send. He asks nothing of the woman he worships. He simply devotes his life to her. She dies; and not even the inviolable chastity of death will permit him to touch her forehead with his lips. Young Lescum, terribly wounded at the battle of Paria, has himself carried to the house of "his lady and guardian angel," and dies happy in her arms. The love of Marot for Margaret of Navarre is of the same nature, or even, perhaps, a little less corporeal and more intellectual. Purity is a constant characteristic of the love inspired by princesses. We can hardly reckon Diane de Poitiers among the Platonic mistresses of men. And yet, when we behold a prince and king of France, like Henry II., sincerely and faithfully devoted to a woman twenty years older than himself, where shall we look for a more satisfactory explanation of the " case " than is to be found in those romantic ideas which were derived, in the first instance from books, but gradually imposed themselves upon real life.

This love, purified of all material taint, and appealing only to the soul, has never been in spite of the instances which we have named without caring to discuss them, of very frequent occurrence, even in aristocratic circles. But it offers incomparable opportunities for conversation, since the least Platonic of men must needs borrow the vocabulary of Platonism when they make love in a drawing-room. We are, therefore, assisting at the birth of conversation. A new type has been evolved. Castiglione studies it, in a treatise, which becomes famous; and manuals of polite behavior multiply. The person who was then called courtier would now be called a man of the world. To be skilled in all athletic exercises, especially in such as develop grace rather than strength of body, to know a little of everything, and not too much of anything, to be able to talk agreeably upon any subject, to be refined in language, reserved in manner, and gracious to all, both men and women is not this the whole duty of the worldling? It is universally acknowledged that conversation flourishes only so long as there is a woman of wit and taste to direct it. In those lettered courts, to which rank alone no longer gave access, but where writers and artists were made welcome and gathered in a group about some royal lady, the power to converse became the earnest of a brilliant career, for social relations had already developed into an art.

Such was the seductive exterior of the "feminism" of the Renaissance. It was exclusively aristocratic, never going beyond

the narrow court circle. Within these restricted limits, it certainly seems, at the first glance, as though the women had gained their cause and succeeded in their attempt to purify sentiment and soften the brutality of manners. But the truth, unhappily, is that there never was a period more utterly perverted and corrupt than this same sixteenth century, and that, too, in the very circles where the women were conducting their crusade.

The sixteenth century began with an outburst of sensualism, and ended in an outburst of violence, during which feminism went to utter shipwreck. The women could not, of course, have foreseen the religious wars; nor was it their fault that their fragile empire was submerged in blood. Yet the rough manner in which the men regained possession of the world's stage is not without its lesson. The arquebus had an eloquence of its own, after so much philosophism and dilettanteism and æstheticism. It had been lustily asserted that life ought, above all things, to be joyous; that nature is good, and we have but to yield ourselves to her attractions; and a certain number of distinguished and emancipated spirits had repaired to the Abbey of Thelema and erected themselves into an order under the rule of their own good pleasEvents undertook to give them their answer; proving beyond a peradventure that human nature is savage at bottom, and that beauty is indeed "vain" to bridle its instincts.

ure.

The fact is that the principle on which the feminism of the Renaissance rested is fundamentally false. The women of that era wrought only for themselves, and their end and aim was the gratification of their own vanity. They reveled in the general concert of praise, and in the incense burned upon their altars by crowds of adorers. They were flattered when men made believe that they were ready to die for them, and to bless the hand that dealt the fatal blow. All their nice insight did not enable them to detect the essential element of falsity in homage of this description. In their energetic revolt from the time-honored teachings of religion, they declared the age to be ripe, and the moment come, for proclaiming an era for enjoyment. They did not know that to seek pleasure systematically is the surest way to miss it. What madness indeed to regard happiness as the object of life! Since the life of man upon this earth began, who has ever attained it? And if it has escaped the most resolute search, eluded the most passionate pursuit, is not the reason plain that happiness does not exist? It is only an intellectual conception, an

illusion of our own sensibility, and the most chimerical of all. Those who have taken this chimera for the guide of their conduct have paid for their blunder by going furthest astray. They sought to attain happiness by loading life with the adornments of external elegance, only to find themselves fooled by appearances; the dupes of the merely accessory. The frame was gorgeous, but it was empty.

From the Revue des Deux Mondes. Translated for the Living Age. January 21st, 1899.