Certainly we must make some deductions from the rather theatrical demonstrations customary at death-beds. The custom was an old one, dating from the time when it was agreed that in losing her master a woman lost her all; these poor women were stricken to the heart-core, and thrilled with an emotion half comic, half touching. That was their manner of receiving their liberty; it seemed as though they had nothing left them but to die themselves, especially if they were young, and for some time everyone seemed of that opinion. In lugubrious and lachrymose tones their friends would remind them of overpoweringly wonderful examples: Artemisia, who drank her husband’s ashes in a cup of water; Portia, Cato’s daughter and wife of Brutus, who, on learning of her husband’s death, finding no knife at hand, did not seek one but swallowed live coals. Those who had simply opened a vein or cut their throat, or who had without ado plunged a dagger in their heart, were past numbering. We can realise what delicacy, what aristocratic charm there was in the Indian widow’s suttee. But for her children, who after reconciling her to marriage reconciled her to life, Louise of Savoy would have died on the corpse of her husband; so, at least, Jean de Saint-Gelais, her chamberlain, assures us, and he was suspected, only too reasonably, of over-familiarity with the secret tastes of his mistress. But for her religious scruples the beautiful Isabella Richisentia had killed herself on the body of Raymond de Cardoña.[114] Bouchet and Moncetto, nicknamed Lycurgus, deliberated in great distress of mind whether they should persuade Mary of England[115] to live, after the death of Louis XII.; they reminded her of Lucrece, Penelope and others, and Moncetto wore himself out in speaking of them to her in every known language and in verse. But for the young Englishman she espoused only a fortnight later, Mary, perhaps, would have died. As a rule these widows, like reasonable creatures, at last made up their minds to live, under pressure from those about them; but it was also customary for them to display at least gorgeous mourning finery.[116] Let us first see how they buried their husbands.