She introduced the two elements which were combined in the eighteenth-century salon:  a fine cuisine and freedom among her friends from the restraint usually imposed by distinction.  She was, also, one of the first to have a circle—­well organized according to modern etiquette—­where the highest aristocracy, men of letters, magistrates, artists, and men of genius met on equal terms and in familiar and social intercourse; Montaigne, Brantome, and other great writers dedicated their works to her.  She also directed a select few, an academy, to instruct and distract herself.  It is said that every coquette, every bourgeois woman, and almost every court lady endeavored to imitate her.  When she died, at the age of sixty-two, poets and preachers sang and chanted her merits, and all the poor wept over their loss; she was called the queen of the indigent.  Richelieu mentioned her devotion to the state, her style, her eloquence, the grace of her hospitality, her infinite charity.  “She remains, par excellence, the one great sympathetic woman of the sixteenth century; her admirers, during life and after death, were legion.  She shared in the lesser evils of the century, but it cannot be said that she participated in the brutalities, grossness, or glaring immoralities of her time; her weaknesses, compared with the great debauches of the age, seemed like virtues.”

Such is this great woman of the sixteenth century, who has received almost universal condemnation at the hands of historians.  It is to be taken into consideration that she was forced to marry a man whom she did not love, and to live in a country utterly uncongenial to her nature and opposed to the religion in which she was reared; furthermore, that her husband first defiled the marital union, thus driving her to follow the general tendencies of the time or to seek solace in religious activity, for which she had too much energy.  After due consideration of the extenuating circumstances, her faults and vices, such as they were, may easily be condoned.  Because she was the wife of a powerful Protestant king, she was condemned by Catholics and by them regarded with suspicion; and, in order to save herself, she was forced to commit unwise acts and even follies.

In fine, whatever may be said against Marguerite de Valois, whom despair drove to acts which are not generally pardoned, she stands foremost among the social leaders and cultured women of the sixteenth century, a century whose prominent women were notorious for their licentiousness and lack of conscience rather than famous for their virtue and womanly accomplishments.  Undeniably powerful and brilliant, these unscrupulous women were never happy; usually proud, they finally suffered the most cruel humiliations; “voluptuous, they found anguish underlying pleasure.”  Their misfortunes are, possibly more interesting than those successes of which chagrin anxiety, and heavy hearts were the inseparable associates.