastic indeed, but less decorative, more scientific, durable, and complete. The comparison served as a theme for _jeux d’esprit_. Some people amused themselves with defending the superiority of painting, by calling God the first of painters, the sublime decorator; others carried the paradox to the point of demonstrating that painting is necessary to war, if only for drawing up plans or making sketches; that it evoked the enthusiasm of the greatest conquerors, like Alexander the Great, and Demetrius, who relinquished the siege of Rhodes rather than risk setting fire to a district of the city where a picture by Protogenes might have perished in the flames. In reality the Italians were fond of painting because they found in it one of the most tender and delightful forms of poetry. Castiglione well expressed this feeling to the sculptor Cristoforo Romano: “It is not my friendship for Raphael that leads me to prefer painting: I know Michelangelo, I know you, I know all these masters! But I find in painting a marvellous charm; it has its plays of light, its chiaroscuro; it demands as much skill in design as sculpture, and offers special difficulties in regard to foreshortenings and perspective. It gives us the colours of reality; it renders more satisfactorily the flesh, the eyes, the sheen of armour, the delicious golden hues of hair, the radiance of love. It alone can speak to us of Nature, reproduce for us the starry skies, the hurricanes and tempests, the rosy dawn, the earth and sea, hills and woods, meadows and gardens, rivers, cities and houses.”

Among the French, on the contrary, the triumph of aestheticism led to the lowering of the plastic arts in general esteem; painters, sculptors and architects no longer received the same personal and affectionate support from high-born ladies as formerly from Anne of France or Anne of Brittany; they lost caste at the court of Francis I., and gained nothing but higher wages; they were treated rather like house-decorators or upholsterers. People applied to art the general principle: Seek ye first intellectual beauty. All were agreed that thought must be worshipped in its highest possible purity; and as thought nevertheless needs a material vesture, poetry was its fitting garb, as “daughter of the skies”; and consequently the movement followed a bent almost exclusively literary and philosophico-poetical. It is hardly necessary for us to say that we are here confining ourselves to the sphere of feminine illusions. No one disputes the beneficial effect of mountain air on certain complaints; but it would be exceedingly tiresome if all mankind were condemned to live on the summit of the Righi.

Margaret of France set herself in opposition to these Alpine ladies, who took such delight in the ever-receding altitudes of the intellect. She was driven to adopt this attitude of temerity partly by her position. As sister of the king, she had to fill the part of “queen of the sex,” and so far as higher matters were concerned, it appeared natural and right that her brother should follow her advice.[351] This explains why the poets so decorously did homage to her: “heroine of the age,” they called her, “mind and knowledge in person ... flower of flowers, the choicest of the choice ... less human than divine.”

Apart from the inconveniences of too lofty a station, Margaret suffered from those arising from her training, having like many women the misfortune of being particularly sensible to influences; her flights are often those of someone else. She remained unswervingly faithful to the habits of her childhood, in other words, to a brilliant and sceptical environment, in which ready wit was regarded as the supreme gift, and liberty consisted in seeing everything, reading everything, hearing everything from a detached eminence, superficially, and without caring for anything in particular except the satisfaction of a sense of form. The only dogma tenaciously held was the pre-eminence of women, and it was an accepted maxim in that society that one woman of real accomplishment conduces more effectually to human happiness than all the lumber of sciences and all the litter of books.

Margaret was thus a philosopher, generous and variable, sceptical and enthusiastic, somewhat visionary, because the speculative spirit spells freedom and distinction. But she was lacking in that ballast of serious studies[352] which, after all, alone permits the development of one’s personality.

Thus lost in the clouds, unstable and vacillating, in reality she took no one intellectual party under her wing; she smiled on everything that was beautiful or pleasant, in other words, on every means of acting on men. She was fond of the music of that period, a wholly psychological art with very little to tickle the ears of the groundlings, but speaking to the soul; she loved any product of the intellect provided the setting was worthy of the gem—ribald stories if they were witty, the drama, lofty speculations on the emotional life, thoughts of divine love, the religious contemplation of God. All these manifestations of the soul, so little alike, she regarded as forming a single philosophic chain, a chain of beauty leading up to God. This idea enabled her to link together conceptions which appear to us disconcerting in juxtaposition, and which her contemporaries themselves were at a loss to reconcile.

Her patronage was above all an art, the art of playing upon the human intelligence as on the finest of keyboards, as on a magnificent and genuinely divine instrument, and of drawing from it the grand harmonies of which it is capable, the tones with which the Supreme Artist has endowed it. Here she strikes a grave and profound note, there a note shrill or thin; she sets men vibrating. “What!” she seems to say, “they say that love deadens! No, no! People of feeling may find their joy in their own natures, but that does not hinder them from finding it outside themselves.” Bouchet and Rabelais, two men of the traditional school, were dependents of Margaret, as well as Charbonnier and Marot, the poets of the day, or Du Bellay and Ronsard, the poets of the morrow. Surrounded by Catholic prelates, herself the intellectual lieutenant of a king hostile to the Reformers, the princess interested herself in everything: Lefèvre d’Etaples and Vatable discussed the Bible with her, Nicolas Mauroy translated the Psalms for her; Jean Brèche translated Plutarch, and Le Masson, Boccaccio. Her own intellect volatilised itself, and was content to perfume the atmosphere.

It was the same in regard to persons; she admitted to intimate fellowship with her the most diverse personages provided they were able to love; and freedom of sentiment was apparently the essential condition of life. Moreover, the intellectual life had not yet assumed the rectangular and rigid forms under which we know it; and as people were particularly eager for impressions, they were on their guard against all the checks by which we so cleverly destroy them. A ruined wall was a ruin, moss and neglect were part of its being; no one dreamt of scraping it, ticketing it, surrounding it with an iron fence and a ring of pebbles. An ancient monument showed itself as it was, covered with all the vegetation which gave, so to say, artistic expression to the life of succeeding generations; no one dreamt of rebuilding it as it originally stood; objects of art _were_ objects of art, which people left in the places they were made for, well in view and fittingly displayed, instead of carting them away and piling them up in gold frames and lifeless desolation on the walls of a museum.

To understand the intellectual dilettantism of Margaret we must steep ourselves in these ideas of liberty and life, which are so alien to our modes of thought, and which even then were on the point of disappearing. Margaret loved to make an emotional impression on others, but she was not at all anxious to guide their reason, any more than she was anxious to be guided herself. Her zest for liberty, pushed to its extreme limit, went almost as far as anarchy. What a singular intellectual harem was hers! Here was a gay dog whose humour had a touch of obscenity; there was a dear friend, the protonotary D’Anthe, author of witty trifles particularly wanton, for instance the _Blason d’une jeune fille_, which we could hardly venture to reproduce; or again, in an entirely different direction, the oppressively virtuous Lavardin, a mighty fang-extractor, whose special duty was to expurgate improper books; or the squeamish La Perrière, who was a century behind the times, apologised for employing the names of mythology, and had the worst of all defects, that of being a bore. These various minds, working symmetrically, produce somewhat the same effect as those many-paned mirrors set revolving by an invisible hand, which might flash for ever without luring an eagle, but are very serviceable for catching larks. The defect of this society was that it attracted second-rate personages, pushing men, notoriety hunters. Moreover, platonist society had always a strong tendency to degenerate into snobbery; it had too much worldliness of character not to suit drawing-room intriguers and men who knew how to get on in the world. Platonism knew nothing of the modest and intelligent men who kept in the background to enjoy the human comedy. This defect amused Castiglione: “To be learned,” he said, “you must belong to the learned set.” The result was sometimes amusing blunders; through being attributed to the wrong author a poem or a piece of music would be received with hearty applause, but afterwards, when better informed, the applauders would hiss, or vice versa. It is the same with everything: wine is good or bad according to the label; Castiglione guarantees he will present you any fool and get you to believe him a genius.[353]

Margaret of France had a taste for notoriety, and sought to bring together all the men who could voice the various opinions of France. She showed them so much affectionate attention that each believed himself to be the favourite, and every cause looked on her as an adherent; to this day, after three centuries and a half, the witchery of the princess remains so potent that everyone loves her and lays claim to her; the platonic think she was a platonist, Rabelaisians rank her as one of themselves, Protestants call her a Protestant. She contented herself with disseminating love, with reconciling and discreetly moderating bitter differences without ever bemoaning those which had brought suffering to herself. It is a singular thing that at a distance she is sometimes taken for a domineering, masculine blue-stocking, one of those women who shake men as the wind shakes the trees, stripping them of leaf and blossom; whereas near at hand she was all softness and loving-heartedness. The most ardent declarations brought no frown to her brow (and left her heart untouched); she pardoned them, laughed at them, sometimes received them with a smile of pleasure. Thus a nobody named Jacques Pelletier permits himself to call her “the half of my soul,” and boasts of her “bitter-sweet favours,” by which he means tender and coy. But Margaret for all her bashfulness does not care for bashful men; she prefers energetic and robustious men who set the pulses beating, who even make themselves tiresome and are not incapable of follies. A certain M. de Lavaux swears he will die if she does not take pity on his martyrdom; she promises him an admirable _De Profundis_. The amiable Hugues Salel praised her pretty hand in extremely graceful little verses;[354] she sends him a pair of scented gloves and a bracelet. But she never forgets Marot; beyond the tomb, when all follies are over, she still proves her sympathy for him.

Apart from this spirit of love you will probe the depths of her soul in vain; there is nothing else to be found.

Margaret has photographed herself in her dressing-gown, surrounded by her intimate friends, in the _Heptameron_;[355] the authenticity of the portrait is guaranteed by herself and her daughter. And what strikes one most forcibly in her doctrine is a pretty style and an excellent solicitude to avoid dulness.

Her gospel was, in heaven God, on earth Francis I.; after them the Beautiful, in which she believed with all her heart as the source of all goodness and all truth. So far as happiness was concerned, she boldly steered for love, which she regarded as the port for the Good and the True. But she had little faith in passion, and confined herself to drawing a most careful distinction between sentiment, which she praised, and sensation, which she condemned; her system was built up on casuistry. She thought that a woman might frankly accept the offer of a virtuous and perfect love; if the man secretly harboured any carnal design, so much the worse for him! Having never loved deeply herself, while on the other hand she had heard so much talk of love, she believed that love was not fatal and that a woman was by no means bound to push charity to the point of absolute self-sacrifice. But remember, she did not commingle the ideas of love and marriage, which were absolutely distinct. As no one can love God without first loving one of His creatures, her design was to lure men thus towards the perfect love of God, and then towards a mystic and philosophical contemplation of the Godhead.

Unluckily, she did not reach her goal, or even get within sight of it. Not for want of ardour: it may well be said of her: “Woman is a flame flaming for ever.” For Bonnivet, “even in their ashes” lived her “wonted fires,” lighting up in him the happy memories of youth. She spoke with fervour, overwhelmed the sceptics with biting taunts or lofty deductions, stimulated the timid by a cheering word, a flight of sentiment. But she wore herself out in this perpetual skirmishing; what she lacked was the will and the intellectual power to effect a sharp, decisive stroke.

As for those on whose conversion to the system of beauty and love she uselessly spent her strength, she got little satisfaction from them.

Attached to her car she dragged along two lovers, who ought to have been the apostles of her philosophy. In reality these very men resisted her.

One of them, the steward Jean de Montausé,[356] an excellent type of official, gallant, frank of speech, amiable in manner, and infinitely courteous, never succeeded in realising the transcendent and virtuous object she had in view. Learning, he finds, is turned to bad uses: religion he respects on principle, without studying it deeply, and laughing in his sleeve at certain mysteries; but virtue he recognises in Madame de Montausé (he is married), not elsewhere. How Margaret exclaims at him may be imagined! Louise of Savoy takes Montausé under her wing.

The other lover, Nicolas Dangu, bishop of Seez, possesses all the princess’s affection. He follows her to watering-places, sentiment oozing at every pore. He has good sense, modesty, and so eminently conciliatory a spirit that he does not deny intelligence to monks and the common people; he even has a profound admiration for the genius of certain malefactors. What a delightful creature is the genuine platonic prelate, so polished, so amenable! How tender, how honeyed, how bland! But he too opposes an almost insurmountable obstacle to her philosophy in practice; he dares not love her love, think her thoughts; he _does_ think, but it is of dying of love, and he has a thousand ways of doing that. He is always dying; he would die rather than say a foolish thing or betray a secret; he dares not put woman’s love to the test, for fear of finding it wanting; if it proved real, he would die of joy. He gets angry with Henri d’Albret, but personally seems quite content with what he has _not_ got; he is the perfection of wisdom and prudence! Yet he gently insinuates that too coy a virtue may become cruel. Margaret is a little troubled; she replies that before she can trust men she requires good sureties, and meanwhile she forgives Dangu’s rash speech because he speaks well of women. That is all she has been able to get out of him, the perfect platonist! But that also is all she gives him.

This social governance, then, does not go to the heart of the question at issue, and does not even convert those who from the first were apostles of the dawn, still less the indifferent, the soi-disant serious men of the world who are met with almost everywhere. The _Heptameron_ presents us with several types, eminently true to life, who clearly show that conversation is not to be relied on to propagate the philosophy: a trim little widow, Madame de Longray, infatuated about her dead husband and very bewitching to other women’s husbands, a veritable scatter-brain in all purity and honour; Mademoiselle Françoise de Clermont,[357] a plump little soul, a bit of a goose, who loves naughty anecdotes, but is extremely shocked at the naturalistic theories of Henri d’Albret and Louise of Savoy; the hoary Burye, who has lost all his illusions with his teeth, convinced by experience of the necessity of platonism, without feeling the want of a brand-new deity expressly manufactured for him; Mademoiselle de Clermont calls him “Old Father Virtue.” Then there is the mother of the famous Brantôme, Anne of Vivonne,[358] the _fin de siècle_ woman, a friend of canons, but a foe to monks; virtuous in principle, but so kind, so very kind! She cannot understand how a woman can live without being loved; she can refuse nothing to anybody; she has a warm affection for St. Magdalene.

“Saffredent,” a well-preserved white-headed beau, cannot make head or tail of all the new theories, and does not mean to. They humiliate him. Do people take him for a mummy, a valetudinarian, a blown-out salamander—for one of those golden-tongued Italians who are all tongue and nothing else? For a dull student with no wants beyond his water-bottle and his cook? He is a knight, esteems only valour and daring and integrity. His speech is like a clarion-call; true virtue, he maintains, consists in loving according to the law of nature,—in loving one woman with all one’s heart rather than in idolising thirty-six on paper. Use is better than abuse. At this unkind and clinching phrase there is a general outcry, and Madame de Longray sighs.

Philosophy limits itself to these extremely superficial passages at arms. Margaret takes pleasure in them; she resembles a blue, transparent sea, chafed and rippled by the sportive breezes, every moment glistening and changing form; but the wind is not set nor the sunlight steady.

She has left us a large number of writings, in which we might at least hope to find or to seek for a more definite groundwork of ideas.

M. Le Franc has devoted himself to the difficult task of examining them all, and in these, again, he has found something of everything—philosophical mysticism, solemn farces, pious impieties, moralities half moral, aristocratico-democratic diversions. The only note common to all is a profound sense of the emptiness of things—which has nothing in common with happiness! Sometimes through the most magnificent fantasies one catches sight of a big rolling tear. Margaret tells us that she knew three lives: a life of love, an intellectual life, and a life of contemplation. But she is lost, as it were, in the desert of her thought, and when her god on earth, the big, jovial, sensual Francis I., dies, she breaks down altogether, and falls back almost desperately upon religion with its terrors.

Life is an instrument of vulgar joy, which exalts only those who humble themselves; Margaret’s mistake was in wishing to remain always on the heights.

Her maxim was to distinguish flesh from spirit, “darkness from light,” and to love love for love’s sake: “Thy love loves thee.” But, apart from the fact that these ideas were not absolutely her own, and that the second already denotes a declension from platonism, we are disturbed on perceiving here and there a strange finger-mark. Margaret had for her private secretary and collaborator a sort of scoundrel, a demon of wit, but one who believed in nothing, not even in his “Minerva.” On reading the _Mirror of the Soul_, her first work, and one which betrays the prentice hand, Bonaventure des Périers at once perceived that there was a place to be filled about the author; he plied her with entreaties, and with puns, and thus became a lieutenant of platonism. The princess showed him infinite kindnesses; in his _Cymbalum_, in which he flouted the only principles on which men were still at one—the existence of God and a few truths of elementary morality—Des Périers was mean enough to hold her up to ridicule; he represented her as seeking to imbue poets with a “chaste and divine” spirit, and sending to Pluto (with a _u_) to ask at once for news of the painter Zeuxis and for patterns of tapestry.[359] Margaret forgave everything; she granted the villain a “prison” in her house, and tried again to improve him by setting him to translate the Dialogues of Plato. But Des Périers, not finding in them the secret of happiness, escaped for good and all by suicide in 1544, and Margaret once more showed her pity by patronising a posthumous edition of his works. That was the man who had doubtless a most intimate part in the composition of writings which he heartily despised, and which he called a “Pactolus of verse and prayer.” He boasted of being their “miscreator,” and in offering one of them to the author he said, with matchless impudence, “Here is your immortal book, and you will find my faults there.”

Thus, if you come near Margaret of France, who appears to govern everything, you find nothing but a mere dilettantism, a manifestation of intellectual epicurism, which influences either ideas or the expression of them. She fixed her eyes not on truth, but on happiness.

As a guiding force Diana of Poitiers showed more precision and vigour.

Having innumerable reasons for leaning less towards the Medici, with more physical beauty than Margaret, more highly endowed in respect of will, she did not devote herself exclusively to the cultivation of the intellect; she loved all the arts, the plastic included, in the good old way. She had a pretty skill in poetry, and appreciated books, especially beautiful manuscripts and fine bindings. She had in her library the Bible, the church Fathers, and books on mystic theology, alongside of her favourite romances, particularly the _Amadis_, which she recommended to the King; to these, as an eminently practical woman, she added books on medicine and natural history; no philosophy to speak of; a copy of Politian, a few treatises on history and geography, a Plutarch, a fair amount of poetry. For her, Philibert Delorme built Anet, Jean Goujon wrought sculptures for it, Jean Cousin, Leonard Limosin, and Bernard Palissy decorated it. She was in fact a French counterpart of Isabella d’Este, a marvellous type of the “lady art patron.” Without aiming at the quintessences of pure love, she really and practically laboured to elevate the cult of beauty.

Women who feel within themselves the power to bear on the sacred torch and to draw minds directly towards the idea of the beautiful certainly ought not to hesitate. But after all, to appreciate art in its practical results, to criticise it, to support it by one’s approbation, is a very noble end, and one suited to any woman, however retiring. History and experience show that these practical influences are often the most effective. This secret society, that religious association accomplish more by simply living their creed day by day than by all your dogmatic teaching. What extraordinary power might not women wield if they were all animated by one spirit urging them towards a common end! And what a noble end—to sustain in the world the healthful principles of beauty, to fill the life of men really and truly with things they can love! To assign to art this social mission, to carry out in regard to it this magnificent part of “patron,” would be to vivify it! Vivify! Let us say rather save it from itself and its abuses! Art would speedily come to ruin if the whims, fads, and prejudices which creep into the studios were not held in check by the necessity of reckoning with the individual and original judgment of experts.

Alas! this is an evil of our present-day society,—this awful slough of commonplace in which we are floundering—a cause or an effect of our moral degeneration and our utter depravity of taste. Big houses built to a specification, decorated at so much a yard, invisibly heated on some patent system you never heard the name of, peopled by lackeys whom you don’t know and only see when they open the doors! Dolly women, clothed by their tailors, a pattern or a copy of their neighbours, with the habits of their callers, the ideas of the men they know, and the conversation of their grooms,—with nothing of their very own; not women at all! People in olden days were so thoroughly persuaded of the real social necessity of forming “amateurs” that the old Italian educators of the fifteenth century wished men to be brought up with that end. How much more women, who have leisure and an inborn refinement! It is very easy to demand that an object, however simple and unpretentious one may suppose it, should bear a stamp of originality and good taste. Is it not at least possible to insist on simplicity in all things, to banish tinsel and brummagem and all our horrible pretentious magnificence?—to seek breadth instead of narrowness?—to give ourselves the pure free air of the Beautiful?—and further, to put writers and artists in a position to express wholesome things with sincerity, in other words, to see things healthily? It would be foolish, deplorable, fatal to ask them to express what they do not feel; but they must be made to feel what they are to paint. There is here an important task to accomplish, and, to a certain extent, an easy one. Everyone knows how sensitive mental toil, particularly if excessive, makes the man who devotes himself to it. Taine goes so far as to consider us the direct products of the influences that encompass us! It is certain that we borrow much from our environment, that the dulness or cheerfulness of the sky, for instance, tinges our thoughts with very different colours; how much more does the sadness or joy of those whom we love? We must create then for art a good moral atmosphere. And when Castiglione writes: “God is only seen through women,” he is not wrong in crying up this spy-glass of his, he understands the need of which we have just spoken; it is as if, on entering a cathedral, he were inviting us to look into the _bénitier_, as if he were showing us a picture in a mirror. There are women’s souls, clear, thrilling, passionate, which reflect things with a distinctness and a vividness of colour that would otherwise be unsuspected. And without launching out into speculations as lofty as those of Margaret of France, mere “women amateurs” can play an artistic part of the first order.

As a rule, Egerias have less need of a transcendent intellect than of an ample provision of good sense, tact, and above all patience, for they may look forward to struggling against terrible temptations.

The intellectual and artistic tribe of the Renaissance was no better than any other. It teemed with crotchety species; it included the usual specimens—the pedant, the man with a grievance, the ingenuous prig, the strutting peacock, the matter-of-fact aesthete always on the look-out for a place or a pension. The proud were always the best, and the least troublesome. Play their cards never so carefully, women found this society difficult to rule; in general, to govern well you have only to make your subordinates discontented, but here you can only reign on condition of satisfying them.

The first step in the intellectual tutelage consisted sometimes in doing little material services, in a quite friendly and natural way (for you can’t live on love). To give “a few crumbs from her table,” to aid the friends of her friends, to look after orphans,—nothing was simpler or less remarkable in a lady: many men would have done as much. Bembo, badly treated by a farmer who owed him two hundred and thirty ducats in “broad gold,” did not hesitate a moment to tear Vittoria Colonna from her celestial preoccupations, to beg her to deal with this little matter. To venture on this ground, however, demanded no little caution. Aretino has shown how easy it was to make a simple expression of friendliness an opportunity for self-advertisement and extortion. What a perfect master he was! Titian applied to him for assistance in disposing of a certain _Annunciation_ which was hanging fire. This was how Aretino proceeded. He issued a flaming advertisement, which fairly hooked the Empress Isabella of Portugal, who raked up from her husband’s cash-box the sum demanded, two thousand crowns. Aretino instantly unmasked and offered to her “sacred and renowned Majesty his inkpot and pens”; in plain English, asked for a pension. What a fine tooth-puller he would have made!

This Aretino fluttered about Vittoria Colonna, whom he sought to capture through her vanity. “Read my books,” he writes to her; “read the _Courtesan_: you will see if your praises were not always at the point of my pen.”

Everybody knows how deeply impressed Aretino always was by the honours of the marchioness, and when his style is defective, there is abundance of will to make up for it. “I have always known you to be of a generous spirit, a magnanimous nature, an active mind, an absolute virtue, a noble faith, a good life. If it were not so, I would have told you.”

That was the beginning of the oddest of correspondences. The lady naïvely thought that she could content the monster with fair words; but he undeceived her by the present of a highly seasoned book, with an explicit request for commendation and money. So far as commendation was concerned, Vittoria thought the request very natural; but the excuse for asking money she thought rather thin. However, she promised sixty crowns, and even fancied she was only acting the great lady in at once sending him thirty, accompanied by some gentle advice. Aretino, in his turn deeply wounded, did not quarrel with “the most excellent lady”; he confined himself to dotting the i’s. “I have to consider the tastes of our contemporaries,” he said; “amusement and scandal are the only things that pay; people burn with concupiscence, as you burn with an inextinguishable angelic flame; for you sermons and evensong, for them music and the play!” Why write serious books? He had sent one to Francis I. five years before, and was still awaiting acknowledgment; he had just addressed his _Courtesan_ to the king, and by return of post received a gold chain: “after all, I write for my bread.”

Vittoria’s purse remained shut. Our fine gentleman would have liked to return the thirty crowns; unluckily he had spent some of them, and he sent back only some epigrams. The marchioness suggested that he should give the balance to the poor, hinting that no worldly pelf was worth as much as the love of God. In consideration of a recommendation to the duchess of Urbino, Aretino condescended to keep what was not already spent. “I too,” he writes with his habitual impertinence,—“I too am a virtuous and Christian beggar, and deserving of your alms; I do not think the poor of Ferrara, of whom you speak, so poor that you cannot assist one of the poor here, since for you it suffices to be rich in spirit through the grace of Christ.”

This little dialogue will show whether women needed an angelic soul to influence for good rarely-gifted men on whom pure love had no hold. But lofty motives must have sustained them; there was really some truth in Aretino’s plea; yes, fortune and glory are only reached by devious paths. Little sketches and dialogues in the taste of the day paid Aretino very well, without great labour on his part; a bookseller in the Rue St. Jacques at Paris made his fortune merely by retailing them, and in the simplest way. He would sell to a lady a book more or less licentious, and as such books are never lent, by and by another lady was sure to pay him a visit. “Madam, here’s one that’s much worse,” whispers the good man in his half Italian jargon, slipping into her hand another very expensive book. It was just the same in the artists’ studios; Ledas and Venuses went off like hot cakes, but Titian’s _Annunciation_ gathered dust on the easel, and Carpaccio had infinite difficulty in selling at so much a foot a religious picture which he considered one of his best.

In France, the position was for a long time not quite so bad, in the sense that the men of letters, excellent fellows who mixed little with the world, esteemed themselves infinitely lucky to receive after solicitation an ecclesiastical benefice which made them independent. One historian becomes incoherent in pouring out his gratitude because a good book, the fruit of many years’ toil and travel, has secured him a life-annuity. But this patriarchal simplicity also disappeared in the end. Publishers had to cater for the public, and one curious affair shows us how they taught authors their trade.

Vérard, the famous publisher whose magnificent productions are still a joy to connoisseurs, had agreed to publish in 1500 a book by Jean Bouchet, entitled _The Foxes traversing the Perilous Ways_. The author was already received at court, the book had an excellent title, piquant and suggestive. Nevertheless, Vérard began by erasing the name of Bouchet, and substituting that of Brandt, a German as well known to the French as the Scandinavians are to-day, and whom, moreover, Bouchet had sought to imitate.

The young poet durst not complain; however, when he read the volume in print, he noticed that Vérard had unceremoniously cut out entire passages, replacing them with passages pillaged from right and left. Bouchet seized the occasion and commenced an action: whereupon Vérard, utterly surprised at so much virtuous indignation, came to terms like a lord; he paid over a good round sum, and asked for no receipt.

Still, this sort of thing was rudimentary, and, apart from the question of private morals, harmless. What was much less inoffensive was the passion of the authors themselves, once they had learnt their cue, for the novel, obscene, or sensational effects which alone secured the attention of the public. They speedily got level with the Italians. Ulrich von Hütten gave an admirable send-off to his _Epistles of Obscure Men_ by surreptitiously putting manuscript copies in circulation. Bonaventure des Périers almost attained to Aretino’s skill. The alleged official destruction of his _Cymbalum_ justified a clandestine second edition, which of course was priceless. “Let us write some vile thing,” he says in one of his dialogues, “and we shall find a bookseller who’ll give us ten thousand crowns for the copy.” That is true; the public only buys and circulates and really cries up the books it contemns. Many notorious books of that time, which we take seriously to-day, probably had no other origin.

An author, indeed, has a perfect right to desire to live at the expense of his readers. But, after all, he must beware, in matters of art, of commercial inducements, and the more indifference, weakness, and unconcern the good public displays, the more one ought to thank the distinguished women who undertake to oppose the high bids of naturalism or extravagance. They do not always succeed; they are sometimes the dupes of noise and fashion; let us forgive them for what they have given us, for the sake of what they have spared us. In these days, people are ready enough to abuse the old system of patronage, which they charge with subverting the dignity of man; to seek something from the State, from a member of the Government, seems natural enough, but many writers would think themselves humiliated by submission to any social patronage—which, however, society is not eager to offer. In the 16th century, among intellectual circles, men were republicans even in a monarchy: they were not enamoured of the idea of the State. And private patronage, in spite of its imperfections, often served as a home for meditation, a shelter for independent men who preferred high thinking to popular applause; if it proved deadening, it was only on mediocre minds. When we see what circumlocution, and what subtle diplomacy the most influential princesses had to employ to gain admission to Raphael’s or Giovanni Bellini’s studio, we have no further misgiving as to the disadvantages of patronage. For a lady to send a poet in distress “a little sugared solace” as Des Périers said, and with so much discretion that the source of the gift remains unknown, or to express her sympathy in the form of a costly present—in this we see nothing to impair the dignity of man; indeed, to be frank, it appears to us delightful.

Moreover, patronage did not confine itself to a purely material and administrative support, as the State necessarily does. Besides sending a present in season, the ladies were still more ready to distribute the small but not less precious coin of tendernesses and compliments. We are here returning into their proper domain, and an intellectual man capable of withstanding this influence would be a rarity. The lady author who praises a writer smacks a little of her trade; Veronica Gambara, after overwhelming Aretino with rhapsodies, cries naïvely, “Praised by you, I shall live a thousand years!” It was “Kae me, I’ll kae thee.” But from a genuine lady of rank, eminent and bountiful, who asks for nothing, one charming phrase, even though it be qualified and far from flattering, is glory, and a glory that can be solicited without humiliation. “They say I am an aristocrat,” wrote Taine, and he was, as we all are who pretend to lead men’s minds. That is why we need this sybaritism,—need to be sustained and perchance guided by a smile. There is hardly a philosopher or poet of the 16th century whose pages are not illuminated and gladdened by the smile of some high-born lady.

How can we analyse this smile? We could not without seeing it, and we only know it very indirectly. We divine it under an infinitely caressing word; in a pretty diminutive, “my little sister,” “wifie”; in an affectionate superlative; Vittoria Colonna calls her friend Dolce “Dolcissimo,” and speaks to him, with a quite natural grace and without apparent exaggeration, of his “divine sonnets,” for which she has not words enough to thank him; with her friend Bembo she permits herself to gush forth familiarly in artless enthusiasm. What a curious litany is the correspondence addressed to that “very magnificent” rogue Aretino, who highly valued the honour done him, and took all possible advantage of it! The writers are the marchioness of Mantua, with her grace and reserve; Mary of Aragon, “the sovereign marchioness of Avalos,” on particularly good terms with him because she has not altogether given up hope of turning him into a monk; the duchess of Urbino, warm, gushing, who calls him “my magnificent most loving lover”; then the good ladies who have lost their hearts to the man of the hour, who take him as he is, a scoundrel but famous, and who write to him as the “fount of eloquence, astonishing, admirable, miracle of nature, most virtuous, (yes, you are!) most wise, my father, my brother.”[360]

The relations of a lady with her protégés were established by slow degrees, or simply through her chancing to hear of a work that bespoke her practical interest. The lady learns through her secret agents that a book is about to appear, in prose perhaps, perhaps a history; she wishes to have the first peep at it; the author, taken by surprise, makes excuses with profound modesty, but sends his manuscript all the same; and the ice is broken, the circuit is complete. The connection will continue under various forms; the writer tells her in confidence of his various works, then in his turn begins to beat the coverts for talents of hers that are lying concealed. In return the lady announces his work _urbi et orbi_, and takes his friends to her heart. A real intimacy is set up between them, sometimes so entirely spiritual that they never even see each other. Thus, before publishing his _Courtier_, Castiglione submitted the manuscript to Vittoria Colonna under the seal of the profoundest secrecy. Vittoria kept it rather a long time, and when at last she had to return it, she excused herself very prettily, being still, as she says, only half-way through the second part: she omits to add that she had lent it rather indiscreetly. She has no suggestion to make, except perhaps that he should not give the names of the ladies whose beauty he is praising in a book intended for the public. Otherwise she applauds everything with all her soul: the freshness of the subject, the refinement, elegance and animation of the style. She is horribly jealous of the persons whose words are quoted in such a book, even if they are dead. As to the passages on the virtue and impeccable chastity of women, she adores them and considers herself, as a woman, honoured by them; but on this point she prefers not to say all that is in her mind.

With Michelangelo she exercises the same supervision; she begs him, in a charming note, to send her a crucifix he is working at, and to come and have a chat.[361]

Far from dissembling the patronage of which they were the objects, the writers and artists boasted of it. In all sincerity they believed women to have been created and sent into the world to inspire them with intelligence. If they had their portraits painted seated in their studies, it was not in the midst of a litter of books, weapons, or carpets, nor even with an air of deep thought or abstraction; it was simply as natural men, writing beside a little Cupid who serves them as tutelary deity. It was accepted without question that a woman’s hand must shake the bough to set the mind winging its flight. “My mind, my strength, my Pallas, is Lydia,” exclaims Catti.[362] Antonio de Gouvea[363] declares that he had no suspicion of what was in him till the fair-haired Catherine of Bauffremont discovered him as one discovers a treasure under the snow: “I should have thought the snow cold, but lo! it was fire.” Michelangelo sings the same song in every key: “Through your fair eyes I see a tender light which my blinded eyes could not have seen.... Wingless, I fly with your wings; through your quick spirit I am unceasingly uplifted towards heaven.... I have no other will than yours; in your soul my thought has birth; my words are moulded in your mind. I am like the moon, who never shines in the sky but as reflecting the brilliance of the sun;” and he adds this profound saying: “O Lady, who by fire and water refinest and purgest the soul for happy days, ah! grant me to return never more to myself!” That was the simple method by which many women in those days directed the minds of men.

We must not exaggerate: we do not pretend that you must everywhere _chercher la femme_, that without her nothing is possible, that she has confiscated the key to all human learning. On the contrary, she has done little for the exact sciences; she has contented herself with piercing the heavens or clambering in somehow or other. But the great kindred of impressionable beings, every man who has lived by beauty and sought after happiness, from philosopher to artist, from talker to poet, every man capable of feeling an emotion, has owed much to women. “Emotion, which is only an accident in the life of man, is it not woman’s whole existence?” And in such a matter, can a better judge be found? Woman is freer from prejudice than man: “she does not need to give abstract reasons for her enthusiasms: her passion, her pity well up spontaneously while man is still discussing and deliberating. And in so doing, she almost always sees more truly.”[364]

Women are the eternal guardians of the Beautiful, and it cannot be said that in this respect the Renaissance introduced any absolutely new idea. Long before, noble châtelaines used frequently to shelter under their roofs the churchman employed to illuminate their Books of Hours, and princesses encouraged the ballad-monger and the image-vendor. Women have always cultivated their souls! But it was a new thing to devote this fervour and enthusiasm to a religion of beauty. In other directions, the women have been condemned; but their aesthetic influence has seemed legitimate; and, in a word, “the works they patronised, the châteaux built for them, have endured, when the doughty deeds of knights on the battlefield have hardly left a trace.”