Anne herself, and Anne of Brittany, thus kept “schools of manners”—a sort of fashionable boarding-school, where the young men never addressed the girls but on bended knee in the ancient style, and where the somewhat cloistral austerity seemed mitigated by the belief that so excellent a place and so well guaranteed a virtue could not fail to tempt the most fastidious husbands. But this institution, intended to serve as a bulwark against the new manners, floated along, on the contrary, in their current: Catherine de’ Medici’s “flying squadron,” as it was called, completely lost the character of a boarding-school, and discharged its functions with freelance recklessness. For the most part, it was at her mother’s side that a girl set off in quest of a husband. The plan of operations varied so greatly that no one will expect us to unravel its principles. All these young girls matched one another in _chic_. They never spoke to their mothers without bleating “Madame ma mère,” or lisping “By your favour, madam,” like so many well-behaved silly sheep. Many of them were for ever showing their teeth: they had a laugh for anything—a phrase, a fly, a gentleman with a bald head. One laughing sent the others into fits too, and that was thought remarkably witty. They were experts in the “sedate management of their green-blue eyes, full of softness and opened neither too little nor too much.” They wore lovely dresses—monumental robes which yet seemed rather an accompaniment than a vesture for their limbs. Some old folk (Vivès, for example) professed horror at their ring-loaded fingers, their pierced ears (a barbarous custom, to be sure!), those light, delicate touches of the brush with which they did up the face, and those subtle perfumes wafted from no one knows where: in all this they saw woful error, and even worse, rank folly. They sharply reprimanded the mothers, reproaching them for a multitude of things: for withering the natural goodness and charitableness of their daughters by fostering expensive habits; for inciting them to a false luxury, all vulgarity and tinsel, which is neither comely nor virtuous, and helps not a whit towards matrimony—at least it is to be hoped so, for it would be a great imprudence to depart so far from reality, and to entice a man into marriage by means of the rouge-pot and sham charms.[93]