wholly kind, Margaret’s good days were now in truth done.  Her nephew Henry left her in possession of her revenues, but does not seem to have been very affectionately disposed towards her; and even had she been inclined to attempt any recovery of influence, his wife and his mistress, Catherine de Medici and Diana of Poitiers, two women as different from Margaret as they were from one another, would certainly have prevented her from obtaining it.  As a matter of fact, however, she had long been in ill-health, and her brother’s death seems to have dealt her the final stroke.  She survived it two years, even as she had been born two years before him, and died on the 21 st December 1549, at the Castle of Odos, near Tarbes, having lived in almost complete retirement for a considerable time.  Her husband is said to have regretted her dead more than he loved her living, and her literary admirers, such of them as death and exile had spared, were not ungrateful. Tombeaux, or collections of funeral verses, were not lacking, the first being in Latin, and, oddly enough, nominally by three English sisters, Anne, Margaret, and Jane Seymour, nieces of Henry VIII.’s queen and Edward VI.’s mother, with learned persons like Dorat, Sainte-Marthe, and Baif.  This was re-issued in French and in a fuller form later.

Some reference has been made to an atrocious slur cast without a shred of evidence on her moral character.  There is as little foundation for more general though milder charges of laxity.  It is admitted that she had little love for her first husband, and it seems to be probable that her second had not much love for her.  She was certainly addressed in gallant strains by men of letters, the most audacious being Clement Marot; but the almost universal reference of the well-known and delightful lines beginning—­

“Un doux nenny avec un doux sourire,”

to her method of dealing not merely with this lover but with others, argues a general confidence in her being a virtuous coquette, if somewhat coquettishly virtuous.  It may be added that the whole tone of the Heptameron points to a very similar conclusion.

Her literary work was very considerable, and it falls under three divisions:  letters, the book before us, and the very curious and interesting collection of poems known by the charming if fantastic title of Les Marguerites de la Marguerite des Princesses, a play on the meanings, daisy, pearl, and Margaret, which had been popular in the artificial school of French poetry since the end of the thirteenth century in a vast number of forms.