men subject to this fault and enslaved by it. I have a nice fellow of a tailor whom I never hear tell the truth, not even when it would be useful to him. If falsehood, like truth, had but one face, we should be better off, for we should take for certain the contrary of what the liar said. But the opposite of truth has a hundred thousand shapes and a limitless field. The Pythagoreans regard good as certain and definite, evil as indefinite and uncertain. A thousand roads lead away from the goal, one leads to it. Certainly I am not sure that I could induce myself to ward off an obvious and extreme danger by a brazen and deliberate lie.
An ancient father says that we are better off in the company of a dog we know than in that of a man whose language is unknown.[1] Ut externus alieno non sit hominis vice.[2] And how much less companionable is untruthful speech than silence! (a) King Francis the First boasted of having completely bewildered[3] by means of this sort of performance, Francisco Taverna, ambassador of Francisco Sforza, Duke of Milan — a man of great reputation in the art of speech-making. He had been despatched to carry his master’s excuses to His Majesty in regard to a very important matter, which was this. The king, in order to have always some sources of information in Italy, whence he had recently been driven, especially in the Duchy of Milan, had arranged to keep at the duke’s court a gentleman of his own, an ambassador in fact, but in appearance a private individual, who had the air of being there for his own affairs; all the more because the duke, who was much more bound to the emperor, — just then especially, when he was negotiating a marriage with his niece, the daughter of the King of Denmark, now Duchess Dowager of Lorraine, — could not openly have any relations or communication with us without prejudice to himself. For this office a Milanese gentleman was thought fit — one of the king’s equerries, named Merveille. He, being despatched with secret credentials and instructions as ambassador, and with letters of recommen-
