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thus people were likely to meet familiar faces, if only among the regular visitors. Under Louis XII., the city of Genoa revolted because its French captain, the Sire de Roquebertin, instead of attending to business, tiresome certainly, passed his life at the waters of Acqui.

A lady of distinction, however, first of all secured a good escort to keep her company; Margaret of France, for instance, carried her whole party off to Cauterets. Then she had to listen to the parting exhortation of her doctor, a punctilious and intelligent man, who apparently had no excessive confidence in his colleagues or his fair client, and who catechised her and made her read the folio. He mentioned eight enemies lying in wait for her headache, insomnia, and the rest;-he instructed her how, by watchfully studying her little secret vices and never for a moment forgetting her digestion, and so on, she would put them to rout. Then he carefully consulted the horoscope, the direction of the wind, the temperature, his chart of epidemics; he assured himself as to the character of the year (for there were some years in which the waters killed off the invalids or made them worse), and finally he pronounced the exeat.

Flinging off this wet blanket with his terrestrial visions, the patient sped away. Pity if it was towards Porretta, near Bologna, a very popular haunt but dreadfully purgative. However, the spirit of Beauty can idealise everything, and an agreeable poet, Battista of Mantua, undertook to show all the moral and aesthetic satisfaction to be got in drinking three glasses of a laxative water, and then leaving Nature to herself.

He describes this regimen in admirable verses:

and so on.

"Far from the bed and all its joys,

You go and come and eke advance

In the slow measure of a stately dance,"

In fact, the idea of becoming young again, the thought of gaining new freedom of mind, new warmth of heart, new suppleness of the bodily frame by sacrifices so slight, of seeing the wrinkles vanish of themselves, in short the pursuit of beauty as a bounden duty, threw the glamour of poetry over many things, and was well worth the self

imposition of twenty-one days of hardship. For all that, fashionable people preferred the bathing-places to the spas.

Life at such places presented the admirable advantage that people could there enjoy the most perfect liberty. Nowhere were there better opportunities for seeing one's friends, for intimate conversation, for deriving real profit from companionship. It was that which made this life so precious. A man who had followed in the train of the princess he loved had absolutely nothing to do but to devote himself to her, for he put up with the rubbings and purgings only as a sop to his conscience. What delightful opportunities between two glasses of water to improve the mind or tell stories! Many collections of Novelli originated near a spring. It was during a season at Lucca, in April 1538, that Vittoria Colonna made the acquaintance of Carnesecchi, the adventurous theologian, and launched out with him into the abstrusest religious speculations. Everyone followed his own bent, and the gentlemen who did not love husbands were less irked there than elsewhere.

We shall not go so far as to say that platonism exercised undivided sway over the bathers; but to have a place at all was something gained. There is no indication that a much purer virtue reigned north of the Alps among the virtuous races. The goings-on at Baden in Aargau scandalised even Brantôme. A Florentine,2 who thought life at Florence pleasant enough, has related his impressions at Baden with a naïve stupefaction; he was dumbfounded the very moment he arrived. The beautiful platonism of his own province, flanked always by jealous husbands and impedimenta of all sorts, appeared to him mere food for babes, a phantom, a faded flower, an unsubstantial pageant, beside those Piccadilly manners. But they did not offend him: "Bravo!" he cries, "who wouldn't be platonic, since Plato preaches the community of women? Here the husbands take everything, absolutely everything, in good part! How wonderfully sensible of them! These Germans don't rack themselves for suspicions, they enjoy the present." And then, Florentine as he is, he goes on to describe the

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1 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.

2 Poggio.

charms of Baden with genuine enthusiasm: the handsome streets in which never a sign of infirmity is to be seen (Baden was recommended to childless women); exquisite fine ladies; men in cloth of gold and silver; somewhat exotic beauties sprung from God knows where, attended by a lackey and one or two waiting-maids; here and there a few noble abbesses of reasonable piety. What a whirl! It is one mad race for pleasure!

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Serious people who take care of themselves and desire a cure, have two or three baths a day, living like so many ducks. For ordinary folk there are common swimmingbaths of wonderful picturesqueness, but every respectable hostel possesses one bath for men, and another for women, with a gallery to which men are admitted in their dressinggowns. To describe the gaiety that reigns there is impossible. There is chatting and laughter, eating and drinking, dancing in a ring; the gentlemen fling down coins which the fair bathers catch with the tips of their fingers or in their linen chemisettes, with much contortioning and struggling. Sometimes, when the company are on intimate terms, they end by fraternising in a single tank, which is much more amusing, and pleases the physicians, because nothing ensures more conscientious bathing. Honi soit qui mal y pense!

In the evening a broad meadow serves as a casino; there is more dancing and singing: and these amusements are mingled with various pastimes such as the game of balle à grelots,1 which leads to all sorts of horse-play.

That is Baden.

One singular fact is brought out. Platonism was regarded as nothing if not complex and elaborate, and indeed it believed itself to be such; antiplatonism, on the contrary, affected airs of the most complete simplicity: yet whenever the two are confronted, it is platonism that proves the more ingenuous.

1[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.]

CHAPTER V

INTELLECTUAL RESOURCES

IT is all very well for a woman to be beautiful, to lend grace to the world, to diffuse sweetness and light; but this would be but a vain show if she did not with jealous care nourish in herself the flame of love of the Beautiful. Castiglione, who liked to give a mathematical precision to his definitions, tells us: "Woman must nourish herself on the life of the world and the life of the arts"-thus in appearance relegating the aesthetic life to a second place; but he is very careful to add: "She must occupy herself with literature, music, painting, dancing, and entertaining"; in other words, the heart must reverse the parts, and in the conscience secret preoccupations must come before visible occupations. His view is logical. How could women govern the world if they were in reality its slaves? The first necessity for a lighthouse is a light.

Further, we ourselves have a right to ask where these ladies think of leading us. Their art consists in pleasing us and in indoctrinating us with their principles. To please is their secret, with which we do not meddle; it is of little consequence to know if Lucretia Borgia cut out her own dresses, where and by whom Mary Stuart had her hats made, or if women always please by what pleases their husbands. But when they speak of ruling our intelligence, it becomes of very great importance to know how they will deal with us.

The intellectual provision of the Renaissance women consisted chiefly of impressions of art, in accordance with Castiglione's prescription. In this, painting (still more the inferior manual arts-lace-making, embroidery, tapestry)

held the lowest rank, on the principle universally accepted in the platonic world that the less an art needs the co-operation of the senses to touch the soul, the greater is its excellence. Music stood higher than painting, because it directly transmits an impression; vocal music in particular represents almost the speech of soul to soul, with but an insignificant admixture of materiality. Poetry was the supreme art, the truly aristocratic thing; no one would have dreamt of comparing it to painting or any manual art. The poet with one stroke paints soul and body; in Ronsard's words, "he paints in the heavens."

To lay in her stock of happiness, a woman will begin by living in close communion with the Beautiful. Sciences are useless to her; she has little taste, and still less time, for their cultivation. But just as she finds breakfast a necessity, so she ought every morning to give her soul nourishment, if it be only one sip of the beautiful. Louise of Savoy on rising used to read a psalm, "to perfume her day," as she put it. These few moments' reading were sufficient to flood her soul with a radiance to light her through the day.

Further, reading is a duty having special claims on women. Not only is there always some new thing to learn, some new chord to touch, but the intellectual life demands a constant outgoing of energy,-I will venture to say, a continual "education.' Could a tree flourish and bear fruit if it refused to suck up its sap? How long would it be before it stood a bare skeleton against the sky?

Thus, with complete independence of mind, as great as her material liberty but much more difficult to acquire, a woman will supply herself with spiritual food; she will seek Beauty in truth stripped of all conventions. The real foe to women's freedom is not this or that man, but themselves, because of their frivolity, their inconsequence, and their innate passion for the superficial; in other words, for the conventional or fashionable. They need a real force of soul to go deeply into anything; they are perfectly happy in yielding to the glitter of a thought which, though obscure at bottom, is dazzling on the surface. When the taste for precision has not been carefully instilled into them in childhood, they run a great risk of wasting their minds in habits. of cursory curiosity, like many men of the world.

Books played a prominent part in the psychology of the

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