A World Lit Only by Fire (14 page)

In this lusty age the most a parent could extract from a daughter was her promise not to yield until the banns had been read.
Once a couple was engaged, they slept together with society’s approval. If a peasant girl was not pregnant, there were only
two practical deterrents to her acceptance of a marriage proposal. It was her desire either to enter a convent or, at the
far end of the spectrum, to join the world’s oldest profession. Harlotry not only paid well; it was frequently prestigious.
Because prostitutes had to expose their entire bodies, they were the cleanest people in Europe. The competition was fierce,
but it always had been, and once established, these women became what were now being called courtesans (from the Italian
courtigiane
), or female courtiers. Moves to suppress them were rare and unpopular; Luther lost many followers when, though affirming
the normality of sexual desire, he proclaimed that the sale of sex was wrong and persuaded several German cities to outlaw
it.

G
REAT
R
ENAISSANCE ARTISTS
flourished while lesser talents actually starved in garrets; but the highly profitable production of erotica, including salacious
illustrations, kept many men well fed. Their work was available at every fair and in all large cities, sold by postmen, strolling
musicians, and street hawkers. The dissolute Pietro Aretino’s
Sonetti lussuriosi
(
Lewd Sonnets
) was as popular in Augsburg and Paris—and, when Clement VII became pope, in the Vatican—as in the poet’s own Venice.
After Aretino’s expulsion from Rome he was thought to have explored the outer limits of propriety. Then François Rabelais,
a priest, published his
Gargantua
epic, using gutter language which shocked Aretino but outsold the
Sonetti
. As happens from time to time, permissiveness was eclipsing faith. Some pornographic books were used as howto sex manuals.
And sometimes a community would treat the most wanton behavior as normal. Witch-hunting being a popular sport of the age,
from time to time suspicious nocturnal gatherings would be reported to the authorities. In each case, chronicles of the time
attest—with obvious relief—those assembled had been engaging in an even more popular pastime. Their meetings, according
to a historian of the period, were “excuses for promiscuous sexual relations, and for initiating young people in the arts
of debauchery.”

Sex among the nobility was complicated by more intricate property transactions. Looking to future generations and plotting
bluer bloodlines, patricians usually arranged betrothals for their sons and daughters shortly after their seventh birthdays.
There were instances in which this was done when they were as young as three. These alliances could later be annulled, provided
they had not been consummated, but unless strong steps were taken, consummation naturally began shortly after the parties
reached puberty, opportunity and temptation being, as always, the prime requisites for coitus. Because these couples had not
married for love, triangular entanglements came later. Since divorce was forbidden by the Church, adultery was an obvious
solution, usually with the consent of both spouses.

Bohemian artists scorned monogamy, and the aristocracy agreed with them. To the ladies in the Nérac court of Marguerite of
Angoulême, queen of the independent medieval kingdom of Navarre and the sister of France’s King Francis I, extramarital sex
was considered almost obligatory. Those wives in the
noblesse d’épée
who remained faithful to their husbands were mocked by the others. To abstain from the pleasures of adultery was almost a
breach of etiquette, like failing to curtsy before royalty. Some of Marguerite’s remarks at the baths of Cauterets have survived.
At a time when “love” was a synonym for casual sex, one young
madame la vicomtesse
asked her, “You mean to say, then, that all is lawful to those who love, provided no one knows?” The reply was, “Yes, in
truth, it is only fools who are found out.” Marguerite never mentioned any intrigue of her own. As a patron of humanists and
an author in her own right, she was one of the outstanding figures of the French Renaissance, and was far too shrewd to risk
weakening her influence. Besides, women who dropped names were not invited back to Nérac; they had compromised their lovers,
thereby eliminating them as candidates for future dalliance. However, according to Seigneur de Brantôme’s
Les vies des dames galantes
, Marguerite did advise the young comtesses and marquesas around her to take their marriage vows lightly: “Unhappy the lady
who does not preserve the treasure which does her so much honor when well kept, and so much dishonor when she continues to
keep it.” Rabelais, enchanted, set aside his misogyny and dedicated
Gargantua
to her.

By the time they had mastered the sophisticated techniques of seduction, mature lords and ladies were unafflicted by pangs
of conscience. However, their youthful married children did not lightly break a solemn, unambiguous commandment, even though
many a
petit seigneur
must have been aware of his parents’ intrigues. The first lapses of the youthful, once one of them had been attracted to
a third party, were made easier by the elaborate embroidery of romantic love, now popular. Aware that infidelity was sinful,
young men and women who were married, but not to one another, forswore sex. Sublimated courtship followed. The infatuated
couple exchanged gifts, lays, madrigals, sonnets, odes, billets-doux, meaningful glances, and met, their hearts pounding,
in secluded trysts. Their platonic fiction was encouraged by Baldassare Castiglione’s
Il cortegiano
, the arbiter of aristocratic manners during the Renaissance. Castiglione assured them that although they aroused one another’s
passions, they could remain just friends, scrupulously chaste. Of course, they couldn’t.
Il cortegiano
was a fraudulent work, its author a civilized pied piper. The period was not one of restraint; boys were sexually aggressive,
and girls liked them so. Both wrote poetry, but their object was mutual possession; in the end he always settled in between
her thighs.

L
UBRICITY FLOURISHED
in all its various forms. “Sodomy was frequent,” a chronicler observes; “prostitution was general, and adultery was almost
universal.” Contemporary records suggest that extramarital sex was most flagrant in France. Although wives were committing
a capital offense, “illicit love affairs,” a historian writes, “were part of the normal life of French women of good standing.”
Yet it appears to have been no different in England, where, historian James Froude later wrote, “private life was infected
with impurity to which the licentiousness of the Catholic clergy appeared like innocence”—which, as we shall see, was saying
a great deal. “There reigned abundantly,” Raphael Holinshed noted in his chronicle, “the filthie sin of lechery and fornication,
with abominable adulteries, speciallie in the king.”

Holinshed probably had Edward VI in mind, but a number of other monarchs could have fallen under the same indictment. One
of Edward’s predecessors took Jane Shore, a commoner, as his favorite mistress, and in that role she served as a friend at
court for many good Englishmen in need of royal favors. Across the Channel Francis I (r. 1515–1547),
le roi grand nez
—a long nose was thought to signify virility, and he had both—seemed bent on outperforming Don Juan. Francis’s most memorable
royal concubines were Françoise de Foix, comtesse de Chateaubriant, and Anne de Pisselieu, whom he created duchesse d’Étampes.
But he always had other irons, so to speak, in the fire. According to one legend, he invested Milan, not to take the city,
but to pursue a pair of lovely eyes he had once glimpsed there. In France his exercise of his
droit du seigneur
was not as popular as he assumed it to be. The husband of la belle Ferroniere, a lawyer’s wife who had been chosen to share
the royal bed, deliberately infected himself with syphilis and gave it to her so that she might pass it along to the king.
Still another mistress-in-waiting disfigured herself in the hope that Francis would find her too repulsive to mount. It didn’t
work. She had been under the impression that the king was interested in her face.

These two, however, were exceptional. Most young Frenchwomen are said to have been delighted when conscripted to receive the
king in all his manly glory, and in their appearances at court they competed for his attention. Opening their bodices, they
displayed swelling bosoms down to, and sometimes below, their nipples (unless the bosoms were inadequate, in which case padding
had been inserted under the stays). Their backs had been cut down to the last vertebra, sleeves billowed, gowns were pinched
at the waist and tightened under the breasts, hidden wires spread out the skirt, and high heels gave each hopeful candidate
a prancing, sexy

King Francis I of France (1494–1547)

walk. In his last years Francis moved to Fontainebleau and surrounded himself with what he called his
petite bande
of lovely maidens, whom he deflowered while watched by those waiting their turn. On his deathbed, where he finally slept
alone, he summoned his sole heir and warned him not to be dominated by a woman. But the youth, who ascended to the throne
as Henry II, had already established the format of his domestic life. France would be ruled by a ménage à trois: the king
himself; his queen, Catherine de’ Medici, whose parents had died of syphilis three weeks after her birth; and the king’s mistress,
Diane de Poitiers.

Various reasons have been advanced to explain why, as medieval shadows receded, European morals declined. This much seems
certain: behavior had become so abandoned that family ties were loosened; impudicity threatened to overflow the channels within
which the institution of marriage sought to confine it, if only for the sake of the social order. To be sure, there were laws
against lascivious behavior, but governments lacked both the manpower and the will. In such times they generally do. Divorce,
which might have brought the problem under control, was rejected by all authorities. The pope, Luther, Henry VIII, and Erasmus
agreed that bigamy was preferable to divorce. After the great split in Christendom, Protestant theologians moved hesitantly
toward the acceptance of divorce, but only in the case of adultery. “Probably the basic cause in the moral loosening in Western
Europe,” a modern historian argues, “was the growth of wealth.” Nevertheless, the religious revolution played a role. There
were no theological villains here. Martin Luther agreed that depravity increased in his Protestant congregations after the
Reformation, but lechery and sexual license had also run amok in Catholic Spain and Catholic Italy, and Francis, whatever
his private sympathies, ruled a Catholic France. Yet the shocking attacks on Rome and by Rome clearly led to a decline of
respect for all vows and inhibitions. “Nobody cares about either heaven or hell,” wrote Andreas Musculus, a Lutheran preacher,
sadly; “nobody gives a thought to either God or the Devil.” That was true, however, only during the transition from one Church
to many churches. Then conservatives on all sides restored moral discipline, and patricians were persuaded to set an example.
Indeed, in the case of some sects—Calvinism, for example—reforms became so excessive that ardent spirits of both sexes
looked back with secret envy to the exuberant, orgasmic laxity of the past.