◆Francis Rabelais was born about 1483 at Chinon in Touraine, where his father was an apothecary. After a stormy youth and some years spent as a Monk in more than one Monastery of more than one Order, and later wandering the country as a vagabond secular priest, he was admitted Doctor in the Faculty of Medicine at Montpellier. Countless stories of his pranks and adventures are told, many no doubt mythical. He visited Rome as well as most parts of France in the course of his life. He died Curé of Meudon, about 1553.
[71] P. 123:
◆Chastity-belts of this sort were already in use at Venice at the time.
◆There is in the Hennin collection of prints at the Bibliothèque Nationale (t. III., fo 64) a satirical print representing what Brantôme relates here. A lady returns to her husband the key; but behind the bed, the lover, hidden by a duenna, receives from the latter a key similar to the husband’s. This instrument of jealousy was the cingulum pudicitiæ of the Romans, the “Florentine lock” of the sixteenth century. Henri Aldegraver also engraved on the sheath of a dagger a lady who is adorned with a lock of this kind. (Bartsch, Peintre-Graveur, VIII., p. 437.) These refinements in jealousy as well as the refinements in debauchery (of which Brantôme will speak later) were of Italian origin. (See on this subject La Description de l’Ile des Hermaphrodites, Cologne, 1724, p. 43.)
[72] P. 124:
◆Lampride, Alexandre Sévère, Chap. XXII.
[73] P. 125:
◆Nicolas d’Estouteville, lord of Villeconnin, and not Villecouvin, nobleman of the Chambre, died in Constantinople in February, 1567. He had gone to Turkey to forget a disappointment in love or in politics. Here is his epitaph:
Le preux Villeconin en la fleur de ses ans,
Hélas! a délaissé nos esbatz si plaisans,