The Marchesa Scaldasole, of Pavia, was one of these terrible harpies; yet she acted with absolute frankness. One day, at a ball, she said to a young protonotary named De Lescun, who was losing his head a little: “You see, I do as your guards do, who fix a tassel to their horses’ cruppers, to warn people not to go too near,” and she pointed to her sky-blue dress: in Italy, blue denoted heavenward aspirations. Lescun was devoured like the rest. By a strange freak of fate, he happened to be severely wounded beneath the walls of Pavia in the famous battle of Francis I. When he was picked up, covered with blood, he asked to be carried to the house of his “dear lady and patroness.” The marchesa received these quivering shreds of humanity with transports of tenderness, and it was in her arms, sustained by her loving look and consoled by her pious words, that Lescun breathed his last. I know not how La Rochefoucauld could say: “The first lover is kept long when no second is taken.” It is the vice of men not to know when to stop. Nothing grieved Margaret of France like the thought that a man, to qualify as a “man of honour” and a “pleasant companion,” was expected to kill someone for giving him the lie, and to love a dozen women. She objected strongly to a happily settled man, as she says, going prowling over the world, were it ever so platonically: “it is wisest to remain satisfied where love has once attached us.” The women, on the contrary, anxious to fulfil their social duty, thought themselves bound to sow love broadcast, to distribute their favours widely; by that means they protected themselves against the tongue of malice, though at the cost of desperately hard work and many embarrassments. For every man of intelligence and breeding who knows better than to display too much whimsicality, how many jealous, touchy, tiresome men there are! A princess could do no less than be kind to a number of favourites; Margaret of France loved not far short of a dozen, and the number was only so small because of the difficulty of finding recruits for platonism.