France, on the contrary, viewed these new ideas with profound mistrust, and long rejected them because of their Italian origin. We knew Italy, but under very false colours; she gloried in rising superior to wealth and rank, in the importance of women, prelates, and artists in her life; while we only knew her through merchants and soldiers. Her bankers established in our towns—“Lombards,” as they were scornfully called—passed in the eyes of the people for men without a country, for birds of prey akin to the Jews; our knights, still bewitched by the joys of their expeditions, spoke carelessly only of a people without weapons and of defenceless women. The French clergy chimed in with their note of bitter opposition to Rome. And thus Italy was readily imagined as a hot-bed of pleasure: but to go there in quest of the philosophic secret of happiness seemed absurd. In the intellectual point of view, Italy created a wrong impression among us through the persons she sent us: professors more or less broken down,[8] exiles more or less voluntary;[9] impecunious, ravenous, and pretentious characters,[10] not very philosophic in their attitude towards their rivals: all those also who rang the changes on the honour we had had in beating them, the Stoas, Soardis, Equicolas, wonderfully assiduous in making Louis XII. out to be a second Charlemagne (in those days Charlemagne was still a Frenchman); Caesar Borgia and his brilliant retinue, at whose brief passage we looked on in contemptuous unconcern. Because Caesar Borgia did not take our fancy, or because some of us had met light women on the highway to Italy, any Italian idea appeared to us a false one; we shut ourselves up in what Pontanus, Julius II., and other Italians remaining in Italy called our “barbarism,” and as we plumed ourselves on our logic, we only abandoned our antagonism to adopt all the Italian fashions completely and indiscriminately. To that end, Louis XII. had to oblige by dying, and Francis I. by reigning; so at least Castiglione, the master of the new school, formally declared after the accession of Francis. So it actually turned out. Thus women are queens; they move like fairies. “It is a small thing to say of a woman that she does not destroy the flowers on which she sets her foot; she must refresh them. The violets should not droop when she passes, but burst into flower.”[11]