He remained in high favour at Court, yet when he was pressed to marry this high-born woman or that, he always excused himself as at present too much of a traveller. When he could settle down he would marry, he said. But he had no love-affairs with women, married or unmarried, and abstained from visits to the grand brothel which Constantine had built and which was the general meeting-place of all the wit and fashion of Constantinople. His enemies hinted that he was no lover of women merely because he preferred his own sex; but that was a foolish lie. If he did not marry, that was, in my naturally prejudiced view, because the memory of my mistress Antonina had remained with him; and he abstained from the brothel because to attend it was against the Christian law which he had sworn to observe. Besides, his work was enough to occupy his mind, and should he want amusement he would go hunting with his staff. If there was a shortage of deer or hare or other game, this would not trouble him much: he would shoot as readily at hawk in the sky or snake in the hedge as at nobler game, and not less accurately. He encouraged his officers at the same practice; for hunting, he said, was a sort of drill. Boar-hunting with the lance he especially recommended.
He came to Antioch twice in the course of his duties, but on the first occasion my mistress and her husband happened to be staying at their villa in the Lebanon; and on the second she did not meet him cither, though she longed to do so. Her husband invited him to a dinner at the house, but he refused, pleading his official duties. However, he wrote a letter in his own hand as a particular compliment to my mistress's husband. My naturally prejudiced view was that he would have felt embarrassed at meeting my mistress again as the wife of another man.
This may seem an extravagant story, but I later met its parallel in Italy: a young patrician had fallen in love with a married woman when he was only thirteen. Not only did he abstain from love of any other woman, but he went out into the wilderness and lived in a cave, and later formed a society of hermit monks whom they now call Benedictines after this desperate Benedict. They were a decent fraternity, whose employments were three only – namely, worship of God, reading, manual labour; they abstained from butcher's meat, politics, and vice. But they came to hold with Benedict that nun and woman should not merely be strangers to each other but natural, irreconcilable foes; which, to me, is nonsensical. I visited their high-walled hermitage on Mount Cassino once, above the Latin Way between Rome and Naples, and found everything under the strictest and cxactest discipline. I reported what I had seen to my mistress, who by the rules of the monastery was not permitted to enter, and said to her of Benedict: 'A good soldier is lost in him.' Belisarius, who was present, answered me in the Christian sense: 'No, Eugenius, a good soldier found.'
This Benedict was nearly defeated once, for the woman with whom he was in love took pity on him at last, and engaged a party of theatre-women to come with her one evening to the monastery, one woman for each monk. They knocked at the great door; and when the porter – a gigantic Goth – opened to them he was assaulted by fondling arms and smothered in scented kisses, and led away prisoner. The attack was carried out most vigorously, and all the monks succumbed except two or three, who locked themselves in their cells and threw the keys out of the window to be rid of the temptation: as Ulysses in the story immobilized himself against the temptations of the Sirens by ordering his sailors to lash him hand and foot to the mast. Only Benedict stood his ground. He took the leader of the enemy by the hand and spoke to her with loving frankness, and made her bitterly ashamed of her action. If this story be true, Benedict was as staunch a character as Belisarius. Or perhaps the woman had lost her looks in the meantime; for she was certainly a good deal older than he, and patrician women at Rome are gluttonous and lazy and soon grow as fat as the captive carp in their fish-pools.
