Italianists and French platonists respected this tradition. In 1506 the town of Amboise got up a performance before Louise of Savoy of the Mystery of the Passion, “the most beautiful that could be discovered.” A priest played the part of Christ; the performance lasted a week, and was so successful that two years afterwards M. de Longueville wished to repeat it at Châteaudun, and engaged in a somewhat acrimonious correspondence on the subject with the functionaries of Amboise, whom he accused of purloining the copy. This performance was very costly; the town took five years (which seemed an enormous period in those days) to liquidate a debt of four thousand livres contracted on the occasion. It does not appear that Louise of Savoy, who was then residing at the château, contributed in any way towards the expenses, as M. de Longueville did at Châteaudun; but she certainly did not disapprove of it; and towards the middle of the century it was again in the presence of a thoroughly platonist woman, the second Margaret of France, that the last known representations of the art of the Mysteries are said to have taken place. With all her daring on other points, the first Margaret maintained a remarkable attitude of reserve in regard to the theatre. She contented herself with experiments in an intermediate style of drama,—religious comedies, a sort of Italianised ‘morality,’ easier to produce and not so long-drawn-out as the ancient Mysteries, yet neither very pious, nor very amusing, nor much calculated to take the public by storm. The result was that the drama long retained traces of its original character. So late as the 18th century Voltaire dedicated a tragedy to the pope, and fumed at not being able to get it performed at Geneva. The only cosmopolitan kind of piece was that of the farces, knockabouts,[251] harlequinades, carnival drolleries, to which the most illustrious platonists of Florence attached their names.[252] Harlequin and Punch were always a success in France: “They have something that sets you laughing without being amused”; but they introduced nothing new. The French farce had long been flourishing on the boards; the Italian was only a competitor. To sum up, the women of the Renaissance, as we see, did not try to be savants or blue-stockings. They skimmed the cream off books and works of art so as to get what suited their mission, that is, something to talk about and to go into raptures over. They did not rise to what was called “humanism,” like the prelates; they stopped short at loving intellectual beauty more than plastic beauty; they cultivated a literature of sentiment and passion, and took a keen delight in beauty of form. They behaved as instructed women, and above all as women of feeling, as women who wished to please, nobly faithful to their single-eyed pursuit of elevated love. CHAPTER VI CONVERSATION We come at last to conversation.