nd when you shall happen to hear any man pronounce these three words, He
is married; if you then say he is, hath been, shall be, or may be a
cuckold, you will not be accounted an unskilful artist in framing of true
consequences. Tripes and bowels of all the devils, cries Panurge, what do
you tell me? My dear friend, answered Rondibilis, as Hippocrates on a time
was in the very nick of setting forwards from Lango to Polystilo to visit
the philosopher Democritus, he wrote a familiar letter to his friend
Dionysius, wherein he desired him that he would, during the interval of his
absence, carry his wife to the house of her father and mother, who were an
honourable couple and of good repute; because I would not have her at my
home, said he, to make abode in solitude. Yet, notwithstanding this her
residence beside her parents, do not fail, quoth he, with a most heedful
care and circumspection to pry into her ways, and to espy what places she
shall go to with her mother, and who those be that shall repair unto her.
Not, quoth he, that I do mistrust her virtue, or that I seem to have any
diffidence of her pudicity and chaste behaviour,--for of that I have
frequently had good and real proofs,--but I must freely tell you, She is a
woman. There lies the suspicion.

My worthy friend, the nature of women is set forth before our eyes and
represented to us by the moon, in divers other things as well as in this,
that they squat, skulk, constrain their own inclinations, and, with all the
cunning they can, dissemble and play the hypocrite in the sight and
presence of their husbands; who come no sooner to be out of the way, but
that forthwith they take their advantage, pass the time merrily, desist
from all labour, frolic it, gad abroad, lay aside their counterfeit garb,
and openly declare and manifest the interior of their dispositions, even as
the moon, when she is in conjunction with the sun, is neither seen in the
heavens nor on the earth, but in her opposition, when remotest from him,
shineth in her greatest fulness, and wholly appeareth in her brightest
splendour whilst it is night. Thus women are but women.

When I say womankind, I speak of a sex so frail, so variable, so
changeable, so fickle, inconstant, and imperfect, that in my opinion
Nature, under favour, nevertheless, of the prime honour and reverence which
is due unto her, did in a manner mistake the road which she had traced
formerly, and stray exceedingly from that ex