nded and
where she spent almost all of her later days instructing the children.

Her court at Usson, where, as a prisoner, she lived for twenty years,
was the most brilliant and least material of all France; there poets,
artists, and scholars were held in high esteem, and were on familiar
footing with Marguerite; the latter showed no despotism, but, with the
most consummate skill, directed conversations and proposed subjects,
encouraging discussion, and skilfully drawing from her friends the
most brilliant repartees. She received people of distinction without
ceremony.

She introduced the two elements which were combined in the
eighteenth-century salon: a fine cuisine and freedom among her friends
from the restraint usually imposed by distinction. She was, also,
one of the first to have a circle--well organized according to modern
etiquette--where the highest aristocracy, men of letters, magistrates,
artists, and men of genius met on equal terms and in familiar and
social intercourse; Montaigne, Brantome, and other great writers
dedicated their works to her. She also directed a select few, an
academy, to instruct and distract herself. It is said that every
coquette, every bourgeois woman, and almost every court lady
endeavored to imitate her. When she died, at the age of sixty-two,
poets and preachers sang and chanted her merits, and all the poor wept
over their loss; she was called the queen of the indigent. Richelieu
mentioned her devotion to the state, her style, her eloquence, the
grace of her hospitality, her infinite charity. "She remains, _par
excellence_, the one great sympathetic woman of the sixteenth century;
her admirers, during life and after death, were legion. She shared
in the lesser evils of the century, but it cannot be said that she
participated in the brutalities, grossness, or glaring immoralities
of her time; her weaknesses, compared with the great debauches of the
age, seemed like virtues."

Such is this great woman of the sixteenth century, who has received
almost universal condemnation at the hands of historians. It is to be
taken into consideration that she was forced to marry a man whom she
did not love, and to live in a country utterly uncongenial to
her nature and opposed to the religion in which she was reared;
furthermore, that her husband first defiled the marital union, thus
driving her to follow the general tendencies of the time or to seek
solace in religious activity, for which sh