Nothing is more common among this sex than oaths, vows and protestations, and, as I have already said, tears, which they can produce at will. They can weep so much that you would think their very hearts had dissolved within them and were pouring out in tears. Their eyes are like rocks that continually drip water: “daily tears, ready to be wiped away like sweat,” says Aristaenetus. They wipe their tears away like sweat, weep with one eye and laugh with the other; or, like children weeping and crying, they can do both together.

Remember not to be moved by girls’ tears; They have trained their eyes to weep.

Pay no heed to women’s tears, I advise you; They teach their eyes as much to weep as to see.

You should pity a weeping woman as much as a goose going barefoot. When Venus lost her son Cupid, she sent a crier around to warn everyone who met him to beware:

If you see him weeping, beware of being quickly deceived; If he smiles, flee all the more; and if he happens To offer kisses, run: his kisses are harmful, And poison lies upon his very lips, and so on.

If you are prudent, beware Cupid’s tears, And his smiles and kisses, I tell you, If he offers them, for they are harmful, And poison itself dwells on his lips.

A thousand years, Castiglione thinks, “would scarcely suffice to count all the enticements and tricks that men and women use to deceive one another.”