A lady of distinction, however, first of all secured a good escort to keep her company; Margaret of France, for instance, carried her whole party off to Cauterets. Then she had to listen to the parting exhortation of her doctor, a punctilious and intelligent man, who apparently had no excessive confidence in his colleagues or his fair client, and who catechised her and made her read the folio. He mentioned eight enemies lying in wait for her—headache, insomnia, and the rest;—he instructed her how, by watchfully studying her little secret vices and never for a moment forgetting her digestion, and so on, she would put them to rout. Then he carefully consulted the horoscope, the direction of the wind, the temperature, his chart of epidemics; he assured himself as to the character of the year (for there were some years in which the waters killed off the invalids or made them worse), and finally he pronounced the _exeat_. Flinging off this wet blanket with his terrestrial visions, the patient sped away. Pity if it was towards Porretta, near Bologna, a very popular haunt but dreadfully purgative. However, the spirit of Beauty can idealise everything, and an agreeable poet, Battista of Mantua, undertook to show all the moral and aesthetic satisfaction to be got in drinking three glasses of a laxative water, and then leaving Nature to herself. He describes this regimen in admirable verses: “Far from the bed and all its joys, You go and come and eke advance In the slow measure of a stately dance,” and so on. In fact, the idea of becoming young again, the thought of gaining new freedom of mind, new warmth of heart, new suppleness of the bodily frame by sacrifices so slight, of seeing the wrinkles vanish of themselves, in short the pursuit of beauty as a bounden duty, threw the glamour of poetry over many things, and was well worth the self-imposition of twenty-one days of hardship. For all that, fashionable people preferred the bathing-places to the spas. Life at such places presented the admirable advantage that people could there enjoy the most perfect liberty. Nowhere were there better opportunities for seeing one’s friends, for intimate conversation, for deriving real profit from companionship. It was that which made this life so precious. A man who had followed in the train of the princess he loved had absolutely nothing to do but to devote himself to her, for he put up with the rubbings and purgings only as a sop to his conscience. What delightful opportunities between two glasses of water to improve the mind or tell stories! Many collections of _Novelli_ originated near a spring. It was during a season at Lucca, in April 1538, that Vittoria Colonna made the acquaintance of Carnesecchi, the adventurous theologian, and launched out with him into the abstrusest religious speculations. Everyone followed his own bent, and the gentlemen who did not love husbands were less irked there than elsewhere.