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The Chinese find our trousers and close-fitting coat-sleeves horribly immodest; I know a lady, an Englishwoman in fact, who allows only two parts in the body, the foot and the stomach: every other word is indecent; so that when her little boy has a fall, the governess must say: “Master Henry has fallen, Madame, on the place where the top of his feet rejoins the bottom of his stomach.
The habitual ways of the sixteenth century were very different. The lords lived a little like men of the people; that is why they talked somewhat like men of the people. Bonnivet and Henri II. amused themselves in jumping like school-boys, and leaping over ditches twenty-three feet wide. When Henry VIII. of England had saluted Francis I. on the field of the cloth of gold, he seized him in his arms and tried to throw him, out of pure sportiveness; but the king, a good wrestler, laid him low by a trip. Fancy to-day the Emperor Napoleon at Tilsitt receiving the Emperor Alexander in this fashion. The ladies were obliged to be robust and agile as our peasants. To go to an evening party they had to mount on horseback; Margaret, when in Spain, fearful of being detained, made in eight days the stages for which a good horseman would have required fifteen days; one had, too, to guard one’s self against violence; once she had need of her two fists and all her nails against Bonnivet. In the midst of such manners, free talk was only the natural talk; the ladies heard it every day at table, and adorned with the finest commentaries. Brantôme will describe for you the cup from which certain lords made them drink, and Cellini will relate you the conversation that was held with the Duchess of Ferrara. A milkmaid now-a-days would be ashamed of it. Students among themselves, even when they are tipsy, will scarce venture what the ladies of honor of Catherine de Medicis sang at the top of their voice and with all their heart. Pardon our poor Margaret; relatively she is decent and delicate, and then consider that two hundred years hence, you also, my dear sir and madam, you will perhaps appear like very blackguards.
V.
Sometimes here, after a broiling day, the clouds gather, the air is stifling, one feels fairly ill, and a storm bursts forth. There was such an one last night. Each moment the heavens opened, cleft by an immense flash, and the vault of darkness lifted itself entire like a tent. The dazzling light marked out the limits of the various cultures and the forms of the trees at the distance of a league. The glaciers flamed with a bluish glimmer; the jagged peaks suddenly lifted themselves upon the horizon like an army of spectres.