Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies

Excerpt:

THE title, “Vie des Dames Illustres,” given habitually to one volume of Brantôme’s Works, is not that which was chosen by its author. It was given by his first editor fifty years after his death; Brantôme himself having called his work “The Book of the Ladies.”
One of his earliest commentators, Castelnaud, almost a cotemporary, says of him in his Memoirs:—
“Pierre de Bourdeille, Abbé de Brantôme, author of volumes of which I have availed myself in various parts of this history, used h...