There were quiet women like Anne of France who contented themselves with the celebration of a very impressive service, and to all appearance shed no tears, for they spoke neither of drinking the powdered bones of the dead man nor of spending the rest of their life in the bed of the dear departed. Anne of France indeed considered these proceedings as “useless, unworthy and detestable follies”; the only mourning that appealed to her was simple, silent and lasting. But more than once people were staggered at the quantity of tears women’s eyes could contain. “Vainly do they tear their cheeks and dishevel their hair; I go off and enquire of a chambermaid or of a secretary how they were, how they lived together. We would much rather they laughed at our death, if they would but smile on us while we live.”[117] A Spanish lady, the Countess of Consentana, in officially notifying her vassals of the death of her husband, signed herself, “The sad and unfortunate countess,” and, the better to indicate her distress, she dropped two ink-blots where her name should have come. The facetious vassals replied to their “sad and more than very unfortunate countess” in an address which, in their agitation, they all signed with enormous daubs and flourishes. Spain smiled, from Bilbao to Gibraltar. So a widow left nothing undone to show how much she deplored her solitary condition. To this first conclusion we must add a second not less manifest: almost every widow strove earnestly to regard her husband as alive, so true is it that her aim was to act under the shadow of a husband as little in her way as she in his. Of all the species of husbands, the dead husband is the one who would require the most special monograph. However little heroic his life may have been, his widow made it her business to sing his praises in public. A woman whose married life had notoriously been one of discreet indifference, if not of discord, would spend her nights and days in celebrating the glory and the memory of the dead man. So profoundly would she identify herself with him in heart that ere long she would develop into the widow of a great man and rise into a superior atmosphere. The greatnesses which the deceased perhaps never possessed she first gave him and then appropriated herself, and in the fire of this love she was gradually consumed. Besides, sometimes she happened actually to have got past the age for love.