Thus, according to Dolce, abstract or severe studies were not for girls: “vain and futile quackeries” he called them, which could only bring them in subjection to men. “All that is needed is to awaken and foster the faculties which are in women.” To rule as with a rod of iron, women need only remain as they are, with the talents given them by nature.[88] What is the good of teaching them, for example, the dates and the nice problems of history? They should be taught to read history, to derive from the accurate narrative of facts an impression of the poignant emotions and moral struggles which the historian necessarily indicates with a more or less light touch, and then, linking these events together in their minds, to get at the heart of them, deduce the lofty moral principles controlling them. In philosophy they have no need of great metaphysical principles; but what is important for them is to understand that misery exists, that there is suffering everywhere, often hidden away and yet only too real. Woman is a fellow-worker with God! It suffices to lop off the thorns which cumber her; she will shoot up naturally towards the light, sucking, like a flower, the earth’s sap, which is love. The corn which is to go to the mill and make bread needs the plough’s rude toil, a lovely delicate flower often asks no more than a handful of earth and a bountiful sky. And it was in this way that so many sweet Italian women blossomed out, almost spontaneously, delighting in life, themselves the joy and felicity of the world, all compact of poetry, archaeology, rhetoric, and philosophy—Attic through and through at thirteen years. The efflorescence was universal save at Venice, a country half-Germanic, half-Oriental, where they insisted on keeping the girls immured until their wedding-day, showing nothing of them but bundles of millinery on Sundays. And yet there do not appear to have been more angels at Venice than elsewhere, and no one succeeded there in resuscitating the type (henceforth unknown) of matrons hypnotised, as it were, by their husbands’ frown or the idea of death. Italy was peopled with fairy-like creatures, who thought nobly of all men and wore to admiration the double ornament of fine jewels and a fine intellect. “A little girl,” said Bembo, “ought to learn Latin: it puts the finishing touch to her charms.” Louise of Savoy brought up her daughter Margaret according to these Italian principles at a period when France as yet did not understand them. Margaret blossomed like a flower: she knew something of everything (too much indeed), notably of philosophy and theology: she learnt Latin, Hebrew, Italian, and Spanish; but she could speak nothing but French. At nine years of age, she was wonderfully clever and accomplished; at thirteen, she inspired so much admiration as to be considered “rather Persian than French.”