the desire of company is allayed by giving it a little liberty.  We are pretty much in the same case they are extreme in constraint, we in licence.  ’Tis a good custom we have in France that our sons are received into the best families, there to be entertained and bred up pages, as in a school of nobility; and ’tis looked upon as a discourtesy and an affront to refuse this to a gentleman.  I have taken notice (for, so many families, so many differing forms) that the ladies who have been strictest with their maids have had no better luck than those who allowed them a greater liberty.  There should be moderation in these things; one must leave a great deal of their conduct to their own discretion; for, when all comes to all, no discipline can curb them throughout.  But it is true withal that she who comes off with flying colours from a school of liberty, brings with her whereon to repose more confidence than she who comes away sound from a severe and strict school.

Our fathers dressed up their daughters’ looks in bashfulness and fear (their courage and desires being the same); we ours in confidence and assurance; we understand nothing of the matter; we must leave it to the Sarmatian women, who may not lie with a man till with their own hands they have first killed another in battle.  For me, who have no other title left me to these things but by the ears, ’tis sufficient if, according to the privilege of my age, they retain me for one of their counsel.  I advise them then, and us men too, to abstinence; but if the age we live in will not endure it, at least modesty and discretion.  For, as in the story of Aristippus, who, speaking to some young men who blushed to see him go into a scandalous house, said “the vice is in not coming out, not in going in,” let her who has no care of her conscience have yet some regard to her reputation; and though she be rotten within, let her carry a fair outside at least.

I commend a gradation and delay in bestowing their favours:  Plato ’declares that, in all sorts of love, facility and promptness are forbidden to the defendant.  ’Tis a sign of eagerness which they ought to disguise with all the art they have, so rashly, wholly, and hand-over-hand to surrender themselves.  In carrying themselves orderly and measuredly in the granting their last favours, they much more allure our desires and hide their own.  Let them still fly before us, even those who have most mind to be overtaken:  they better conquer us by flying, as the Scythians did.  To say the truth, according to the law that nature has imposed upon them, it is not properly for them either to will or desire; their part is to suffer, obey, and consent and for this it is that nature has given them a perpetual capacity, which in us is but at times and uncertain; they are always fit for the encounter, that they may be always ready when we are so “Pati natee."-["Born to suffer."-Seneca, Ep., 95.]—­And whereas she has ordered that our appetites shall be manifest