Will lead my steps aright.
Souvent femme varie,
Bien fol est qui s’y fie!
(Woman is very fickle,
Great fool he who trusts in her!)
Victor Hugo (Le Roi s’amuse).
In the play Francis I (1494-1547) enters singing these lines. (Francis wrote on the walls of the royal apartments at Chambord Toute femme varie, “Every woman is fickle.”) One finds this never-ending theme of poets and cynics in Virgil’s Varium et mutabile semper Femina, “Woman is a fickle and changeable thing” (Aeneid iv, 569), La donna è mobile (Rigoletto), and countless other passages.