“After eating your bread for so long a time, we should be ungrateful indeed if we did not serve you.”

She made excellent show of not understanding the matter, thinking by this seriousness to confound them; but they pursued their discourse in such sort that she saw that all was discovered.  So she immediately devised a means of baffling them, for, having lost honour and conscience, she would in no wise take to herself the shame that they thought to bring upon her.  On the contrary, like one who set her pleasure before all earthly honour, she neither changed her countenance nor treated them worse than before, whereat they were so confounded, that they carried away in their own bosoms the shame they had thought to bring upon her.

“If, ladies, you do not consider this story enough to prove that women are as bad as men, I will seek out others of the same kind to relate to you.  Nevertheless I think that this one will suffice to show you that a woman who has lost shame is far bolder to do evil than a man.”

There was not a woman in the company that heard this story, who did not make as many signs of the cross as if all the devils in hell were before her eyes.  However, Oisille said—­

“Ladies, let us humble ourselves at hearing of so terrible a circumstance, and the more so as she who is forsaken by God becomes like him with whom she unites; for even as those who cleave to God have His spirit within them, so is it with those that cleave to His opposite, whence it comes that nothing can be more brutish than one devoid of the Spirit of God.”

“Whatever the poor lady may have done,” said Ennasuite, “I nevertheless cannot praise the men who boasted of their imprisonment.”

“It is my opinion,” said Longarine, “that a man finds it as troublesome to conceal his good fortune as to pursue it.  There is never a hunter but delights to wind his horn over his quarry, nor lover but would fain have credit for his conquest.”

“That,” said Simontault, “is an opinion which I would hold to be heretical in presence of all the Inquisitors of the Faith, for there are more men than women that can keep a secret, and I know right well that some might be found who would rather forego their happiness than have any human being know of it.  For this reason has the Church, like a wise mother, ordained men to be confessors and not women, seeing that the latter can conceal nothing.”

“That is not the reason,” said Oisille; “it is because women are such enemies of vice that they would not grant absolution with the same readiness as is shown by men, and would be too stern in their penances.”

“If they were as stern in their penances,” said Dagoucin, “as they are in their responses, they would reduce far more sinners to despair than they would draw to salvation; and so the Church has in every sort well ordained.  But, for all that, I will not excuse the gentlemen who thus boasted of their prison, for never was a man honoured by speaking evil of a woman.”