to them, especially to the pretty ones, small
coins, which they catch with their hands or with the outspread dresses,
whilst one pushes away the other, and in this game their charms were
frequently unveiled....

"But the most striking thing is the countless multitude of nobles and
plebeians, who gather here from the most distant parts, not so much for
health as for pleasure. All lovers and spendthrifts, all pleasure
seekers, stream together here, for the satisfaction of their desires.
Many women feign bodily ailments, whilst it is really their hearts that
are affected; therefore, one sees numberless pretty women, without
husbands or relations, with two maidservants and a man, or with some old
beldame of the family who is more easily deceived than bribed.... There
are here also virgins of Vesta, or rather of Flora; besides, abbots,
monks, lay-brothers, and ecclesiastics, and these live more dissolutely
than the others; some of them also live with the women, adorn their hair
with wreaths, and forget all religion.... And it is remarkable that
among the great number, almost thousands of men of different manners and
such a drunken set, no discord arises, no tumults, no partisanship, no
conspiracies, and no swearing. The men allow their wives to be toyed
with, and see them pairing off with entire strangers, but it does not
discompose or surprise them; they think it is all in an honest and
housewifely way." Poggio, with truly Rabelaisian irony, adds: "No baths
in the world are more apt for the fecundity of women."

But whether the Italian classicist is willing to excuse the luxury and
debauch, refined or otherwise, which he found at Baden, or which he
might have found anywhere in the social circles of the rich German
cities, the truth is that the intercourse between the sexes had become
loose, and that the prelates and their ladies, the cavaliers and their
mistresses, the rich burghers and the "light misses," the monks and
roving women were swarming everywhere; and that those abuses became one
of the foremost grievances which helped to swell the ranks of those
German patriots so that a reform in head and limbs of the social
structure became a necessity.

Indeed, "the good old time of pious memory" had reduced prostitution to
the standard of a science; there is an ostentatious freedom in the
treatment of the question which is quite offensive to modern ears. The
fantastic romanticism described in the preceding chapter had rea