they were severely punished. Finally, on payment
of a certain tax, they were allowed to go without the ribbon, and then
they were to be distinguished by their impudence only." In Florence,
women of this class were especially noted for their beauty, and there it
was customary to compel them all to live within a certain district.

In the average Florentine household it had been the custom to have three
women servants,--a cook, a second girl, and a _matrona_. This third
servant was better educated than the others, and it was her duty,
outside of the house, to keep her mistress company, whether she rode in
her carriage or went about on foot. At home, she did the sewing and the
mending, and generally dressed her mistress and combed her hair. For
this work the _matrona_ received a salary of six or seven dollars a
month, and it seems to have been usual for her employers to arrange a
good marriage for her after several years of service, giving her at that
time from one hundred to one hundred and fifty crowns as a dowry. Later
in the century, the _matrona_ does not seem to have been so common, and
many women went alone in their carriages, while on foot they were
accompanied by a manservant in livery. The wealthier ladies of the
nobility, however, were accompanied in their conveyances by a
_donzella_, and on the street and in all public places by an elderly and
dignified manservant, dressed in black, who was known as the
_cavaliere_. The fashion with regard to this male protector became so
widespread that the women of the middle class were in the habit of
hiring the services of some such individual for their occasional use on
fete days and whenever they went to mass. The further development of
this custom and its effect upon public morals in the following century
will be discussed on another page.

Busy with all-absorbing questions of dress, etiquette, and domestic
management, it does not appear that the women of the seventeenth century
in Italy took any great share in public events, although one Italian
woman at least, leaving the country of her birth, was placed by fate
upon a royal throne. Henry IV. of France, about the year 1600, was hard
pressed for the payment of certain debts by Ferdinand I., Grand Duke of
Tuscany, as the Medici were still the bankers of Europe, and the French
king was owing more than a million louis d'or; but the whole matter was
settled in a satisfactory way when Henry gave definite promises to pay
with