Religion, which in the sixteenth century was so badly understood, and practised even worse—­obscured and falsified by fanaticism, disfigured and exaggerated by passion and hatred—­was the secret cause of all downfalls crimes, horrors, intrigues, and brutality.  Yet, it alone survives, and all the important figures of history return to it after a period of negligence and forgetfulness.  In their religious aspect, the women of the sixteenth century differ as a rule, from those of the eighteenth, who, though equally powerful, witty, refined, sensual, frivolous, and scoffing, were far less devout; for “’tis religion which restores the great female sinners of the sixteenth century ’tis religion which saves a society ploughed up by so many elements of dissolution and so many causes of moral and material ruin, rescuing it from barbarism, vandalism, and from irretrievable decay;” but the women of the eighteenth century clung, to the end, to the scepticism and material philosophy which served them as their religion, their God.

Among the conspicuous women of the sixteenth century to whom, thus far, we have been able to attribute so little of the wholesome and pleasing, the womanly or love-inspiring, there is one striking exception in Marguerite d’Angouleme, a representative of letters, art, culture, and morality.  With the study of this character we are taken back to the beginning of the century and carried among men of letters especially, for she formed the centre of the literary world.  She, her mother, Louise of Savoy, and her brother, Francis I., were called a “trinity,” to the existence of which Marguerite bore witness in the poem: 

  “Such boon is mine—­to feel the amity
  That God hath putten in our trinity
  Wherein to make a third, I, all unfitted
  To be that number’s shadow, am admitted.”

Marguerite inherited many of her qualities from her mother, “a most excellent and a most venerable dame,” though anything but moral and conscientious; she, upon discovering that her daughter possessed rare intellectual gifts, provided her with teachers in every branch of the learning of the age.  “At fifteen years of age, the spirit of God began to manifest itself in her eyes, in her face, in her walk, in her speech, and in all her actions generally.”  Brantome says:  “She had a heart mightily devoted to God and she loved mightily to compose spiritual songs.  She devoted herself to letters, also, in her young days and continued them as long as she lived, in the time of her greatness, loving and conversing with the most learned folks of her brother’s kingdom, who honored her so greatly that they called her their Maecenas.”  Tenderness, particularly for her brother, seemed to develop in her as a passion.