Some cross-grained people imagine that to women talking is the easiest thing in the world, that friends spring up around them spontaneously, that the art reduces itself to finishing their toilette by lunch time and then letting their tongues wag till evening. It is extremely simple, they say. Simple! They think it sufficient then to fling their doors open on certain days, and to deal out here and there among their guests a few formal and chilling inanities! “Men are so scarce that when you have them you should rate them very high,” said Anne of France, very justly. Simple, not to rest satisfied with the mere glitter of small talk, but to take full possession of one’s visitors, to form a warm nest of friends! It is a heavy task. If in these days women no longer exercise any serious influence, is it not to some extent their own fault? A superficial and cramped education has often rendered them incapable of effort. They are afraid of a conversation on broad, serious lines; they will not be bothered with it. But to form a set, a woman must belong to herself no longer, she must belong to her friends; conversation is her bread of life, to adopt an expressive phrase, and she does in fact become so habituated to her part that she cannot do without it; she _must_ talk, if only with her husband. Mary of England used to talk to Louis XII.— Soubz le drap couvert d’orfebvrerie, Qui reluisoit en fine pierrerie, Passions temps en dictz solatieux Et en propos plaisans et gratieux.[256] Bereavements and misfortunes only render conversation more necessary. Emilia Pia,[257] proscribed, stripped of her all, and persecuted, could not appear in the streets of Rome without an adoring throng of prelates and admirers, just as there was never more laughter and gossip than in the crowded cells of the Reign of Terror. A well-bred man considered himself literally entitled to command the conversational abilities of women. In this connection a very curious misadventure befell some judges of the Parliament of Paris who in the course of their duty went to hold assize at Poitiers. In the heart of the 16th century, when everybody went the pace, and the air was charged with moral electricity, there was still found one town where the women would have believed, as they did three hundred years earlier, that they were lost if they opened their doors. Jean Bouchet,[258] loyal Poitevin as he was, has described the boisterous amusement with which France heard that some bashful ladies answered these poor judges through a peep-hole with a _Non possumus_. The ladies of Paris themselves sent a petition to their “colleagues” at Poitiers, begging them not to let their husbands die of dulness. The ladies of Poitiers replied with blushing cheeks: “’Tis not our way at Poitiers.” They hugged the tradition of dulness.