nated from a pure, chaste woman; that Marguerite must have
experienced the sins she depicted; but such reasoning is not sound.
The expressions used by her were current in her time; there
was greater freedom of manners, and coarseness and drastic
language--examples of which are found so frequently in the writings of
Luther--were very common.

Marguerite was less remarkable for what she did than for what she
aspired to do. "She invoked, against the vices and prejudices of her
epoch, those principles of morality and justice, of tolerance and
humanity, which must be the very foundation of all stable society. She
wished to make her brother the protector of the oppressed, the support
of the learned, the crowned apostle of the Renaissance, the promoter
of salutary reforms in the morals of the clergy; in politics, he was
to follow a straight line and methodically advance the accomplishment
of the legitimate ambitions of France."

She expressed the most modern ideas on the rights of woman,
particularly on her relative rights in the married state:

"It is right that man should govern us as our head, but not that he
should abandon us or treat us ill. God has so well ordered both man
and woman, that I think marriage, if it is not abused, one of the most
beautiful and secure estates that can be in this world, and I am sure
that all who are here, no matter what pretense they make, think as
much or more; and as much as man calls himself wiser than woman, 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