The difficulty with which the custom became acclimatised in France has been attributed to very various causes. Following an old tradition, many preachers so late as the 16th century inveighed against the habit of bathing. Out of thirty women who go bathing, says one, not one can call herself pure. “O fatal laving, prolific in elements of death!” exclaims another. “Ye women who stew yourselves,” says Oliver Maillard,[221] “I summon you all to the stewpots of Hell!” The Calvinists went to still greater lengths of indignation, and more than one physician, even, thought well to adopt a cautious attitude. At the end of a long treatise on hygiene, Gazius says: “I have still to speak about the baths, and I shall do so briefly, for the custom of bathing does not exist among us, and further, it is a pleasure which is not devoid of danger; perhaps it would be better not to speak of it, lest I should appear to recommend it. For myself, I have never taken a bath, and I am none the worse for it, thank God!” However, Gazius, not to come to logger-heads with the ancients, or the Arabs, or his colleagues, goes so far as to acknowledge that cold water is in use “in very distinguished countries”; for his part, he sees nothing objectionable in a douche followed by brisk friction or massage. But we must get to the bottom of this matter, a question of morals rather than hygiene. We have unexpectedly come upon principles which we recognise as old acquaintances. Neither preachers nor Calvinists were willing to admit that any consideration of utility could induce a self-respecting woman to strip herself of all, or nearly all, her clothes, either in the open air as in ancient times, or in one of those public bathing establishments which were cried every day in the market-places between the artichokes and the cheese,[222] and where the authorities winked at certain familiarities. Many historians have concluded outright that Calvinists and preachers had a horror of water; but this is not strictly accurate; they recommended baths at home. Thus the council of Basle passed a canon inviting persons to set bath-rooms in their houses. The platonists fell in the more heartily with the council’s recommendation in that they treated their bodies with sacerdotal attentions, so to speak, and that no refinement appeared to them unreasonable in forging the weapon of delightful love. Some discriminating women preferred dry methods to water—powders, pastes, scraping of the skin, which enabled them to say “that they did not wash their hands”; but the majority owed a great deal to water, and the room devoted to this work of regeneration was a sanctuary. The little bath-rooms of the 18th or the beginning of the 19th century, hung all round with mirrors, are familiar to us. The idolatry of the 16th century was less blatant but not less ardent; Raphael himself decorated Bibbiena’s bath-room, and, as we know, the subject chosen by