charm.

Platonism had its renegades but it had also its saints--Leonora d'Este,
Vittoria Colonna, Marguerite of France, the three Graces of the
Renaissance.

Marguerite of France, surnamed the Marguerite des Marguerites, was a
flower that had grown miraculously among the impurities of the Valois
weeds. Slightly married to a Duc d'Alencon and, at his death, as slightly
to a King of Navarre, she held at Pau a little court where, Marot, her
poet and lackey, perhaps aiding, she produced the _Heptameron_, a
collection of nouvelles modelled after the _Decamerone_, a bundle of
stories in which the characters discuss this and that, but mainly love,
particularly the love of women "qui n'ont cherche nulle fin que
l'honnestete."

Honnestete was what Marguerite also sought. In days very dissolute, a
sense of exclusiveness which whether natural or acquired is the most
refining of all, suggested, it may be, her device:--_Non inferiora
secutus_. She would have nothing inferior. One might know it from her
portraits which bear an evident stamp of reserve. In them she has the air
of a great lady occupied only with noble things. All other things,
husbands included, were to her merely abject.

The impression which her portraits provide is not reflected in the
phraseology of the _Heptameron_. The fault was not hers. She used the
current idiom. Prelates at the time employed in the pulpit expressions
which to-day a coster would avoid. Terms that are usual in one age become
coarse in the next. But, if her language was rude, her sentiments were
elevated. In her life she loved but once and then, idolatrously. The
object was her brother, the very mundane Francois I{er}, who, on a
window-pane wrote with a diamond--the proper pen for a king--Toute femme
varie, an adage to which legend added Bien fol est qui s'y fye and
Shakespeare variously adapted.

Neither the adage nor its supplements applied to Marguerite. The two loves
of pseudo-platonism she disentangled from their subtleties and, with
entire simplicity, called one good, the other evil. Hers was the former.
She was born for it, said Rabelais.

In the _Heptameron_ it is written: "Perfect lovers are they who seek the
perfection of beauty, nobility and grace and who, had they to choose
between dying and offending, would refuse whatever honor and conscience
reprove."

There is the _Non inferiora secutus_ expounded. The device may have
appealed to Leonora d'Este. Tasso said that when he