Pedigrees assumed wonderful proportions. Only those who had the moral simplicity of Margaret of Austria were content with the ancient kings of Germany for ancestors; every Scottish archer, no matter how insignificant, claimed descent from the ancient kings of Scotland. Louise of Savoy made a beginning by modestly connecting the French house with the most ancient of royal dynasties, that of Babylon. Some went even farther. They dived into the remote and shadowy depths of history, the ages of stone and iron, when some wild girl became their ancestress through a chance meeting with a savage in a wood, and when five minutes’ rain instead of sunlight would have been enough to wash a whole race of men from the page of immortality. Anne of Brittany was descended from one of the giants sprung direct from mother Earth. Rabelais with great gravity presents his hero to us in his exact style as son of one of the original sons of Earth: “Would to God,” he adds, “that everyone was as well acquainted with his pedigree from the time of the Flood!” But in reality, under cover of these novel and pedantic vanities, money, with its brutality and vulgarity and appeal to vulgar minds, led the dance and dragged the pick of the nation pellmell after it. The Balsac of the time, Robert de Balsac, fills a good many pages with examples of the crowd of worldlings who, as he expresses it, hurried in unbridled, almost frantic haste on the road to beggary.[132] There are voluptuaries, debauchees, spendthrifts, men gorged with gold, yet athirst for more, tumultuously dashing on and upwards in frightful torment and agitation towards a will o’ the wisp; one after another they fall headlong into the gulf, while the foreground is filled with the eternal procession moving on with slow pace and clockwork regularity. Alongside of this mad insolent triumph of gold fierce hatreds develop, and men begin to speak under their breath of the horrible triumph of wretchedness approaching, and can foretell the hour when materialism from below will make its awful response to materialism from above. Women ought to have remedied this state of things. They ought to have prevented men from becoming besotted and ruining themselves. Anne of France dared not suggest to all these idle nobles that they might occupy themselves with intellectual things, but she was anxious at least to brace them up by a life of physical endurance. Without military courage, she declares, the nobility resembles “a withered tree,” without valour “it is nothing worth.”