The ambassadors who talked with her were enchanted by her, and always went to see her after having paid their first ambassadorial visit.  She had so great a regard and affection for the king, that when she heard of his dangerous illness she said, ’Whosoever shall come to my door, and announce to me the recovery of the king my brother, such courier, should he be tired, and worn out, and muddy, and dirty, I will go and kiss and embrace as if he were the sprucest prince and gentleman of France; and, should he be in want of a bed and unable to find one whereon to rid him of his weariness, I would give him mine, and I would rather lie on the hard, for the good news he brought me.’ . . .  She was suspected of inclining to the religion of Luther, but she never made any profession or sign thereof; and, if she believed it, she kept it in her heart very secret, inasmuch as the king did hate it sorely.” . . .  “The heresy was seen glimmering here and there,” says another contemporary witness [Florimond de Raimond in his Histoire de l’Heresie], “but it appeared and disappeared like a nightly meteor which has but a flickering brightness.”—­At bottom this reserve was quite in conformity with the mental condition of that class, or as one might he inclined to say, that circle of Reformers at court.  Luther and Zwingle had distinctly declared war on the papacy; Henry VIII. had with a flourish separated England from the Romish church; Marguerite de Valois and Bishop Briconnet neither wished nor demanded so much; they aspired no further than to reform the abuses of the Romish church by the authority of that church itself, in concert with its heads and according to its traditional regimen; they had no idea of more than dealing kindly, and even sympathetically, with the liberties and the progress of science and human intelligence.  Confined within these limits, the idea was legitimate and honest enough, but it showed want of foresight, and was utterly vain.  When, whether in state or church, the vices and defects of government have lasted for ages and become habits not only inveterate but closely connected with powerful personal interests, a day at last comes when the deplorable result is seen in pig-headedness and weakness.  Then there is an explosion of deep-seated and violent shocks, from which infinitely more is expected than they can accomplish, and which, even when they are successful, cost the people very dear, for their success is sullied and incomplete.  A certain amount of good government and general good sense is a necessary preface and preparation for any good sort of reform.  Happy the nations who are spared by their wisdom or their good fortune the cruel trial of only obtaining such reforms as they need when they have been reduced to prosecute them beneath the slings and arrows of outrageous revolution!  Christian France in the sixteenth century was not so favorably situated.