inviting her to all court ceremonies and consulting her on all disputed questions of etiquette—­even going so far as to intrust her with the reception of the Duke of Pastrana, who had come to ask the hand of Elizabeth of France.  It is reported that in her last years she led a worse life than in her earlier days—­she had become a woman of the bad world, resorting to every possible means to hide her age and to gain any vantage ground.  In order to be well supplied with blond wigs, she kept fair-haired footmen who were shorn from time to time to furnish the supply.  In the latter part of her life, spent at Paris and its vicinity, she fell a victim to hypochondria, suffering the most bitter pangs of remorse and terrible fear at approaching death.  To alleviate this, she founded a convent where she taught the children music.  She died in 1615, in Paris, “in that blended piety and coquetry which formed the basis of a character unable to give up gallantries and love.”

One of the very few historians who give due credit to her social importance and assign her the position she may rightfully command among French women of the sixteenth century is M. Du Bled.  According to him, she was the leader of fashion, and in all its components she showed excellent taste and judgment.  Forced to marry the king of Navarre, she said, after the ceremony:  “I received from marriage all the evil I ever received, and I consider it the greatest plague of my life.  They tell me that marriages are made in heaven; heaven did not commit such an injustice;” and this seems to be the secret of her “vicious life.”

As soon as she discovered that the king’s favorites were determined to make life hard and disagreeable for her, she sought consolation in love and the toilette, in balls and fetes, in ballets and hunting, in promenades and gallant conversations, in tennis and carousals, and in an infinite variety of ingeniously planned pleasures.  The spirit of chivalry, the habits of exalted devotion, were again in full sway about her.  She worried little about virtue:  “She had the gift of pleasing, was beautiful, and made full use of the liberality of the gods.  Whatever may be said of her morals, it can truthfully be stated that she showed art in her love and practised it more in spirit than with the body.”  Music was a favorite art with her; she encouraged and rewarded singing, especially in the convent which she founded and where she spent almost all of her later days instructing the children.

Her court at Usson, where, as a prisoner, she lived for twenty years, was the most brilliant and least material of all France; there poets, artists, and scholars were held in high esteem, and were on familiar footing with Marguerite; the latter showed no despotism, but, with the most consummate skill, directed conversations and proposed subjects, encouraging discussion, and skilfully drawing from her friends the most brilliant repartees.  She received people of distinction without ceremony.