Note 71 — FIRST DISCOURSE (continued 3)
A. R. (Alfred Richard) Allinson translation
P. 123:
◆Chastity-belts of this sort were already in use at Venice at the time.
◆There is in the Hennin collection of prints at the Bibliothèque Nationale (t. III., fo 64) a satirical print representing what Brantôme relates here. A lady returns to her husband the key; but behind the bed, the lover, hidden by a duenna, receives from the latter a key similar to the husband’s. This instrument of jealousy was the cingulum pudicitiæ of the Romans, the “Florentine lock” of the sixteenth century. Henri Aldegraver also engraved on the sheath of a dagger a lady who is adorned with a lock of this kind. (Bartsch, Peintre-Graveur, VIII., p. 437.) These refinements in jealousy as well as the refinements in debauchery (of which Brantôme will speak later) were of Italian origin. (See on this subject La Description de l’Ile des Hermaphrodites, Cologne, 1724, p. 43.)