thout wounding or endamaging the flesh
wherewith they are veiled and covered. Just so it is that women for the
greater part never bend the contention, subtlety, and contradictory
disposition of their spirits unless it be to do what is prohibited and
forbidden.

Verily, quoth Hippothadee, some of our doctors aver for a truth that the
first woman of the world, whom the Hebrews call Eve, had hardly been
induced or allured into the temptation of eating of the fruit of the Tree
of Life if it had not been forbidden her so to do. And that you may give
the more credit to the validity of this opinion, consider how the cautelous
and wily tempter did commemorate unto her, for an antecedent to his
enthymeme, the prohibition which was made to taste it, as being desirous to
infer from thence, It is forbidden thee; therefore thou shouldst eat of it,
else thou canst not be a woman.

Chapter 3.XXXIV.

How women ordinarily have the greatest longing after things prohibited.

When I was, quoth Carpalin, a whoremaster at Orleans, the whole art of
rhetoric, in all its tropes and figures, was not able to afford unto me a
colour or flourish of greater force and value, nor could I by any other
form or manner of elocution pitch upon a more persuasive argument for
bringing young beautiful married ladies into the snares of adultery,
through alluring and enticing them to taste with me of amorous delights,
than with a lively sprightfulness to tell them in downright terms, and to
remonstrate to them with a great show of detestation of a crime so horrid,
how their husbands were jealous. This was none of my invention. It is
written, and we have laws, examples, reasons, and daily experiences
confirmative of the same. If this belief once enter into their noddles,
their husbands will infallibly be cuckolds; yea, by God, will they, without
swearing, although they should do like Semiramis, Pasiphae, Egesta, the
women of the Isle Mandez in Egypt, and other such-like queanish flirting
harlots mentioned in the writings of Herodotus, Strabo, and such-like
puppies.

Truly, quoth Ponocrates, I have heard it related, and it hath been told me
for a verity, that Pope John XXII., passing on a day through the Abbey of
Toucherome, was in all humility required and besought by the abbess and
other discreet mothers of the said convent to grant them an indulgence by
means whereof they might confess themselves to one another, alleging that
religious women were