Assuredly, magnificence had a glory of its own: there was no lack of gazetteers to applaud to the echo the marvels seen on great occasions: “Signorina Bulcano, in white cloth with gold trimmings and a golden girdle; her Excellency the Countess Maddaloni in red velvet; her Excellency the Countess du Rugo, in red cloth with large gold necklace.” There is this to be said, indeed, that these chroniclers, superior in this respect to some of ours, were destined to come down to posterity. Nevertheless, this was inevitably the death of platonism, the ruin of all it loved and all it desired. A fine thing to characterise a lady by the cloth or velvet with which she garbed her bust or limbs! In this profound decadence of taste people came to see some good in the general worship of close-fitting garments, for, now that women were nothing but dolls, it was certainly better that they should appear jointed. And what seriousness could be expected of, what noble idea or worthy aim could be suggested to, a woman who was a slave to her gloves, her hats, her jewels, who spent part of her day in close confabulation with her dressmaker or jeweller? Cest anneau est du temps passé, Ce ruby est mal enchassé, Ce saintureau n’est pas fort gent. Ma troussoire n’est que d’argent, J’en veuil une batue en or....[194] and so on indefinitely: that was how she talked; she was no longer her own, she was a slave. Satan in the pit of hell was bewailing, it seems, the fact that he no longer saw rustling about, as formerly, dresses “open down to the waist”; and he cursed platonism! He might make himself easy, there were still most melting sights for him! And his colleague Lucifer sets himself to cheer him, showing him the league of vanity mounting to the assault of the Beautiful, the almost invincible might of money, combated and proscribed above, triumphing and swarming on all sides under the most pitiful forms of jealousy and coquetry: among good housewives, who have neither grasped nor retained anything of the new ideas but an instinct for rigging themselves out to play the countess or the duchess—among kitchen wenches who deck themselves in fallals and furbelows in apish imitation of their mistresses. Unhappily, the king went over to the side of vanity; official France allied itself with the most dangerous adversaries of Roman philosophism and intellectual splendour: with the Milanese, whose tinsel and fripperies amused all Italy; and the Venetians, a people of large expense. The struggle was thus fought out between sensuous gratification and aestheticism. It did not alarm the platonists: they were prepared for it; as Castiglione says: “There are fools everywhere.”