and the sole benefit is reaped by us, or at least by men capable of enjoying an illusion. Sometimes, in their infinite goodness, they may give us divine moments that compensate for the painfulness of life; they succeed in thrilling us with that magnetic influence which quickens our faculties, sends our life into a wider channel, makes commonplace actions seem interesting to us, gives higher relief and brighter colour to all our surroundings. They do a good work, a pious work, a social work. And that is why this loveless love fell especially to the lot of princesses. At first sight the idea of making love so excessively aristocratic appears somewhat singular, if not repugnant. What is the value of distinctions of birth in such a matter? To sincere hearts they can only raise obstacles to genuine happiness. This was especially the opinion of Anne of France. Could it be right to dignify with the name of love or platonism a wretched coquetry which consisted in attaching oneself to the most conspicuous women, whoever they were?—for some were plain, and, what was worse, influential!—so that this so-called love would oscillate between snobbishness and solicitation of the kind nowadays practised upon a minister of state—whose ugliness does not matter. Assuredly it is possible to love a plain woman with all one’s heart; such love, indeed, is said to be the strongest. But how difficult it must have been in those days for a princess to believe in a disinterested love! And even supposing such happiness were hers, could she ever have relied upon it? So the love of princesses, which was an essential characteristic of platonism, sprang in reality from a very special principle. The princesses (and other great ladies) had no experience whatever of the sentiment (very masculine and somewhat modern) that everything was theirs by right, and that a certain lofty egotism was the natural complement of a lofty station. On the contrary, they imagined themselves to be the property of society, so to speak, and not their own—and further, as they realised that a great name is just as isolating and paralysing as a large fortune, if not more so, they considered themselves specially bound to keep their activities in full play. Their efforts were sweetened by their pride. That the woman should have the castle and the man the cottage, that she should be rich and he poor, seemed to them a good thing: it was the subversion of old ideas, but the consecration of the idea that was to be. They found a special charm in material inequalities of position; it was often distressing to have to raise a man morally, but it was delightful to raise him in a material sense; as Balzac has said, “No man has ever been able to raise his mistress to his own level, but a woman always places her lover as high as herself.”