In vain did the women most liable to such treatment have recourse to all sorts of subterfuges—sleeping elsewhere that night, or rising at dawn; escape was almost impossible. Margaret of France knew all about it; for all her demureness, Clément Marot wrote a scrap of verse expressly to threaten “to give her the innocents” and “see that comely body.” Her nephew Charles of Orleans made merry at her expense because, “having risen too late” on Innocents’ Day, he impudently made up for it next day with his poor aunt and another lady: “I won’t tell you just now,” he wrote, “all that I saw.” His letter tells a good deal as it is. It is not surprising that a princess habituated to such buffooneries strove at least to raise their level a little. As there was no help for it but to exercise their charm on man the brute by such proceedings, the women displayed neither pedantry nor affectation. Besides, if the sensualists thought only of the body, women thought only of the soul; and here, under a new form, we again trace the idea that in giving heart and mind and soul to the man of her choice a woman had really given him all that was dearest, most precious to her, all that constituted her personality, and that the rest had only a secondary importance. She had lent her material person to a husband who had not troubled himself about fathoming her soul: why then should she think of refusing favours of no consequence to the man who had really gathered the early blossom of that soul? Just as the most trifling familiarity disgusted her when it sprang from a vulgar material motive or was forced, so the greatest seemed to her legitimate and even pleasant if it was spontaneous, if it consecrated a genuine affection. The lady who, while taking her bath, would have thought it more seemly to dismiss her maid, did not fear to receive there in all honour a visit from a gentleman. Why should distinguished ladies have deprived themselves, at the levee they held on rising and retiring, of the pleasure of an intimate bedside conversation with their lover? In their eyes it had exquisite advantages: first, the very intimacy of the conversation; then the intellectual and emotional relish it imparted to the purely physical operations of the toilet; finally, for the favoured visitor, there was the tiny reward of platonic love, the little personal token, the special bond which no one else had. Margaret of France tells us explicitly that she could not have insulted a man of position and a friend of the king, like Bonnivet, by excluding him from her “dressing and undressing”; that, further, there was no harm in Bonnivet’s “taking this opportunity to increase his affection,”[186] seeing that platonic love consists precisely in loving up to the very verge of the forbidden.