And this self-abnegation has nothing to do with material questions of comfort or economy; there is no woman so poor that she cannot, if she wishes, rise above her wretchedness by means of these external symbols. Such at least was the opinion of the sixteenth-century women. To them every colour spoke of the soul and to the soul; it was the ensign of one’s spiritual fatherland, or, to use a modern metaphor, a railway signal-light; white, the line is clear! it signifies a heart free as air, a soul unappropriated or at any rate overflowing with youthfulness; green, it is springtime with the soul, in the full vigour of sweet acknowledged hopes; red, an utter despair! The cloth of gold, the golden jewels then so much in vogue, represented the rich glow of sunlight, the spacious joy of life! Whoever wished might approach and find warmth and gladness. Celestial blue meant to the Italians soft ethereal happiness; to the French, a tender and fortunate love. Black was regarded as melancholy: yet this colour, incapable of fading, symbolised constancy, firmness, and had its friends in consequence. Why restrict it to mourning, as though our feelings for our dead are alone eternal? Margaret, who loved and encouraged the use of black, protests: Le noir, souvent, se porte pour plaisir, Et plus souvent que pour peine et tourment.[191] However, people generally preferred not to take their pleasure in black. Rabelais allowed in the Abbey of Thelema none but brilliant costumes: he wished to have one colour a day, and that the days should be told off as white, pink, yellow, red, green—never black. Thus the sartorial art, in spite of little encouragement, itself came at last to exhale a perfume of life and the ideal. Unhappily it had a cruel, powerful foe, which was incessantly to check its aspirations and keep it in perpetual bondage to materialism. This foe was the vulgar passion for sumptuous display, the terrible taste that substituted a mere ostentation of wealth for a garb expressive of art and sentiment. The French never recovered from that fever. When Charles VIII. found himself face to face with the court of Ludovico Il Moro,[192] sinking under the weight of golden shoulder-knots and jewellery, a thrill shot through the French army. From that time it was vain for the preachers to join hands with the philosophers and demonstrate the infinite vulgarity of luxuriousness and its deplorable moral effects; it was vain for the legislators to enact laws; the die was cast. People were dazzled, fascinated by wealth: they knew not nor wished to know what wretchedness it cloaked, how many women, and some of the noblest of them, ruined themselves in their vanity, how many others lived by expedients that would not bear the light.[193]