The wide and colorful canvas of Brantôme testifies that court morals under the later Valois were free in every respect. At several points in the _Lives of Gallant Ladies_ (1665) he implies that lesbian attachments were taken for granted in his time, and in Section 15 of his first Discourse he raises the question whether husbands are cuckolded when their wives engage in “the love that is called _donna con donna._”[17] He also doubts whether the point has ever been raised before, living as he did three centuries before divorce was commonplace and lesbian activity actionable as one form of alienation of affection. The cases he cites are almost all bisexual, for though he has heard of women who would have nothing to do with men, these do not seem to have been celebrated for variance either. He says it was useless to seek one young girl in marriage because her “friend” would never let her go; but the friend, who was providing bed and board, was a married woman. Indeed, he maintains that husbands regarded such affairs lightly, since these could not lead to embarrassing questions about the paternity of offspring. With characteristic wit he manages to include among his anecdotes every possible means of satisfaction between women, impermissible of translation today outside a medical treatise. He maintains throughout that women come in the end to acknowledge the inadequacy of all such means, “for after all nothing is the equal of a man.” Anthony Hamilton in his _Memoirs of the Comte de Grammont_ (1713) gives an amusing account of the rivalry between the Earl of Rochester and Miss Hobart, a maid of honor to the Duchess of York, for the affections of the rather stupid young court beauty, Miss Anne Temple. However, at the English court even under Charles II such affairs were not taken so lightly. When, after a long siege, the patient Hobart attempted to embrace her favorite, the girl screamed, other waiting women came running, and “this was sufficient to disgrace Miss Hobart at court and totally ruin her reputation in London.”[18] These affairs occurred in high society, but Montaigne—or perhaps his secretary, who is said to have written the _Voyage in Italy_ (1581)—writing in the same period as Brantôme, describes the case of a young weaver, one of a group of six or seven transvestists engaged in that trade, who courted several women in towns near her own and was finally hanged for effecting a marriage with one of them. The union endured happily for half a year, however, before the offender was recognized and exposed by someone from her own village. This is interesting evidence of contrast in sexual mores at different social levels, for the country in this case was Italy, and Brantôme and others claim that homosexuality was rife there, particularly in the courts of Naples and Sicily.