Here again fashion was more than a match for philosophy; and, barring a few isolated exceptions, kissing and dancing carried all before them. Examples come from all sides: from the court with its licentious masked balls, and from the heart of the provinces; witness that singular strike of the ladies of Aix in Provence. The courts having interdicted, on the score of modesty, the dance known as the _volta_ (a sort of cancan), these ladies at once threatened to betake themselves _en masse_ to the pope at Avignon, and their affrighted husbands had to obtain the annulment of the decree. The platonists and their friends knew the world too well deliberately to open a campaign against abuses they could not destroy. They confined themselves to bewailing them. It struck them as deplorable to see men amusing themselves hour after hour in cutting their clownish capers at the expense of honest women. They considered it absolutely ridiculous to pretend to forbid men in the ordinary intercourse of life to smirch by word, look or gesture a lady who pleased them, while at a ball everything was permissible. The remedy, they thought, would be found in giving women more serious and more elevated tastes; they believed that a woman habituated to really noble ideas would know how to set herself high enough to win love without yielding to the caprice of the first comer. The Huguenots pursued a different policy, and did not shrink from attacking with all their force every kind of dancing: it would seem that they did not dance at all. They spoke of animals coupling, of disastrous confidences: “Look,” cries the good Daneau[206] with horror, “look at this lady with her head high, vaulting, whirling, swinging herself about, making a clatter with her feet.” That was what you saw at the ball: could anything be more ridiculous? But what most strikes him is that she leaves her modesty and her mantle together in the-hands of the lackeys in the cloak-room. “There any man may run his eye over the ladies as they stand, even with their husbands or mothers, and may choose any woman he pleases, in other words, the woman who excites his lust: those whom the eyes have chosen the hands clasp, and the men, as though already in the thrill and enjoyment of their desires, kiss them, hug them, lead them through the room; the young fellows exert themselves to appear lively and gay, so as to entertain and caress with a thousand tricks and approaches the girls they hold, and the girls show no reluctance to respond in kind. In the _volta_ there are regular tricks for making one’s partner bound and rise so high that the calves, even the thighs are shamelessly exposed and prostituted to the eyes of the throng. The dancers go up and down, lose sight of each other, then find themselves close together again; and when they meet there are oglings and caperings, redoubled gaieties, all showing how their hearts are bounding with joy at seeing themselves once