CHAPTER VI

RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE (_Continued_)

“I would a thousand times rather believe in and pursue an ideal, even though too high, than miss or betray it,” said Montalembert. Many persons in the 16th century were of a different opinion. They deemed aesthetic religion too frivolous or too worldly a thing, above all, too chimerical. The adversaries of the religion of beauty split up into two categories: some opposed it from reasoned conviction, others from social jealousy and incompatibility of temper.

The first, of whom Alberto Pio[429] and Budé,[430] eminent and estimable men, may serve as specimens, scouted the very idea of any connection between philosophy and religion, between aesthetics and morals; in their opinion religion did not tend to satisfy the reason, nor beauty to purify the conduct. The suggested reconciliation was to them an ill-disguised reversion to paganism, and in practice led to scandals like the representation of Machiavelli’s _Mandragora_[431] at the Vatican.

As we have seen, persons of this same opinion had already demonstrated the irrationality and inadequacy of reasoning; they had thereby relieved the world of a serious embarrassment; sensibility was henceforth to be the sole guide of life. But now we find others wishing to destroy this sensibility also, and to strip us of everything. At the idea that love is born of beauty such people veil their faces, and beg us to take away this thing they cannot bear to look upon, that is neither moral nor religious!

Assuredly it is impossible to commend everything in the Roman movement. Far from it! There is only too large a scope for criticism. Aestheticism was carried too far: it was, for example, a singularly wild notion to consider the building of St. Peter’s at Rome a social necessity of the first importance, and to sacrifice a part of the Catholic world to the desire of completing the Vatican. Antiquity, to be sure, evoked a quite exclusive enthusiasm, and it was singular to see the headquarters of Christianity going crazy about Pomponius Laetus, calling him “the glory of the age,” “Caesar,” because he was unearthing pagan catacombs. Not that mythology, as then cultivated, aimed at bringing back a real, lively faith in the Olympian deities! Isis, Apollo, Venus, on the walls of the Vatican or the churches, stood only for symbols and types of philosophy: Jean Bouchet very happily styled them “the aristocracy of the world.” Men thought, with Plato, that the beauty of things can only be gauged by comparing them with an eternal type; as Margaret of France said: “The Beautiful is seen in all forms of beauty.” Further, morality, without divorcing itself officially from Christianity, sometimes was pretty completely disjoined from it; to many people virtue consisted in wearing a good coat and keeping up a good style. Montaigne, Aretino, and Benvenuto Cellini, for example, passed for virtuous men.

To protest against this paganism was a right and proper thing. But was it necessary to forbid Christianity to secure a rational appreciation, and even to win our love by working upon our emotions? An ineradicable instinct prompted the Latin races to believe through love; “Italy will be un-christianised, not Calvinised,” as Azeglio admirably said. To invest worship with mundane pomp and circumstance is as profoundly human an idea as it is to keep the clock at a railway station a few minutes behind time.

The Middle Ages, however, kept strict time: materialistic as they were, they erected cathedrals, the baser instincts avenging themselves by affixing to the cornices, or even to the porches, in full view, ornamental details cynically human. The Renaissance, for all its mysticism, was not partial to the dim religious light, or the mysteries shadowed in lofty arches far out of eyeshot; it loved clearness, daylight, illumination. It built only châteaux, even to the glory of God. St. Peter’s at Rome is a château; the eye detects nothing abnormal in it; and there man feels himself at home.

It was thus with the religion of prelates and women. It was lofty, sometimes loftier than Gothic arches, but so broad, so clear, so full of unity, of so human a hospitality that no one felt he had to do with the unknown, the unfathomable. It was a reflection of life itself, but with added brilliance and decoration; it aimed at attracting man, when he had performed his material functions in eating, drinking, loving his wife, to a banquet of spiritual fare and spiritual love. We look to women to quicken our perception. In spiritual concerns the parts are reversed.

Now, men spent their lives in an atmosphere of materialism and unbridled sensuality. Melin de Saint-Gelais declared nudities “heavenly objects, worthy of altars.”[432] Coyness was unknown. “Happy the people who have only God to deal with,” cries a young lady: “with men it is enough to save appearances.”[433] In the view of many, morality found only an insufficient sanction in religion; the third Margaret of France wrote, with a modesty unhappily too well justified: “Some consider that God holds the great in his special protection.” And on the other hand, the laws of society did not always oppose a very solid barrier: it was easy to a noble lady to override them. Renée of France took a manifest pleasure in running atilt against popular conventions; Marot had only to set the mob against him as “a lascivious pagan,” to merit her indulgence. Apparently she was even tempted to believe a daughter of France so superior to humanity at large that she could have only lovers.

However, it was sincerely believed that, for people of refinement and distinction, good style and good taste rendered many artistic things inoffensive. So (to select one example among a thousand) no one was shocked when the Abbé de Maupas gave his approval to some neat verses in which Gilles d’Aurigny boasted his conquest of a “sweet pale Margaret.” The gentle spotless Vergerio very gaily accepted the title of “bishop of Aretino.” Margaret compliments her brother on retaining his faith through all his sin. Does she praise the sin? Not at all: but she praises the king for what is praiseworthy, the remaining a Christian. Vergerio would have shrunk with horror from certain of Aretino’s books, but he considered the man as a force, of as much importance as any diocese, while many of the episcopal boroughs contained as many vices with less wit. And he tries to coax some good thing out of this diocese. On the same principle Margaret set Vauzelles to translate some of Aretino’s devotional works. Indulgence thus shown in practice had no modifying effect on principles, and besides, men were particularly careful not to extend it to the masses. Among them, as everybody knows, there is no such thing as sentiment, but only sensations, and with them, consequently, the fetters of a material morality were still found serviceable. The same Caterina Cibo who highly approved Firenzuola’s book on love, severely reproached the bishop of Camerino for his slackness in reforming the morals of his clergy, and succeeded in obtaining from the pope a rigorous brief on the subject.

In society it happened that pagan sensation and Christian sentiment all but touched; it seemed prudent, advantageous, and politic not to accentuate the difference between them. Many people, like true gourmets, let themselves swing gently between mysticism and materialism; perhaps it was just as well not to compel them to decide one way or the other. It has been well said that “faith has this peculiarity, that when it has vanished, it influences still: grace survives by force of habit from a once living sentiment.”[434] The logical Germans proceeded to deduce from this spiritual condition the system of “faith without works.” But folk remained satisfied with “confidence without works.” It was in these practical considerations that an answer was found to Budé’s objections.

However, Budé was a friend, and sought only to point out abuses. The real and invincible adversaries of the religion of beauty, those who hoped to destroy it, came from below. They were such as society scouted—the vulgar, the superstitious, the material-minded, the street as against the salon: in short, the men. When Vergerio went to Germany to discourse of love, he was answered in a strain that disconcerted him: the Germans talked politics to him. “I am tortured,” he cries, “to see the cause of Jesus Christ treated with so much indignity; it appears to me that to-day this is not the real explanation of the immense trouble taken with so many people: it is assuredly only a pretext. The main thing considered under the cloak of zeal for Christ is, I believe, nothing but the private interests of a few individuals.”

The clergy did not follow the religious lead of the prelates. The whole of the middle or lower orders among them, the country parsons, the monks, made common cause, some in a materialist direction,[435] others as visionaries, against the philosophic group, the higher prelacy, and the priesthood of women.

The monk was a man of different stamp. Margaret petting Rabelais resembles, if we may be allowed the expression, a hen mothering a duck. Look at the man of fustian, whom one pious author liked to call “God’s nightingale,” there in his pulpit, fist on hip, vulgar, impassioned, ranting, preaching terrible doctrines with sonorous voice. The antagonism between him and the platonist women is easily realised. He did not bother his head about beauty or love; instead of an amiable liberality which would suit a sceptical audience, it seemed as though with his wild declamations he had no other aim than to quench the embers still smouldering. It was more than a treason, it was a folly. He did not mince matters; he reviled the bishops and great ones of the earth; talk to him of love, he replied with retribution, toil, eternal torments, the glories of poverty, the agonies of the animal man. Savonarola himself, so warm and passionate, so much loved and worthy of love, brandished with scriptural fervour the great popular weapons, the prophecies and the wrath to come. In France, Oliver Maillard, Ménot, Rabelais himself (though misguided) possessed a breezy eloquence, rugged, turbid, picturesque, censorious, verbose, nowhit metaphysical, the opposite of the official Ciceronianism:

Il presche en théologien; Mais pour boire de belle eau claire, Faites-la boire à vostre chien, Frère Lubin ne le peult faire.[436]

Maillard went so far as to sing songs of his own in the pulpit! Others indulged in wearisome or tasteless jests, in the most aristocratic of churches,[437] and before a queen.

Ignorant of the world and its refinements, the monks and parsons applied to distinguished consciences the casuistry of the suburbs: their morality smacked of the natural man. It proscribed refined joys: a man should be “an ox or an ass,” as Savonarola said. Not that the monks were ill-natured: they were hospitable; they would console an unhappy wife; they would assist a widow to find a gem of a son-in-law. But there their understanding of the feminine nature stopped. For the rest they saw in women only Satanic lures, false chignons, perfumes, all the fripperies of which Savonarola had made so magnificent a holocaust in the great square of Florence! Amiability was quite beyond them. Fra Inigo, in one of the streets of Toledo, happened to be walking behind some ladies whose trains were raising clouds of dust. They good-naturedly stopped to let him pass. Fancying he was the very pink of courtesy he said: “I kiss your hands, ladies; proceed, I beg you: the dust raised by the sheep doesn’t annoy the wolf.” In the pulpit it was the same; if they spoke of social necessities, it was like the peasants they were; they preached poverty and chastity without qualification; they had no eye for fine shades, but bedaubed the most delicate façades with their garish colours. “Are you in fit state to die? You women who display your beautiful bosoms, your necks, your throats, would you wish to die in your present condition? And you priests, would you like to die with your conscience burdened with the masses you have said? Not four out of a thousand, I believe, would be found ready. If the last trump here assailed our ears, we should then see who would respond to its appeal!”[438]

The monastic spirit was indestructible; Spagnuoli[439] and Du Four carried it into the courts. Adrian VI., coming between two Medicean popes, cherished this spirit at the Vatican.[440] During three reigns Francis de Paul remained faithful to it at the court of France. Once before, as he passed through Rome, St. Francis had ventured to upbraid a cardinal lolling in a sumptuous equipage, and the prelate, bending forward over the door, had replied with a fine and courtly smile that it was very necessary to inspire the children of that generation with respect. How much St. Francis was idolised by the ladies it is beyond us to tell: in all circumstances of gravity they claimed his intercession, and yet he did not flatter them. He would never give audience to them. Women and wealth, said he, are the two scourges of the Church—and especially devout women: them he called “vipers.”

How the world flung back these invectives! Ladies and prelates vied with one another in mocking at the lower monastic orders—those shaven scurvy bald-pates who stood in the way of all spiritual regeneration; ill-bred, material-minded fellows, uneducated, coarse, fat, full-blooded, brimming over with a hot, carnal vitality, gay to the core and therefore prompt to sin, much “more attentive to the life active than to the life contemplative”—those easy-going vagabonds who, awaiting eternity, “do not weary their minds overmuch by perusal of a heap of books,” for fear lest the lore they might imbibe from them should puff them out with pride, like Lucifer, and “make them decline from monastic learning.” The pallid platonists, “crushed under their trappings,” called them fanatics, hypocrites, misers, gluttons, and above all filthy and disgusting wretches. It was a singular idea the Prince da Carpi had—to be buried in a monk’s fustian frock, and thus “turn monk beyond the tomb.” That was clean contrary to the mode!

Margaret lampooned the monks. Alexander VI. called them tyrants, and declared he would much rather offend the greatest of kings than the least of these mendicants. At a carnival at Rome, Bibbiena, galloping along under his mask, caught sight of a monk, and swooped down on him like a hawk upon its prey. “I know you,” he cries tragically: “the provost is after you to arrest you, but I will save you; I will carry you off to the chancellor’s”; and thereupon he grabs the unlucky monk, hoists him on to the crupper all shivering and shaking, and off they go amid the hoots and yells and gibes of the mob, under a shower of eggs! Soon Bibbiena was yolk of egg from head to heel,—and was privately accusing the people of uncommonly bad marksmanship. At last, when the city had had its fill of laughter, he deigned to yield to the supplications of his victim and set him down. Then the other broke a few more eggs over him, flung off his frock, and with a low bow said, “I am your groom.” Bibbiena galloped on.

We need not, of course, take literally the jests of that period against the monks. There were good and bad monks; the good were those least in evidence. But Guy Juvenal, who was an active and honest worker for monastic reform, winds up his enquiry[441] with a phrase as old as St. Augustine: “You find in the convents the best and the worst.”

However, the adversaries of the monks do them justice themselves, unintentionally. The company in the _Heptameron_, for instance, are much amused at the idea that some monks may possibly have overheard their ribald talk. One of the Urbino coterie traces a portrait of the monks from the outside which leaves us musing. Gross and plump, he says, they were hypocrites: little mortification of the flesh there! Emaciated and unkempt, they were false hounds who distinguished between sins secret and sins open. Elegant, well-trimmed, scented—these were everything that was vilest and most antagonistic to platonism! But what then ought their style to have been?

Trithemius, however, defined the monastic life in a highly platonist phrase: “To love is to know.” How came, then, the idea that monks could not actively mingle in the life of the world, since St. Ignatius proved the contrary when he founded an order in harmony with the new spirit? The convents of old were peopled with distinguished intellects; Luther, Calvin, Erasmus, Jean Thenaud, André Thevet,[442] and a thousand others sprang from these decried lower clergy. How can we believe that the monks were by their tenets at odds with aestheticism, when the Italian Dominicans monopolised the charming art of mosaic in wood and almost monopolised also that of painting on glass—when St. Mark’s at Florence, impregnated with the fragrant inspirations of the Fra Angelicos and the Fra Bartolomeos, stands forth to this day, in the profound simplicity of neglect, one of the most delightful refuges of human thought?

Certain of the more cultured orders had a bent for learning. And these were expelled; the Jacobins were harried away by the cardinal of Amboise because they lived outside their convent walls in order to dance attendance at court, and neglected the offices of the church. There was a striking repetition of this quarrel in the 17th century, between Dom Mabillon, who advocated a learned monkhood, and the fiery abbé of Rancé, who wished to maintain the monasteries in the simple practice of piety; and in this contest also a woman (the duchess of Guise) took part.

Yet many of the monks, from a godly desire for success, strove earnestly to suit themselves to the fashion; they freely cited the Olympian deities and quoted Ovid and Virgil; in spite of the counsels of Savonarola, they exerted themselves to please, even though at the expense of “the divine.” One preacher draws an ingenious parallel between the Virgin and Isis. Others discourse on beauty or coquetry, its benefits and perils. Some maintain that the Virgin was not pretty, because she was lowly and not in society; others, on the contrary, nourished on the _Song of Songs_ and other aesthetic authorities, depict her as “clothed with the sun” according to the phrase in the Apocalypse—dark-skinned perhaps, being a Jewess, but a woman to be admired nevertheless!

But the monks, do what they might, scatter a thousand flowers of mythology and rhetoric as they pleased, never acquired the lightness of touch the least of the sonneteers possessed.

Rabelais opens with a polemic on the merit of women, a stale subject, but impossible to avoid. He loves the world and mocks at the “molish monk”; he extols, on the other hand, the monk “young, gallant, dexterous, bold, adventurous, resolute, tall, lean, voluminous in chaps, well-favoured in nose, who smartly patters his prayers and polishes off his masses ... moreover, a clerk to the finger-tips in point of the breviary.” He admits both sexes to his abbey of Thelema, on proof of perfect beauty. It is laved and perfumed, this modern abbey—full of gold and jewels, of beauteous garments, of music, of things sumptuous and comfortable, of books: nothing is wanting there: it has nine thousand three hundred and thirty-two chapels, and a single swimming bath under the watchful eye of a statue of the Three Graces. No one there is irked by theology!

And yet Rabelais was absolutely at sea in regard to the platonist spirit, to these mystic abstractions: “To have a woman is to have her for the use wherefor Nature created her ... for the delectation of man.” If anyone speaks to him of the “devotion of love” he laughs and sets himself down at the table: “Drink,” cries the Sibyl in his ear, “drink!” Drunkenness—that is mysticism enough for him! He leaves the convent to become a physician. He commends none but the natural sciences, and the only one he cannot away with is the only one that women accept—prophetic astrology. He was bound to end as a parson!

Even in Italy, the monk always smacked of his convent. Folengo[443] spent his life in going in and out of it. His works also are nothing but one everlasting buffoonery. In his _Moscheid_, he appears to depict the conspiracy of monks against fine ladies—an epic complot of all creeping things—ants, bugs, spiders—against the winged race of bees and butterflies. The royal head of the chancellery, Spingard, sets off on a lean-ribbed mare, bearing splendid letters under the great seal of the Senate (an image of Liberty and Justice), in order to entice men into a spider’s web.

But the Italian monks accepted their rout; they derided the antiquated “subtleties of St. Thomas,” as well as visions of God without intermediaries, and hatred of indulgences. Their solace was a splendid ignorance, Neapolitan, epicurean.

In Germany, on the contrary, they triumphed. Despite the recommendations of Leo X. and the passionate objurgations of Erasmus, the Germans refused to admire the works of the hour, the _Epistles_ of Eoban,[444] for instance, in which the holy women of the New Testament are represented as writing in the style of Ovid. They waged implacable war against aestheticism and dilettantism, and the bitterness of the struggle was only accentuated every time they came in contact with Rome. Burckhardt, writing his memoirs day by day about a splendid epoch, is incessantly bemoaning its corruption: does he perceive the existence of a spiritual movement at Rome? He sees nothing of liberty but the scandals; he does his duty like a painstaking but muddle-headed corporal. Erasmus himself is blind to all but the humanities, while Luther finds only horrors. They spoke with different tongues. When Hoogstratten, a German monk, impeached Reuchlin, who had ventured to defend certain Jewish books on scientific grounds, Rome was utterly unable to make out the bearings of this Teutonic quarrel: she procrastinated, and let the matter drop.

Ulrich von Hütten tried to Italianise himself at the little court of the archbishop of Mayence, which claimed to be a copy of Urbino, but all they did there was to play billiards and abuse the monks behind their backs. He returned to Rome in 1516, one of the years of triumph; and there, son of a sturdy and poor country where the lord ruled and even robbed people at his pleasure, and where woman was emphatically the weaker vessel, he, the old and unknown student, found himself excluded from that superb court,[445] from those “false gods” as he called them, and relegated to the society of a German financier of low degree; he had no recommendation but his birth; and he could barely succeed in finishing his studies in law. He took his revenge in abuse. “I have human feelings,” he wrote to Luther.

With lofty eloquence and burning zeal he preached the necessary war. The apostles of love had called war a brigandage. Hütten denounced as brigands the non-combatants—merchants, advocates, and priests. His motto was: a beautiful woman, gold, and indolence. In 1522 he took up arms, and with a magnificent gesture pointed out the splendid churches to the mob.

Luther, too, protests against the philosophic spirit. He checks liberty at a certain point, forbidding the mind to emancipate itself further. From a thinker he becomes a man of action, and joins hands with the great lords.

There was an explosion of anti-feminist and anti-liberal sentiments—war to the knife. It took place, like all great moral outbursts, under the banner of religion, because religion possessed organised battalions, a force ready at call, and, above all, excellent pretexts with which to veil struggles entered into on behalf of selfish interests.

“Talk of household concerns is women’s affair,” said Luther: “they are mistresses and queens there, and more than a match for Cicero and the finest orators.... But take them from their housewifery and they are good for nothing.... Woman is born to manage a household: ’tis her lot, her law of nature: man is born for war and polity, to administer and govern states.” As a model for the sculptor woman delighted Luther; but that was all; he denied her physical and moral vigour; the less her moral strength, the more he congratulates her. Evidently the intellectual pretensions of feminism constituted in his eyes an absurdity and a peril. Calvin went still farther. Whatever was pleasing to women he proscribed, even aesthetic emotions however inoffensive, however religious in character. He would hardly deign to believe that women are really good hands at puddings! Some ladies, in their noble devotion to his cause, had found a common prison in the Châtelet; he sent them somewhat grim felicitations. “If men are frail and easily shaken, the frailty of your sex is still greater.... God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, and the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty, and base things of the world, and things which are despised, to bring to nought those that are great and of high worth.”

There was nothing for Luther to invent. Everyone desired a reformation, like himself. The cardinal of Amboise and the traditional school wished to try back and restore discipline; the philosophic women and the Roman world were for pushing ahead, and saw salvation in the rejuvenescence of faith through liberty.[446] But neither party was eager for a schism, above all the Liberals of Rome, who not only stood for unity, which was their breath of life, but also gladly washed their hands of pure theology.

Luther invented nothing. All that he said, and even more, had been said at Rome for fifty years before him. He caught certain floating ideas, and fixed those which had passed into current morality. This was to attack dilettantism. The gentle feminist and Latinist prelates, with their tolerance, their openness of mind and intellectual freedom—Sadoleto, the friend of Melanchthon, Contarini, Pole, the kindly scholar ruled by Vittoria Colonna, Flaminio, Vergerio—all deplored the degradation of their handiwork: they felt as a Raphaelite painter would feel if he found his dreams copied in a picture by Espinal. Yet, while lamenting this use made of liberty, they respected it; at bottom they considered Zwingle and Melanchthon as two of themselves, and they did not despair of achieving the triumph of freedom by freedom itself. Such was, as we know, the policy of Pole at Ratisbon, and of Vergerio at Worms; but despite the support of Vittoria Colonna, Margaret of France, and a whole band of enthusiastic and ardent women, they did not succeed; they were caught between two fires.

Women threw themselves into the fray with enthusiasm.

We might fancy ourselves looking at the Sabine women of David’s famous picture: daughters of the Roman Church, very devoted, very judicious (at least in their own opinion), and yet ready in the name of freedom to defend and love their adversaries.

Vittoria Colonna always believed herself as orthodox as the Holy See itself, and more clever, even when in the heat of the battle she put forth opinions somewhat questionable.

She sang the barque of Peter triumphing over all the billows of the world’s vileness and ill-will, and she received the papal benediction. But yet, in the great religious struggle of the 16th century, she could never realise that genuine difficulties of doctrine were involved; she saw nothing but a medley of personal intrigues, rivalries, jealousies, offended susceptibilities, good intentions bungled; excellent judges have shared her impressions. Entirely new circumstances had to arise, the fiercest moment of the battle had to come, before the court of Rome at last repudiated retrospectively all fellowship with Vittoria. And yet events seemed to justify the thesis of love—a thesis neither Protestant nor strictly Catholic.

Attached to a religion of intuition and sentiment, the women aimed at saving the guilty by the love of the innocent; they put into practice a doctrine rather divine than religious; their scheme was that of Henri IV.: “Those who unswervingly follow their conscience are of my religion, and I am of the religion of all who are brave and good.”

Vittoria Colonna took a very special interest in a celebrated Capuchin, the ardent and eloquent Ochino, who had formed at Naples a sort of liberal triumvirate. Somewhat intoxicated with his popularity and the warm sympathies of the feminist group, Ochino bitterly attacked Paul III. about certain measures of reform directed against the Capuchins. The marchioness hastened to prevent a rupture; she issued a great liberal manifesto addressed to Contarini, and at the same time urged Ochino to come to Rome. Paul smiled at the manifesto, and sent the author a pilgrim’s passport, for herself and a Capuchin. Ochino, however, made a rancorous reply. Women put forth indescribable efforts to bring back to the fold this sheep who was threatening to wander away! Thanks to the feminine freemasonry, Ochino, though openly at odds with the pope, still occupied with brilliance the principal pulpits of Verona, Venice, Bologna and Mantua, until at last he took to flight. Vittoria never lost sight of him; at Venice, she got secret information as to his welfare from Bembo, who had just been raised to the cardinalate.[447] Later, by means of anonymous letters in which she told her old protégé that she was buying his books and getting insight into his views, flattering him, calling herself his “very obedient daughter and disciple,” she did her utmost to bring him to reason. Vain illusion! Ochino was a monk, Vittoria a noble lady; they belonged to two jarring worlds.

Margaret of France wished to play the same part, but she found herself in a more embarrassing situation, and understood still less, if possible, the real bearing of the struggle. She dreamed of reforming humanity, not dogmas; she left to God the task of winning the victory and causing the “word of truth” to shine forth. Why limit the range of these dreams? “The Church is a living and active voice, which is its own explanation, and can always express itself anew and more abundantly.” Why this procreation of rigorous dogmas, to the ruin of the feminine apostleship? Margaret pressed towards synthesis; she wished to know, to co-ordinate, to succeed. Briçonnet wrote to her smilingly: “If there were at the end of the earth a learned doctor who, by means of a single compendium, could teach the whole art of grammar, besides rhetoric, philosophy and the seven liberal arts, you would rush to him as a cold man rushes to the fire.”

Where then was she to seek the illumination of love and faith if not in that religious philosophy towards which she had always inclined? In regard to faith, still more than in social matters, she felt how good it was to soar into the heights of abstraction, to go direct to the verities without troubling about men. How cramping it would have seemed to her to embody all theology and all faith, both Paradise and Hell, in one man, in one priest! She smiled on men, provided they were men of good-will, even if they burnt others, as Francis I. did, but still more if they were burnt or in danger of burning, like “that poor Berquin,” or the chaplain Michel, or the canons of Bourges, or Farel, Vatable, Gerard Roussel.[448] A man might translate the Thomist work the _Mirror of Ladies_; might call himself Lefèvre d’Etaples, _faber ingeniorum_, or Dolet; might be a witty libertine like Pocques or Duval—no matter, he had claims on her affection, if he was well disposed. She delighted in hearing Erasmus and Luther discuss the question of free-will. She looked on at these passages at arms with the same satisfaction as others witnessed a tourney. In concert with a lady of influence, she dragged the king to St. Eustace, to hear a sermon by a whirlwind of a parson who preached peace and _sursum corda_. She was anxious to arrange at Paris a controversial meeting with Melanchthon, but the Faculty of Theology was not agreeable. The theologian really after her own heart was the amiable prelate Nicolas Dangu, who followed her everywhere like a perfect lover.

There was yet another man able to please her; a sort of magian, remarkable in spite of his wild notions, who carried feminine theology to the pitch of absurdity. This was Guillaume Postel, a workhouse foundling, a nobody, a village brat and then a lackey, half oriental, half Italian, though a Frenchman: a man of eminent learning and enlightened mind, the fine essence of eclecticism. He wrote in twelve languages on the most various subjects, in support of the most diversified theses. He advocated a universal monarchy which he offered to Francis I., and a universal religion, genuinely catholic and Roman, the papacy of which he reserved for himself. He based it upon the doctrine of infinite love (if need be, a somewhat sensual love), and upon an aesthetic philosophy which should solve all mysteries by applying the formula of the Beautiful. According to this religion, it was for women to regenerate the world; wherefore he salutes with ardent sympathy the Mothers of the Church whom he sees budding forth almost everywhere—More’s daughters in England; Isabella Rosera in Spain; in Portugal Loysa Sygea who at the age of twenty-two honoured Pope Paul III. with her advice in five little-known languages. Paul replied in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, but excused himself in regard to Chaldean and Arabic, and instructed Postel to take the pen.

Postel’s strange work[449] appeared after the death of Margaret of France, under the auspices of Margaret of Savoy. Postel announced the discovery of a new Eve, whom he extolled above all other women, even above Vittoria Colonna. She was an aged sorceress of Venice, endowed with second sight, who read through paper as if she had the Röntgen rays at her disposal. Unhappily the Venetians sent her about her business.

To sum up, the women believed and maintained that, in dealing with the people, the only language they understood must be employed—that of force; but that for the elect there was only one real weapon—the matchless one, liberty. The first of liberties is that of talking nonsense. It was needful, then, to be able to tolerate freedom in others, one’s own friends included.

The practical result of women’s intervention was in France insignificant enough.

The long-standing hostility of the French clergy to the court of Rome had burst out so glaringly in the reign of Louis XII., it displayed itself so vigorously in the more or less official dithyrambs of Andrelini, Villebresme, De Mailly, Gringoire, Jean d’Auton, Seyssel, against the “Roman profligacy,” that Leo X. became alarmed and very prudently abandoned in 1515 the real bone of contention, the right to dispose of benefices. From that moment the Church, fused with the State, became a national machine, and no philosophic argument could in future shake an organisation so solid. Luther gave wide application to the same system in secularising the property of the clergy. The ruck of men left the business of dealing with these religious questions to the higher powers; they held to their creed either out of a taste for ignorance or from scepticism; the learned were quite content to smile and call theology a “poesy”—like vine-growers who sell a certain doctored wine, but keep the genuine locked up in their cellars—the wine they alone are sure of because they cut the grapes.

Liberalism was supported, then, by only a few timid and affectionate voices, like that of Longueil, the friend of Bembo and Pole, who said in his _Letter to the Lutherans_: “I take no side in the struggle: a simple citizen of the Christian republic, neither gratitude, nor hate, nor ambition impels me to one side or the other.” Unhappily, it is not with lofty language like this that you can rouse a mob!

Is it necessary to recall what followed? It was at all points the reverse of what the feminists had hoped. “Our adversaries say of us,” wrote Calvin, “that we have begun a sort of Trojan war, on account of women, _mulierum causa_.” And in truth, as in the wars of the past, women had again become to a certain extent the gage of battle. Religion declared war on platonism, just as platonism had declared war on religious virginity; instead of draping women in inaccessibility, people contented themselves with making matrimony easier. That was a simple solution of the difficulty. And yet it took longer than might be supposed to get back to this solid ground of matter-of-fact. The first woman espoused by an Archbishop of Canterbury was obliged, it appears, to travel like an animal in a chest pierced with holes, so as to escape the buffooneries of the mob; the second went to court; but when Queen Elizabeth saw her she bit her lips: “What am I to call you? Madam I cannot, and Mistress I dare not.”

Catholicism, roused to action, henceforth asked for nothing except to condemn. It was a sudden drop from the ideal back again to earth, a dreadful battle of personalities, a life and death struggle with mythical or literal methods of exegesis for weapons. Erasmus was already writing: “These interpreters of the language of Heaven go off like gunpowder, they frown most terribly. What is Hütten to me? Shall I prefer the authority of Luther to that of the pope? If we had not received a pope from Christ, we should have to invent one.” “They scream and scuffle and insult one another,” sneers Des Périers, who no longer believed even in the existence of God. Blessed are the poor in spirit, concludes Agrippa; blessed are illiterate people like the apostles; blessed is the ass!

CONCLUSION

Nothing now remains but to relate the conclusion of the dream.

A dream indeed—all these schemes of happiness which had flashed across the gloomy background of realities like dissolving views on the wall of a lecture-room: the blue sea, the blazing sun, appearing but for a moment, left the blackness deeper still.

Margaret, the great organiser of happiness, never found the secret of happiness for herself. Her last days were vexed with the most poignant sorrows: the court, Calvin, the people, well-nigh the whole world, cast her off and treated her as a Utopian dreamer: her husband went the length of striking her, her daughter was torn from her, and Henri II. sent her into exile; several of her friends, such as Ramus and Dolet, were persecuted, alas! from motives far from sincere: it was, in truth, what she called “the suburbs of death.” By divine mercy her heart, incessantly a prey to anxieties, at length parted company with a life that was anything but love. She perished, poor duchess, at her post as charitable vendor of love—perished in flames, like the salamander! No man came to her aid, none even paused to mourn her. Three young English maidens named Seymour erected to her a frail monument of verse under the auspices of her niece; but save for one devoted friend, Sainte-Marthe, whose enthusiastic funeral oration nevertheless provoked the liveliest criticisms, men maintained a remarkable silence. The princess had greatly erred in scattering her affections and seeking to create a sociology of the heart. Men do not care for love, they wish to fear and obey! There is no true love but the love of an individual.

The Saint-Gelais, the Héroëts, the Salels, all those exquisite hearts bubbling over with sentiment when a smile from Margaret could lead them to fortune, now remained mute; the drum had to be set a-beating, and then at length there appeared a volume of elegies, a subtle fantasia in many tongues, which would have been cold as ice but for the vigorous beam Ronsard shot into the midst of the medley—a tiny volume, brilliant, ingenious, perverse, like the princess’s soul, full of pretty verses all alike—alike in expression, with the same silvery veneer of tenderness—the very image of the somewhat phantasmagoric and unreal romanticism in which some mystic women delighted: brightness, but no warmth or life. Yes, Margaret was too fond of these intense lights and shades. A thousand causeless murmurings woke echoes in her soul. She sustained herself upon the subtle aroma wafted on certain nights upon the breath of the quickening world. She never heard the full, resounding roar of the sea in the darkness, but was content to see the fringe of foam.

At the moment when Margaret disappeared, the power of women in France seemed at its apogee; in reality, it was on the wane. It was attacked more especially on the moral side. According to so-called Puritans like Agrippa, the influence of women resulted in the declension of morals; and what a declension! Everything converged towards the joys of the senses; painters could no longer paint anything but boudoir scenes, architects could only open doors or pierce balconies, husbands only speculate on the exploits of their wives, Luther only recommend the reading of stories (sometimes astonishing) from the Bible.

Unquestionably, feminine influences, even the purest, seemed soft and enervating. The energetic spirit of old France, of the time before Francis I., sprang suddenly to life again. A country gentleman, Du Bellay, sounded the charge against Roman cosmopolitanism by claiming France for the French. At one stroke, as J. M. de Heredia has said, his clear and picturesque style clean obliterated Marot, Saint-Gelais, and the whole of Margaret’s school. Du Bellay would have loved Savonarola: he speaks the same tongue as the friends of Anne of France; he has sworn implacable hatred against platonism with its cloying sweetness, against the languors of petrarchism: “He has not breathed in the ardour that sets Italy in flame.” Though he has seen Rome, decadent Rome, he has not caught her infection; it is she that he blames, and yet the “bashful squires,” the “exiles from joyance,” and other vulgar “fantasticals,” whom he flagellates and sends packing along with the Round Table, were very often French. He has in his veins the proud and lusty blood of a soldier. Like Anne of France he worships truth, and candour, and lucidity.

Ronsard too, of like blood and ancestry, advocates truth: “I love not the false, I love the true.” He overwhelms with his vigorous eloquence all sham loves, “Cupids with curled love-locks, but broken arrow”; all the platonic cant, so virtuous in show and so little virtuous in fact: and all these refinements, and hypocrisies, and conceits on twofold incorporeal love!

Aimer l’esprit, Madame, c’est aimer la sottise.[450]

The voices of these two men stirred up no little commotion among a large number of the lesser nobility or quasi-nobility, men of middling station, less sensible to high-falutin’ than to the spirit of frankness and independence—“gaillards,” as they styled themselves, who loved women as they loved “daylight and the sun,” but as men, by no means with an idea of “playing lackey to a mistress,” particularly one who was wrinkled, painted, or terribly accomplished.

De Junon sont vos bras, des grâces vostre sein, Vous avez de l’aurore et le front et la main, Mais vous avez le cœur d’une fière lionne.[451]

That was their type. And they laughed at the Vadiuses and Trissotins[452] of their day, at all the fine carollings that Du Bellay amused himself by imitating, forgotten tunes of long ago, the faded frippery of the ballroom. What merriment there is when a belated poet returns from Italy with another _Amadis_! Neither Olivier de Magny nor Baïf will take the moon for the sun, or love for a mere ornamentation.

The men of the Pléiade had no love for patronage or the Medici species. They hated and abhorred the Jews. Ronsard would have liked to see a fine St. Bartholomew butchery of them, and could not forgive Titus for wasting his chances: his gorge rises at the thought of a Leo the Hebrew[453] figuring among the sages of platonism. Good decent fellows, they drape themselves in their somewhat rustic free-and-easiness. From their modest snuggeries they proudly tell the king “Nature has made us of the same flesh and blood as you”;[454] they do not hesitate to write to a Medici lady that the finest royalty is to be “king of oneself.”[455] They vie with one another in launching their epigrams against the court, the salons, the ruling women;[456] they sing of woods and dales, even of the wild untrammelled life—

O bienheureux le siècle où le peuple sauvage Vivoit, par les forêts, de gland et de fruitage.[457]

—_Ronsard._

They sing praise to Nature their mother, not an abstraction, an infinity, but immeasurable:[458] the lines of the horizon, it would seem, spring from their hearts, and like an outspread fan gather up the whole immensity of life. How remote this from the gardens of philosophy ordered so delicately, with their shimmering fountains, their shivering Venuses![459]

When under a clear Roman sky Du Bellay is sauntering in pleasant indolence amid all the pomp and luxury of cultured prelates, enjoying the serene life of country villas; when, as a background to the picture, behind carriages and laurels, fashionable women and noble statues, he sees flushed in a golden haze the forest of towers, and pediments, and obelisks, and St. Peter’s in all its majesty, the glory of the world, what does his heart say to him?

Quand reverray-je, hélas! de mon petit village Fumer la cheminée?[460]

Such was the sentiment of the Pléiade.

Social philosophy had changed all at once. People were weary of the idea of the beautiful, and henceforth the wind was to set towards scepticism: no longer an airy, Ciceronian, superficial scepticism, the scepticism of Cardan, or of Erasmus, the jabberer of Latin, the flouter of monks, often madder than the madmen he derides, but a masculine aggressive scepticism, which believes in nothing in this world, not even in love, and is incredulous about the other world and the immortality of the soul. Yet it feels an “impression” of the unseen: deprived of an ideal for this life, it must willy-nilly suppose another apart from mortal men, and thus yearningly, gropingly, unawares, it takes a step towards Christ.

And then those who are still reasoning in this untoward generation laugh or weep. What a harsh harrowing laugh is that of Boistuau,[461] who had nevertheless been a friend of Margaret! Boistuau speaks to us of love, and tells us that it is a distressing malady of the mind, characterised by symptoms of agitation and disorder, and exhausting all its energies, physical and moral. You hear those attacked by it groaning and dropping words like “coral, alabaster, roses, lilies”; they have lost all individuality; they sob and abase themselves and are a continual supplication. The cause of the malady is obscure; some speak of magnetism, others of microbes, others of the influence of the stars.

It was this kind of scepticism which was destined to lead us to the morality of Charles IX.’s court.

Then it was seen how fatal had been the disease of sensibility, and the profound soul-weariness which resulted from imaginative pleasures, from the mirage which overlay the things of life since women had undertaken to interpret everything through the affections. It had been a woful error to create an art of sensibility! Sensibility serves to attract men, but cannot hold or guide them. Women believe in sensibility because they always consider the heart of a man as a reservoir of moral strength. It is the other way about; men for the most part err through weakness; it is that which renders them inconstant and vicious. They would gain in steadfastness and goodness if women, less timid and more active, had strength rather than tenacity, and a real energy under an appearance of tenderness.

An attempt was made, but too late, to show that the feminist spirit could display energy as well as tenderness.

A certain Almanque Papillon[462] proposed a new formula of love, more robust than platonism, and bound, as he thought, to render men truly “virtuous and not effeminate.” François Billon, one of the royal secretaries, wandering one evening amid the ruins of Rome, felt the touch of grace within himself. He dreamed of writing a book entitled _The Impregnable Fortress of the Female Sex_. He descried and saluted among the shadows a number of vigorous women—Catherine de’ Medici and Jeanne d’Albret, more valorous than any man; Mesdames de Berry and de Nevers, surpassingly witty; Anne d’Este, duchess of Guise, the eloquence of fleshly beauty. Billon made his book, but not his fortune. Under the Valois, many women were not anxious to be too well defended.

Ronsard and Du Bellay triumphed, then: and yet, to all appearance, their triumph troubled them; they hankered after ideas they had gone about to destroy; they mistrusted themselves, their friends, their principles. Ronsard had an admirable genius, but he hesitated between an attempt to satisfy the popular naturalism with the crudities so much in request, and an instinctive thirst for an aristocratic spiritualism. He followed rather than led the movement; both he and Du Bellay, in spite of their robust breezy energies, remained more sensitive than they cared to acknowledge to the charm of classical art and the graciousness of the salons.

Further, an eminent woman kept a tight rein on the Pléiade, and showed them that graciousness was not necessarily tameness, that there were women’s hearts at once ardent and strong, that it is possible to retain practical views of life while “rising wholly towards spiritual things.” This woman was the niece and goddaughter of Margaret of France, her spiritual daughter and the faithful guardian of her fame—the second Margaret of France, duchess of Berry and afterwards duchess of Savoy.

She pursued a totally different method from her aunt. She abandoned philosophy, intuitions, mystic professions of faith: instead of wearing black she dressed fashionably, tricking herself out with jewels and brightly-coloured materials: thus (pardon the detail) she used handkerchiefs of crimson silk: that formed part of her psychology. Her household was maintained on a very princely scale, and directed by the solemn Madame de Brissac, who never shifted her quarters without taking with her a huge pile of dresses and especially a terribly big bed, which alone required several mules to carry it; the moment the destination was reached, Madame de Brissac’s bed had to be set up with infinite precautions, as though it were a shrine. One can guess how the treasurer, among many other people, grumbled; but the princess was so kind!

With this system of simplified morals and external complexity, Margaret of Savoy exercised extraordinary fascination over men’s affections. She had adopted as emblem an olive branch guarded by serpents, with the motto, “_Sagesse, gardienne des choses!_” She resembled, as a poet tells us, “a rose-bud, nourished on celestial dew,” and received the nickname of Pallas. She was just the woman to govern vigorous men: a woman of taste and intelligence, who had a passion for winning love, but with much breadth and dignity, and without recourse to the spiritual and material experiments of her aunt. Her secret she had not gone far to seek, but had found simply in her woman’s heart; her Machiavelism consisted in a kindliness carried to perfection, intelligent, active, ingenious—a refined good-heartedness, which embraced both rich and poor. Des Périers himself could not refrain from speaking of it in a tone of respect and sympathy quite unusual in him; Brantôme has painted the princess in one magnificent phrase: “She was _the_ goodness of the world.”

And we must not forget that life had not spared her hard lessons. The poor woman’s greatest ambition was to root and ground herself in the family affections, and these affections had been torn from her one by one with her heart’s blood. Her father Francis I. had as little to do with her as possible, indeed, but scantily appreciated her. She lost her brother Charles miserably enough; at that period it was not the custom to care for life’s halt and maimed, yet Margaret sedulously watched over servants who were out of employment. Her heart was wrapped up in her sister Madeleine. Madeleine coveted a crown; she went to Scotland, and six months afterwards came news of her death. Margaret was so grievously stricken that she remained in utter prostration, and it was doubtful for some time whether her health would recover from the shock. Her aunt Margaret had to intervene to insist on her taking care of herself, and going for long morning walks in the park of Fontainebleau.

Thus, instead of “devouring her heart,” in the forcible phrase of Pythagoras, this noble princess made existence a song of grave and warm passion, not a song of love.

Her disappointments were no fewer, it is true, since it is a natural law for the heart to be deceived in its hopes, like the reason; but she found less bitterness and more grief; the wholesome contact with real suffering, in bringing out the true power of sympathy, saved her from social and intellectual extravagances, and bred in her that perfection of tenderness which no one could resist; for the world itself loves to be treated seriously.

The passion Du Bellay felt for her in no way resembles either the flowery sentimentalism to which princesses had till then been accustomed, or the coarse freedom of Marot’s school: it was a constant, sincere, and lasting passion. On returning from Italy, he exclaims with the same emotion as at his departure:

Alors, je m’aperçus qu’ignorant son mérite, J’avois, sans la connoistre, admiré Marguerite, Comme, sans les connoistre, on admire les cieux.[463]

And these are not mere idle words. Many years afterwards, when it came to Margaret’s turn to leave her country, the poor poet, struck, no doubt, with presentiments of an imminent death, shed real tears, “the truest tears that e’er I shed.”

The great sense of truth and constancy that Margaret carried into the concerns of the heart she applied also to the concerns of the mind. She showed, like Anne of France, how women were slandered, how they slandered themselves when they fancied they were incapable of a genuine effort; instead of pouring out a stream of conversation and writings like her aunt, and of trusting to her impressionability merely, she applied herself with all the force of a fine intellectual health to the most rigorous tasks involved in the discipline of truth. Many scholars by profession would not have pushed solicitude for the niceties of truth so far. She got her reader, for instance, to buy for her at Paris three different editions of Cicero’s _Offices_; she read Aristotle’s _Ethics_ simultaneously in Greek and in a Latin translation; she collated six commentaries on Horace.

Although entirely French—she was much more French than her aunt—she set herself to stem the somewhat too violent tide of reaction setting in against Italy. Like Louis XII. before her, she thought there was much in Italy and the classics that was worth adopting; while she read Aristotle she proclaimed Urbino the “school of knowledge,” and Du Bellay had to draw in his horns and, under her gentle guidance, acknowledge the charm which he did not feel spontaneously. He not only translated Bembo and Naugerius,[464] but went so far as to agree that time would never extinguish the fame of Boccaccio, and that the laurels of Petrarch would remain for ever green.

She did more (for the words “art” and “patriotism” cloaked in reality questions infinitely smaller, and larger—questions of personal jealousies); she had the courage to keep by her side an Italian, Baccio del Bene, an enthusiastic worshipper of the “pearl of the West,” who declared he had been saved by her bright eyes, “his stars,” from the direst of shipwrecks. Ronsard undertook, against wind and tide and his own convictions, to rehabilitate this relic of the past, and to proclaim that Del Bene was the only Italian for two centuries who was worth consideration.

Margaret long remained the tutelary “virgin,” the spirited “unbacked colt,” running where frolic fancy led her, unfretted by the “spurs of love.” Whatever the inevitable malignity of mankind may have said, she was a perfect type of platonism, basking in her many warm friendships with men, and in no hurry to be married. Too much attached to France to go far away, too thoroughly a princess to wed one of her brother’s subjects, she fixed her choice on the heir of Savoy. On one occasion she did not hesitate to accompany her aunt to Nice and present herself in person, in defiance of the elementary rules of etiquette; but as politics, the bane of sentimental princesses, threw obstacles in the way, she possessed her soul in patience, and waited twenty-one years. She was married in 1559.

The king of France ordered a magnificent trousseau, an exact copy of that of Madame de Lorraine—gold-embroidered dresses, laces, jewels; he chose for the bridal dress a robe of yellow satin with bodice embroidered in gold, a regal mantle trimmed with lace a foot wide, an evening cloak in silver cloth, lined with lynx fur. He commanded splendid entertainments. Everyone knows what followed—Henri II. mortally wounded in the official tournament; this long-desired marriage consecrated at midnight beside a bed of anguish. Here truly was something to amaze and strike with awe. Anyone with a touch of superstition would have attributed to the princess the evil eye.

They knew better, to be sure.

If she was loved, it was because she had the very uncommon talent of loving her friends.

No sooner was she in Piedmont than she seemed to have thoughts only for them. She wrote to Catherine de’ Medici commending Ronsard to her notice, and the poet, much moved, hastened to reply with a noble apostrophe to the royal house of France, “happy and fruitful ... mother of such a line of kings.”

From time immemorial France and Piedmont had played in the world the somewhat ungrateful part of quarrelsome lovers. Margaret, like a true woman, patched up this quarrel; while she lived there was no open rupture. Still more, every Frenchman who visited Turin was conscious of being anticipated by a gentle and invisible protecting hand. Presented to the duchess, often lodged and entertained at her cost, he would receive in addition, anonymously, a purse to defray his travelling expenses.

France did not, therefore, lose Margaret altogether; but she planted in Savoy the sweetness of Urbino with the sparkling brilliance of her own land. At the gates of Geneva she caused the most perfect religious peace to flourish; it was there that Francis de Sales was born. Without flinging heart and mind piecemeal to the winds, like her aunt, we see her in a corner of that violent 16th century, a radiant centre of kindliness and spiritual illumination, surrounded by testimonies of gratitude as by a modest and glorious retinue. She often received thanks at that supreme moment when all men speak the truth. In his last hour Du Bellay wept for her; an ambassador of France at Constantinople left her his fortune; L’Hôpital declared in his will that to her he owed his whole career. She herself on her deathbed heaved, so to speak, the last breath of the feminist spirit.

Il ne restoit rien d’entier de la France, De pur, de saint, d’une antique bonté, Que Marguerite, humaine déité.[465]

And now what more is to be said? The hateful orgies of the 16th century were unchained! Here and there in the turmoil some few feeble shoots of platonism continued to appear[466] under the form of preciosity or literary feminism, till we come to the hôtel de Rambouillet.[467] Women of energy and activity were still seen. But fate willed that the 17th century, magnificent, wholly masculine,[468] should be ushered in with terrible convulsions. It was a momentous and appalling epoch, and bore out the prediction of the _Heptameron_: “The best things are those from which, when abused, result the worst ills.”[469] What a spectacle is the court of the Valois![470]—all these sly, knowing women, talking in a way to make the shades of their grandmothers blush, running after men who wish them further! How little the third Margaret of France, the first wife of Henri IV., resembles her earlier namesakes! She was as highly gifted, prettier, as accomplished, as witty, as fascinating, as noble, as thoroughly a princess—so princely indeed that she thought herself quite entitled to love gipsies and let prejudices go hang! Fair as a lily, too, polished, wonderfully polished, bathed and perfumed! All she saw was that platonic love had broken down, and of the other love she said: “Nothing could be so sweet, if it were not so short.”

Even in Spain platonism perished, or rather it winged its flight towards God with zest and ardour, often worthy of the Song of Songs:[471] “A love redeemed from all terrestrial things, and having only God for its object,” exclaims St. Theresa, “is like an arrow shot by man’s will towards his God with all the force of which he is capable.” Or else it was flung out of window. When the cook and the niece of Don Quixote make a bonfire of the _Amadis_ romances and other illustrious annals of pure love and valiant exploits, the good Spanish curate, who assists at the auto-da-fé, momentarily hesitates before a volume bearing the name of Ariosto. He opens it, to burn it if it is a Spanish translation, to kiss it if it is the Italian text. O relic of old Spain! O son of the Cid!

In Italy the crisis could not take a tragic development, as in Germany, but men felt the need of returning to anonymity, to placid affection, to love without any twaddle. “The learned are so mad after love,” writes Nelli, “they have so pounded and minced and dissected it, that it is altered out of all knowing.” Petrarch was blasphemed: everyone was eager to revile him as a flashy rhetorician, to sneer at his so-called purity. They declared that they preferred to the sighs of love-sick princesses and the sentimental romances, the bold, frank love of a coster-wench.

Farewell to the dream! It dissolved in a religious crisis. Rome herself recovered from her intoxication, and no longer existed as the nursery of sentimental philosophy and the liberal-minded instructress of mankind.

La paix et le bon temps ne règnent plus icy; La musique et le bal sont contraints de s’y taire.[472]

Attacked, Catholicism had stood to the defence in the armour of authority. It was fighting for life, and was bent only on self-discipline and purification. One good soul devoted himself to the task of spiritualising the writings of Bembo.

The tender imaginings of art disappeared. The time was coming for art itself to return to scenes of domestic commonplace, as in Holland, or of pure reason, as in France. The sole impression Brantôme received as he viewed the Coliseum was that its ruined condition was most strikingly apparent at the top—as was seen also with women.

The mortification would have been less acute if people had not really expected to find happiness, and if they had begun by looking painful realities square in the face as they did afterwards. The 17th century left philosophy to the philosophers; it believed in suffering as a gift of God: Pascal coldly investigated only the secret of the anxieties which hold us by the throat; and so that admirable time of vigorous action and patient endurance led us to philosophy.

Platonist tenderness resulted in nihilism. And then how sad a spectacle was the spiritual Sahara! And how well men understood, as soon as women had disappeared, that they were right in believing them necessary! Our great Montaigne, who arises at this moment, is a splendid eulogist of the cold and colourless in life. He is the perfect son of this respectable land of France, where wisdom consists in settling down in a benevolent neutrality, without hating, and without loving: life being such, without restraints, without illusions, nothing is left, surely, but to die.

Montaigne, in his cool, common-sense way, delights in making mincemeat of everything that has given women faith and enthusiasm and an object in life.

The heart! what a dangerous organ, essentially a thing to keep under restraint! Better forgive a folly than a victory!

Love! After having distilled out its quintessence, after having discovered “three, four, or five degrees of superior things” external to ourselves capable of producing it, is it not found that wisdom lies in looking after one’s own interests, in loving as little as possible, in loving one’s children perhaps, but even then with sufficient tranquillity “to live comfortably after their loss”?

Goodness!—that does not exist in the pure state, but contains always some taint of corruption, a savour of mortality, which Plato should have discerned: “Man is but patchwork and motley.”

The quest for the Beautiful! How conventional! Let us hear no more of Bembo or Equicola! “When I write, I do very well without the company and the stay of books!”

Fame! A mere bubble, at the mercy of every puff of wind, dissolving under our own eyes, ere we reach the grave! Fame!—for books or ideas which are fated to disappear as everything has disappeared!—a name which changes and will pass to others!

The charm of original thought! Ah! the ridiculous pretension of wishing to transcend the current opinions, the common sense of one’s fellows, and to fancy oneself “capable of all things.” It is on this head that we must hear Montaigne; he has no more illusions about the mind than about the heart: he warms up, and celebrates in Shakespearian accents the immensity of the human void.

And is he wrong when he tells us that we are our own deceivers?—that we are unwilling to confess our ignorance lest we scare our children? “Overmuch knowledge is harmful, as in virtue. Keep in all points to the common highway: ’tis not good to be so subtle and nice.... Shun all novelty and oddity.... All extravagant ways vex me.... In my time, those who have some rare excellence beyond others, and some extraordinary sprightliness of mind, we see as it were overflowing into license in opinion and morals.... We are right to set upon the human mind the rigidest barriers we can.”[473]

The traitor! How he laughs at himself and his friends! At bottom he is a son of women[474] and of love, but he has lost women and love. The shallow epicurism with which his doctrine may be reproached is also the weak side of feminism, which had already shown us the madness and error of the idea of saddling the few years we have to spend on earth with fatigue, tribulation, vanities. And yet, while inheriting this need for living the easy impressionist life, Montaigne revolts with characteristic feeling and vigour against women, because he belongs to a disillusioned generation which feels constrained to wreak personal vengeance against those who had been confounding the religion of beauty with the religion of happiness. Religion consists in resignation to unhappiness, while beauty and happiness are in truth somewhat loosely connected. The keeper of a museum who spends his life among masterpieces will acknowledge, if you put it to him, that one can be very unhappy there. Further, perched in his rustic turret, between his few books and a large farmyard, Montaigne is one of those peaceable and self-satisfied country folk who have not succeeded in understanding what all the pother is about, or how women could ever pass for priests or physicians. He considers them as objects serviceable, even necessary, to men, but socially speaking he chants their _De Profundis_.

His bile is moved at the sight of the grand duchess taking the head of the table in the ducal palace at Florence. What a rage he flies into! “She has wheedled the prince”; is it by “her pleasant and commanding features,” or her beautiful bosom? Don’t talk to him of the ideal. Take a peep into this dressing-room—rouge-pots, false teeth, second-hand lures, perfumes like musk derived from the “discharge of animals,” and all the rest: this is the ideal, forsooth, you think of making the axis of life! To him (the phrase will serve, it is homely but exact) platonism is the art of palming off paste for diamonds.

Yet the same scoffer Montaigne has for aide-de-camp a simple maiden, Mademoiselle de Gournay; and, after all, his whole system comes to this—that we should do well to be women, nay children; and that the best thing for us would be to live like the bird on the bough, with no other care than the due round of the seasons.

But no: this is an impossibility! There are no seasons for us, we have no right to expect seasons! or rather, we have only a summer,—life; only a winter,—death! And this winter lies hungrily in wait for us! It comes to this—that the science of life is the science of death! “The continual work of our life is to build up death.” Since there is neither beauty nor love, in other words no life, we are but animated corpses: our life plunges into the stream of death, emerges, and disappears again; we live on death as a tulip lives in its water, or corn in its refuse. Then, like the tulip and the corn, we go through the inverse process: “Your death is part of the order of the universe, a piece of the life of the world.” From your disintegrated flesh the vital energy will spring up and pass into the larva, into the sap of plants, to die yet again and nourish afresh the butterfly or the bird or the ox, continuing thus its endless transmigrations. Without hailing death as it passes, like the mystics, Montaigne is continually brooding upon it, and holds it “in particular affection,” since that is the only sure conclusion and all the rest is chimera. Wherever he goes, a grinning spectre seems to go before to show him the way. Of what account are the fashionable quintessences beside the clear and insistent spectacle of a bed “surrounded by physicians and parsons, by creatures all mazed and quaking, by pale-faced lackeys ... and the room without daylight, the candles lit!” It is just that! And “the leap to be made with lowered head and dazed brain ... into a depth of silence and obscurity!” Yes, that is death, as said (merely adding a word of immortality and hope) those humble monks of the early days of the century, so violently excluded from philosophic religion; men had stopped up their ears so as not to hear them, and yet now return soberly to their scheme of morality, which grips one round like a ring of iron! What does Ménot say?—

“We die all of us, and like water sink into the earth and return no more to the surface. Yea, Lord, we all step on towards death. The water of the Loire ceases not to flow, but is it the water of yestereve that passes under the bridge to-day? The folk who to-day dwell in this town were not here a hundred years ago. Now, I am here; next year you will have another preacher. Where is king Louis, but late so dread a monarch, and king Charles, who in the flower of his youth set Italy aquake? Alas! the earth has already rotted his corpse. Where are all these damsels of whom we have heard so much? Have you not the Romance of the Rose, and Melusina, and many another far-famed beauty? Behold, we all die, and like the water we enter into the earth, to return no more for ever.”

Montaigne is right. Whether we like it or not, we have to live in contact with the enemy, that is, with reality. Only, is it absolutely necessary to look at reality so mistrustfully, and to ask of it but gloomy impressions? All the enemies of faith maintain that faith cannot but be sombre and melancholy; in making itself pleasant and speaking of a God of Love, religion, it seems, would lie and do them wrong, would trench on their domain, would go beyond its part, which consists in expiation and sacrifice. Material joy—that is their creed; and at the same time they believe it is a great mistake to wish to rule the world by love; men are not held by spiritual systems; you buy them, crush them, oppress and coerce them.

Nevertheless, all was not false in the delicious dream of prelates, women, platonists. Pure love is too exquisite a thing ever to exist in this world. But it is the business of women to strive towards it, and to show that we have need of it. The idea of dividing the world, of leaving bodies to men and souls to women, had something to be said in its favour. Men are sometimes too philosophical, women never philosophical enough.

The convulsions which broke out every time men wished to turn the tables on women, in the 16th century, and in the 18th, are not sufficient to convince us that the unmitigated employment of force is the ideal of politics. What human being is there, even with all the sentiment crushed out of him, who does not feel an unquenchable thirst for happiness! Nations also feel this thirst. No, it cannot be said that the need of happiness is but an empty dream: it is a real need, sincere, imperious, natural, a moral and physical need which takes entire possession of us, in which all things are summed up—this need in which we live and die.

We live and die in it! We should have to remain always children, or strangely to shut our eyes, not to see falling around us the victims of life’s ironies, felled by Montaigne’s philosophy as surely, as clearly, as by a dagger-thrust.

A proverb says that one does not die of love: perhaps; but what we know with absolute certainty, what stares us everywhere in the face in letters of fire and blood, is that one dies of the absence of love, one dies of inanition.

Hence it will always be necessary to ascend to the source of life, to fix ourselves firmly at the fountain-head: in other words, to nourish ourselves on beauty. Philosophically, “beauty” and “life” are synonymous terms; so we have already said, and we shall not cease to revert to this thought, because it appears to us clear and salutary. All the possible definitions of beauty apply also to life; life and beauty are one and the same thing.

Beauty and life generate love and are themselves born of love, so that love does no more than forge links in the immeasurable chain of life and beauty. And what men call happiness is the perfect joy of life.

Why did they fail in their schemes of love and peace—these timid women of the 16th century, who had all that was necessary for success—a heart, boundless, bottomless ocean of kindliness; an admirable intelligence; and in many cases knowledge, beauty, wealth? They lacked the courage to be themselves; they were wanting in passion. Instead of taking their rightful place they fell back into obedience,—half-hearted dilettanti, caught in their own snares. Why?

Medieval Christianity was not hostile to the idea of the beautiful, but it had unduly neglected it, for the purely scholastic and traditional reason that, strictly speaking, no theory of the beautiful is to be found in the Gospels.

No, you will not find a theory of the beautiful there. But the Renaissance unquestionably was right in saying that you find assurances of life. And how many assurances of love? Christianity is of hope and love all compact. Love speaks on every page of its early lessons, and at every moment of its history. The Magdalene, St. Augustine, and many another—have they not marked stages on the road to heaven? St. Francis of Sales, Fénelon—were they not yet to cheer by affection the victims of pure reason?

The Renaissance, then, accomplished a very great advance when, with Plato’s aid, it instituted the religion of beauty, and in this respect we certainly cannot reproach the platonists of the 16th century with having followed a wrong bent. They were right to believe that happiness and peace can only be effectually secured if men can be induced to turn their eyes towards the beautiful, to adopt beauty as the beacon of their lives, to believe through love, act through love, live through love. That, in truth, is the common substance underlying both Christianity and platonism.

But how then are we to explain the phenomenon we have noted?

Plato, so far as theory and literary style are concerned, is admirable; why does his teaching end in negative results whenever it is enforced? Why could he himself deduce from it only a sociology embroidered with Utopian dreams? Why are those who live familiarly with him and upon him tortured by the consciousness of the emptiness of things, as was seen in the 16th century, and as we may see still?

The platonism of the Renaissance had a strange fate. It found a society in the plenitude of vigour, and save for a few elect souls it left it dead. As a philosophy, it resulted in perfect scepticism; as a social panacea, in the wars of religion. It slew art, it slew literature through the idea of seeking beauty in itself, in other words, by academism, by art for art’s sake: the aesthetic Utopia alongside of the philosophic Utopia! Still further, in place of the exquisite, enthusiastic, ardent, adorable women who were the queens of the world, it gave us, as time went on, women without energy, without activity, case-hardened with the idea of a selfish happiness; it left behind it a progeny of coquettes, _précieuses_, or else of Delilahs and sensual women. The woman of vigorous and irradiant affection, the woman who used to shed life and happiness around her, has disappeared. And, finally, we observe that at the very moment of Plato’s greatest glory, few women steadfastly pursued the path of happiness: with some, goodness had disappeared in feebleness, with others intelligence had evaporated in reasoning. They ought to have saved us from sensualism and metaphysics, and they ran aground on both reefs. How bitterly they have been reproached! We have done them the high honour of throwing upon them and their ideas the blame of all our calamities, as though they were exclusively at fault. As if it would not have been allowable, after all, to combine common sense with the spirit of kindliness and love!

If there were, then as always, silly women, profligate women, insatiate cormorants, why take platonism to task, why blame women alone?

Certain personages of that time, and some of the most notable, refused to admit any division of responsibility. To them, all that had happened was bound to happen; the origin was patent, the year 1515; when women of high rank, admitted to court, determined to devote themselves personally to the apostolic mission of love, all France took the cue, so that the idea of love, which issued to begin with from a source insufficiently philosophic, as it flowed downwards gained nothing and became no purer. It is very curious to find this line of argument proceeding from Brantôme’s pen; he is not generally a preacher of virtue, and has indeed enunciated this eminently courtier-like maxim: “The cast-offs of great kings could not but be excellent.” According to Brantôme and his friends, men had undergone an irresistible infatuation for which they were not to be blamed: thus, he says, no one would regard Francis I. as a Heliogabalus or accuse him of having employed violence: he was a victim. All men are victims. It is very true that the frightful demoralisation of the 16th century sprang from the court, which set the example and persistently dragged the nation after it. But we shall be permitted to think that Francis I. and the other victims among his circle, without being Heliogabaluses, were not anchorites either; which is capable of demonstration. In any case, it seems to us very difficult to characterise the doings of the court as platonic: platonism, on the contrary, was a barrier, and the only reproach we can bring against it is that it was often leaped.

But the real question is not to know whether there were women of average or cheap virtue at the court of France, and whether they gave the tone to others. We want to know whether women like Anne of France, Vittoria Colonna, Margaret of France, Margaret of Savoy, and their likes were wrong to strive after high ideals, and whether they did what was necessary to succeed. This question is much more delicate than the first, because it really touches platonism and shows how it came to grief.

Women can be reclaimed from sensualism; their necessarily refined feelings, the passive part they play, the disparity between the advantage and the disadvantage, conduce easily to disgust. But they never revert from mysticism to love. The Gospels mention no Jewesses converted by mysticism, whilst the Magdalene, the Woman of Samaria, the Woman taken in Adultery, see Heaven’s light while in the full flush of sensualism. Men, on the contrary, often get the better of mysticism, because their instincts scarcely lie that way, and moreover the throng and press of realities only too easily brings them down to earth.

Now, Plato, even when rendered practical by the theory of two loves, which sanctioned curious concessions, represented the algebra of the beautiful; but you cannot make algebra your daily bread.

Women of the highest distinction, and especially those we have named, lived with Plato as it were in a balloon: there was no more actual communication with the world, no more really practical energy, no more heat and flame! The rope was cut; they were adrift in the clear and rarefied atmosphere of an altitude of thousands of feet. What an illusion, and how disastrous! Instead of elevating the world, this was the very means of abandoning it to itself. How many strange visions this dizzy height brought before their eyes!

First, the idea of living face to face with the absolute, and of importing the absolute into life—pride of thought of the vainest kind! To adopt St. Augustine’s figure, you might as well shut up the ocean in a hole in the sand! As De Musset said: “My glass is small, but from my glass I drink.” The realms of space do not furnish a substantial love, and it is vexatious enough to leave that love grovelling on the earth.

Secondly, along with this supramundane mysticism, platonism developed the exclusive contemplation of self, another deplorable mistake. We live in virtue of a continual exchange, as physiological and moral laws equally prove. God alone can rejoice in perfect independence of life and happiness; the condition of us men is to be happy through give and take; we have to receive everything, but also to give everything. To search for happiness within oneself allows no room for enthusiasm or an enlarged current of life, nor, consequently, for life itself: one withers up like a tree which should forbid its roots to imbibe moisture from the soil, its branches to breathe.

The poor dear women, once isolated in the boundless tracts of their imagination, became giddy, fell a prey to needless torments, lost the precious gift of simplicity, which was so natural to them in their capacity as great ladies—that excellent and wise simplicity of mind which assigns us our place in the vast sequence of things, according to the will of God. They hovered too far out of touch with realities, they generalised, wished to grasp too much, they grew restless and uneasy, which rendered them a prey to intriguers: their sensibility had no ballast. To influence humanity, they had first to influence the human beings they had at hand. So long as their mission remained individual, private, concrete, intimate, it produced satisfactory results. How many men did they carry up with them into the heights! But when they wanted to act upon mankind at large, the game was up. Trying to influence everybody, they ended by influencing nobody. Thus Vittoria Colonna gave to her beloved Michelangelo forces which he turned to admirable account; but in her abstract efforts towards public regeneration she completely failed.

Let us add that Frenchwomen had a much more difficult mission to fulfil than the Italian women. Spell-bound by the example of Italy, they fancied that what had succeeded there was sure to succeed here, and they did not even see (so great was their taste for blind imitation) that they were behind the fair, that they were importing among us the imitation of a decadent art, the imitation of an imitation, a counterfeit love, a counterfeit curiosity, a counterfeit scheme of life. What they should have done was to inspire robust activities, to cause, no matter whence or how, a gush of ideas beautiful, striking, original, soul-stirring; instead, they refined and subtilised and complicated, they wasted their ingenuity in seeking to discover which was the more aesthetic, poetry or painting; complication seemed to them to be art, and not the apprentice stage of art: they never attained that noble logic which is art itself. Truly strong souls know well that you cannot nourish the world on sweetstuffs merely, that a decided will is needed in life, and that the beautiful becomes one with the true when truth has all its potency. Happy are those who skilfully draw love from truth!—the ploughman who loves his furrow, the poor man who loves his poverty, the maiden who loves her purity! We find among women many valiant souls of the stamp of Anne of France, able thus to lay hold of life. As to those who allow themselves to be led astray by the obsession of an abstract and too lofty ideal, they die.

Platonism, then, marked a great advance towards the idea of beauty, but it did not accomplish any striking progress towards the idea of happiness, and Nifo was not far wrong in predicting that the doctrine of two loves, the one celestial, immaterial, good, and desirable, the other terrestrial and carnal, would result in mere negation, by setting men between impossible alternatives—a colloquy of angels, or, as M. France says, a colloquy of chimpanzees. We may regret our condition, but how escape from it? Natural law (that is, divine law) bids us disdain none of the gifts of God, but to obtain from each its particular beauty. Happiness consists really in loving what we have round about us, in appropriating therefrom all that is beautiful and congenial, and in affectionately conforming to Nature without coercing her, so as to nourish ourselves upon her spiritual and physical forces, and to assimilate her warmth and energy and her universal harmony.

In our own day John Ruskin has been one of the apostles of happiness under this aspect, and though his doctrine may be difficult to define, he has unquestionably carried the idea of platonism a stage further, in harmony with the saying of Plato which we have already quoted: “Those who know have impressions.”

The impressions on which he lived were often inconsistent, and still more often nebulous, one might almost say musical. He has been taunted with his apparent lack of logic, though the glitter of his thought by its very brilliance often conceals a logic that is sufficiently real. But, after all, he has unduly neglected the spiritual side of Nature, in particular the human soul. While we cannot shut our eyes to the existence of the body and the utility of earthly possessions, it is at the same time good and necessary for happiness to keep the body and material well-being on the lower plane. The body is essentially localised, wealth is limited, and, for both, giving spells exhaustion; only the soul can spend itself unceasingly, and grow the richer thereby. And thus social happiness results, so to speak, from the socialism of souls.

Ruskin belongs to the old Venetian school, materialistic, and pagan; his heart has echoed to physical harmonies, and to him a certain material socialism would not have been unpleasing. Yet he has well shown what we ought to feel in our communion with Nature, he has glorified the worship of beauty and happiness, which consists in guessing at God, in seeing Him, in acclaiming Him in the beauty of mountains as in the beauty of a heart overflowing with tenderness and love, in all that is beautiful, and beautiful for us. His essential idea is that everything around us produces an impression upon us, and that we ourselves have a duty to our environment. Gardens are no longer a mere setting of life, they are alive. Ruskin goes so far as to extol the idea of sacrificing ourselves for posterity—to plant forests under whose shade our descendants may live, to build cities in which future nations will be able to dwell.

It is a far cry from these undulatory but noble theories to the egoistic enjoyment of oneself; yet it is very certain that to carry them into practice in reasonable measure is the way to find happiness.

That is essentially the moral system which women ought to teach—women born for impressions, for devotion, generosity, the higher life.

Unhappily, Ruskin, little conversant with love and altogether unacquainted with the domestic affections, never showed in his own life a really high appreciation of women’s rôle, nor has he less misconstrued it from the theoretical standpoint. Apart from some sonorous phrases in which he recommends them to be queens, but in submission to their husbands, or to practise good social economy in relation to their dressmakers, it may be said that he did not understand the charm of women, and that he felt no attraction for their particular beauty. When he speaks of beauty, whether in regard to modern painters or to the Greeks, it is always in general terms, without indicating in any way whether the feminine expression of the beautiful has for him a special signification. In his enthusiasm for the aesthetics of the Middle Ages he even admires masculine beauty above all: his type in that case is the beauty of a stalwart knight.

M. Bourget, for example, has more clearly conceived and accurately interpreted the necessity of harmony with Nature; his sensations or sentiments approximate to the philosophy of the Renaissance, and reflect the spirit of penetrating sweetness which women had undertaken to develop.

“The sincere acceptance of the inevitable,” he says, “supposes a love for the inevitable, the consciousness, and not merely the idea, that this obscure universe has a mysterious and kindly signification. In the depths of our sensibility there exists an indestructible craving that this world shall contain something wherewith to satisfy our heart, since this heart is the world’s own child; and the pure and guileless men whose ever young and tender spirits speak to us across the ages—Francis of Assisi, Savonarola, those who believed in this bountiful kindness of the universe, as they breathed, as they lived, with the whole of their being—these appear to us in a state of unanswerable protest against the nihilism with which we are stifled. They become the accomplices in us of a faith which is hardly conscious of itself, and sometimes seeks its way with tears. ‘Thou wouldst not seek me,’ says the Saviour in the beautiful _Mystery of Jesus_, ‘if thou hadst not found me.’ Is this phenomenon far from that other mysterious one which true believers call prayer?”

We can, we must love Nature, because God has placed her all about us, and because happiness consists in living with what we love. We love things that are not ideally perfect, in other words, which are not superlatively beautiful, because happiness presents itself to us under an essentially relative aspect, and because there is no one but lays claim to it. It is not even a question of loving beautiful things, then, but, as we said, of loving what is beautiful in things.

In real life, to be sure, unpleasant things are as common as blackberries, while pleasant things are few and far between. Nevertheless the truth of the system of happiness through love is proved by its efficacy. Just as the pure platonist, penetrated by his glorious ideal, is cold, unprofitable, and unhappy, the man who loves is conscious of being filled with strength and light. To love is to have real and ardent emotions instead of locking oneself in the icy sentimentalism of reasoning or of false mysticism; it is to become a wellspring of sweetness, kindliness, activity, a mainstay of the world: it is to sow life with flowers, to bestow happiness and to possess it. Though placed by birth in a refractory medium, Ruskin, in spite of his insufficiencies, contradictions, weaknesses, lacunae, has exercised a profound influence, while the platonism of Ficino and Bembo, in a land of high sensibility, amongst incomparable artists and charming women, stifled everything and throttled itself.

There are, spread over the world, two unequal races which, living continually side by side, yet never understand each other and never blend—the race of pride, and the race of vanity. Pride tends to enthusiasm and advancement; it would be well to have proud women. Unhappily men, no matter who they are, do not love them, but much prefer the feeble and the vain.

Yet the efforts of the Renaissance women have not been wholly wasted. Those noble women sowed for the future, and the germ subsists.

Nor can it be said that their defeat was absolute. To form a sound judgment on the question we should have to be able (failures being invariably more noticeable than successes) to gauge the mysterious, secret operations of their grace; to number the despondent men cheered by a kind word or a glance of pity or affection; to fathom the resources, in truth unfathomable, possessed by the spirit of love even when pure, and possessed by it alone. Women of great soul, the Vittoria Colonnas of the world, have drawn from it results almost miraculous; and many others, without turning themselves into a sort of celestial dancing-mistresses, or becoming lost in worthless caprices, have given us reason to hope that, what with labour and earnestness and dignity, the end of their usefulness will not be seen for many a long day.

In short, they took the lead in the profoundest revolution we have ever experienced; from Louis XI. they led us to the boudoirs of the 18th century.

We can give their work neither unqualified praise nor condemnation. But we can praise many of these high-souled women—praise them for having seen and followed their star, though they at first sight may not have recognised the more excellent way. With all our reservations, we feel their spell upon us, because they were interesting, sincere, devoted, eminently tender, eminently feminine. We can commend them to the sympathy of those many ladies of our own day who, as we know, are also seeking their path, and even their star.

Some of my readers may not approve of this conclusion: some will think it optimistic, others pessimistic: in such matters contradiction is easy. Will they allow me to reply in advance that such criticisms would not surprise me? More than once I myself have recast this book, now in the optimistic direction, now in the pessimistic: a simple historian, in contact with subtle, fleeting, elusive shades, with women I sought to see through; as independent as a man may be, in presence of beauties for three centuries in the grave, when he is grey with years, sated with the two great spectacles which, according to Montaigne, quiet the soul—the sight of government, the sight of death,—I would ever and anon catch myself understanding their witchery, enthralled to their charm, or else hating their charm, unjustly; and then, at the moment when I fancied I could at last write my _veni, vidi, vici_, the ideas slipped from my book like water through a sieve. It is thus I have acquired the right of loving these dear ghosts.

And now adieu, princesses, cease to tempt us beyond our powers! Only continue to live amongst us! Our age is very masculine, your spiritualism pays us but angel visits now!—you have been driven in a thousand ways to learn what a soulless commercialism is like. And yet, in your better, spiritual part, you are with us always. We have lovable and accomplished women, we have women in a true sense aristocratic, whose hearts are capable of enthusiasm and heroic charities; there have been some whose names even live after them as synonyms of intelligence and goodness. We have our Margarets of Savoy, and, in goodly numbers, women whose moral bearing surpasses that of men; we have even women of energy, and also, it is said, of tenderness. The day when they proudly resume the motto _Non inferiora secutus_, and when to their eminent good qualities they add the talent of being themselves, the will to speak in their own true accents rather than a borrowed tongue, they will give us back our illusions, and with them what was not illusion.

Let them renounce public life! But let them take complete possession of the home life. Let mannish women, if they must, turn doctors, and womanish women turn priests! Let all be philosophers, comforters, ministers of love human and divine; let them work through love, and love through love! Let them have what we lack, let them excel us, enlighten us, encourage us! And in our hearts we Latins shall bless them, as we bless the sun. Passion is a warrant-royal of life.

The moral of our book is that good women should love the beautiful, and that virtue can be neither tiresome nor torpid.

There is no need to be always a maiden of twelve. True sweetness, true goodness, true love come, not of naïveté or feebleness, but of intelligence and personal force.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Madame Vincent has reminded us, in an interesting memoir, that ladies at one time sat as peers of France.

[2] As administrative authority depended on territorial possessions, it was quite natural that women should exercise it on occasion. The village gilds, though composed of men, sometimes elected a woman as president.

[3] “The history of marriage is the history of a relation in which women have gradually triumphed over the passions, prejudices, and selfish interests of men: that is the picture of true progress.” (F. Brunetière.)

[4] An Italian caricature of about the year 1450 (repeated by the French in the sixteenth century) gives a satirical representation of women violently struggling to wear trunk-hose.

[5] [The manual of religious instruction given to French girls on attaining the age of twelve.]

[6] Clément Marot on the motto of Madame de Lorraine:

[If love fail, faith is surely slain; If faith die, love flies hence amain; So in one motto link the twain— _Faith and love_.]

[7] One of the most distinguished women of Italy to-day, the Countess Pasolini, assures us that the great influence still exercised by women in Italy springs from their approximating more closely than men to fifteenth-century ideas.

[8] We may say, in passing, that the Italianism of the end of the fifteenth century, usually regarded as originating with the Italian expedition of Charles VIII., really goes back to Louis XI. Louis was Italian in education and tastes. Italians flocked into France during his reign.

[9] Cornelius Vitelli, styled Corythius by the public, came to France in 1482, for the simple reason that his own country had become unsafe for him. We have not many details about him or about his colleague, Girolamo Balbi, a pompous and quarrelsome character. A third Italian, Fausto Andrelini, made his appearance in 1488, under the auspices of the Marquis of Mantua. Andrelini, who lived very comfortably at Paris till his death in 1518, had no other effects than the memories of a little love-affair, which he confided to us in three books of verses, his “pages of youth,” as we should say to-day. Exiled, penniless, almost naked, but a poet, he was, as soon as he arrived, petted, adopted, and idolised, the favourite of Chancellor Guillaume de Rochefort and of fortune.

[10] Fausto Andrelini was the object of incredible adulation; Erasmus, wise man, simply calls him “divine,” but some did not hesitate to proclaim that “he alone had rendered France filled instead of famishing, cultivated instead of waste, verdant instead of barren, Latin instead of barbarous.” One of the noblest characters of the time, Guillaume Budé, actually dedicated to him this amazing epitaph: “Here lies Fausto. If the Fates had not given him to us, Gaeta herself would not have been more barbarous than France.” But he was no sooner buried than everyone regarded him as a knave.

[11] John Ruskin.

[12] [The most prolific and popular eclogue writer of the fifteenth century (1436-1516).

“As the moste famous Baptist Mantuan, The best of that sort since Poetes first began.”

—_Alexander Barclay._

Erasmus went so far as to match him with Virgil.]

[13] [The celebrated cabalistic philosopher (1486-1535). He stayed for a time with Dean Colet in London. He wrote a book _De Nobilitate feminei sexus_.]

[14] An extract from the marriage of Peregrino will give an idea of the Romance (Book I., cap. i., p. 32):

“There standing and awaiting the wished-for end, I heard the voice of a minister of Jupiter, who, regarding both of us, thus spake: ‘Peregrino, and you Geneva, are you clear and free from every manifest or secret bond?’ ‘We are free, nor anywhit bounden?’—_Minister_: ‘Are you not conjoined in affinity?’ _Peregrino and Geneva_: ‘Naught in affinity, and little in amity!’ _Minister_: ‘Have you promised marriage or betrothal to any other man or woman?’ _Peregrino and Geneva_: ‘No, never.’ _Minister_: ‘Are you by common consent disposed to celebrate this present holy sacrament of matrimony?’ _Peregrino and Geneva_: ‘We wish it heartily and in faith.’ _Minister_: ‘Thee, woman, give I to him, and Peregrino will put on the ring.’

“Having done his bidding, as it is the wont, we sat ourselves down,” and a tender conversation ensues between the two spouses.

“O matchless eloquence!” cries Peregrino, “O thrice lucky hour! O blessed day! O my hope in the sovran guerdon vouchsafed to me! With thee, sweet my dame, love, and gentleness, and discretion, and prudence have their habitation, in thee every good thing doth lie hid. Thou art very music, of all discords the harmony. In all parts I find thee whole and perfect. Thou art abundant in all humanity and sweetness, and in thy making the lord and maker of heaven hath created the true copy and sovran revelation of all things.” The couple dream their souls away in these platonic effusions. The bride is bedded there and then, and the author omits no detail. The sun is already high when a young maidservant ventures to come in and light a fire of twigs.

[15] [The quotation is taken from the _Heptameron_, Tale 40. There the lady is named Nomerfide, whom the author identifies with a certain Mlle de Clermont.]

[16] “_Anna_: The maiden invokes with all her prayers the sweets of wedlock, and yet with the first amorous intoxication begin the woes of the conjugal bed; the woman is scarce nestled upon the heart of the man than with one consent they long for separation. _Phyllis_: Anna, little it recks me that thou decriest the bonds of wedlock and the crabbed sour race of men; my heart is a-fire with love and I am tormented with thirst for marriage.... I deem it better far to marry betimes; wedlock is a refuge where modesty may shelter herself.”—(J. Cats, pp. 6, 7, 16.)

[17] _Heptameron_, Tale 21.

[18] [As these royal ladies are constantly cited in subsequent pages, the reader will allow us to remind him once for all of their relationships. Louise of Savoy was the wife of Charles, Count d’Angoulême, cousin-german of Louis XII., and the mother of Francis I. and of Margaret of Valois. She was a passionate and masterful woman and completely ruled her son, and her greed and intriguing spirit brought disaster upon France. Anne of France, also known as Anne of Beaujeu, was the eldest daughter of Louis XI., and wife of Pierre II. of Bourbon. She was virtual ruler of France during the first eight years of the reign of her brother Charles VIII.: see further Book III., chapter i. She is connected with English history in so far as it was largely her money that financed Henry of Richmond’s successful enterprise against Richard III.]

[19] No law in the world had yet authorised them to marry “without the knowledge, advice, and consent of their fathers” (Rabelais).

[20] The good Anne of France, married to a husband much older than herself, had in her life a romance which has escaped notice. She was fond of her first fiancé:

“Le prédit duc de Calabre, famé, En l’espousant luy donna ung aneau, Non de grant pris; mais si fut il amé De par la dame et plus chier estimé Qu’or ny argent, ne bague, ne joiau Qu’elle garda, mieulx que plus riche et beau, Jusque a la mort, c’est vérité patente....”

[“Calabria’s foresaid duke, a prince of fame, Plighted his troth and gave his bride a ring, Of no great price, I wot, but yet the dame Loved him so dear, so high esteemed his name As never gold nor any precious thing, Silver nor gem, did her more pleasure bring, Until her death. ’Tis very truth I tell.”]

The duke died six years after the betrothal,

“Qui fust ung deul qui bien tost ne passa, Mais grefvement poingnit et trepersa Le noble cueur de la jeune espousée. Par quoy, tost fust la chose disposée Qu’aultre mari prendroit notable et bon, Ung sien prochain, feu Pierre de Bourbon.”

[“And ’twas a sorrow that not soon did pass, But smote fell sore and heavily, alas! The noble heart of this young winsome bride. Nathless, ere yet her brimming tears were dried, Another mate was found her, good and high, Pierre de Bourbon, of her own family.”]

But the princess clung to the ring of her former lover, symbol of

“Loyalle amour dont estoit anoblie ... ... En cest aneau que luy avoit doné Son amy mort, voullut Pierre espouser.”

[“Of loyal love’s ennobling influence. And with this ring, gift of her lover dead, Would she her husband Pierre de Bourbon wed,”]

in order to preserve the memory of him whom God, in his unfathomable designs, had seen fit to take from her—

“Pour petit cueur, d’une jeune pucelle, Bien garde est d’amour honneste C’est quant jamais ne varie ou chancelle ...”

—_Poème inédit de La Vauguyon._

[“To the sweet guileless heart of tender maid ’Tis surety of a chaste and noble love That changeth never, nor will ever fade.”]

The princess was as pure a woman as any of whom we have any account, but the author dwells on this innocent romance in order to keep her memory alive in the hearts of lovers.

[21] [Vittoria Colonna (1490-1547) was the most illustrious member of an old and illustrious Roman family said to derive its name from the _column_ to which Christ was bound for His scourging. At the age of seventeen she married the Marquis of Pescara, and when he died of wounds received at Pavia (1525) she refused many offers of marriage, and devoted herself to literature and works of piety. She wrote poems in imitation of Petrarch.]

[22] [Tiraqueau was the learned and genial seneschal of Fontenoy who released Rabelais from the tender mercies of the Franciscans, for which kindness he was eulogised in _Pantagruel_. He had a large family, wrote many books, and was a water drinker; whence an anonymous epigram which, roughly rendered in English, reads:

Tiraqueau, fruitful as the vine, Got thirty sons, but drank no wine; Not less prolific with the pen, Produced as many books as men. And had not water sapped his strength, So strenuous a man at length Had filled this world of ours—who knows?— With books and little Tiraqueaux.]

[23] [A famous physician of Lyons (1471-1540), who founded the College of Medicine there. He was also a man of action and a writer, and his _Nef des dames vertueuses_ made him so popular with the ladies that he had to choose back ways to avoid affectionate mobbing.]

[24]

“Ainsi, comme j’ayme m’amye, Cinq, six, sept heures et demye L’entretiendray, voyre dix ans, Sans avoir paour des médisants, Et sans danger de ma personne.”

—Clément Marot, _Dialogue nouveau_.

[Thus, as I love my doxy dear, Five, six, seven hours, nay full ten year I’ll court her, free from fear of slander: And scatheless—for I but philander.]

[25] [The great general (1460-1525) who served Charles VIII., Louis XII., and Francis I. He conquered Lombardy for Charles, and was killed at Pavia.]

[26] [See Book II., cap. v.]

[27] [_i.e._ Catherine Sforza, the natural daughter of Galeazzo Sforza, Duke of Milan. She married the prince of Forli, and on his assassination by rebels was thrown into prison with her children. But hearing that Rimini held out for her against all assaults, she offered to carry in person an order for its capitulation. On arriving before the city, however, she bade the rebels lay down their arms, and cowed them by sheer force of character. She married later Giovanni de’ Medici, father of Cosimo. She defended Forli against Caesar Borgia, but was captured, and imprisoned in S. Angelo; thence escaping, she retired to Florence, and soon afterwards died there.]

[28] The countess’s lover.

[29] [Egnazio, a fellow-pupil of Leo X., teacher of eloquence and editor of Ovid and Cicero, etc.]

[30] _Heptameron_, Tale 25.

[31] _Heptameron_, Tale 25.

[32] [The Yorick of French literature: see Victor Hugo’s _Le Roi s’amuse_. When Panurge has vainly sought advice from everyone else on the momentous question, ‘to marry or not to marry?’ he tries Triboulet, who sends him to consult the oracle of the Divine Bottle (Rabelais, _Gargantua_, Book III.). Triboulet was court jester to Louis XII. and Francis I.]

[33] [Of the early part of the 17th century. Her chief work is the _Angoisses douloureuses qui procèdent l’amour_.]

[34] A large number of these _cassoni_ exists. One of the most beautiful that can be mentioned represents the story of Esther (Chantilly gallery). The author possesses one that represents Filippo Maria Visconti before the Emperor.

[35] Two days after his marriage, Girolamo Riario sent his bride a casket containing diamond necklaces and robes of gold brocade and of velvet, embroidered with fine pearls; one robe alone carried nearly 3000 pearls; there was also a purse of gold, silver-embroidered girdles, etc.—(Pasolini.)

[36] _Anna Karenina._

[37]

“Y cuidez-vous avoir repos En mariage, mes mignons? Ouy dea!”

[“And think you then to find repose In marriage bonds, my jolly joes? Heigh ho!”]

chuckles Roger de Collérye, addressing himself here, however, to men.

[38] “It ought to be a voluptuousness somewhat circumspect and conscientious.... Is not a man a miserable creature? He is scarce come to his own strength by his natural condition, to taste one only complete, entire and pure pleasure, but he laboureth by discourse to cut it off: he is not wretched enough except by art and study he augment his misery.” (_Montaigne_, bk. i. cap. xxix. [Florio’s translation]).

[39] [Elder sister (1492-1549) of Francis I., and head of the Renaissance party in France. Her character is elaborately analysed in subsequent pages of this book. The quotations under her name are from the _Heptameron_, and the poems of which she is the reputed author.]

[40] _Heptameron_, Tale 40.

[41] [Baldassare Castiglione (1478-1529), the author of the famous _Book of the Courtier_, Hoby’s translation of which has been recently added to Mr. Henley’s ‘Tudor Translations.’ This book is frequently quoted from and alluded to in the following pages. It purports to be a record of conversations held at the Court of Guidobaldo, Duke of Urbino (1472-1508), upon the qualities that make up the perfect courtier, and many other subjects incidentally. The chief interlocutors who are mentioned in these pages, are the duchess, Elizabeth Gonzaga; Cardinal Pietro Bembo (1470-1547), of so fastidious a taste as to revise his works forty times, the author of _Gli Asolani_, dialogues on platonic love; Bibbiena; and the coarse and dissolute Pietro Aretino, called Unico (1492-1557), who alternately satirised and sponged on the great; he wrote several witty and indecent comedies, and his letters throw much light on the social life of his time. The reader will find some specimens of his work _La Cortigiana_ (the Courtesan) quoted in Burton’s _Anatomy of Melancholy_.]

[42] The abate Serassi has preserved it: “My dear husband, I have got a little daughter, for which I think you will not be sorry. I have been much worse than last time, and, as I wrote you, I have had three attacks of very high fever. To-day, however, I am feeling better, and hope to have no more trouble. I will not try to write any longer, lest I be over bold. With all my heart I commend myself to your lordship. Your wife, who a little _starocca_ with pain. Mantua, August 20, 1520.”

[43] [The duke’s health was ruined by early excesses; Castiglione says ‘gout.’]

[44] [Paolo Giovio, Italian historian (1483-1552), an interesting but untrustworthy writer. As Brantôme puts it, he used two pens, one of gold, the other of iron, according as the princes he served treated him!]

[45] _Heptameron_, Tale 68.

[46] _Heptameron_, Prologue and Tale 45.

[47] By ‘amateurs’ we mean men who, while not professionally qualified, have leisure to devote to extended scientific study. In our own day, as is well known, M. Pasteur and M. Claude Bernard would not be entitled to give professional advice.

[48] [Mistress of Henri II., an imperious and avaricious woman, but a generous patron of the arts. See Hugo’s _Le Roi s’amuse_.]

[49] “I affirm not but I may one day be drawn to such fond opinions, and yield my life and health to the mercy, discretion, and regimen of physicians,” says Montaigne. “I may haply fall into this fond madness; I cannot answer for my future constancy. But even then, if any ask me how I do, I may answer him as did Pericles, ‘You may judge by that.’” (Bk. II. chap, xxxvii.)

[50] “O heavenly physician!” cries St. Theresa, “thou dost resemble only in name these physicians on earth! Thou visitest the sick without summons, and more gladly the poor than the rich.”

[51] Doctors, further, had to take orders and were not allowed to marry.

[52] [An Italian writer (1508-1568) who “wrote in all styles but excelled in none.” He wrote two dialogues on matrimony and the misadventures of husbands.]

[53] Savonarola, who fought in vain against the vogue of astrology (_Opus singulare contra l’astrologia_: a woodcut represents him disputing with an astrologer), ridicules the Roman prelates who never moved a step without consulting their astrologer. The great soldiers and sovereign princes, such as Lodovico Sforza and Francesco di Gonzaga, were no whit different. In princely houses a physician who would not condescend to practise astrology led a sorry life. He points to his phials in vain; “against death he has no medicine”; while the astrologer, a man of position, handsome, fat, well-fed, rich, gazes into the boundless heavens (_Dance of Death_); there was no profession more lucrative than astrology, none more tempting to ambition. It lent itself to dramatic effects. First the astrologer was usually a foreigner, no man having honour in his own country—an Italian or German, or, better still, a Moor or Gipsy. He puts on airs and keeps his clients waiting. If someone sends him a birth date, to have his horoscope cast, he sends no reply; his eyes are so fatigued by constant watching! he is so tired! And the awestruck princesses in the waiting-room say to one another that patience is necessary with “such geniuses.” And the stars were put to marvellous uses.

Bonaventure des Périers relates the amusing story of a physician of Paris, who, alleging high astrological reasons, never showed any amiability to his wife except on rainy days. The despairing lady at last hit upon a very simple expedient: every evening she had a tub of water emptied on the roof so as to produce the sound of a shower in the gutter-spout, and it rained every day! At this game the physician came off second-best and died; and his widow, who found herself very well off, was besieged with numerous offers. She incontinently sent all the physicians packing, then asked her other suitors if they were familiar with the moon and stars. Everyone thought it well to make solemn affirmation that he was, and received his _congé_. There was only one who was simple enough to confess that his science was limited to taking moon and stars to witness when he went to bed. He gained the day (_Contes et Récréations_, Tale 95). No glory was wanting to astrology; physicians and savants practised, defended, and taught it; great nobles gave it their patronage. Marshal Trivulce accepted the dedication of Pirovano’s _Defence of Astrology_. The science numbered eminent adepts. Luther made use of it in support of his doctrines. Michel Servet, after vainly trying theology and medicine, began to profess transcendental astrology; he foretold eclipses, plagues, wars, and the deaths of potentates; he achieved a very great success, pupils drank in his instruction. Unhappily the jealous Faculty directed him to return to the natural sciences and give up the “Almanac.” Servet then turned geographer, and it was not long before he went back into the religious mêlée. The _Atlas of Astrologers_, one of the most curious monuments of moral derangement, enumerates a crowd of astrologers, among them the Sibyls of the Vatican and King Alfonso of Naples.

[54]

Wing’d spirits, who the middle space ’Twixt earth and highest heaven possess, God’s scouts, the outposts of his grace.

[55]

Unnumbered cords, frail strands full fraught with pain, That join the soul to things of time and sense.

[56]

The body’s ruled by your command, Like clay beneath the potter’s hand.

[57]

And this your will and pleasure, stars! ... In vain doth man at eve and morn Torment you with his useless prayer; Fate sweeps him on, he knows not where, As billows on the stream are borne.

[58] _Les Evangiles des quenouilles_ promise to a wife a son or a daughter according as she loves battle stories or has longings for dancing and music.

[59] One of the greatest ladies of the time, Marie de Luxembourg, Countess of Vendôme, lived on an annual income of 16,000 livres.

[60] Book III.

[61] [“To the Mistletoe! the New Year!” The cry of Breton peasants, “begging small presents or New-Year’s gifts, an ancient tearm of rejoycing derived from the Druides, who were wont, the first day of January, to go into the woods, where having sacrificed and banquetted together, they gathered mistletow, esteeming it excellent to make beasts fruitful, and most sovereign against all poyson” (Cotgrave). From a patois corruption the Scots _Hogmanay_ is said to be derived.]

[62] She provided for so many maidens “by way of marriage, and had so great care of them, that she deserved to be named their mother.”—_La Vauguyon._

[63]

Quattuor sunt que mulieres summe cupiunt: A formosis amari juvenibus, Pollere filiis pluribus, Ornari preciosis vestibus, Et dominari pre ceteris in domibus.

—_Tractaculi sive opusculi._

[“Four things there are that women eagerly covet: to be loved by handsome youths; to be good for many sons; to be decked out in costly array; and to rule the roost.”]

[64] Montaigne relates that he was put out to nurse with peasants, “and brought up in the humblest and most ordinary way of life.”

[65] Montaigne, Bk. II., cap. iii.

[66]

[Daughter and son gave her obedience, Stored full of wit and virtue and good sense.]

[67] Maffeo Vegio, a disciple and the biographer of St. Bernardin of Sienna, secretary of Pope Martin V., was a very eminent humanist at the beginning of the 16th century. He added a supplementary book to the _Aeneid_. He was ranked much higher than Petrarch. The book cited, _De educatione liberorum et eorum claris moribus_, often republished since 1491 and issued in a French translation in 1508, is a very remarkable work, and exercised a great influence. It seems, however, to have escaped the researches of the historians of education.

[68] [Jean Lemaire de Belges (1475-1548), historian and poet. His chief works quoted from in these pages are: _Illustrations et singularités des Gaules_ and _Le Temple d’honneur et de vertus_.]

[69] Montaigne.

[70] [A friend of Calvin, and a professor, who reduced himself to beggary by his unselfish efforts to improve the educational methods of his day (1479-1559).]

[71] [A cardinal, and an ardent humanist (1477-1547). He took Cicero for his model, and wrote moral philosophy and poetry. The work here alluded to is his _Paedotropia_.]

[72] [Vivès accompanied Catherine of Aragon to England as her tutor and chaplain. Siding with her on the divorce question, he had to leave the country. His works were published at Basle in 1555.]

[73] He admits astrology among the exact sciences.

[74] [Ulrich von Hütten (1488-1523), friend of Luther and one of the most energetic of the Reformers, by turns soldier, poet, theologian, and politician. He is alluded to _passim_.]

[75] _Heptameron_, Tale 18.

[76] [A 16th century scholar who in an amusing book called _Apologie pour Hérodote_ made an elaborate attack on the clergy of his day.]

[77] “My pupils do just as they please; most of the time they are digging the soil,” writes an unlucky tutor, referring to the dauphin of France; “I have grave doubts whether they’ll be fit for anything better.”

[78] Numerous Latin dialogues were written for children in France and Germany.

[79] Montaigne.

[80] “My daughter is of the age wherein the laws excuse the forwardest to marry. She is of a slow, nice, and mild complexion, and hath accordingly been brought up by her mother in a retired and particular manner, so that she beginneth but now to put off childish simplicity.” (Montaigne.)

[81]

Quid tibi praecipiam molles vitare fenestras? Ad culpas aditum laxa fenestra facit. Libera mens, captiva tamen sint lumina, quando Hanc animo invenit saeva libido viam. Cogite fallaceis, animus ne peccet, ocellos, Cogite, libertas ne peritura cadat. Pellite materiam, primasque extinguite flammas.

(Pontanus, _De Liberis_.)

[“Why should I admonish thee to shun the seduction of windows? An unbolted casement is the door to vice. Keep the mind free, but the eyes in durance, since concupiscence discovers this way to the soul. Restrain thy eyes from tricks lest thy soul sin; yea, lest thy liberty fall and perish. Thrust away the fuel, and extinguish the beginnings of flame.”]

[82] [A disciple of Thomas Aquinas: he died in 1316.]

[83] [The famous mystic and theologian (1363-1429), who so stoutly opposed scholasticism, astrology and magic. The _Imitation of Christ_ has been ascribed to him.]

[84] “Take care of your daughters; let them be always at home, gentle, pious, scorning money and outward adornments. And thus you will preserve not only these young girls, but the men who will one day wed them, and you will assure a good posterity from a healthy stock.”

[85] “From a braying mule and a girl who speaks Latin, good Lord, deliver us.” (Bouchot.)

[86] It was to an expert in high culture that Renée of France entrusted her daughters, in the person of Olympia Morata, who was noted for the eloquent Latin and Greek discourses she delivered as a precocious child of thirteen. While still under fifteen, Olympia’s pupils were sufficiently advanced to act a comedy of Terence before the pope. This education by means of the theatre was completed with serious readings in Ovid and Cicero, and the final polish was given by a Greek monk of known liberal views, Francesco Porto. There was no idleness or melancholy here.

[87] [An Italian poet, pupil of Pontanus (1488-1530). The _Arcadia_, his chief poem, ran into sixty editions.]

[88] Montaigne (who, however, deduces from these premises altogether different conclusions).

[89] “Let us retard the age of marriage,” cries M. Legouvé, “if we wish girls to exercise free choice and live free lives.”

[90] [_Praeter naturam est, feminam in masculos habere imperium._ (Erasmus.) “’Tis against nature for a woman to have rule over males.”] “I allow woman to learn; to teach, never.” (Bruno.)

[91] [A poet of Lyons, who lived about the middle of the sixteenth century.]

[92] [One of the most active of the Italian humanists (1380-1459). He brought many ancient MSS. to Rome, and translated Xenophon and other Greek writers. His _conti_ are as obscene as some of Boccaccio’s.]

[93]

Nil est simplicitate prius. Haec placet; haud ulla est quaesitae gratia formae, Quae studio peccas, simplicitate places, Nulla est ornandi, nulla est, mihi crede, parandi Gloria, naturae est forma, nec artis opus; Ars odio digna est, ubi nullo fine tenetur.

(Pontanus, _De amore conjugali_.)

[“Nothing comes before simplicity. That is pleasing; there is no grace in artificial beauty. By artifice thou wilt err, by simplicity thou wilt please. There is no glory in adornment, none, believe me, in farding oneself; beauty is the work of nature, not of art. Art is hateful when not kept within bounds.”]

[94] [A vigorous and witty social satirist (1421-1510).]

[95]

[Some maidens, in their modest way, With fools their garters stake at play.]

[96] Nifo sincerely admires princesses who go to their husbands _virgines intactae_.

[97] [A doctor of the Sorbonne and a Dominican (1443-1514). In one of his sermons occurs the story of the church bells, repeated by Rabelais à propos of the marriage of Panurge.]

[98]

[A woman, a dog, and a walnut tree, The more you beat ’em, the better they be.]

[99] In the long run the best things become wearisome: men at last believe they are sacrificing themselves. “Christ died only once for His church; we die every day for our wives,” is the heartfelt cry of a husband; to which a lady retorts: “Go to the wars, then, and lie for a month on the bare ground; and you won’t be sorry to get back to your good bed! Men only appreciate their comforts when they’ve lost them.” (_Heptameron_, Tale 54.)

[100]

Femme bonne qui a mauvais mari A souvent le cœur marry. ... Femme aime tant comme elle peut, Et homme comme il veut.

—_L. de Lincy._

[A good woman with a bad husband has often a sore heart.... Woman loves as much as she can; man as much as he will.]

[101] A woman, irritated at her husband reading in bed, calls out to the servant: “Ah well! Bring me my distaff!” (Billon, _Le Fort inexpugnable de l’honneur du sexe féminin_).

[102] “He who loves not him by whom he is loved is regarded as a homicide, and not merely a homicide, but a committer of sacrilege and a thief.” (Champier, _De vraye Amour_).

[103]

Il se commence à soucyer Et à chagrin s’associer. Il plaint la teste, puis les dents, Et a les oreilles pendans Ne plus ne moins comme un lymier.

—_R. de Collérye._

[He begins to fume and fret, Becomes sworn brother to regret; Headache, toothache he bemoans, Chapfallen he sighs and groans.]

[104] _Dialogus de matrimonia._

[105] “You have been to seek a little school-miss, an angel who dared not lift her eyes, and who to all appearance was candour to the finger-tips.... She was thinking things over: she was enticing you into her trap, because your rank and fortune suited her, but determined at the bottom of her soul to give you a ‘combing’ later: she says in confidence to her friends, ‘randy steeds need breaking in’.” (Jean d’Ivry: _Les Secretz et Loix de mariage_).

[106] [Title of a brilliant comedy by Emile Augier and Jules Sandeau, produced in 1854. M. Poirier is a wealthy retired cloth merchant who has married his daughter to a spendthrift marquis in the hope of getting a peerage through his influence.]

[107] [Charles had been solemnly betrothed to the daughter of Maximilian of Austria, and Anne of Brittany had been wedded by proxy to Maximilian himself. Both repudiated their contracts, and their alliance united Brittany to the crown of France.]

[108] Cf. the following ballad by Alione:

Qui veut ouir belle chanson D’une fillette de Lyon Qui d’amour fut requise, Ale houe! En venant de l’église. Mais elle en fut reprise! Ale houe!

Un bon copain lui voulut donner Cent florins pour la marier, Mais (_Pourvu_) qu’elle fût s’amie. Ale houe! Prenez-les, je vous prie; De cœur les vous octroie. Ale houe!

A sa mère s’en conseilla, Qui lui dit que bien la gardera De cette maladie. Ale houe! Il peut bien dire pie, Car il ne l’aura mie. Ale houe!

“Les amoureux du temps présent Font des promesses largement, Et montrent main garnie. Ale houe! Mais folle est qui s’y fie: Trop coûte la folie! Ale houe!”

La fillette ne voulut pas Son conseil croire, en celui cas; Car elle eut plus grant joie, Ale houe! De gagner sa monnaie, Cent florins de Savoie. Ale houe!

Cent florins sont beaux et luisants; S’elle eust fillé vint et cincq ans, Voire toute sa vie, Ale houe! Toute sa fillerie N’en vaudrait la moitié. Ale houe!

[Who lists to hear a famous ditty All on a maid of Lyons city, Who as she came from church one day (Hey nonny!) Was sought in love the usual way— And sore she smarted, gossips say— (Hey nonny!)

The jolly youth would give, he said, A hundred florins her to wed If she would first his leman be. (Hey nonny!) “Prithee, take them, dear,” says he, “With all my heart I give them thee.” (Hey nonny!)

The hussy home did straight repair: Her mother counselled her: “Beware! Lest it repent thee by and by; (Hey nonny!) For though he speak thee fair and sigh, His precious gold is all my eye! (Hey nonny!)

“The young men of the present day, Promise more largely than they pay, And though their purse well filled appear, (Hey nonny!) The girl who trusts to it, I fear, Will find her folly cost her dear.” (Hey nonny!)

Alack! the hussy tossed her head, Heedless of what her mother said, For ’twas to her a greater joy (Hey nonny!) To get the money from her boy— Those hundred florins of Savoy. (Hey nonny!)

A hundred! how they gleamed and shone! Had she sat spinning on and on Full twenty year, till worn and old, (Hey nonny!) Not all the thread she’d spun and sold Had brought her half that shining gold. (Hey nonny!)]

[109] One of the friends of Margaret of France, the worthy La Perrière, thunders against marriages for money or beauty, which only end in putting “a fox into a hermitage.”

[110] _Heptameron_, Tale 37.

[111] [See Book III. chapter iii.]

[112] Vittoria Colonna’s bed, preserved in the Pescara palace at Naples, is extraordinarily wide.

[113] A lady of Florence, Alessandra Bardi, on learning of the sudden death of one of her sons, wrote to another the following beautiful letter, so touching in its resignation: “My sweet son, I have learnt how, on the 23rd of last month, it pleased Him who gave me Matteo to recall him to Himself, in complete consciousness, in full possession of grace, with all the sacraments necessary to a good and faithful Christian. I have felt the bitterest grief at being deprived of such a son, and methinks his death has done me great affliction apart from filial love, and likewise to you two, my sons, now reduced to so small a band. I praise and bless the Lord for all that is His will” (Müntz, _History of the Renaissance_, i. 18).

[114] The story is given in Nifo’s _De Amore_, cap. cii.

[115] [Sister of Henry VIII. She was Louis’ third wife: he was in his decrepitude, and died three months after the marriage. She at once married the handsome Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, who had escorted her to France.]

[116] The diplomatic agent of Mantua thus reports his visit of condolence to the Duchess of Urbino: “I found her in her room among her ladies, all in black, the shutters closed, the apartment lighted by a single torch placed on the floor. She was seated on a cushion, a black veil on her head, and wore a high-necked dress, or at any rate her bosom was covered with a veil as high as her chin.... She held out her hand and burst into tears; a moment passed before her sobs and mine permitted us to speak. I handed her your lordship’s letter, and dispatched my visit, my condolences, and my attempts at solace in a few words, so as not to prolong her grief. I imparted to her also the recommendations and offers with which I was charged by my most illustrious lord. Both were well received.” Then they talked of Mantua and the Gonzaga family: the Duchess kept the ambassador for more than two hours. Next day, there was another visit of three hours; this time, her spirit got the upper hand, an interesting discussion ensued, and the ambassador succeeded in making her laugh.

[117] Montaigne, bk. ii. cap. xxxv. He himself desires no tears, no funeral oration: “I renounce henceforth the favourable testimonies men may will to give me, not because I am worthy of them, but because I am dead.”

[118] June 8, 1508. Sisters Domicella and Elena, from Forli, to Catherine Sforza.

[119] [Daughter of Maximilian of Austria, and regent of the Netherlands. She was affianced as a child to the Dauphin of France (Charles VIII.), then married to the Infant of Spain, who died in a few months: finally at the age of twenty-one married Philibert of Savoy, who died after four happy years of wedlock. She was a great patroness of agriculture and the arts, and a poetess.]

[120] She herself, however, employed on occasion the most convincing arguments. She had confiscated the jewels of her cousin, the Countess of Montpensier, who was regarded as rather too hot-headed for a widow, and she refused to restore them to her.

[121] The _Fifteen Joys of Marriage_ include among domestic calamities to return from war after a long captivity and to find one’s wife wearing the finery of a new lord and master.

[122] “There’s no man will have you!” is an insult flung by a peasant at a woman during a squabble.

[123] “Be obedient to your mother, show her honour and reverence, and take care to please her in everything you can, as is her due, as much because it is God’s commandment as that I know she merits it, and that you ought so to do if you wish to succeed, for having known her, I know that she will advise you so well that you will be therewith content” (Instructions of a Duke of Nemours to his sons).

[124] Ruskin.

[125] Ruskin’s favourite theory.

[126] [Minister of finance to Francis I., a faithful and honourable servant of the crown. Lautrec, governor of Milan, having asked for 400,000 crowns as arrears of pay for his troops, the queen-mother, Louise of Savoy, who had a grudge against him, seized all the money in the treasury on the pretext that it was owing to her, and even intercepted what little coin Semblançay was able to get together. The result was that Lautrec’s army melted away and Milan was lost. Louise made Semblançay the scapegoat, and when Francis, after his defeat at Pavia, was carried a prisoner to Spain, she threw Semblançay (he was 72 years old) into the Bastille, had him tried on trumped-up charges, and brought about his execution.]

[127] [Bohier was a jurisconsult, Briçonnet, bishop of Lodève and Meaux, and an insincere persecutor of the Reformers; Robertet was treasurer of France under Louis XII. and Francis I.; and Duprat a venal minister of Francis I. and a partisan of Louise of Savoy.]

[128] Coquillart.

[129] “Have you never reflected, then,” says an old author, “what this smoke is worth?” (Baltazar Gracian).

[130] [Italian poet and historian (1426-1503), the most ‘elegant’ writer of the sixteenth century. He wrote _Amorum libri ii._, on conjugal love.]

[131] _Heptameron_, Tale 51.

[132] Gallants, ambitious men, fashionable men late abed and late up, those who live on credit, litigious fellows, spendthrifts, poor devils who marry for love without a penny, loafers, philosophers who live from hand to mouth, soldiers who run through a quarter’s pay in a month, husbands ruined by their wives’ dressmakers’ bills or their servants’ guzzling, men who keep no accounts, who, without being princes or lords, put eighteen yards of velvet into one costume, who spend much and get little, who let their horses starve, their tapestries and furniture moulder, who leave their orchards to be robbed, who would not spend a penny but fling away a shilling, who endow their daughters too largely, who toil without rhyme or reason, who accept financial responsibilities ... weak-kneed men who back out of their lawsuits, who are led by the nose by those about them, who are always singing a _gaudeamus_ and never a _requiem_, braggarts, giddypates, boasters, “Roger Goodfellows,” gormandisers, debauchees.

[133] [George of Amboise, the wealthy Archbishop of Rouen: a great builder and art-patron, who brought many painters and sculptors and architects into France from Italy. When he died Pope Julius II. “thanked God he was now Pope alone”! The cardinal’s tomb in Rouen Cathedral is one of the finest pieces of Renaissance work in France.]

[134] Which included, we may say in passing, music and gymnastics.

[135] But he did not mean to be absorbed by either the one or the other.

[136]

To love money Save for its use, is rank idolatry.

[137]

They have what pleasures they desire, Honours whereto they dare aspire, And wealth much more than they require.

[138] Almanque Papillon’s _La Victoire et Triomphe d’argent_ (Lyons, 1537). A copy belonging to Baron Pichon includes two miniatures: (1) the Triumph of Money, (2) the Triumph of Honour and Love, represented by Francis I. in a car drawn by two unicorns, and led by Diligence, Sapience, Sobriety and Virtue.

[139] _Imitation of Christ_, book iii., chap. v.

[140] [Italian scholastic philosopher (1453-1538). His lectures attracted lords and ladies who came to laugh at his ugly grimaces and ungainly antics, and at his amusing anecdotes and witticisms. His works include treatises on Beauty, on Love, _De Principe_, etc.]

[141] [The leading Italian humanist (1433-1499); the first professor in Cosimo de’ Medici’s Florentine Academy. He translated Plato under Cosimo’s auspices].

[142] [A prodigy of learning who wasted his energies in attempting to reconcile theology and philosophy, and died young. He knew twenty-two languages].

[143] [An illegitimate scion of the house of the Sanseverini (1425-1477). He founded an academy for the study of antiquity, and pushed his enthusiasm so far as to worship at an altar erected to Romulus, and to roam the streets garbed as Diogenes].

[144] So that nothing should be wanting, a Diogenes started running about the streets with his lantern and his tattered cloak (Paul Jove).

[145] Erasmus archly observes: “When Plato appeared uncertain whether to set woman among rational animals or among the brutes, he did not mean that woman is merely an animal; he merely intended to point out the stupidity of this charming animal.”

[146] To this day this theory of two loves is commonly attributed to Plato, even in philosophical treatises.

[147] His ardent oration has been reported in the _Courtier_ of Castiglione, which became the breviary of the new society; we know that Castiglione faithfully reproduced his words, and, for greater accuracy, first submitted the manuscript to Bembo. [It may be as well to state that the passage quoted here is not a continuous quotation, but an admirable condensation of several pages of Castiglione. See pp. 343-363 of Hoby’s translation in Mr. Henley’s “Tudor Translations.”]

[148] Sonnet viii.

[149] Sonnet lii.

[150] Distinguished as she necessarily was, the lady who inspired such accents had herself nothing so tragic or so sublime. She wrote:

Amor, tu sai, che mai non torsi il piede Dal carcer tuo soave, nè disciolsi Dal dolce giogo il collo, nè ti tolsi Quanto dal primo dì l’alma ti diede.

Tempo non cangiò mai l’antica fede; Il nodo è stretto anchor, com’io l’avvolsi; Nè per il frutto amar, ch’ognihor ne colsi, L’alta cagion men cara al cor mi riede.

Visto hai quanto in un petto fido, ardente Può oprar quel caro tuo più acuto dardo, Contro del cui poter Morte non valse,

Fa homai da te, che’l nodo si rallente, Che a me di libertà già mai nol calse, Anzi di ricovrarla hor mi par tardo.

[Thou knowest, Love, I never sought to flee From thy sweet prison, nor impatient threw Thy dear yoke from my neck; never withdrew What, that first day, my soul bestowed on thee.

Time hath not changed love’s ancient surety; The knot is still as firm; and though there grew Moment by moment fruit bitter as rue, Yet the fair tree remains as dear to me.

And thou hast seen how that keen shaft of thine, ’Gainst which the might of Death himself is vain, Smote on one ardent, faithful breast full sore.

Now loose the cords that fast my soul entwine, For though of freedom ne’er I reck’d before, Yet now I yearn my freedom to regain.]

[151] “Ye women who glory in your ornaments, your hair, your hands, I tell you you are all ugly. Would you see the true beauty? Look at the pious man or woman in whom spirit dominates matter: watch him, say, when he prays, when a ray of the divine beauty glows upon him, when his prayer is ended; you will see the beauty of God shining in his face, you will behold it as it were the face of an angel.” (_28th Sermon on Ezekiel_).

[152] “Monsieur, si vous estiez aseuré de la prudence et discrétion que vous dictes estre en moy, vous ne prendriez peine de m’escripre courte ne longue lettre, car ou deux telles vertuz consistent, une n’a lieu: qui servira de briefve response à tout ce que m’escripvez. De mon vouloir, il est tel, sans jamais changer propos, que je seray telle que je doibz estre, et que ne m’estimez estre si bonne par vostre lettre; ouy bien autant qu’il me sera possible, et quelque jeune d’aage que je soye, si cognois je bien que en suyvant ces deux devant dictes vertuz, l’on ne se peult desvoyer. Quant à l’audience que me demandez, je ne puis, et ne veulx; et, sans plus m’escripre, à Dieu prenez en gré et ne vous desplaise.” (_La Fleur de toutes joyeusetez_).

[Here is the letter of a woman of the old style: “Sir, if you were assured of the prudence and discretion you say are in me, you would not waste your time writing letters, whether long or short, for where two such virtues are conjoined, a letter is but vain: which will serve as a brief response to all you write to me. My will is such that I am firmly resolved to be good, as I ought to be, though from your letter you do not think I am; ay, so far as lies in my power: and though I may be young in years, yet know I well that in seeking after the two aforesaid virtues one cannot go astray. As to the interview you ask of me, I cannot and I will not; and, without writing further, I pray God you may take it in good part and not be huffed.”]

[153]

La Françoise est entière et sans rompeure: Plaisir la meine: au proffit ne regarde. Conclusion: qui en parle ou brocarde, Françoises sont chef-d’œuvre de nature ... Pour le desduict (_le plaisir_).

—Marot, _Rondeau 13_.

[Our ladies flawless are and all complete: ’Tis pleasure leads them; they look not for gain: Conclusion: men will talk and scoff in vain, For pleasure they are Nature’s master-feat.]

[154] Cornelius Agrippa furnishes a curious piece of evidence on this point. Disgraced by Louise of Savoy, he asked himself what had caused the princess’s hatred. While pondering the matter he mechanically opened his Bible and lit upon the passage where Ahab says in regard to the prophet Micaiah, “I hate him, because he doth not prophesy good concerning me.” “That’s my very own case,” cries Agrippa, and remembers that one day he had foretold a victory for M. de Bourbon. What victory?—he did not say, and for good reasons: but that was enough. So he takes his pen, and writes a long address to prove that he is not, has not been, and will not be of the Bourbon party, in spite of the overtures made to him. He got nothing by his prose; some time afterwards Bourbon was killed at Rome, and, adds Agrippa, “Jezebel possesses his vineyard. The angel of the Lord has warned me and saved me from the evil woman. Nothing remains but to fling Jezebel headlong and give her carcase to the dogs.”

[155]

Awaiting thus the seasonable hour For justice or for God to interpose with power.

[156] _L’aisnée Fille de fortune._ [“If she had a little of that, she would be the most accomplished lady God ever gave life to.”]

[157] La Vauguyon describes with emotion the sorrow of her servants and vassals: “What will become of us now?... Death has seized our mother.”

[158]

Bonnet entendoit la magie Aussi bien que l’astrologie: Bonnet le futur prédisoit, Et de tout présages faisoit.... Bonnet sçeut la langue hébraïque Aussi bien que la caldaïque; Mais en latin le bon abbé N’y entendoit ny A ny B. Bonnet avoit mis en usage Un barragouin de langage Entremeslé d’italien, De françois et ... savoysien. Bonnet fut de l’Académie, De ceux qui souflent l’alchumie.

—Du Bellay, _Epitaphe de l’abbé Bonnet_.

[Bonnet knew astrology As well as demonology. Bonnet the future could foretell And cast your horoscope as well. Bonnet knew the Hebrew tongue, And in Chaldee spake and sung, But, good soul, in Latin he Could not say his A B C. Bonnet used with good intention A jargon of his own invention— Words from France he would employ, From Italy and from—Savoy. And in academic state Of alchemy Bonnet would prate.]

[159] Montaigne, bk. iii. cap. x.

[160] A naïve French poet, with the words ‘grace’ and ‘hope’ ever on his lips, somewhat scornfully depicts the French court guarded military fashion by two Italians, Pasquil and Aretino, whom he styles Bohemians of sinister aspect. ‘Diligence’ and ‘Bon Vouloir,’ old deities of the past, had much difficulty in approaching. “Noble Cœur,” says a poet, “found his ‘temporal joy’ in chatting with and serving ladies; Nature encourages Noblesse-Féminine to rule men, who include good and bad. In a delightful garden the tree of Humanity flourishes; this splits into two equal branches, that is, between the two sexes ‘one in being, one in substance, one in dignity,’ and differentiated only by accident. Vilain-Cœur and Malebouche have long been devising mischief against Noblesse-Féminine; at the instigation of Nature, Noble-Cœur at length arms himself in her defence.”

[161] [In reference to the group of seven literary men who banded themselves together to reform and classicise the French language and literature. Ronsard, Du Bellay, and Baïf were three members of the Pléiade who reappear in the following pages. But as the manifesto of this coterie was issued in 1549, the year of Margaret’s death, the name Pléiade is anticipated for the literary court she maintained, the most notable members of which were Marot and Bonaventure des Périers.]

[162] Margaret to the King, 1534.

[Ah, with what error Dante’s head is crowned, Who comes to paint his Passion, antique tale, And with his gloomy Hell our souls astound.]

[163] _Heptameron_, Tale 40.

[164] [French admiral (1488-1525), who after the defeat at Pavia deliberately threw his life away. He rivalled Francis I. in gallantry, paid sedulous court to Margaret, and is said to have been the luckless (and well-scratched) hero of the nocturnal escapade described in the 4th Tale of the _Heptameron_.]

[165]

[Loves like little budding flowers, Loves to sweeten idle hours, Likewise old amours.]

[166]

Amoureux suis d’une paintresse, Qui est belle en perfection. Son geste plein d’affection La fait juger demie princesse.

—_Gilles d’Aurigny._

[I adore a painter dear, Perfect grace and beauty she, And her loving ways to me Make her half princess appear.]

[167] _Heptameron_, Tale 18.

[168] _Ibid._, Tale 58.

[169] _Heptameron_, Tale 14.

[170] [Poet and translator (1493-1545), friend of Aretino. He wrote ‘amorous discourses’ in imitation of Boccaccio; comedies in imitation of Plautus; a translation of the _Golden Ass_ of Apuleius; and a prose work on the beauty of women.]

[171]

Son âge estoit d’envyron les quinze ans, Qui est le temps que désirent amans. La taille en fut longue, menue et droicte, Espaulle platte, et par les flancs estroicte.

(Anne de Graville.)

Toutes les nuyctz, je ne pense qu’en celle Qui a le corps plus gent qu’une pucelle.

(Marot.)

[Her age was fifteen, as I guessed, The age that pleases lovers best; Her figure long, slim, straight as arrow, Her shoulders broad, her haunches narrow.]

[I lie awake o’ nights, and my thoughts are sure to go To the maid whose body’s comelier than any maid’s I know.]

[172]

Is she plump, or is she lean? My pleasure is the same, I ween.

[173] [Both these ladies were mistresses of Francis I.]

[174] [A poet (1463-1537) who having lost his all in the sack of Rome was succoured by Bembo. He wrote sonnets and pastorals.]

[175] [The French Baedeker.]

[176] Castiglione, _Courtier_ [(Tudor Translations, pp. 212, 213.)]

[177] Castiglione, _ibid._, p. 166.

[178]

“Thy shape! Ah, lady! ’tis to me well known Through him whose soul is thine, no more his own.”

[179] [Jean Clouet (1485-1545), painter to Francis I.: Janet was his pet name at court. The reference is to Ronsard’s lines—

Peins-moy, Janet, peins-moy, je t’en supplie, Sur ce tableau les beautés de ma mie.]

[180] [A master in portraiture in enamel (1505-1575.) As many as 1840 of his works are known, all signed. Specimens may be seen in the Louvre.]

[181] [Sculptor to Francis I., born 1515, killed in the St. Bartholomew massacre, Aug. 24, 1572. His statue of Diana adorned the front of Diana of Poitiers’ palatial château of Anet. Diana is represented nude, reclining upon a stag, with a bow in her hand, and surrounded by dogs.]

[182] [The _blason_ was a short poem celebrating a single feature, or some small possession of a lady—an eyebrow, a rose, or a jewel, for instance.]

[183] This portrait, painted by an Italian, no longer exists, but an excellent miniature copy, executed in Henri IV.’s time, is to be found in the rare manuscript known as the _Book of Hours of Catherine de’ Medici_. The other miniatures in this manuscript are made after French portraits, and do not admit of so extravagant an interpretation. Louise of Savoy is represented as a widow, in the classical severe and ungainly costume.

[184] Night-dresses, by the way, were not yet in use.

[185] Tale 45.

[186] _Heptameron_, Tale 4.

[187]

Washed of her paint, of her vices bereft, Body and soul there is nought of her left.

[188] [A painter of the Florentine school (died 1440) about whom nothing is known but a treatise on painting discovered in 1820, and some frescoes at Volaterra.]

[189] [Author of _Gli ornamenti delle donne_ (the ornaments of ladies), published at Venice in 1574.]

[190] [A poetess of Lyons, author of some remarkable sonnets.]

[191]

For pleasure oft my black I wear, More often than for woe or care.

[192] [Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, one of the most vigorous opponents of the French king’s Italian expeditions. The surname “Il Moro” came from his cognisance, a mulberry-tree.]

[193] Alione, in one of his farces, has related the amusing story of a Lombard lady (and she was not the only one) who gave herself to a French soldier passing through, on the mere promise of a dress of Venetian velvet, and to whom the rogue afterwards sent six crowns, with the excuse that an everyday dress was good enough for a casual lady.

[194]

This ring is old and out of date, This ruby’s badly cut: This girdle’s precious ugly—wait, This casket’s silver, but I wish for one of beaten gold—

[195] [Librarian to Cardinal Farnese (1529-1600), a great authority on antiquities, especially coins; he spent the greater part of his modest income on pictures and bronzes.]

[196] [Historian and member of the academy of Pomponius Laetus (1421-1481). He was Vatican librarian under Sixtus IV., wrote a history of the popes, and a curious work on hygiene entitled _Opusculum de obsoniis ac honesta voluptate_—the work here referred to.]

[197] [Sebastian Brandt (1438-1521), jurisconsult and poet of Strasburg, author of the famous _Ship of Fools_, referred to in subsequent pages.]

[198] On ordinary days, the household of Marie of Cleves easily disposed of half a calf, a quarter of an ox, five or six sheep, and dozens of fowls.

[199] “Gout,” cries Cardan, “is queen, gout is noble! She is a synthesis of ills! She is discreet and courteous; she attacks only the showable parts of the body. There is nothing hideous about her as about leprosy. She purifies man and raises his moral worth, as all pain does, but more than any other pain. Why is she the enemy of grand dinners, and of midnight toil, and of all the charming occupations of mind and body?” (_De malo medendi usu._) A German song was dedicated to her:

O Gout my goddess, Gout my queen, What mortal wight but fears thee? Earth, sea and sky have ever been Thy subjects: Jove reveres thee. O mighty goddess, hear the prayer Of those that now implore thee: Give peace to every gouty toe, And grant to all who limping go Freedom from pain, release from care, And perfect health before thee.

(_Podagrae Laus._)

[200] Gout was very common. Louise of Savoy suffered from it.

[201] [A sort of farcical comedy.]

[202] [Jean Gast, Swiss Protestant theologian (died 1553): author of _Convivalium sermonum liber, meris jocis ac salibus refertus_.]

[203] Entering a lady’s house, a man would kiss her hands; and to recall to mind a first presentation the graceful formula frequently employed was: “The first time I kissed her hands.”

[204] To civilise his dominions, Peter the Great required his subjects of both sexes to learn dancing, and he directed the performance, like a general directing manœuvres. He insisted on the gentlemen kissing the ladies on the lips.

[205]

“Ou soit d’un baiser sec, ou d’un baiser humide, D’un baiser court ou long, ou d’un baiser qui guide L’âme dessuz la bouche et laisse trespasser Le baiseur ... Ou d’un baiser donné comme les colombelles.”

[Dry kiss or wet kiss, Long kiss or short kiss— Kiss that lures the kisser’s soul, Leading him to sin and dole— Kiss that seals the purest loves, Innocent as kiss of doves.]

[206] [One of the earliest of French theologians who accepted the Reformed faith, born in 1530. He wrote a tractate on dancing.]

[207] _Heptameron_, Tale 21.

[208] Bonaventure des Périers, Tale 114.

[209]

Templa pudicitiam maculant, ni rite peractis Rebus abis: templi noxia saepe mora est.

(_De Liberis._)

[The temples stain thy modesty unless when service is over thou departest: to delay in the temple is often hurtful.]

[210] _Heptameron_, Tale 42.

[211] Margaret of France.

All hail! ye gardens, mansions, Edens of delight, Whose comeliness and beauty put your vices out of sight!

[212] See the frescoes in the Borromeo palace at Milan.

[213] [In allusion to the wreaths used at the ceremony of laureation.]

[214] [Anne de Montmorency, the coarse, violent Constable of France, who mumbled his prayers and his orders to his men together, because, as Brantôme says, “he was so conscientious that he always tried to combine the two duties.”]

[215] “Most illustrious and excellent lady, most respected madam,” wrote the countess of Forli to the duchess of Ferrara: “the credible accounts and perfect information brought in by innumerable persons about the extreme kindliness and rare munificence of your excellency, inspire me with the boldness to address you in confidence. I know that the most illustrious lord your spouse and your most illustrious ladyship adore hunting and birds, and that you always have in abundance dogs of all kinds, excellent, perfect. I beseech your excellency very earnestly that you would deign to make me a very beautiful and very precious present, namely, a pair of greyhounds, well trained and fleet-footed, for the deer of the Campagna, which are very swift: a couple of good deer-hounds and a couple of handsome pointers, so good that I may hope to say regarding their exploits when they catch their quarry, ‘these are the dogs the most illustrious duchess of Ferrara gave me.’ I know that your excellency will not send me anything but what is really good.” She cordially recommends to the duchess the falconer she is sending, to fetch the hounds, and probably to choose them. (Letter of Catherine Sforza to the duchess of Ferrara, 1481).

[216]

King Louis Twelfth had perfect pastimes three: Triboulet first, then Chailly, lastly me.

The author has collected the various pieces, still unpublished, in which these hounds and hawks of Louis are celebrated.

[217] [Professor of mathematics and philosophy at the Cardinal Lemoine college at Paris (1455-1537): a broad-minded man, the quarry of a heresy hunt: chosen by Francis I. as tutor to his son Charles.]

[218] [Architect and antiquary of Verona (1445-1525). He spent eight years in France at the invitation of Louis XII., designing bridges and buildings: he was afterwards one of the architects of St. Peter’s at Rome.]

[219]

Kathin alloit bien montée a la chasse, Portant espieu. Cupido la pourchasse Avecques son arc, et luy dit: “Combatons, Puisqu’ainsi est que nous avons bastons.” Elle respond: “Amour, que penses tu? Longtemps y a que je t’ay combatu Sans estre armée: a présent, je le suis; Retourne-t-en, et plus ne me poursuis, Car seure je suis que tu seroys batu.”

(Michel d’Amboise.)

[Kitty well mounted to the hunt was hying, Holding a spear; Dan Cupid her espying, Loosing his bow, gave chase and caught her. Said he: “Come let us fight, since both are armed and ready.” Then answered she: “Love, art thou then so daring? Long have I fought thee, weapon never bearing; Now am I armed, turn, never more pursue me, For I would beat thee, ere thou couldst undo me.”]

[220] _Ship of Fools_, sixth engraving. Critics almost always represent epicurism in a boat.

[221] [A Franciscan friar (1440-1508) and a vigorous and racy preacher. His sermons were larded with buffooneries.]

[222]

C’est a l’image saincte Jame Ou se vont baigner ces femmes; Et baignez, et estuvez, allez. Bien servies vous y serez De varletz, de chambrière, De la dame bonne chère. Allez tost, les baings sont prestz.

(_Les Cris de Paris._)

[To the image of St. James Go for bathing these fair dames. Haste ye, ladies, bathe and stew, Maids and varlets wait for you, Service good, delightful fare; The baths are ready: speed ye there.]

[223] “A work, for our epoch, in which the use of mineral waters is so common, very useful to physicians, but still more to all other persons, and very entertaining.”

[224] For example, _Le Bain de St Barthélemy_: “A man of Feltre named Petrarch, after an accident to his knee, having been attended by a series of, I will not say bone-setters but, bone-breakers, experienced the keenest anguish; a flux resulted: astringents and cold remedies were applied; and an induration ensued, which compelled him always to walk with a stick or a crutch. At the end of two years, he came to see me; I prescribed the baths. They did him so much good that after a fortnight he left for home without his crutch.” (_De Balneis_, 1563).

[225] Gregorovius gives in his _Lucretia Borgia_ an account of an extremely free fête got up at Sienna for fair bathers, from which husbands and brothers were excluded.

[226] Poggio.

[227] [The _balle à grelot_ was a hollow ball of metal containing something that caused a jingle when the ball was moved or thrown—like our horse-bells.]

[228]

So many books there are, my memory fails To number or to name them; but to see Their fair array’s a pleasant sight to me. ... And as for fearing what they have inside, ’Tis a mere folly I may not abide. ... I piled a pillar of them, and methought It heaven and earth together brought.

[229] Lucretia Borgia took to Ferrara for her personal use only beautifully decorated Books of Hours, a few devotional books, a manual of history, a collection of songs, a Dante, and a small Petrarch.

[230] Especially Castiglione, who borrowed entire passages from Cicero. A translation of the _De Officiis_ was published at Lyons on Feb. 11, 1493-94.

[231]

All this is excellent good lore, And none of it locked in the cupboard.

[232] [Rheinauer (Latinised as Rhenanus), a famous German philologist, a friend and correspondent of Erasmus.]

[233] The duchess of Orleans was so fond of them that her husband could find no finer present to give her than the romance of _Troilus and Cressida_, and one day she sent a messenger in hot haste after a lady of the court who had borrowed a _Cleriadus_ and forgotten to return it—as often happens.

[234] The reading of _Lancelot of the Lake_ inspired Dante, as is well known, with the exquisite passage on Francesca da Rimini.

[235] [“In which there are divers relations of the deceptions of servants towards their masters, and of pimps towards lovers, translated from Italian into French.” Paris: 1527.]

[236] He had got it in the library of the Palace.

[237] A woodcut, thrice repeated in the _Illustrations des Gaules_ (1528) represents France on a throne, with Ill-hap at her feet; on her right is Noblesse, represented as a maiden playing a violin; on her left, the People, depicted as a young man playing a guitar.

[238] National Gallery.

[239] So well interpreted by Giovanni Bellini in his _Girl Singing_ in Hampton Court Palace.

[240] Charles VIII. was even obliged to threaten serious consequences in order to secure the restitution of a singer and a lute-player who had been enticed away when he passed through Florence.

[241] Ockeghem, it has been said, “breathes into his music the soul of song, envelops it in a vigorous harmonic body, and clothes it with a fine tissue of ingenious thematic developments, imitations more or less close and more or less extended. One finds in his pieces, often in their inner parts, phrases of great melodic beauty, and full of an extraordinary sweetness and depth of expression. His harmonies are often enough peculiar and archaic, but they are striking and rich. He also brings his pieces to a close in a manner sometimes surprising and odd, but certainly very interesting.” (R. Eitner.)

[242] _Harmony_, by Paul Veronese (fresco at Masera): _Parnassus_, the _Crowning of the Virgin_, by Raphael (Vatican).

[243] Neapolitan proverb.

[244] Erasmus.

[245] In the Louvre.

[246] The Madrid museum possesses a magnificent portrait of him by Raphael.

[247] He was born, like Leo, in 1470.

[248] An opera-ballet was got up in the open-air by Bergonza di Botta, in his park at Tortona, on the occasion of the marriage of Isabella of Aragon.

[249] At Metz, in 1502, the public violently interrupted and rendered impossible the representation of one of the comedies of Terence which were constantly played at Rome; the performance had to be postponed till next day, when it was continued before a select audience, composed in great part of clergy.

[250] _E.g._ The Mystery of the Passion; of the Three Gifts, played in 1509; of St. Andrew, played in 1512; of St. Barbara, and St. Eustache, played in 1504.

[251] [_Pochades_]

[252] Lorenzo de’ Medici, Pico della Mirandola, Agnolo Dovizio da Bibbiena, Bernardo Ruccellai [see George Eliot’s _Romola_], Machiavelli, and others: it was a singular, incoherent, burlesque procession of characters of all sorts and sizes—devils, deaths, nymphs, courtiers, old husbands, young wives, merry nuns, hunters and huntresses, pages, winds, furies.

[253] “With the tongue seven men are not a match for one woman” (Erasmus, _Colloquies_).

[254] “He who keeps his mouth shut knows no care” (P. Meyer).

[255] _Heptameron_, Tale 10.

[256]

Beneath the broidered sheets we lay— Sheets flashing with gems and gold— And whiled the dreary hours away With comfortable tales of old, And converse debonair and gay.

[257] [One of the Urbino coterie.]

[258] [A lawyer of Poitiers who is said to have composed a hundred thousand verses, mostly dull. He called himself _Le Traverseur des voies périlleuses_ (the traverser of perilous ways), and wrote moral and familiar letters and _Les Regnars_ (foxes) _traversant les voies périlleuses_.]

[259] [The brilliant Bishop of Orleans (1802-1878), noted equally for his eloquence, his pugnacity, and the huge blue umbrella he carried on sunny days. It was said of him that he was “a journalist who had strayed into a bishopric.” He wrote _Letters on the Education of Girls_, and especially opposed the opening of university courses to girls: he did not wish them to go “from the bosom of the Church to the arms of the University.”]

[260] He adds: “We gambled, played music, took walks, supped, and worked (not often that): no cares, no anxieties! We were often with the Venetian nobles: my life flourished like a growing plant. Nothing could be more pleasant than that life, which lasted five years and a half (September, 1526-February, 1532): we used to chat with the prefect, whose palace was our kingdom and rostrum.”

[261] Raphael’s portrait of Castiglione in the Louvre.

[262] Like the good curé who, seeing a lady shedding hot tears at the conclusion of a superb _exaltet_, charitably approached her to console her for what he believed to be the effect of the music, and stopped aghast when the good dame replied, “Ah! I fancied I heard my poor dead donkey!”

[263]

O liberté aujourd’hui clairsemée Et cher vendue, on te doit bien servir, Car en tous lieux souvent est réclamée.

(Alione.)

[O liberty, to-day so rare And dear sold, we must serve thee well, For thou art asked for everywhere.]

[264] Here is an example: “Why, Dagoucin,” says Simontaut, “don’t you yet know that women have neither love nor regret?”—“I don’t yet know it,” he replies, “for I have never dared try for their love, for fear of finding less than I hope for.”—“You live on faith and hope, then,” says Nomerfide, “as the plover lives on wind? You are very easy to feed.” (_Heptameron_, Tale 32.)

[265] “When women confess, they always tell what they have not done.” (Old Italian proverb.)

[266]

Rusticus est vere, qui turpia de muliere Dicit, nam vere sumus omnes de muliere.

(_Facetus._)

[He is truly a boor who speaks ill of women, for verily we are all of woman born.]

[267] _Heptameron_, Tale 62.

[268] [Filippo Beroaldo (1453-1505), professor of ancient literature at Bologna, so learned that Pico della Mirandola called him the ‘Living Library.’ His most curious work is _Declamatio ebriosi, scortatoris et aleatoris_, in which three brothers, a drunkard, a lecher, and a dicer, dispute among themselves which of them, being the most vicious, their father will disinherit.]

[269] [Italian poet (1445-1515) attached to the court of Ludovico il Moro at Milan. When Ludovico was captured by the French, Fregoso went into seclusion and became known as the Friend of Solitude.]

[270] An attempt was made to revive this system in certain notable salons of the 18th century. The rules for the _Lanturelus_ drawn up in Madame Geoffrin’s salon included the obligation of being just, loyal, cheerful and kindly; they forbade one to grow old, that is, to become peevish and misanthropical. The sittings held under the direction of a “queen” were divided into two parts, one devoted to song, poetry and _facéties_, the other to philosophy.

[271]

But that I fear to shock beyond forgiveness The soilless purity of your chaste ears.

[272] He used to amuse himself with a drunken impromptu-monger, a Roman named Querno, whom he jestingly called Archipoeta. Querno says to him:

Archipoeta facit versus pro mille poetis.

[Arch-poet makes enough verses for a thousand poets]

Leo replies:

Et pro mille aliis Archipoeta bibit.

[And drinks enough for another thousand]

Archipoeta responds:

Porrige quod faciat mihi carmina docta, Falernum,

[Give me some Falernian, to inspire my song]

and Leo:

Hoc etiam enervat debilitatque pedes.

[That also renders your feet weak and shaky]

[273] [A clerical poet (1466-1502) who translated Ovid’s Epistles into French.]

[274]

“De son cheval on fait une rosse, Et de sa femme une catin.”

[Of one’s horse one makes a jade, And of one’s wife a harlot.]

[275] _Heptameron_, Tale 52.

[276] Seventy-five letters of this princess have been collected by M. Amante.

[277] [Mistress of Francis I.]

[278] Anne of Laval, for example, writes to her sister: “J’ay entendu que Monsieur mon frère ce vante que à son retour j’auré ung petit neveu. Plust a Dieu qui fust ainsi, d’aussi bon cueur que je le desire. L’espérance que j’en ay me faict vous envoyer des poix en gousse, qui est viande de femme grosse.”

[I have heard that my brother is boasting that on his return I shall have a little nephew. God grant it may be so, of as good heart as I desire it. The hope I have induces me to send you some peas in the pod, which is a food for pregnant women.]

[279] Here are some samples of these private letters:

“Monsigneur, tant et si tres humblement que je puis a vostre bonne grace me recommende.

Monsigneur, je vous suplie tres humblement croire que la créance que remais a ce porteur n’est que la plus grande obaissence que james tres humble fille ne servente vous saroit porter et coume la plus obligée de ce monde.

Monsigneur, prie Dieu qui vous dont tres bonne et tres longue vie.

Voutre tres humble et tres obaissente fille,

Magdalene.

_Address_: Au Roy mon souverain seigneur.”

[My lord, as truly and as humbly as I can I commend myself to your good favour.

My lord, I beg you very humbly to believe that the letter of credit I confide to this carrier is only the greatest obedience that ever humblest maid and servant could bear to you, and like the most dutiful in the world.

My lord, I pray God to give you a very good and very long life.

Your very humble and very obedient daughter,

Magdalene.]

“Ma cousine, je n’ay point voullu que ce porteur soit passé par Chantilli sans vous porter de mes laitres; je vous en usses plutost envoié, mes les piteulses nouvelles qu’avons repsues de Hedin m’an onst engardé, car je n’aime poinct a mander de mauvesses nouvelles, et en cete perte j’ay esté tres esse d’entendre que Monsieur le conte de Villars vostre frere est seulement prisonnir (_sic_) avecq tant d’onneur que je suis sure que vos prieres luy onst beaucoup servi. Vous feres tant pour moy, ma cousine, de croire que tout ce qui vous touchera que je ceray mervelleucement esse qu’il soint anci hureulx comme vous le desires et moy anci ce que je suplie de bien bon cueur Dieu et de vous donner bonne vie et longue et a moy l’eur de vostre bonne grasse a laquelle de bien bon cueur me recommande.

Vostre melieure cousine et amie,

Marguerite de France.

A ma cousine Madame la connestable [duc]esse de Montmorency.”

[My cousin, I would not let this carrier pass through Chantilly without taking some letters from me for you. I should have written sooner, but the dreadful news we have received from Hedin has prevented me, for I do not care to send bad news, and in this loss I was very glad to hear that the count of Villars your brother is only a prisoner, with so much honour that I am sure your prayers have much profited him. You will do so much for me, my cousin, as to believe that, in all that touches you, I shall be wonderfully glad if all falls out as lucky as you desire, and myself too, and I pray God so with all my heart, both to give you a good and long life, and me the bliss of your good favour, to which with all my heart I commend myself.

Your best cousin and friend,

Margaret of France.]

“Mon pere, je ne voulu leser aler se pourteur sans vous faire savoir de mes nouvelles, lequeles sont bonnes, pour se que je aeudire souvan des vostres qai me pabise (?) bien, car s’et au proufit du roy et a vostre ouneur. Je prie Dieu vous i vouloyr tenir; je ne veus oblier a vous faire mes reconmandasions bien fort voustre bonne grase.

Vostre bonne fille,

Marguerite.

A Monsieur le grant maistre.”

[My father, I would not allow this carrier to go without letting you have news of me, which are good, because I have often had news of you which please me, for ’tis to the profit of the king and your honour. I pray that God will keep you in the same; I do not forget to commend myself very earnestly to your good favour.

Your good daughter,

Margaret.]

“Mon pere, j’ay esté tres esse d’entendre par vostre cegretere presant porteur du bon partement du Roy et du vostre et aucy que toutes les afaires continuent de mieulx en mieulx; cant a cele conpagnie, la Royne et monsieur ce portent tres bien, aucy faict tout le reste. Nous ne fesons faute de prier bien Dieu tout les jours pour le Roy; après luy, mon pere, je vous puis assurer que vous estes le prumier (_sic_) en mes auraisons. Je vous prire (_sic_), mon pere, presanter mes tres humbles recommandasions au Roy et me tenir en sa bonne grasse et an la vostre. A laquelle de bien bon ceur me recommande, et prie Dieu vous donner bonne vie et longue.

Vostre milieure figle et cousine,

Marguerite de France.

A mon pere, Monsieur le connestable.”

[My father, I was very glad to hear by your secretary the present bearer of the good departure of the king and yourself, and also that affairs are going better and better: as to this company, the queen and _monsieur_ (the king’s brother) are very well, as are all the rest. We do not neglect to pray God every day for the king: after him, my father, I can assure you that you are the first in my prayers. I beg you, my father, to present my very humble greetings to the king and to keep me in his good favour and in yours. To which with much love I commend myself, praying God to give you good and long life.

Your best daughter and cousin,

Margaret of France.]

[280] [She came near perishing by shipwreck on her way to join her young husband, the Infant of Spain, and composed her epitaph:

Ci-git Margot, la gente demoiselle, Qu’eut deux maris, et si mourut pucelle.]

[281] She died in 1530, barely fifty years old.

[282] Her portrait is in the Louvre.

[283]

Friends, know that I have changed my dame; Another holds me at her will, In soul Renée, Renée her name.

(Renée = re-born: the pun cannot be translated.)

[284] “I fatti sono maschi, le parole femine.”

[285] Clément Marot writes:

Adieu le bal, adieu la dance!; Adieu mesure, adieu cadence, Tanbourins, aulboys, violons, Puisqu’à la guerre nous allons ... Adieu les regards gracieux, Messagers des cœurs soucieux; Adieu les profondes pensées, Satisfaictes ou offensées; Adieu les armonieux sons De rondeaulx, dixains et chansons ... Adieu la lettre, adieu le page! (To the court ladies.)

[Farewell to dance, farewell to ball, And cadenced measures, farewell all! Fiddles, hautboys, tambourines, For we go to warlike scenes. Sweet looks from ladies’ eyes, that tell How much they love us, fare ye well! Farewell to meditation deep, That gives us joy or mars our sleep; Farewell to all harmonious strains Of ballads, rondeaux, and dizains; Letters and pages, all farewell!]

[286] National Gallery.

[287] _Ibid._

[288] The brilliant captain whose Memoirs or Commentaries, it is said, were afterwards called the Soldier’s Bible by Henri IV.

[289] “Catherine, if you make the dance go thus, Atlas will find the world a lighter burden,” exclaims a poet.

[290] Francis I. regarded this as Michelangelo’s masterpiece.

[291] Emile Trolliet, _La Vie silencieuse_.

The veil of flesh is rent; the spirit’s light Pierces and routs the clinging mist of sense; And Earth, this Virgin and this God beholding, Learns what Love is, and worships Womankind.

[292] [The sovereign family of Rimini and Romania, a race of warriors and cut-throats. Robert, commandant of the troops of Sixtus IV., was poisoned by Riario in 1483.]

[293]

En cas d’amour, c’est trop peu d’une dame, Car si un homme aime une honneste femme, Et s’il ne peut à son aise l’avoir, Il fait très bien d’autre accointance avoir.

(Melin de Saint-Gelais.)

[In case of love, one dame doth not suffice, For if a man loveth one fair of fame, And cannot have her at an easy price, ’Tis well for him to have another flame.]

[294] _Heptameron_, Tale 42.

[295] Coquillart.

[296] _Heptameron_, Tale 8.

[297] _Heptameron_, Tale 38.

[298] Nifo, _De Amore_, cap. xvi.: _De viro aulico_, Bk. I., caps. xxx.-xxxiv.

[299] _Heptameron_, Tale 4.

[300] _Heptameron_, Tales 18 and 25.

[301] _Heptameron_, Tale 24.

[302] _Ibid._, Tale 50.

[303] _Ibid._, Tale 5.

[304] Calvin regards his co-workers as “playactors,” worthy of bespattering with mud. “The future appals me,” he cries: “I dare not think of it: unless the Lord descends from heaven, barbarism will engulf us.” (Preface to the Geneva Catechism.)

[305] Aretino wrote placidly: “I have legitimated my dear girls in my heart; no other ceremony is needed.”

[306] Natural children easily obtained recognition by the concession of the right to bear arms, or their legitimation. In Italy, legitimation was only a fiscal formality; Innocent VIII. gave his nephew the right of granting it.

[307] The Grecised name of Otto Schwartzmann, German jurisconsult (1571-1670).

[308] The “Pomeranian doctor” (1485-1558). He married Luther, and buried him, and was one of his coadjutors in the translation of the Bible.

[309] Bernardino Ochino of Sienna (1487-1565). He was a monk, and for three years general of the Capuchins, but turned Protestant and got into hot water with the Church. He spent a few years in England at the invitation of Cranmer. A man of rare independence of mind, his opinions soon verged towards heresy, and his _Diologi_, in which he opposed the doctrines of the Incarnation, the divinity of Christ, and others, and spoke in favour of polygamy, brought on him the displeasure and even persecution of his co-religionists.

[310] “Difficiles aditu fugias in amore puellas.” (_Celtis_, _Quattuor libri_.)

[311] _Heptameron_, Tale 30.

[312]

Souvienne-toy, regaignant ta raison, Que ta maîtresse est de grande maison, De noble sang, et non pas amusée A dévider ou tourner la fusée; Et que son œil, mais plutôt un soleil doré, Et son esprit, des autres adoré, Et ses cheveux, les liens de ta prise, Sa belle main, à la victoire apprise, Son ris, son chant, son parler et sa voix, Méritent bien le mal que tu reçois.

(Ronsard.)

[Remember, when thou canst regain thy nous, Thy mistress is of high and famous house, Of noble blood, nor is she wont to play At wheel and distaff all the livelong day. Remember that her eye, a sun of gold, Her mind, by other worshippers extolled, Her hair, the bonds of thy captivity, Her lovely hand, well trained to victory, Her smile, her song, her speech, her gentle voice Deserve that for thy smart thou shouldst rejoice.]

[313]

Et, si l’on dit que le privé toucher Faict près du feu le tison approcher, Je respondray: Il y ha ja longtemps Que, si l’honneur, où tousjours je prétens, N’eust en moy deu faire plus de demeure, Un, que nommer je ne veux pour ceste heure, Par les effors de sa langue diserte Auroit plus tost tiré gaing de ma perte, Que par baisers, ne par approchements Qui de la chair ne sont qu’attouchemens.

Héroët (one of Margaret’s friends).

[And if one says the intimate caress Is fire to tinder, then will I confess That if the honour hitherto my pride Within my soul no longer would abide, Long, long ere now a man I will not name (Lest at this hour it bring us both to shame), Would by his tongue’s delicious eloquence Have won his profit at my dear expense Far speedier than by kiss or dalliance hot, That titillates the flesh, and is forgot.]

[314] The ancient Valentinians went much farther, and maintained that it is impossible to the witty to become corrupt, whatever their actions.

[315]

Qu’eust fait ce grec, si ceste image nue Entre ses bras fust Vénus devenue? Que suis-je lors, quand Louize me touche Et, l’accollant, d’un long baiser me baise? L’âme me part, et, mourant en cet aise, Je la reprens ja fuiant en sa bouche.

[What would that Greek of old have done if in his clinging arms His naked statue had become Venus with all her charms? And when Louisa touches me, ah! what is then my bliss, When all my body tingles with the thrill of her long kiss? In that sweet agony I die, my soul then from me slips; But I catch it as it passes ’twixt my lady’s burning lips.]

[316] There are some rather lively and amusing letters of Bibbiena. On February 7, 1516, he wrote to the Marchioness of Mantua: “The compliments your Excellency has been good enough to pay me on behalf of Isabella have given me supreme pleasure, for I have always loved and still love Isabella more than myself. I am wholly Isabella’s, body and soul; so that, whether loving or not loving Isabella Mario, I am wholly hers, and desire above all things in the world to be loved by her.”

[317] _Heptameron_, Tales 20, 25, 14.

[318] Here are specimens of Phausina’s talk, that Nifo found so delightful. “Phausina,” said he, “since it befell me to love you, you have become an Aurora, superb, resplendent! How happy it makes me!”—“Near such a sun as you,” she replies, “ought I not to become the finest dawn ever seen?”

“One day I asked her how it was that with her sixteen years and her charm she could love an old fellow like me, reciprocity of love resulting philosophically from a certain similarity.”—“True, we are different,” she replied prettily, “yet we are wholly at one in the basis of our mutual love” (she meant beauty of soul).

“Who is the true lover?” he said. “The idolater,” she replied, “is he who adores the image and not the divinity; the false lover, he who loves the face of a girl, but does not respect her modesty.”

“Phausina, how can you love a man with one foot in the grave?” “’Tis not the dotard I love so warmly, but he whom neither age nor anything can affect; he who, after his death, will come to life again.”

“One day I was teasing Phausina: to provoke her I said, ‘Come now. Phausina, when you are quite old, do you think I shall still love you?’: ‘Why, of course,’ she said: ‘what you love in me will not grow old. Petrarch loved Laura ardently, young, mature, living, dead: he saw no mark of age, which nevertheless he might have earnestly desired, so that he might enjoy her beauty without any suspicion.’ And I then asked Phausina what would be the reward for such a love. ‘That you will not be a liar when you shower your praises on me.’”

[319] “One day, among the group of girls, someone set the little problem of guessing what gave me the greatest pleasure in my relations with Phausina. One of them said it was to gaze at so pretty a woman, another that her conversation was very sweet, another swore that in reality it was because we wrangled so pleasantly, and that she knew it. Phausina smiled and said: ‘We all know, my dear Nifo, that all those things go to produce my pleasure: but my deepest satisfaction is to be able to enjoy everything, frequently, freely, without fear of material seductions, because of your age.’”

[320]

Ma dame, un jour, daigna tant s’abaisser, Parlant à moy, de doucement me dire: ‘Je ne te veux, amy, rien escond[u]ire Qui soit en moy, je te pry le penser.’ Et pour encor du tout récompenser Mon triste cueur de l’enduré martire, Sa blanche main hors du gand elle tire Et me la tend pour la mener danser.

(Magny, p. 7.)

[My fair did condescend one day Sweetly to speak to me, and say: “My friend, nothing will I deny thee Of all I have, come prithee, try me.” And for to recompense my heart For all its grievous dole and smart, From out her glove she drew her lily hand, To lead her forth to dance did then command.]

[321] “And you, Madam, if you succumb to the flesh, beat your breast, for you do not shun temptation. Why do you stand at your window? why chat with young men?... Why go to the ball and give yourself to so many idle conversations? Shun temptation, and the devil will leave you in peace. Resist him and he will flee from you!” Woman’s tongue is one of the greatest of the devil’s instruments: “I did that because the devil seduced me:” it is Eve over again: “The serpent beguiled me.” (Baraleta.)

[322] “Casta est quam nemo rogavit.”

[323]

The servant that is brisk and trusty Becometh master ere he be rusty.

[324] _Heptameron_, Tale 40, and prologue of first day.

[325] “Most illustrious and wicked girl. When the terrible duchess Elizabeth was alive, she made me her martyr and protomartyr; and you perhaps, nay certainly, with your angel’s face and your serpent’s heart, were her perfidious counsel to my detriment; and now look at me, compelled by aid of medicine to support as best I can the miserable remnant of a life thus exhausted. Through that pity which you know not, either in life or in fiction, you will condescend to do me the favour to send me a _baratollo_ or rather a little tree of _barbe di calcatrepuli_, a specialty of Urbino, so that I may boast of once having had a prayer granted by the flinty ladies of the house of Gonzaga. I do not commend myself to your highness, not wishing to waste my words on the air. I only pray Heaven to keep you long in health and happiness, so that you may long make mincemeat (_macello_) of your servitors.—Your servant for life, Unicus.”

[326] _Heptameron_, Tale 8.

[327] Tales 9, 10.

[328] One of the ladies replies tranquilly: “I should prefer all my life long to see the bones of all my servitors in my room than to die for them: for everything can be amended but death.” (_Heptameron_, Tale 32.)

[329]

“Je le sçay bien, mais point ne le veux croire, Car je perdrois l’aise que j’ai reçeu.”

(Clément Marot.)

[I know it well, but will not it believe, For I should lose the comfort I receive.]

[330] Hütten writes: “What shall I say of Samson, who while all but in the arms of a woman received the inspiration of the Holy Ghost?... And of Solomon, who had 300 queens and an infinite number of concubines, till his death, and who nevertheless in the eyes of the divines passes for saved? What is the inference? I am not stronger than Solomon, nor wiser, and one must sometimes have a little joy. The doctors say ’tis necessary to cure melancholy. Well, what do you say of these grave authors? Ecclesiastes says: ‘There is nothing better than that a man should rejoice in his own works.’ So I say to my love, with Solomon: ‘Thou hast wounded my heart, my sister, my spouse, thou hast wounded my heart with one of thy hairs. How fair is thy breast, my sister, my spouse! How much better is thy breast than wine!’ and so on.”

[331] _Heptameron_, Tale 15.

[332] _Ibid._, Tale 18.

[333] _Ibid._, Tale 13 and end of First Day.

[334] [Referring to the fable of the Stork and the Fox, versified later by La Fontaine. “The stork with his long neck could not pick up a bit.”]

[335]

Comes from divinity, And its torment from our humanity.

[336] [Ninon was the celebrated courtesan who, without any great beauty, retained her ascendancy over men through a long life (1616-1706). She was well-born, wealthy and witty, and capricious in the bestowal of her favours. She is the original of Clarisse in Mlle de Scudéry’s interminable romance _Clélie_. Herself a writer and a lover of literature, she left Voltaire 2000 francs to buy books.]

[337] [An ancient princely family of Rome which claimed descent from Fabius Maximus the Dictator.]

[338] Panormita, who died in 1471, had already employed his muse in lamenting departed courtesans; for example:

Hoc jacet ingenuae formae Catharina sepulcro; Grata fuit multis scita puella procis, etc.

[In this tomb lies Catharine of noble beauty: pleasing was the fair girl to many a wooer.]

[339] Women “may accept of our service unto a certain measure, and make us honestly perceive how they disdain us not; for the law which enjoineth them to abhor us, because we adore them, and to hate us forasmuch as we love them, is doubtless very cruel.... A queen of our time said wittily that to refuse men’s kind summons is a testimony of much weakness, and an accusing of one’s own facility, and that an unattempted lady could not vaunt of her chastity.... If rareness be in any thing worthy estimation, it ought to be in this.” And again: “In my time, the pleasure of reporting and blabbing what one hath done (a pleasure not much short of the act itself in sweetness) was only allowed to such as had some assured, trusty and singular friend; whereas nowadays the ordinary entertainments and familiar discourses of meetings and at tables are the boastings of favours received, graces obtained, and secret liberalities of ladies. Verily it is too great an abjection and argueth a baseness of heart, so fiercely to suffer those tender, dainty, delicious joys to be persecuted, pelted and foraged by persons so ungrateful, so indiscreet, and so giddy-headed.” (Montaigne, Bk. III., cap. v.)

[340] Vice was incredibly base and ignoble at the courts of Charles VIII. and Louis XII. Ragged and loathsome wretches went everywhere in the train of the court, to whom the princes gave alms on fête days.

[341]

[Nor will you find it hard to tell On what fair morning this befell.]

[342]

[God hath sent you to this place Like some miracle of grace, That you may both have and hold Our great sovreign’s heart of gold, And that like a holy fire, Purified in all desire His affection light may shed, By your true perfections fed. Kings to mortal men below God’s own form and image show.]

[343] [And you have won the whole great heart of France.]

[344]

[Shall I alone of all this age in France Forbear to sing thy dread and puissant name, Nor tell the glory of thy crescent flame, Nor by some deathless rime thy praise enhance?]

[345] Some historians have maintained that the love of Henri II. for Diana was purely platonic.

[346] As a prelate and an aspirant to the purple Bembo was tied to celibacy; but he was only in the lower ranks of the clergy so far as actual _orders_ were concerned.

[347] Before becoming pope Julius had shaved. It was during his pontificate that the discussion waxed bitter. Clement VII. lent his name to the tractate _Pro sacerdotum barbis_ of Piero.

[348] “Well may a piece of marble raise your titles as high as you list, because you have repaired a piece of an old wall, or cleansed a common ditch, but men of judgment will never do it.” (Montaigne, III. x.)

[349] In the Louvre.

[350]

The day thy sail dipped to the dancing brine, And from our streaming eyes robbed sight of thine, That fatal bark bore far from weeping France The Muses erst who dwelt there—sad mischance! And now Parnassus thrums a tuneless lyre, And Helicon distils an ooze of mire; Our laurel is all parched, our ivy sere, Our song-birds stint their singing—thou not here!

[351]

Prince Françoys, veulx tu, comme seigneur Supérieur, estre dominateur, Prans pour faveur, par amour et mérite. Celle qui est en florée verdeur, Digne d’honneur, nommée Margarite.

[Prince Francis, if thou dost desire To rule indeed as lord and sire, For love and worth in favour set Her who is filled with youthful fire, Deserving honour, Margaret.]

[352] This is especially noticeable in her first work, _The Mirror of the Soul_, which she modestly called the work of a woman “who had in herself neither science nor knowledge.” Besides, she employed a good secretary.

[353] Another anecdote of the court of Urbino. A Bergamese peasant had just entered the service of a nobleman. The princesses were told that there had arrived a retainer of Cardinal Borgia, who was a fine musician, a dancer, and a great oddity. They fetched him in, welcomed him, sat him down among them, and lionised him with great respect. Unhappily the good man spoke an indescribable jargon. The author of the trick made the princesses believe that he was shamming the Lombard peasant for fun. The scene lasted a rather long time, while those in the secret were splitting their sides.

[354]

O main polye, main divine, Main qui n’as ta pareille en terre, Main qui tient la paix et la guerre ... Main portant la clef pour fermer Et ouvrir l’huys de bien aymer, Main plaisante, main délicate, Je n’oserois te dire ingrate. Tu peulx blesser, tu peulx guérir, Tu peulx faire vivre et mourir.

[O fair smooth hand, O hand divine, Hand never match’d on earth before, The arbiter of peace and war, That bears the key to lock or loose The door for happy lover’s use, O pleasant hand and dainty, ne’er To call thee thankless could I dare. ’Tis thine to wound and thine to heal, And thine both life and death to deal.]

[355] The question has often been asked whether the _Heptameron_ is a work of imagination, or whether it should be taken seriously. After the labours of MM. de Montaiglon, Franck, and Gaston Pâris, to speak only of the principal authorities, there can be no longer any doubt. Margaret, like Castiglione, certifies in a general way the veracity of her stories. She worked at this collection for several years, beginning probably in 1545, and with so much care that in 1549, when she died, she left it incomplete. The _Heptameron_ then is not a juvenile work, but the testament of her court life and her philosophic career, and an autobiography, since several anecdotes relate to her, her brother, and her intimate friends. Moreover, among the large number of manuscripts she left in her portfolios, Boistuau (another strange character, to judge by his works!) chose this one to publish under the title of _History of Fortunate Lovers_, with some touching up, and a few excisions he thought it well to make in certain risky passages. This precaution gave offence, and Margaret’s own daughter took care to get a new and authentic edition published, two years later.

[356] So we identify “Simontault,” [one of the _raconteurs_ of the _Heptameron_].

[357] Thus we identify “Nomerfide.”

[358] “Ennasuite.”

[359] Margaret excelled in artistic needlework. She made a piece of tapestry, representing a high mass as perfectly as a picture could have done. While she plied her needle, she had near her someone to read to her, or a historian, poet, or writer of some kind to talk to her.

[360] Very few poets had the audacity of Clément Marot, who, harassed by his creditors, went a-begging to the Queen of Navarre, beslavering her with love the while: she replied with a _dixain_. He acknowledged receipt of it ironically, saying that on the strength of her verses his creditors have called him “Monsieur,” and have permitted him to borrow again, which he proceeded to do.

[361] “My heart’s friend, I beg you to send me the crucifix for a short time, even if it is not far advanced, so that I may show it to the gentlemen of the Most Reverend Cardinal of Mantua. And if you are not very busy to-day, come and talk to me at any hour that suits you.—Yours to command, the Marchioness of Pescara.”

[362] [Usually known as Lydius Cattus. His Latin poems in praise of Lydia appeared at Venice in 1502.]

[363] [A Portuguese writer (1505-1566) who spent the most of his life in France and taught philosophy at Paris. He is chiefly notable for his crushing reply to Ramus’s attacks on Aristotle.]

[364] Paul Bourget, address in the French Academy, Dec. 9, 1897.

[365] He undertook to write for her the _Annals of Brittany_, and had an idea of a history of the Greeks and Turks for the same princess.

[366] [So called because their aim was to purify the Italian tongue by sifting the wheat from the chaff.]

[367] Castiglione got Bembo to revise the speeches he attributed to him.

[368] The Spanish _canzone_, inserted by Lucretia Borgia in her letters to Bembo, are perhaps not her own.

[369] [Her librarian.]

[370] Castiglione, that arbiter of taste, devotes six pages of excellent Latin distiches to dissuade his lady from going to the sea-baths. He gives a charming description of the sea monsters which advance towards the girls, not only to fling them as food to the fishes, but to get them into their embrace, and so on. “Let us go rather,” he sighs, “towards the gentle river, in the thick shade, among the flowers. Perfumed, crowned with our favourite colours, we will let the water lave thy snowy feet, ... the zephyr will lay bare thy marble flanks.... O, dear soul of mine, the woodland gods will feel the sting of my love, the very water of the river will boil with my flame: let no one know whither we bend our steps! The crowd strips rocks and woods of their charm.... Let young scatterbrains go to the sea. We will be mum about the place whereto we are bound. And if on the billows thou hearest a murmur, ah! my love, at once bury thy head in my breast!”

[371] Virgil was much out of fashion, though translations are occasionally to be met with.

[372] [A poet of Mantua (1498-1560), writer of extremely free verse on monks and women.]

[373] [_I.e._ the Doubtful.]

[374]

Young Maupas’ sparrow—he is dead, alack! Fair maids, lament him. A thing unfeathered save upon his back Hath slain and rent him. Ye know the rogue—that froward wight Called Love hath done it out of spite, For when the mistress ’scaped his arrow, He turned about and slew the sparrow.

[375] [Lemaire de Belges wrote an elegiac poem on _L’amant vert_, Margaret’s parrot. A charming poem with the title _Vert-Vert_ was written by Gresset, a contemporary of Voltaire, recounting the burlesque story of a parrot which had been the pet of a convent.]

[376]

Mon Dieu, quel plaisir c’estoit, Quand Peloton se grattoit, Faisant tinter sa sonnette, Avec sa teste folette! Quel plaisir, quand Peloton Cheminoit sur un baston, Ou, coifé d’un petit linge, Assis comme un petit singe, Se tenoit, mignardelet, D’un maintien damoiselet! Ou, sur les pieds de derrière, Portant la pique guerrière, Marchoit d’un front asseuré Avec un pas mesuré.

[Gad, how pleasant ’twas to see Fluffy scratching prettily, Making with his silky pate Toy-bells tintinnabulate! And what fun to see him ride On a hobby-horse astride, Or, bedight in tiny cape, Squatting like a little ape, Posing like a proper squire, Spruce and dainty in attire; On hind legs erect, perchance, Shouldering a martial lance, Marching at a measured pace, Full assurance in his face.]

[377] [The French adapter of _Sandford and Merton_, etc.; known as the Friend of Children.]

[378] [Alluding to his forename Angelo.]

[379] In 1500, in the village of Auvilliers in Normandy, a girl of fourteen named Jeanne la Fournette, as skilled in Latin as the parish parson, sang the Tenebrae in church.

[380] “Verse is the clarion, prose the sword.” (L. Veuillot.)

[381] “Gli Italiani, col lor saper lettere, haver mostrato poco valer nell’ arme, da un tempo in qua.” (Castiglione.) [The Italians, with their knowledge of letters, have shown little worth in arms at any time.]

[382] [The popularity of the _Ship of Fools_ was partly due to its admirable woodcuts, which are of quite extraordinary excellence, and much more amusing than the text.]

[383] Hütten. Though he is joking, Hütten pretty faithfully represents the opinions of a part of Germany, which did not perceive his sarcasm.

[384] [Verses by Héroët and La Borderie appeared in _Opuscules d’amour_, Lyons, 1547. Héroët’s _Parfaite Amie_ is a lady who, having lost her lover, is content to await a spiritual union in a better world. La Borderie’s _Amie de Cour_ is a lady of quite contrary proclivities.]

[385] In 1546 Delahaye, sometime printer of Alençon, now blossomed into ‘Silvius,’ could praise Margaret for the service she had just rendered to the French mind: A coarse Cupid, he said, was reigning when true Love descended from heaven to chase him away, found hostelry with the princess, and “gently settled upon a hedge.” According to him, Margaret had succeeded in ruling the appetites, and in practically introducing philosophic love into poetry.

[386] [The _puy_ was properly a mound or other elevated place on which competitions in poetry and song were held—eisteddfoddi.]

[387] [A racy preacher whose sermons on Brandt’s _Ship of Fools_ were very popular. He preached on “subjects of the day.”]

[388] _Stultifere naves._

[389] Bk. i. cap. li.; bk. iii. cap. v.

[390] One of the peculiarities of the Albigensian heresy was that it developed through the apostleship of women.

[391] With this motto:

Donnez puissance souveraine Au croissant de France, tel cours Qu’il vienne jusqu’à lune plaine Sans jamais entrer en décours.

[All sovereign might do ye bestow On France’s crescent; let it grow Till a full moon in heaven it reigns And never from that glory wanes.]

[392] Bk. ii. cap. xii.

[393] “Platonis, ceterorumque philosophorum, quos omnes errorum magistros ostendimus.”

[394] “Nevertheless it must not be thought, when we make mention of philosophy, that we speak only of that which is learnt in the writings of Plato and other philosophers, for we get also from the philosophy of the Gospel, which is the word of God, the holy and salutary precepts with which Margaret was so well indoctrinated and instructed by her teachers” (Sainte-Marthe’s Funeral Oration).

[395] People still went to witches and “Egyptians” to get antidotes for love, or love philtres, or simply potions for securing good luck. These potions were mischievously used, as morphine is to-day: it was what they called selling the devil in bottles. Rabelais shows us his Pantagruelion: Porta, Cardan, and other grave occultists or physicians have handed down several of the prescriptions then current: opium was generally used to produce delightful dreams; nightshade produced smiling illusions. The principle of love philtres was derived from remote antiquity, and apparently M. Brown-Sequard has borrowed something from them.

[396] For instance, a lady of Blois, attacked with a decline, “bewitched,” it was said, had a mass said at Notre Dame des Aides; then a witch lay full length upon the patient, mumbling her wicked charms. The sick lady was at once cured; it is true that, two months afterwards, she had a relapse and died, but the witch attributed that accident to her own unruly tongue.

[397] Witches were the happy possessors of a number of talents: they cured diseases by amulets or charms; they brought hail and rain; their malign power played with the secrets of kings as well as of families. Two young peasants of Nivernais, stalwart striplings and much in love, one day married two sisters. On the evening of the wedding day, strange to say, the newly-married couples, instead of making love, fell to blows. All at once someone remembered that on the previous Palm Sunday one of the young fellows had refused to give a piece of consecrated boxwood to an old witch in that neighbourhood, and that she had simply said: “You will repent this.” Off they went to the hag, brought her back with them, gave her a warm welcome and a good meal; she relented and allowed one of the men to drink from her glass; he recovered immediately and his wife was satisfied. The other, on the contrary, who had not drunk of the same cup, fell ill; soon he seemed in imminent danger; the witch, when summoned, refused to inconvenience herself a second time: all offers and threats were alike unavailing. The family was in despair, the whole village at its wit’s end. The witch locked herself in; a hole was made in the roof, she was dragged out with her husband and carried off. Arrived at the bedside of the sick man, the husband said: “You are not going to die”; but the woman refused to utter a syllable. Then the rage of the bystanders knew no bounds: men who had been in hiding flung themselves on the malevolent hag as soon as she withdrew, seized her, and flung her into the fire. Others, more merciful or more apprehensive, managed to pull her out, her legs horribly burned, carried her home, and tended her. But the wretched woman, stoically wrapping herself in her pain, shut her door, refused to send to Nevers for a doctor, and after three months of agony died in her obstinate solitude.

[398] [An accomplished lady of the court of Ferrara, who wrote dialogues and Greek verses, married a German physician, and died at twenty-nine.]

[399] [Medieval types of the perfect wife. Clotilde was wife of Clovis I., King of the Franks (475-545); Theodelinde, Queen of the Lombards (died 625). Both converted their husbands to the Christian faith.]

[400]

Le nom de foy et de bonté A tant mon esprit mesconté, Que je croy qu’il est en nature Moins de bons hommes qu’en peinture.

(Melin de Saint-Gelais, in allusion to the order of St. Francis de Paul, known as _bonhommes_.)

[“Goodness” and “faith” and all such cant With me find sympathy but scant; Nature doth fewer good men breed Than live in pictures: that’s my creed.]

[401] Thus Paul Jove describes the villa on the Lake of Como, in which he wrote his _Elogia_: a villa fanned by gentle breezes, hung on a hillside dominating the lake, so rich in classic memories, so pure, so blue; in the episcopal dining-room, Apollo and the Muses presided; the drawing-room, dedicated to Minerva, contained busts of several great writers of antiquity; thence one passed to the library, then into the Hall of the Sirens, then the Hall of the Three Graces. Large windows opened upon green flower-bedecked mountains, luxuriant valleys, rugged granite peaks, a majestic horizon of eternal snow, and indestructible glaciers, above which hung the beautiful transparent blue sky.

[402] [A conventual order for ladies of rank founded by the repudiated queen of Louis XII.]

[403] “With a cable of love and fidelity welded together, I fasten my barque to a never-yielding rock, to Jesus Christ the living stone, whereby I may at any time return to port.” (Vittoria Colonna.)

[404] All the speakers in the _Heptameron_ begin by taking the communion.

[405] [The moralist who translated Pascal’s _Lettres provinciales_ into Latin, and to some extent continued his influence.]

[406]

[Churches I saw (cries Margaret), rich, beautiful, and old, And altars deck’d with images of silver and of gold; My heart was fill’d with pleasure as I heard new strains of song, And saw the gleaming tapers and the torches pass along, And heard the merry clash and clang of bells high overhead, To mortal ears astounding: oh, ’tis heaven below, I said.]

[407] Bonaventure des Périers, Tale 35.

[408] The Bible was much in request. Editions in the vulgar tongue had long been popular in Germany and Italy. Lefèvre d’Etaples, who produced his translation in 1523, had passed his life in expounding the sacred books. In 1514, Charles de Saint-Gelais dedicated to Francis I., while still only a prince, a translation of the Book of Maccabees.

[409]

Les aucunes sont bibliennes Et le texte très mal exposent: Jeunes bigottes, anciennes, Dessus les Evangiles glosent, Et tout au contraire proposent De ce qui est à proposer.

(Gringoire, _Les folles Entreprises_.)

[Some are bible-women bold, And very ill the text expound: Bigots young and bigots old Gloss the Gospels round and round, Preaching doctrine far from sound.]

[410] M. Gebhardt has well characterised this spirit of Italy: “The astonishing intellectual freedom with which Italy treated dogma and discipline; the serenity she was able to preserve in face of the great mystery of life and death; the art she devoted to the reconciliation of faith with rationalism; her dallyings with formal heresy, and the audacities of her mystic imagination: the enthusiasm of love which often carried her up to the loftiest Christian ideal—such was the original religion of Italy”—that of the Renaissance as of the Middle Ages. Alexander II. and Julius II. scandalised everybody beyond the borders of Italy: in Italy, no one.

[411] Tale 34.

[412] [A wealthy _bourgeoise_ who held a literary salon frequented by the Encyclopaedists—Diderot, D’Alembert, and the rest.]

[413] “Grant, I beseech thee, Lord, that by the humility that becomes the creature and by the pride thy greatness demands, I may adore thee always, and that, in the fear thy justice imposes, as in the hope thy clemency justifies, I may live eternally and submit to thee as the Almighty, follow thee as the All-wise, and turn towards thee as towards Perfection and Goodness. I beseech thee, most tender Father, that thy living fire may purify me, thy radiant light illumine me; that this sincere love for thee may profit me in such wise that, never finding let or hindrance in things of this world, I may return to thee in happiness and safety.”

[414]

I have transgresséd all God’s Holy laws; To stint my story, I except not one.

[415]

Las, tous ces motz ne voulois escouter, Mais encore je venois à douter Si c’estoit vous, ou si par adventure Ce n’estoit rien qu’une simple escripture.

[I would not hear those words, but still A doubt my wearied soul would fill, Whether ’twere very you indeed, Or chance had given me trash to read.]

[416] In her _Comédie sur le trespas du Roy_ the shepherdess Amarissima (that is, she herself) mourns the death of the god Pan; she no longer believes in anything—either human virtue, or human consolations, or even the old-time constancy. She has lost her philosophy! In the end, the Paraclete comes to restore our serenity by the assurance that Pan is tasting Elysian joys in the eternal meadows. At the carnival of Mont-de-Marsan in 1547, the princess, shaking off mournful preoccupations, put another comedy on the stage, in which she brought into opposition a beautiful lady of fashion, a superstitious lady who speaks of death and paradise, and a wise woman who advocates equilibrium of soul and body; then the “Queen of God” (we may guess who she is) upsets it all—the world, superstition, and wisdom—with a philosophic panacea of divine and human love commingled. We shall not be expected, however, to follow Margaret in the meanderings of her thought, nor even in her prayers “of the faithful soul,” or “to Jesus Christ”—earnest appeals to the love and favour and mercy of the Most High, who can save us only by love.

[417] See the close of the _Navire_, a poem devoted to the praise of love and to the glorification of the beauty and virtues of the late king Francis I.

[418]

“Souvienne toy qu’ilz sont nés imparfaitz, Et que de chair fragile tous sont faitz.”

[Remember that imperfect were they born, And of frail flesh God’s creatures all are made.]

[419]

“Priez Dieu pour les trespassez, Dont le retour est incongneu.”

[Pray God for sinners whose return From Death’s far bourn is all unknown.]

Very few have returned, “the way is long!”

[420] [The architect and sculptor (1400-1469) known as Philaretes, who mingled pagan mythology and Christian legend in his designs for the bronze gates of St. Peter’s, and in his _Treatise, on Architecture_ taught that a true architect should possess all the virtues.]

[421] [The _palinod_ was properly a poem in honour of the Immaculate Conception. Several such poems were recited on a set day, and a prize was awarded to the best.]

[422]

The flesh! ’Tis mortal, fed with mortal food! Love’s spirit nourishes true hearts and good.

[423] [Author of _De perpetuo in terris gaudio piorum_. Basle, 1558.]

[424] _Heptameron_, Prologue.

[425] This was before Luther, or independently of him. Erasmus pleasantly scoffs at prayers to the Virgin or to St. Christopher, and is convinced that the vows of sailors during a tempest are to be traced simply to paganism, the ancient worship of Venus, “Star of the Seas.” He has glorified the Virgin in cold but elegantly rhetorical verses, in which the Styx, Phlegethon, Helicon, and the Castalian fount proclaim the new spirit. While in former days Louis XI., for the slightest tribulation, struck a medal to the Virgin or went on a pilgrimage, neither Louis XII. nor Francis I., who will not be regarded as Lutherans, had any such idea; in an extreme case, Louis XII. pays his vows direct in the Holy Eucharist. Sannazaro, who remained faithful to the Virgin, declared himself of Spanish descent.

[426] [Disappointed of a cardinalate, he undertook a polemic against the Reformers, but was led to adopt their views. He had met Luther at Wittenberg.]

[427] Heroine of Bandello’s love-poem.

[428] [One of the best modern Latin poets (1498-1550). He was nominated by the pope as secretary to the Council of Trent.]

[429] “Who then has supported these men?” cries Alberto Pio: “the dignitaries of the church, and the highest of them! They have maintained at their voluptuous court these men with their half pagan leanings, who pour contempt on all that is dear to the people, and strive only to overturn existing things.”

[Pio was prince da Carpi, and a nephew of Pico della Mirandola.]

[430] “We,” he says, “nourished and moulded by Christianity, no longer approach the thought of divine and eternal things except with a heart full of vanity, a mind deadened and filled with the love of material things. To the instruction of Scripture, to the responses and prophecies of the Son of God, it is necessary to find (I am ashamed to say it) an academic counterpart. We have gone back to the old state of polytheism or atheism, to the maxims of antiquity.... In this paradise of study it is necessary for every lover of letters that his philosophic mind, leaving behind the pastures of philology (very pleasant, but in themselves futile and of no account for what concerns the present object), should strive to fill itself with the nutriment of sacred philosophy, the feast of heavenly wisdom descended among mortals.”

[431] [A brief criticism of this excellent comedy is given in Macaulay’s essay on Machiavelli.]

[432]

La foy sans amour est morte et endormye, Aussi l’amour sans effect vient à rien.

[A loveless faith is slumberous and dead, And love inactive naught accomplishes.]

[433] _Heptameron_, Tale 42.

[434] Renan.

[435] The art of evoking the spirits which hover about us, and of entering by their aid into relations with the absent or the dead—an art largely practised in France and Germany—was quite as pagan as the Italian mythology. Trithemius, the famous abbot of Spanheim, laid down dogmatic rules for it. Many spirits came without being summoned. There were amiable spirits among them, simple domestic goblins who made themselves useful. At the moment of death Agrippa was thus attended. There were also troublesome fiends, like those tricksy sprites who visited women in the darkness of the night. Jean Mansel relates the story of an unhappy woman tormented every night by a sort of unconscionable husband, who was no other than a jovial demon. At last, worn out, she consults a hermit, who directs her to raise her arms at the critical moment towards a sacred picture; with the result that the demon takes flight, not without cursing the hermit.

[436]

[Theology he will expound; But as for drinking water pure, You’d better give it to your hound, For brother Lubin can’t—be sure.]

[437] Oliver Maillard declaims at St. Jean de Grêve, Paris: “O women, O flaunting wenches, bethink ye well. Why fill your time with amusements and vanities? You will have to answer, not for the conceptions of Aristotle, nor the learning of idealists or realists, of legists or physicians, but for your good or evil life.... Lift up your hearts, ladies; are you good theologians?” That is what he finds to say to women who patronise and cultivate learning, to platonists penetrated with the idea of the indulgent mercy of God, and convinced of the great number of the Elect. (_Sermones de adventu_). A preacher is describing the Virgin at the moment of the Annunciation: “What was she doing, ladies? Think you she was occupied in painting and powdering her face? No, at the foot of the Cross she was reading the Hours of Our Lady”!

[438] Maillard.

[439]

“Nec formæ contenta suæ, splendore decorem Auget mille modis mulier; frontem ligat auro, Purpurat arte genas et collocat arte capillos, Arte regit gressus, et lumina temperat arte. Currit ut in latebras ludens perducat amantem.”

(_Egloga_, 4.)

[Not content with her natural beauty, woman enhances the brilliance of her charms in a thousand ways. She binds her brow with gold, artfully colours her cheeks and knots her hair and rules her gait and manages her eyes. She runs that sportive she may lure her lover into her secret nook.]

[440]

Dueil, jalousie, Puis frénésie, Puis souspessons, Mélancolie, Tours de follie, Regretz, tensons, Pleurs et chansons, Sont les façons D’amoureuse chevalerie. Mieulx vauldroit servir les massons Que d’avoir au cœur telz glassons.

[Jealous care, Rage, despair, Then suspicions, Melancholy, Freaks of folly, Regrets, quarrels, Tears and carols, These conditions Do our love-lorn knighthood bear. Better to fill a hodman’s part Than have such icicles chilling the heart.]

That is how the good prior of Liré, Guillaume Alexis, expresses himself as he rides with a nobleman along the road from Rome to Verneuil. (_Le grant Blason des faulces amours._) He continues in the same vigorous and cutting style. What, replies his companion, disagreeably surprised, you ask them only to work

Et de nul plaisir n’avez cure! Tous pageaulx Sont-ils égaulx?... ... Quant on est jeune, Force est qu’on tienne Le train des autres jouvenceaulx.

[And never to have a pleasure in life! Varlets in hall, Are they equal all? When one is young One needs must along With other younkers rolling the ball.]

Nature speaks; Gawain, Arthur, Lancelot

Qui ne craignoyent ne froit ne chault ... Toujours estoyent amoureux. Nous aymerons Et chanterons En noz jouvences: Quant vieulx serons, Nous penserons Des consciences, Menues offenses, Et négligences. Quelque jour récompenseront Force pardons, prou indulgences.

[Who feared nor heat nor cold a whit, Were ever in love. Blithe and gay With love and lay Youth we will speed: When old and gray ’Twill be time to pray, Conscience to heed, Follies to shun, To rue good undone. And some day indulgences, pardons galore, Will help pay the piper and settle the score.]

The monk replies with a long discourse, flagellating the vices of women and resulting disasters.

[441] _Reformationis monasticæ vindiciæ_, 1503.

[442] [Thenaud and Thevet were both Franciscans who travelled in the East and published accounts of their adventures.]

[443] [He eloped with a woman, lived a Bohemian life for ten years, and then returned to the hair-shirt and piety, wandering from convent to convent. He was one of the earliest and most successful writers of macaronic verse (_Opus Merlini Cocaii macaronicorum_).]

[444] [Noted for an excellent Latin verse translation of the _Iliad_. He was a German.]

[445] Maitre Berthold, he relates, who had gone to Rome to seek his fortune, had only succeeded after two months in finding a place as groom to an auditor of the rota, to look after his mule. “But,” said I to him, “that’s not the sort of thing for me, a master of arts of Cologne; I can’t do things like that.” “Very well, if you won’t, I can’t help it.” “I think I shall return to my own country.... Am I to currycomb the mule and scrub the stable? Sooth, everything may go to the devil, for me!” Again, Conrad Stryldriot writes: “’Tis the devil who brought me here, and I can’t go back; there is no good fellowship here as in Germany; people aren’t sociable; if a man gets drunk once a day, they take offence and call him a pig. What is one to do? The courtesans are very dear, and not at all pretty. I tell you in all truth, in Italy the women are uncommonly ill made, spite of all their fine furbelows of silk and camlet.... They stoop, and eat garlic and are swarthy-hued.... What colour they have is paint.” (_Epistolæ obscurorum virorum._)

[446] “Post tenebras ego spero lucem,” wrote Jean Marot in 1415.

[447] “You cannot imagine anyone more useful or holy,” her friend Bembo wrote; “I understand why your ladyship is so fond of him!” Again: “Our brother Bernardino is adored here: men, women, everybody lauds him to the skies.... I hope some day to converse with your ladyship about him.”

[448] Lavardin also touched the chords of feeling, and was thereupon congratulated by Ronsard in a sonnet: he translated for the princess a dialogue by Mark Antony Natta, on the Nature of God. He acknowledges that in reality the subject seems to him inaccessible, whether one takes the wings of an eagle or descends into the depths: in the end he thinks that the incomprehensible had better be left to faith. But he dedicates this work to Margaret in excellent verse:

A quel plus propre autel pourrions-nous présenter Le sujet immortel de ce précieux livre? ... O perle, ô Marguerite, O beau fleuron royal, vostre sang très chrestien, Et toutes les vertus dont vostre grâce hérite ... Nous font foy ... Que des enfans de Dieu vous serez le soutien.

[To what more seemly altar could we bring The immortal subject of this precious book? O pearl, O Margaret, Fair queenly gem, thy purest Christian ray And all the virtues by thy grace possest To us attest God’s children all will find in thee their stay.]

[449] _Les très merveilleuses Victoires._

[450]

To love the mind, Madam, is loving folly.

[451]

Your arms are Juno’s, and your breast The Graces have with beauty drest; Your hand and brow Aurora sent, A lioness proud your heart has lent.

[452] [Trissotin is the affected coxcomb and Vadius the pedant of Molière’s famous comedy, _Les Femmes savantes_ (Act iii. scene v.).]

[453] [A Jewish physician whose Dialogues on Love were printed at Venice in 1549.]

[454] Ronsard to Henri III.

[455] Baïf to Catherine de’ Medici.

[456]

L’homme à la femme y rend obéissance.... L’esprit bon s’y fait lourd, la femme s’y diffame, La fille y perd sa honte, la veuve y acquiert blasme. Tous y sont desguisez: la fille y va sans mère, La femme sans mary, le prestre sans bréviaire.

[At court the woman rules the man.... The brightest wit grows sluggish, and women smirch their fame, The maid loses her modesty, the widow her good name. All there is masquerade: the girl without her mother fares, Wife without husband; and the priest no breviary bears.]

All they think of there is

mendier le goust d’une vaine fumée (Qui s’acquiert à grand’peine, et tost est consumée), Piaffer, se friser, à faire l’amoureux.

(Jean de la Taille, _Satires_).

[to beg a spark of empty praise (That’s very hard to kindle, and too quickly burns away), To cut a dash, and dandify, a lover’s part to play.]

[457]

[Happy the age when wild in woods The naked savage ran, When nuts and apples were his foods, And man was yet a man.]

[458]

Multa tegit sacro involucro Natura; neque ullis Fas est scire quidem mortalibus omnia; multa Admirare modo, necnon venerare, neque illa Inquires quae sunt arcanis proxima.

[Nature conceals many things within her sacred shrine; nor may any mortal presume to know all things; many things indeed thou mayst admire, aye, reverence, without prying into those that lie closest to the mysteries.]

[459] Yet Ronsard and his friends made the mistake of believing that the language should be aristocratic, and that it was for writers, not for the people, to form or reform it.

[460]

[Alas! when shall I see again The smoking chimneys of my village home?]

[461] [A popular French writer (died in 1566). He translated Bandello into French, and his _Théâtre du Monde_, in which he discussed “the woes of humanity and the dignity and excellence of man,” ran into twenty editions.]

[462] [His _Nouvel Amour_ appeared along with Héroët’s _Opuscules d’Amour_.]

[463]

[Then I perceived that, ignorant as yet Of her high worth, I worshipped Margaret, As, all unwitting, we admire the heavens.]

[464] [Andrea Navagero, commentator on the classics, author of _Viaggio_.]

[465]

[Nothing remained in all the realm of France Holy and pure, of antique charity, Save Margaret, a human deity.]

[466] The 16th century was the golden age of women’s education.

[467] [The hôtel de Rambouillet was the famous salon held by the marquise de Rambouillet, where met a crowd of wits, fops, and scholars, to set fashions for society and for literature. This was the headquarters of the _Précieuses_, who were anxious to polish the language, and who introduced, among forms of expression which time has approved, absurd affectations like the Euphuism of the previous century in England.]

[468] When women were not supposed to be able to do more than “distinguish a doublet from trunk-hose.” [A quotation from Molière’s _Les Femmes savantes_, Act ii. sc. vii.]

[469] Tale ii., “Corruptio optimi pessima.”

[470] “Venus has caught the ladies in her toils, and God is tired!” (Montaiglon). Tavannes asks that someone will shut women’s mouths.

[471] St. Theresa goes to these words from the Song of Songs: “The milk of thy breasts is sweeter than wine, and from them riseth a savour more excellent than precious ointments”; or to these: “I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.”

[472]

Peace and joy in living reign no longer here; Music and the dance to silence are constrained.

[473] Cf. the following well-known passage from the _Apology of Raymond de Sebonde_ (_Essays_, ii. cap. xii.): “The soul, by reason of her trouble and imbecility, as unable to subsist of herself, is ever and in all places questing and searching comforts, hopes, foundations, and foreign circumstances on which she may take hold and settle herself. And how light and fantastical soever his invention doth frame them unto him, he notwithstanding relieth more surely upon them, and more willingly, than upon himself.... It is for the punishment of our temerity, and instruction of our misery and incapacity, that God caused the trouble, downfall, and confusion of Babel’s tower. Whatsoever we attempt without his assistance, whatever we see without the lamp of his grace, is but vanity and folly. With our weakness we corrupt and adulterate the very essence of truth (which is uniform and constant) when fortune giveth us the possession of it.” [Florio.]

[474] “Nam vere sumus omnes de muliere” (_Facetus_).

INDEX

Accolti, Bernardo, itinerant singer, 273.

age of marriage, 27, 28, 98.

Agrippa, Cornelius, his view of marriage, 21; on Louise of Savoy, 166 _n_; book on the Pre-eminence of the Female Sex, 400; lectures on Plato, 402.

Alexander VI., pope, on Urbino marriage, 52; his hunting, 247; on monks, 463.

Alfonso of Aragon’s wedding, 40.

Alfonso of Naples’ dinners, 231.

Alione’s ballad, 121 _n_; anecdote by, 222.

almsgiving, 66-69.

_Amadis de Gaule_, its popularity, 269.

Amaretta, Costanza, 339, 340.

‘amateurs,’ 56, 264, 388.

Amboise, cardinal of, 146, 257.

Andrelini, Fausto, 17, 326.

Anet, château of Diana of Poitiers, 387.

animals, platonist attitude towards, 244.

Anne de Graville quoted, 198 _n_.

Anne of Brittany, 145, 375.

Anne of France, her first lover, 26 _n_; as sick nurse, 54; her charity, 68; views on education, 85, 89-91; on girls’ stories, 100-102; ‘school of manners,’ 103; on maternal self-sacrifice, 105; on mourning, 129, 130, 133; on valour, 146; on love-making, 165; her character, 166-168; idea of charm, 180, 181; her platonism, 181; compared with Margaret, 197; opinion on ‘age of wisdom,’ 214; on dress, 216, 218; hunting, 252, 253; books, 265; political career, 313, 314; love of art, 375.

Anne of Polignac, 131.

Anne of Vivonne, 385.

architecture, domestic, 224.

Aretino, on tutors, 79, 80; his _Marescalco_, 80, 281; on duchess of Urbino, 351; courtesans, 201, 358, 361; on nudities, 204; his methods, 370; relations with Vittoria Colonna, 390, 391; correspondence, 394, 395.

art, 377, 380.

_Asolani_, Bembo’s, 156, 432.

Baden in Aargau, 259, 260.

balls, 232, 236; Daneau on, 236, 237.

baths, 254; Calvinists’ view of, 255, 256; life at, 259, 260.

Battista Spagnuoli, his view of marriage, 21; of baths, 258; of monks, 460.

beards, dispute on growing of, 370.

Beatrice d’Este, _see_ D’Este.

beauty, platonist idea of, 158, 159, 161; Bembo’s idea of, 160; Michelangelo’s, 161; distrusted, 196; preservation of, 215.

Bembo, on Latin for girls, 96; his _Asolani_, 156, 432; on love, 159-161; conversation, 294, 295; handwriting, 304; his Morosina, 366-368, 390; his talk, 403, 404; idea of poetry, 404; relations with Olympia Morata, 428; letter to Isabella d’Este, 432.

Beroaldo, Filippo, on drunkenness, 298; on love and Propertius, 402, 403.

Bibbiena on Catherine Sforza, 29; his _Calandra_, 79, 278, 279; decoration of his bath-room, 256; his letters, 307; his liberalism, 432; anecdote of, 463.

Bible, reading of, 155, 288, 438, 439.

_bibliennes_, the, 426, 435.

Billon, 481.

Blando, Michelangelo, on hunting, 251, 252.

_blasons_, 208.

Boccaccio, popularity of, 100, 268, 398.

Bonaventure des Périers, _see_ Des Périers.

Boistuau, 480.

Bonnivet, admiral de, 178, 213.

books, 88, 263.

Botticelli’s _Venus and Cupid_, 318.

Bouchet, Jean, on flirtation, 105, 106; remedy for materialism, 147; story of ladies of Poitiers, 288; _Les Regnars traversant les voies périlleuses_, 392.

Bourget, Paul, his naturalism contrasted with Ruskin’s, 499, 500.

boutrimés, 300.

boys’ education, 75, 76.

Brandiolini, Aurelio, musician, 273.

Brandt’s _Ship of Fools_, 416.

Brantôme on tutors, 99; on marquis of Pescara’s book, 124; on spicy literature, 266; on Mortemart ladies, 286; on the court, 495.

Brascha, ambassador, 42, 43.

Briçonnet, bishop of Meaux, 470.

Budé, Guillaume, _Livre de l’Institution du prince_, 250, 251; on religion, 454.

burial customs, 129.

Burye, character in _Heptameron_, 385.

Calvin on women, 84, 467; on divorce, 339; character of Reformation, 467.

Calvinists, objection to fine weddings, 37; to baths, 255, 256.

Cardan on marriage, 32; on gout, 230; on talk, 285; life at Venice, 290 _n_.

Carnesecchi, 259.

carpet knights, 369.

Castelli, Cardinal, his hunting ode, 248, 249.

Castiglione, relations with his wife, 51; theory of social aesthetics, 144; on Raphael, 157; on intellectual occupations for women, 261; his _Courtier_, 265, 395, 404, 405 _n_; on music, 274; on talk, 292; on duke of Urbino, 293; handwriting, 304; letters to Vittoria Colonna, 306, 395; letter to Marchesa Scaldasole, 306; on viragos, 319; on painting, 377, 381, 431.

Cataneo, on two loves, 156, 159.

Catherine de’ Medici, _see_ De’ Medici.

Catholicism and colour, 220; relation to philosophy, etc., 456 ff.

Caviceo, his _Peregrino_, 22, 239.

_Célestine, La_, 270.

Chailly, Louis XII.’s hound, 249.

Champier on marriage age, 28; _Livre de vraye amour_, 45, 46; on doctors, 59; on love, 114, 168; on women and men, 301.

charity, 66-69.

charm, theory of, 195-200.

chase, the, 246-253.

Christian socialism, 142.

churches, mundane use of, 237-240.

Church’s distrust of women, 422, 423.

Cibo, Caterina, _papaline_, 428, 457.

_cicisbeo_, 346, 347.

classics, respect for, 143, 156, 157.

clergy, character of, 165, 434-438.

Clichtoue’s philosophy of life, 146, 147.

Clouet, Jean, 207.

college education, 75, 76, 78.

Collérye, Roger, quoted, 46 _n_, 115 _n_.

Colonna, Ascanio, 312.

Colonna, Pompeo, his _Apologia pro mulieribus_ (MS. in M. de Maulde’s possession), 399, 400.

Colonna, Vittoria, age of betrothal, 27; widowhood, 131, 316, 317; relations with Michelangelo, 163, 182, 183, 395; on painting, 182; relations with Carnesecchi, 259; letter to Paulo Giovio, 292; handwriting, 304; letters, 305-308, 450, 451; character, 316, 317, 328; relations with Aretino, 390, 391; with Dolce, 394; with Bembo, 394; her poetry, 163, 404, 405; religion, 428, 469; relations with Pole, 429; her prayer, 442; relations with Ochino, 469, 470.

colours, 219-221.

complexions, 199.

concubinage, 113, 363-366.

Condivi on Michelangelo, 162, 182, 183.

Consentana, countess of, anecdote of, 129.

conversation, 284-302, 345, 347.

coquetry, 187.

Coquillart, 105, 325.

Correggio’s _St. Jerome_, 449; _Mystic Marriage_, 450.

correspondence, 304-310.

Costa, Lorenzo, picture by, 276.

country life, 242, 243.

country squires, 64, 140.

courtesans, 356-362.

_Courtier_, Castiglione’s, 265, 395, 404.

Cremonini, 152.

_Cymbalum_, Des Périers’, 386, 393.

D’Albret, Charlotte, 131.

D’Albret, Henri, 53, 334, 352.

D’Amboise, Catherine, 444.

D’Amboise, Françoise, 132.

D’Amboise, Michel, 206, 252.

dancing, 233-237.

Daneau on dancing and balls, 236, 237.

Dangu, Nicolas, 384.

Dante, 406.

D’Aragona, _see_ Tullia.

De Beaulieu, Eustorg, 99.

De Bourbon, Gabrielle, expenditure, 66; lack of dowry, 117; death of her son, 126; religious works, 443.

De Clermont, Mlle, 24, 385.

De Longray, Mme, 385.

De’ Medici, Catherine, her ‘flying squadron,’ 103.

De’ Medici, Julian, 205.

De Montausé, 384.

Des Périers, Bonaventure, 59, 386, 387; his _Cymbalum_, 386, 393, 418.

De Pons, 315, 316.

De Soubise, Madame, 315.

Desprez, Josquin, 275.

D’Este, Beatrice, 318.

D’Este, Isabella, setter of fashions, 219; on pilgrimage, 240; love of art, 374, 375.

D’Etampes, duchess, 364.

dialogues, 156, 403.

Diana of Poitiers, as widow, 131; her portraits, 207, 211; statue of, by Goujon, 208; relations with king, 364, 365; love of art, 387.

divorce, 127, 338, 339.

doctors, 55-58.

Dolce on misadventures of husbands, 58; on education, 94, 95; the moon, 423.

domestic letters, 117 _n_, 126, 304-310.

dowries, 117-119.

‘dragons,’ 330, 331.

drama, 278-283.

dress, 216-223.

drinking, 229, 230.

Du Bellay, 169 _n_, 362, 365, 408, 476, 477, 479, 483, 484.

Du Four, 165.

Dürer’s women, 203.

dwelling house, 223, 224.

eating, customs in, 229-231.

education, 74-78, 86-100.

Egnatius, 31.

Eleanor, wife of Francis I., 53.

Equicola, _Di natura d’amore_, 161.

Erasmus, on virginity, 32; on maternity, 48; education, 82, 97; husbands, 116; women’s stupidity, 157 _n_; church music, 277; his attitude to reformers, 473.

Estienne, Henri, 84.

Eustorg de Beaulieu, 99.

eyes, 199.

_facéties_, 266-268.

Feo, lover of Catherine Sforza, 30, 321.

Ferrara, music at, 276; talk at, 290.

Ficino, Marzilio, on platonic love, 154, 158, 159.

Firenzuola, on beauty, 196; his stories, 299; his inspiration, 399.

flirtation, 103-107.

Florentine worship of Plato, 153, 154; idea of charm, 198.

flowers, 243.

Folengo, 465.

Francis I., 62, 125, 169, 170, 240, 251, 265; his mistresses, 363, 364.

Francis de Paul, St., story of, 461.

Franco, Veronica, 358.

free love, 327.

Fregoso, detractor of women, 298.

French marriage customs, 37-39; country gentry, 64-66; society, 140-142; worship of rank, 144, 145; idea of charm, 198; drama, 282, 283; conversation, 296, 297; letters, 308-310.

Gambara, Veronica, 364, 394.

gambling, 237.

Gastius’ table talk, 232.

Gazius, _Florida Corona_, treatise on health, 255.

German girls’ education, 89; table talk, 297; opposition to Italy, 415, 416; liberalism, 433; narrowness, 434; monks, 466.

Gioconda, _see_ _Monna Lisa_.

girls’ education, 86-100; tutors, 98, 99.

Gonzaga, Julia, 52.

Gonzaga, Leonora, 28.

Goujon’s statue of Diana, 208.

hair, popular colour of, 199.

hair-dressing, 216, 217.

handwritings, 303, 304.

Helysenne de Crenne, 39.

Henri II., 364.

_Heptameron_ quoted, 24, 25, 33, 34, 49, 53, 84, 112 _n_, 151, 173, 175, 189, 212, 213, 296, 298, 299, 329, 334, 335, 351, 353, 354; realist character of, 382-385.

Héroët de la Maisonneuve, 344, 418.

history, 401.

hood, the, 217.

households, constitution of, 66.

Huguenots on dancing, 236, 237.

hunting, 246-253.

husbands’ authority, 109, 110.

Hütten, Ulrich von, 83, 466, 467.

hydrotherapeutics, 254-258.

illegitimacy, 338.

_Imitation of Christ_, 139, 150.

Imperia, courtesan, 358, 361.

impromptus, 300.

incomes, 64, 68, 117.

Inghirami, Tommaso, 280, 281, 300; anecdote of, 431.

‘innocents,’ the, 212.

instrumental music, 276-278.

interviews, 29.

Isabella d’Este, _see_ D’Este.

Isabella of Aragon, 312.

Isabella the Catholic, 323.

Italian marriage customs, 34; education, 94-96; drama, 278-281; conversation, 285-296; letters, 306; monks, 465.

Jeanne of Aragon, 312, 407.

Jews, hatred of, 478.

Joanna, wife of Philip the Fair, anecdote of, 114, 115.

Josquin Desprez, 275.

Jove, Paul, 52, 292.

Julius II., anecdote of, 68; hunting, 247; beard, 370.

kissing, 233-235.

Labé, Louise, poetess, on dress, 218; accomplishments, 245; on music, 274; poetry, 412, 413.

La Bruyère quoted, 115, 210, 296, 372.

ladies’ letters, 305.

_Lancelot du Lak_, 269.

lapdogs, 244.

La Rochefoucauld quoted, 111, 184, 214, 314.

La Salle, Antoine de, 79.

La Trémoille, Louis de, 29, 117; _see_ Gabrielle de Bourbon.

Lefèvre d’Etaples, 250, 264.

Lemaire de Belges, 79, 327, 401.

Leo X., 247, 280, 300, 362, 425, 431.

Leonardo’s _Monna Lisa_, 191; ideal of beauty, 200.

letters, domestic, 126, 127 _n_.

letter-writing, 303.

liberalism at Rome, 430, 431, 433, 434, 473.

life at spas, 259, 260.

Limosin, Leonard, 207.

literature, licentious character of, 391-393.

Longueil, 473.

Louis XI., 118.

Louis XII., 64, 67, 118, 129, 234, 249.

Louise of Savoy, her views on education, 77, 85, 96; her sphere, 170, 311; her reading and books, 262, 265, 267; her politics, 311; on mystic love, 335; her principles, 354.

Luther on celibacy, 32; divorce, 338; on women, 467; his true relation to Reformation, 468.

Lyons, headquarters of feminine poetry, 411.

Madeleine, sister of Francis I., 309.

Maillard, Oliver, on bathing, 255; his preaching, 459, 460.

_Marescalco_, Aretino’s, 281.

Margaret of Austria, her collections, 226; career, 313; parrot, 408; poetry, 411.

Margaret of France (sister of Francis I.), on marriage, 49; relations with her husband, 53; on doctors, 53, 58; influence of stars, 61; charity, 69; education, 96-98; authority of husband, 123; widow, 131; remarriage, 134; defects of women, 137; remedy for materialism, 147-149; names and character, 170-172, 245, 418; her portraits, 170, 210; theory of love, 173-175; motto, 176; platonic love, 189, 352, 353; compared with Anne of France, 197; _petit lever_, 213; on physical decay, 214; on wearing black, 221; books, 263, 266, 267; poetry, 274; drama, 282, 283; as a talker, 285; her failure, 287, 475; handwriting, 304; moral scheme, 334; toleration, 355, 475; relations with Francis’ mistresses, 364; intellectual influence, 378-383; lovers, 384, 385; writings, 386, 387; vacillation, 418; religion, 436, 437, 442-445, 457, 470.

Margaret of France (wife of Henry of Navarre), 486.

Margaret of Lorraine, 133.

Margaret of Savoy, 172, 481-486.

Marone, Andrea, 273.

Marot, Clément, 29, 165 _n_, 198 _n_, 212, 287, 315, 317, 353, 407, 457.

marriage customs, 37-42; presents, 72.

Mary of Cleves, 67.

Mary of England, 129, 217, 274.

Mary Stuart, 92, 376.

materialism, 456.

matrimony, test questions for, 33.

Maupas’ sparrow, 407.

medicine, 54-58.

men of letters, 392.

Ménot on death, 491.

Michelangelo, his nephew’s marriage, 35, 36; on love, 162; relations with Vittoria Colonna, 162, 182, 183, 213, 214, 395, 396; his _Eve_, 202; _Last Judgment_, 204, 324; _Virgin_ of Casa Buonarotti, 323; _Pietà_, 323, 324; ideal of woman, 324; sonnets to courtesans, 359; frescoes, 428.

_Mirror of the Sinful Soul_, 92, 386.

mistresses of Francis I., 363.

money, importance of, 117-121; worship of, 145, 146, 148, 149.

monks, 458-466.

_Monna Lisa_, Leonardo’s, 191.

Montaigne on marriage, 46; on capricious treatment of women, 52; on business, 65; on peasant nurture, 73 _n_; on college education, 76, 78; on women’s ‘policy,’ 86; on his daughter, 88, 95; on moneyed wives, 121; on tears of mourning, 130; his scepticism, 191, 479, 488-490; on coquetry, 362 _n_; on women’s virtue, 420; on faith, 425; on death, 491.

moon, woman compared to the, 423.

Morosina, Bembo’s mistress, 366, 367.

Mortemart, ladies of, 286.

motherhood, 71-74, 77.

mother-in-law, the, 110.

mourning, 128.

Muguet, falcon of Louis XII., 250.

music, 83, 88, 270-278.

Mysteries, 282, 283.

mysticism, varieties of, 446-448, 465.

mythology, use of, 156, 455.

Naples, love of art at, 225.

Nature and man, 138, 139, 254, 449; platonist attitude towards, 241-243, 253, 254.

naturalism, Ruskin’s, 498, 499; contrasted with Bourget’s, 499, 500.

needlework, 88.

Nifo, his changeableness, 152, 331; catalogue of love-motives, 191, 192; pen portrait of Jeanne of Aragon, 208, 209; anecdote of, 327, 328; platonism, 332, 333; Phausina Rhea, 348, 399; feminism, 369.

_Nouvelles_, 259, 266, 267.

nudities, 202-209.

nurses, 73.

Ochino, 339, 428, 469, 470.

Ockeghem, John of, 275.

Olympia Morata, 94 _n_, 428.

Ordelaffi, husband of Catherine Sforza, 321.

Orleans, duchess of, her charity, 66; love of music, 273.

Ovid, popularity of, 265, 266.

painting, 396, 377.

_palinods_, the, 446.

Papillon, Almanque, 149, 480.

patronage, 393-396, 398.

Paul II., 247.

Paul III., 432, 469.

Paul IV., the ‘breeches-maker,’ 204.

pen portraits, 208-210.

_Peregrino_, Caviceo’s romance, 22.

Pernette du Guillet, 412.

Perugino, 375.

Petrarch, 234, 265, 272, 406, 487.

‘Phaedra,’ _see_ Inghirami.

Phausina Rhea, 210, 348.

Philippa of Gueldres, 133.

philosophy, love of, 401, 402.

physical exercise, 244.

Pia, Emilia, 288, 305.

Piccoli, Gabriele, 322.

Pico della Mirandola, 154.

pilgrimages, 240.

Pio, Alberto, 277, 454, 462.

plate, family, 229.

Plato, theory of love, 151-153; vogue of, 154, 402, 448; theory of beauty, 158, 161; Nature, 241; relation to Christianity, 425; negative results of doctrine, 494-496.

platonic love, 213, 339-344, 348.

platonism, 154, 157, 164, 177-193, 197, 260, 297, 334, 336; causes of its failure, 487, 488, 495-498.

Pléiade, the, 172, 478-481.

poetry, 262, 271, 404-408; and hunting, 248-250.

Poggio, his _facetiae_, 100, 154; on Baden, 259, 260.

Poirier, son-in-law of Monsieur, 117.

Poitiers, three maids of, 102; ladies of, 288.

Pole, Cardinal, 429.

Politian, 154, 265, 409.

polygamy, 339.

Pomponius Laetus, 154, 278.

Pontanus, 88, 104, 144, 240.

poodles, 244, 407, 408.

portraits of ladies as Venus, 205-207.

Postel, Guillaume, 471, 472.

priesthood of women, 428.

princesses’ love, 187, 188.

publicity, writers’ objection to, 376.

Puritans and music, 277.

_puys d’amour_, 419.

Rabelais, pedigrees, 145; on colours, 221; antiplatonist, 325, 336; his abbey of Thelema, 465; his mysticism, 465.

Raphael on marriage, 36, 37; _Vision of a Knight_, 330; anecdote of, 431.

Raulin, Jean, his sermon, 108.

reading, 88, 262.

religion and aesthetics, 423, 424; relations to philosophy and Plato, 425, 426, 479 ff.

Renée of France, on influence of stars, 61; letters, 308; career and character, 314-316, 456.

Romances, 100, 268-270.

Roman aristocracy, 143; idea of beauty, 143; liberalism, 430-434.

Ronsard, 60, 198, 215, 235, 343, 365, 376, 477, 478.

Rosera, Isabella, 409.

Ruskin, 111; on nature, 137, 138; his naturalism compared with Bourget’s, 498-500.

Sadoleto, 429.

‘Saffredent’ (character in _Heptameron_), 385.

Saint-Gelais, Melin de, 235, 327, 431.

Saint-Gelais, Octovien de, 167, 266, 300, 326.

Saint-Simon on Mortemart ladies, 286.

Salel, Hugues, 382.

Savonarola, 163, 164, 278, 297, 322, 459.

Scaldasole, Marchesa, 184.

scepticism, 479.

Semblançay, 141.

serving maids, 106, 112.

Sforza, Ascanio, 248, 249.

Sforza, Bianca, 42, 43.

Sforza, Catherine, widowhood, 29; her wedding presents, 40 _n_; alchemy, 61, 62; character and career, 245, 246, 320-322.

_Ship of Fools_, 416.

slave girls as concubines, 113.

small families, 71.

sonnet, popularity of, 405.

Spagnuoli, Battista, on marriage, 21; on baths, 258; on monks, 460.

Spain, education of girls in, 91-94; idea of charm, 198.

spas, 257, 258.

Spinola, Thomasina, 190.

stick, the, 110, 111.

‘stork-love,’ 355, 441.

story-telling, 299.

subsidiary marriage, 339.

Sygea, Loysa, 409.

table-talk, 231, 232.

Theresa, St., 92, 197.

Tiraqueau, 27, 35.

titles, love of, 143.

topics of conversation, 294.

tournaments, 245, 246.

Triboulet, 34.

Trithemius, 458 _n_, 463.

Tullia d’Aragona, her book on the Infinity of Perfect Love, 164; her influence, 357, 360; a poetess, 413.

tutors, 78-81.

Urbino, court of, 159, 290, 303, 381 _n_.

Urbino, duke of, 52, 145, 293; duchess of, 41, 43, 52, 129 _n_, 309.

Valois, court of, 369, 486.

Vegio on tutors, 79.

Venice, marriages at, 41; education at, 96; idea of charm, 198; music at, 277; courtesans at, 361.

Venus, passion for painting, 201-205.

Vérard, publisher, 392.

Vergerio, 451, 452, 457, 458.

Vert-vert, 408.

Villamarina, Isabella, anecdote of, 320.

Virgil, unpopularity of, 265.

virtue represented in painting as repellent, 329, 330.

Vittoria Colonna, _see_ Colonna.

Vivès, on education of girls, 92, 98, 100; on husbands, 111; on dancing and kissing, 233, 234.

vocal music, 270-273.

Voiture, 187.

_volta_, the, 236, 237.

war, 317-319.

wealth, worship of, 222, 236.

widows, 128-134.

witchcraft, 426, 427.

women as professional writers, 409, 410.

Zwingle on education, 82.

GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO.