School of Gallantry

Your Nerve-appropriate yet still SFW post for the day:

You are a 17th century French teenage aristocrat with an allowance of the size of Luxembourg and a conga line of ladies waiting to be wooed and strategically married for family gain and fortune. Problem is, you are a teenager and know as much about a lady's wooable parts as you do about strategic alliances.

What to do? Have your parents send you to Mademoiselle de Lenclos's School of Gallantry.

Mademoiselle de Lenclos, known affectionately as Ninon, was the most celebrated courtesan of seventeenth century Paris. Her notorious salon was visited by the brightest minds of the day from Moliere to Racine to Cardinal Richelieu, who legend holds, offered her 50,000 crowns for a night in his bed. After being asked repeatedly for her secrets as a lover and looking for a way to supplement her income, Nincon began instructing the sons of aristocrats on the ways of love. Known as the School of Gallantry, subjects included the care and handling of wives and mistresses, how to seduce a lover, how to terminate an affair and the “physiology of artful sex.” Her graduates went on to successfully marry and seduce, prompting women to beg for her instruction as well.

Her reply to a woman’s desire to know how big her breast needed to be to attract a man, Ninon replied “Large enough to fill the hand of an honest man.”