The Wisdom of Kerbouchard: Restarting Installment

Insert usual 'sorry I took so long' stuff here.

Today's subject is: Poverty and the Charity of Women (AKA 'The Ladies')

This installment is brought to you by Chapter Forty-Three

"Evil comes often to a man with money; tyranny comes surely to him without it.
I say this, who am Mathurin Kerbouchard, a homeless wanderer upon the earth's far roads. I speak as one who has known hunger and feast, poverty and riches, the glory of the sword and the humility of the defenseless....
Hunger inspires no talent, and carried too far, it deadens the faculties and destroys initiative, and I was hungry, although not yet starving.
Women have treated me well, bless their souls, and it has occurred to me that a man need know but two sentences to survive. The first is to ask for food, the second to tell a woman he loves her. If he must dispense with one of the other, by all means let it be the first. For surely, if you tell a woman you love her, she will feed you.
At least, such has been my limited experience.
Yet such a solution was beyond me, for my rags lacked gallantry and rags without firm exciting flesh beneath them excite little compassion and no passion. A woman who will gather a stray dog into her arms will cal the watch if approached by a stray man, unless he is very handsome, but not often even then, for there remains an occasional feminine mind of such a caliber that she might suspect him of more interest in her money than more intimate possibilities...Around me were wealth, luxury and decadence. The two former I did not share, but decadence is the one attribute of the very rich to which the poor have equal access.
Decadence is available to all; only with the rich it is better fed, better clothed, better bedded.
Cities were built for conquest, and I, a vagabond, must conquer this one with what weapons experience had provided.
To a man without money, for I could not cal myself a poor man, the obvious way to riches was theft. Thievery, however, is a crime only for the very ignorant, in which only the most stupid would indulge. There is a crass vulgarity in theft, an indication that one lacks wit, and the penalties far outweigh the possible gain.

{Mathurin considers what he can do in the new city considering his many talents. He decides against acrobat, magician mercenary and physician.}

A storyteller, perhaps? A weaver of tales? Thus far my flights of fancy had been reserved for the ears of women, for long since I had observed that masculine beauty as an enticer of the female is overrated. Women are led to the boudoir by the ears. For one who talks well, with a little but not too much wit, it is no problem.
Where women are concerned it is the sound of the voice, the words that are spoke and the skill with which they are said, especially when combined with a little, but not too much, humility."

Thoughts, fP's?