all cats are grey in the dark

[Of a widow:] And to make carnall appetite content,

To take lacke of beautie but as an eye ſore.

The fayre and the foule, by darke are lyke ſtore.

When all candels be out, all cats be grey,

All thingis are then of one colour, as who ſey.

And this prouerbe ſaith, for quenching hot deſyre,

Foule water as ſoone as fayre, will quenche hot fyre.

In such a darkness, in which all cats are grey, Lucrezia Borgia might well seem as white as a blue-eyed Persian. But the paradox remains that Corvo might not impossibly be right. As, but for superhuman strainings, Dreyfus might have gone down to history as a traitor to France, so may the Borgian Lucrezia have been as blameless as the Tarquinian to whom indeed Ariosto boldly compares her. The woman who protected the Jews during a famine, provided poor girls with dowries, passed evenings over her embroidery frame and held the esteem of the greatest poet and the greatest stylist of her day, may really have lived up to that washing list.