so much the more grievously will he be punished if the fault be on his side.  Those who are overcome by pleasure ought not to call themselves women any longer, but men, whose honor is but augmented by fury and concupiscence; for a man who revenges himself upon his enemy and slays him for a contradiction is esteemed a better companion for so doing; and the same is true if he love a dozen other women besides his wife; but the honor of woman has another foundation:  it is gentleness, patience, chastity.”

Desire Nisard says that Marguerite d’Angouleme was the first to write prose that can be read without the aid of a vocabulary; in verse, she excels all poets of her time in sympathy and compassion; her poetry is “a voice which complains—­a heart which suffers and which tells us so.”  “It is not so much her own deep sentiment that is reflected, but her emotion, which is both intellectual and sympathetic, volitional and spontaneous.”  Her letters were epoch-making; nothing before her time nor after her (until Madame de Sevigne) can equal them in precision, purity of language, sincerity and frankness of expression, passion and religious fervor.

In spite of what may be said to the contrary, her life was an ideal one, an example of perfect moral beauty and elevation; noble, generous, refined, pious, and sincere, she possessed qualities which were indeed rare in her time.  She was attacked for her charity, and is to-day the victim of narrow sectarian and biased devotees.  Her act of renouncing all gorgeous dress, even the robes of gold brocade so much worn by every princess, in order to give all her money to the poor; her protection of the needy and persecuted; her court of poets and scholars; her visits to the sick and stricken; even her untiring love for her brother and her acts of clemency—­all have frequently been misinterpreted.

The greatest poets and men of letters of the sixteenth century were encouraged financially and morally or protected by Marguerite d’Angouleme—­Rabelais, Marot, Pelletier, Bonaventure-Desperiers, Mellin de Saint-Gelais, Lefevre d’Etaples, Amyot, Calvin, Berquin.  Charles de Sainte-Marthe says:  “In seeing them about this good lady, you would say it was a hen which carefully calls and gathers her chicks and shelters them with her wings.”

Many critics believe that her literary work was imitative rather than original; even if this be true, it in no measure detracts from her importance, which is based upon the fact that she was the leading spirit of the time and typified her environment.  Her followers, and they included all the intellectual spirits, looked up to her as the one incentive for writing and pleasing.  Her disposition was characterized by restlessness, haste—­too great eagerness to absorb and digest and appropriate all that was unfolded before her.  She imitated the Decameron and drew up for herself a Heptameron; her poetry showed much skill and great ease, but little originality.