The affair soon made a great noise, and the King, who heard of it, immediately sent express orders to the Husbands of the Ladies to take no share in the quarrel. The Lady of Liancourt applied to the ordinary course of law, and brought a criminal action against the Marchioness, before the Parliament of Paris; the consequence of which was, that the latter was condemned to ask her pardon in open Court upon her knees, and to pay her about two thousand pounds damages, besides being banished from the whole extent of the jurisdiction of the Parliament. The Servants, who are generally very severely dealt with in France, when they suffer themselves to become the instruments of the violence of their Masters, were sent to the Gallies. And Miss De Villemartin, who had been co-spectatress of the flagellation, in the same coach with the Marchioness, and had shared her triumph, was summoned to appear personally in Court, there to be admonished, and condemned to pay a fine of twenty livres, ‘for the bread of the prisoners[105].’
That part of the bodies of their enemies, to which Captain St. Loe, and the above-named Marchioness, directed the corrections and insults by which they proposed to humble them, naturally leads us to remark the opposite lights in which that part has been considered by Mankind, and to notice the fantastical and contradictory disposition of the human mind.
The part we mention, which, to follow the common definition that is given of it, is that part on which Man sits, is, of itself, extremely deserving of our esteem. It is, in the first place, a characteristic part and appendage of Mankind: it is formed by the expansion of muscles which, as Anatomists inform us, exist in no other animal, and are intirely proper to the human species.
Nor does that part confer upon Man a distinction from animals, that is of an honorific kind merely, like the faculty of walking in an erect situation, which, as Ovid remarks, enables him to behold the Sun or the Stars, as he goes forward: but, by allowing him to sit, it enables him to calculate the motions, whether real or apparent, of those same Stars, to ascertain their revolutions, and foreknow their periodical returns. It puts him in a condition to promote the liberal Arts and Sciences, Music, Painting, Algebra, Geometry, &c. not to mention the whole tribe of mechanic Arts and manufactures. It even is, by that power of assiduity (or of being seated) it confers upon Man, so useful to the study of the Law, that it has been looked upon as being no less conducive to it than the head itself, with which it has, in that respect, been expressly put upon a par; and it is a common saying in the Universities abroad, that, in order to succeed in that study, a Man must have an iron head, and leaden posteriors; to which they add, a golden purse, to buy books with:—caput ferreum, aurea crumena, nates plumbeæ.
Nor does the part of the human body we mention, only serve to make Man a learned and industrious animal; but it moreover contributes much to the beauty of the species, being itself capable of a great degree of beauty.
Without mentioning the opinion of different savage Nations on that account, who take great pains to paint and adorn that part, we see that the Greeks, who certainly were a well-cultivated and polite People, entertained high notions of its beautifulness. They even seem to have thought that it had the advantage, in that respect, of all the other parts of the human body; for, though we do not find that they ever erected altars to fine arms, fine legs, fine eyes, or even to a handsome face, yet, they had done that honour to the part we mention, and had expressly erected a Temple to Venus, under the appellation of Venus with fair posteriors (Ἀφροδίτη Καλλίπυγη): the above Temple was built, as some say, on occasion of a quarrel that arose between two Sisters, who contended which of the two was most elegantly shaped in the part we mention; a quarrel that happened to make a great noise. To this we may add, by the by, that so little did the Greeks in general think that the part we allude to, was undeserving of attention, that they sometimes drew from it indications of the different tempers of people; and they, for instance, gave the appellation of a Man with white posteriors (Πύγαργος) to a Man whom they meant to charge with having too much softness and nicety.
The Latins entertained the same notions with the Greeks, as to the beauty of that part, or those parts, on which Man sits. Horace more than once bestows upon them the appellation of fair (pulchræ): he even in one place expressly declares it as his opinion, that, for a Mistress to be defective in those parts (depygis) is one of the greatest blemishes she can have,—is a defect equal to that of being with a flat nose (nasuta) or a long foot, and is in short capable of spoiling, where it exists, all other bodily accomplishments. (Hor. Sat. 2. Lib. I.)
Among the Moderns, notions of the same kind have prevailed. Rabelais, a well-known Writer, places one of his best stories to the account of a certain Nun, whom he calls Sister, or Sœur Fessue; which he would not certainly have done, if he had not been of opinion that the size and exact shape of those parts of the Nun’s body from which he denominated her, were in the number of her greatest perfections.
In times posterior to Rabelais, other Writers among the French, have expressed opinions exactly alike. La Fontaine, if I mistake not, speaking in one of his Tales, of a certain Beauty whose charms he means to extoll, exclaims, ‘Breasts, Heaven knows, and a rump fit for a Canon!’