favorites. She became the social leader, the queen inviting her
to all court ceremonies and consulting her on all disputed questions
of etiquette--even going so far as to intrust her with the reception
of the Duke of Pastrana, who had come to ask the hand of Elizabeth
of France. It is reported that in her last years she led a worse life
than in her earlier days--she had become a woman of the bad world,
resorting to every possible means to hide her age and to gain any
vantage ground. In order to be well supplied with blond wigs, she kept
fair-haired footmen who were shorn from time to time to furnish
the supply. In the latter part of her life, spent at Paris and its
vicinity, she fell a victim to hypochondria, suffering the most bitter
pangs of remorse and terrible fear at approaching death. To alleviate
this, she founded a convent where she taught the children music. She
died in 1615, in Paris, "in that blended piety and coquetry which
formed the basis of a character unable to give up gallantries and
love."

One of the very few historians who give due credit to her social
importance and assign her the position she may rightfully command
among French women of the sixteenth century is M. Du Bled. According
to him, she was the leader of fashion, and in all its components
she showed excellent taste and judgment. Forced to marry the king of
Navarre, she said, after the ceremony: "I received from marriage all
the evil I ever received, and I consider it the greatest plague of my
life. They tell me that marriages are made in heaven; heaven did not
commit such an injustice;" and this seems to be the secret of her
"vicious life."

As soon as she discovered that the king's favorites were determined
to make life hard and disagreeable for her, she sought consolation in
love and the toilette, in balls and fetes, in ballets and hunting, in
promenades and gallant conversations, in tennis and carousals, and in
an infinite variety of ingeniously planned pleasures. The spirit of
chivalry, the habits of exalted devotion, were again in full sway
about her. She worried little about virtue: "She had the gift of
pleasing, was beautiful, and made full use of the liberality of the
gods. Whatever may be said of her morals, it can truthfully be stated
that she showed art in her love and practised it more in spirit than
with the body." Music was a favorite art with her; she encouraged
and rewarded singing, especially in the convent which she fou