undefended in the hour of slander, unsaluted in prosperity, unvisited in sickness or sorrow, unholpen in poverty, or unprayed for in the hour of death. Few sweeter eulogies could be given to any woman. “In truth,” says the Knight of La Tour, “though I was only nine years old when I knew her, I still remember many a wise thing she said and did, that I would set down here had I the time and space.” Madame Olive de Belleville was as frequent a type as the Lady des Belles-Cousines and her kind. More frequent than either, and between the two extremes of saint and sinner, is the wise and prudent Lady of La Tour, the careful mother of growing daughters, “très gentille et preude femme,” who, beautiful still, and often subject to temptation, is skilful as Portia or Beatrice in the witty answer, the brilliant, inviolable smile, which serves to turn aside the insinuation of evil. Nor let us forget that noble wife of a nobler husband, Madame Antoinette de Turenne, “who scarce lived in her husband’s absence, with so great love did they love each other,” who had refused the hand of a Royal prince in order to marry Sir John Bouciquaut. There were then, as now, in every class, countless women of purest honour, of staunchest virtue, wise in counsel, true of heart. And, in the highest rank, if the absence of daily cares produced many frail and thoughtless beauties, the same cause added to the souls of its saints a singular aloofness, a dazzling lustre of unworldliness, and a penetrating grace of meditation. The long empty hours of the mediæval donjon, if they fostered the loves of a Tristan and an Yseult, also brought forth many a radiant spiritual flower. XIII In the castles of the fourteenth century, the men no less than the women were religious. The middle class, and especially the respectable bourgeois man of letters, affected a certain freedom of thought: he was already the father of Voltaire and the grandfather of the speech-making Jacobins of the French Revolution. But all that was changed among the nobility. There it was essential (even as it is among the nobles of France to-day), however light of life, to be grave of thought. The education of every knight made him instinctively religious. Even the scapegrace Louis of Orleans would pass weeks together in the Convent of the Celestines, praying, fasting with the monks before the altar. And a perfect knight was habitually not only pious, but austere.