In short, women genuinely platonic used their physical beauty as a first means of developing their charm. In this respect they were at odds with the mystics, who regarded the body as a negligible quantity and an encumbrance; but they were still more sharply divided from the sensualists. Their idea was to deify the body, enshrine it, so to speak, and glorify it as the vesture of the soul, the servant of the heart. Platonists of a lofty flight pushed this idea as far as possible: Michelangelo so closely identified soul and body as not even to admit that the face could have wrinkles when the soul had none; so great was his enthusiasm for the beauty and youthfulness of Vittoria Colonna’s soul, that he had that strange artist fancy never to perceive a line on her face. He himself, when a scarred and battered octogenarian, never felt withered; to his last day he never ceased to ascend with shining countenance the altar of the Beautiful, like those priests who bow hoary heads before the altar of the Eternal Beauty, the Eternal Sacrifice, as they invoke “the God who rejoiced their youth.” He has sometimes been twitted with having represented the Virgin as a woman of thirty, even after the death of Christ; he did so, it is true, and to him nothing appeared more natural. To him such a woman was always thirty. On this point Anne of France did not quite agree with him; it was one of her favourite maxims that a woman had much better accept the inevitable with a stout heart; conceal nothing, dress to suit her age, and persuade herself that wisdom is worth as much as beauty. But Margaret of France could not bring herself to believe that a few marks of physical deterioration dim the radiance of a woman’s moral beauty or impair her charm. That such is not the case was the assured conviction of these noble princesses. Unhappily it was not easy to persuade men so. La Rochefoucauld retorts: “There are few women whose worth survives their beauty.” To men a woman no longer exists if she can say: “When I was younger”; every possible defect is then laid to her charge; she is found to be ugly, jealous, washed out, viperous. Wisdom may be worth as much as beauty, but what can she do with her wisdom? In Italy a woman was reckoned to have reached the wisdom stage at thirty, and Anne of France only consented as a great favour to allow her another ten years. Apart from any sort of notion of coquetry, it was therefore of the greatest importance to a woman, from a mere sentiment of her duty and her mission, never to be forty; the theory of charm would not have been complete without the addition of the science of never growing old.