ies did not lose her head the other lost his temper.

La Bruyere had not then come, but there are maxims which do not need
expression to be appreciated and then as since men contended that when a
woman's heart remained unresponsive it was because she had not met the one
who could make it beat. Others, less finely, insisted that a woman who
could love and would not should be made to. Love then had its martyrs,
platonism its agnostics. That, though, was perhaps inevitable. Platonism,
whether real or imaginary, has always been less a theory than a melody; as
such unsuited to every voice. But at the time it was serviceable. It
deodorized, however partially, an atmosphere supercharged with pagan
airs. It turned some women into saints, others into sisters of charity
that penetrated the poverties of the heart and distributed there the
fragrance of a divine largesse. In that was its beauty and also its
defect. Being in its essence poetic, it could appeal only to epicures. To
mere kings like Henry VIII, to felons like Henri III, to the vulgar
generally, to people incapable of sentiment and eager only for sensations,
as the vulgar always are, it was Greek, unapproachable when not unknown.
There were virtuose that drew from it delicious accords, there were others
that with it executed amazing _pas seuls_. Otherwise its exponents in
attempting to convert life into a fancy ball and love in a battle of
flowers failed necessarily. The flowers wilted, the dancers departed, the
music ceased. The moral pendulum swung again from ether to earth.

In the downward trend Venice perhaps assisted. Venice then was a salon
floored with mosaics where Europe and Asia met. Suspended between earth
and sky, unique in construction, orientally corrupt, byzantinely fair, a
labyrinth of liquid streets and porphyry palaces in which masterpieces
felt at ease, it was the ideal city of the material world, a magnet of
such attraction that the hierodules of the renaissant Aphrodite, whose
presence Rome had found undesirable, made it their home. Qualified,
naively, perhaps, but with much courtesy, as Benemeritae, they exercised a
sway which history has not forgotten and became the renegades of
pseudo-platonic love. To enjoy their society, to sup for instance with the
bella Imperia, whose blinding beauty is legendary still, or with Tullia
d'Aragona, who had written a tract of the "Infinity of Perfect Love,"
princes came and lingered enchanted by their meretricious