fix, without giving a single Christian reason. In fact, the lover of
the most gentle maid that God ever created in a good-tempered moment,
had he talked like a book, jumped like a flea, turned about like dice,
played like King David, and built for the aforesaid woman the
Corinthian order of the columns of the devil, if he failed in the
essential and hidden thing which pleases his lady above all others,
which often she does not know herself and which he has need to know,
the lass leaves him like a red leper. She is quite right. No one can
blame her for so doing. When this happens some men become
ill-tempered, cross, and more wretched than you can possibly imagine.
Have not many of them killed themselves through this petticoat tyranny?
In this matter the man distinguishes himself from the beast, seeing that
no animal ever yet lost his senses through blighted love, which proves
abundantly that animals have no souls. The employment of a lover is
that of a mountebank, of a soldier, of a quack, of a buffoon, of a
prince, of a ninny, of a king, of an idler, of a monk, of a dupe, of a
blackguard, of a liar, of a braggart, of a sycophant, of a numskull,
of a frivolous fool, of a blockhead, of a know-nothing, of a knave. An
employment from which Jesus abstained, in imitation of whom folks of
great understanding likewise disdain it; it is a vocation in which a
man of worth is required to spend above all things, his time, his
life, his blood, his best words, besides his heart, his soul, and his
brain; things to which the women are cruelly partial, because directly
their tongues begin to go, they say among themselves that if they have
not the whole of a man they have none of him. Be sure, also, that
there are cats, who, knitting their eyebrows, complain that a man does
but a hundred things for them, for the purpose of finding out if there
be a hundred, at first seeing that in everything they desire the most
thorough spirit of conquest and tyranny. And this high jurisprudence
has always flourished among the customs of Paris, where the women