Page:Lives of Fair and Gallant Ladies Volume II.djvu/227

Rh herewith, that, nine o'clock striking, he cried, getting up from the chair where he was seated: "Truly, I am a greater simpleton than you two, which have kept me here two good hours chattering with you rascals, and all the while I have been forgetting six or seven sick folk I am bound to go visit." So with a word of farewell, he doth hie him away, though not without a further last word in reply to us, when we called after him: "Rascal yourself, Doctor! Oh! you doctors know some fine things and do 'em too, and you especially, for you talk like a past master of the art." He answered us, looking down, "True enough, true enough! we both know and do some fine doings, for we do possess sundry secrets not open to all the world. But I'm an old man now, and have bid a long farewell to Venus and her boy. Nowadays I leave all this to you younger rascals."

 

E read in the life of St. Louis, in the History of Paulus Aemilius, of a certain Marguerite, Countess of Flanders, sister of Jeanne, daughter of Baldwin I., Emperor of the Greeks, and his successor, seeing she had no children,—so says History. She was given in her early girlhood a teacher named Guillaume, a man esteemed of an holy life and who had already taken minor orders. Yet did this in no wise hinder him to get two children of his fair pupil, which were christened Baldwin and John, and all so privily as that few folk knew aught of the matter. The two boys were later declared legitimate by the Pope. What fine teaching, and what a teacher! So much for History. 