Bayle has offered another explanation, still more amusing: he has simply translated by “médecin” Nifo’s honorary appellation of “Medici,” and founding on this little slip of his, he takes occasion to thunder against physicians who abuse the confidence of their fair clients. Even so, there would still have been no liberty! Besides, Nifo was not a physician, and even if he had been, he would not have found himself much further on; for ladies, as we have shown, had no belief in the neuter sex of the experts who tended them, and were wonderfully ready to regard them as veterinary surgeons rather than philosophers. They always drew a distinction between the nude and the unclothed! Nifo simply ventured on the same pleasantry as Michel d’Amboise and Ronsard and all the second-rate idealists, ready to pay intellectual adoration to a woman, and yet susceptible to her physical charms—if only like a fish on a baited hook. He ascribes to his platonic princess, but in an aesthetic and abstract sense, a beauty well calculated to increase the number of her courtiers and shed lustre upon her philosophical activity; he acts like a good lieutenant and henchman, rendering her a philosophical service of which she cannot but show herself sensible. Those who have the patience to read Nifo will find later in his book an explicit corrective, the strict necessity of which, however, is by no means obvious. In another chapter, to remove all misapprehension, he enlarges with fervour on the moral virtues of Jeanne of Aragon, putting in the forefront the two which seem to him the most salient—the beauty which attracts, enflames, enraptures, elevates men; the modesty which serves her as breastplate and armour: “In these two points,” he cries, “you eclipse all other women!” Poor Nifo! Even of Phausina Rhea, the waiting-maid to whom he declared his love without any beating about the bush, he knew nothing but her chignon! And it was just this perfect, if a little vexatious, security that gave such a zest to his pleasantry about the princess. In the seventeenth century also, a century of masculine predominance, people fancied they were deifying men, and especially princes, by representing them nude. La Bruyère was compelled to laugh when at a street corner he contemplated the head of the state, the grave Louis XIV., posed as a stone Apollo. The idea may be as ridiculous as you please, but who would ever dream of being disturbed at the sight? Did La Bruyère himself imagine for a single moment that Louis XIV. had taken the trouble to leave an authentic torso to posterity?