been a queen, and many examples might be given of her
haughty demeanor in the presence of those who were unwilling to do her
bidding. Before leaving Sweden, Christine had tried to gather a circle
of learned men about her at Stockholm, and the great French philosopher
Descartes spent some months in her palace. Later, when in Paris, on her
way to Italy, a special session of the French Academy had been held in
her honor, and all of the literary men of France went out to the palace
at Fontainebleau while she was domiciled there, to do her honor. Once in
Rome, it was her immediate desire to become the centre of a literary
coterie, and to that end she was most generous in her gifts to artists
and men of letters. Her intelligence and her liberality soon gave her
great influence, and before long she was able to organize an Academy in
due form under her own roof. She was for many years a most conspicuous
figure in Roman society, and at the time of her death, in 1689,
Filicaia, a poet of some local reputation, declared that her kingdom
comprised "all those who thought, all those who acted, and all those who
were endowed with intelligence."

In this seventeenth century, as in the one before, parents were
continually compelling their children and especially their daughters to
enter upon a religious career, and many of them were forced to this
course in spite of their protestations. Cantu tells of the case of
Archangela Tarabotti, who was compelled to enter the convent of Saint
Anne at Venice, though all her interests and all her ways were worldly
in the extreme. To the convent she went, however, at the age of
thirteen, because she was proving a difficult child to control, and
there she was left to grind her teeth in impotent rage. In common with
many other young girls of her time, she had never been taught to read or
write, as the benefit of such accomplishments was not appreciated in any
general way--at least so far as women were concerned; but, once within
the convent walls, from sheer ennui, Archangela began to study most
assiduously, and finally published a number of books which present an
interesting description and criticism of existing manners and customs in
so far as they had to do with women and their attitude toward conventual
institutions. Having entered upon this life under protest, her first
books were written in a wild, passionate style, and it was her purpose
to make public the violence of which she had been a victim