But the orderly life of the king was not imitated by the court. According to Brantome and Sauval, the excesses of the age of Francis were aggravated under Henry. It was rare, says the former, that ladies presented their virginity to their husbands; and husbands who objected to the intimacy of their wives with "kings, princes, noblemen, and others of the court," were eschewed from society. A woman was held to be virtuous because she begged her lover to wait till she was married to gratify his desires; married women who retained their love for the same _galant_ for several years were considered models of purity. Brantome intimates distinctly that ordinary debauchery fell short of the desires of the courtiers; incest, sodomy, and similar enormities could alone satiate the passions of the old debauchees of the day. The same writer partially explains the spread of vice by saying that within the last half century the ladies of France had acquired the arts of Italy; nor is it doubtful that with the Medicis many of the monstrous vices which have been peculiar to Italy ever since the age of Imperial Rome were imported into France. We hear of all kinds of instruments of debauchery; of lewd books and lewd pictures; of indecent sculptures and bronzes being sold without let or hinderance in the stores of Paris. It was the age of Aretino; and besides that famous or infamous writer, a number of other Italians had competed for the prize of lewdness in composition. Poets, painters, sculptors, seemed to try how far art could be prostituted. Cellini, Leonardo da Vinci, Giulio Romano, Nicollo dell' Abate, and, indeed, almost all their contemporaries, debased their genius by the execution of indecent works. Many of these found their way to Paris. When Pope Clement VII. undertook to prosecute the authors of indecent works, whether in letters or art, most of the compositions that were endangered by his bull were transported to France. Brantome alludes to many of them as being quite common in his time. He describes, for instance, a silver goblet on which the most indecent scenes were graven, and which a nobleman of the court always obliged the ladies who visited him to use at table. Other noblemen had their rooms painted in fresco in similar taste. It is stated that Anne of Austria caused three hundred thousand écus worth of frescoes of this kind to be removed from the ceilings of the palace at Fontainebleau.[189] But in the reign of Henry II. it does not appear that any one was ever prosecuted for dealing in this kind of merchandise.