Lives of Fair and Gallant Ladies. Vol 2.Brantôme, Pierre de Bourdeille
History
Lives of Fair and Gallant Ladies. Vol 2.
Brantôme, Pierre de Bourdeille
Erotic literature
We were discoursing one day, the late Baron de Vitaux and myself, with
M. Le Grand, a famous physician of Paris, a man of agreeable manners
and excellent counsel, he having come to visit the said Baron, who
was ill of some amorous indiscretion. Both of us questioning him on
sundry little ways and peculiarities of the ladies, he did entertain
us finely, and told us a round dozen of tales that did verily take the
prize. So engrossed did he grow herewith, that, nine o’clock striking,
he cried, getting up from the chair where he was seated: “Truly, I am a
greater simpleton than you two, which have kept me here two good hours
chattering with you rascals, and all the while I have been forgetting
six or seven sick folk I am bound to go visit.” So with a word of
farewell, he doth hie him away, though not without a further last word
in reply to us, when we called after him: “Rascal yourself, Doctor! Oh!
you doctors know some fine things and do ’em too, and you especially,
for you talk like a past master of the art.” He answered us, looking
down, “True enough, true enough! we both know and do some fine doings,
for we do possess sundry secrets not open to all the world. But I’m
an old man now, and have bid a long farewell to Venus and her boy.
Nowadays I leave all this to you younger rascals.”
2.
We read in the life of St. Louis, in the History of Paulus Aemilius, of
a certain Marguerite, Countess of Flanders, sister of Jeanne, daughter
of Baldwin I., Emperor of the Greeks, and his successor, seeing she
had no children,—so says History. She was given in her early girlhood
a teacher named Guillaume, a man esteemed of an holy life and who had
already taken minor orders. Yet did this in no wise hinder him to get
two children of his fair pupil, which were christened Baldwin and John,
and all so privily as that few folk knew aught of the matter. The two
boys were later declared legitimate by the Pope. What fine teaching,
and what a teacher! So much for History.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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