es which she had already
begun to form at Paris. The patronage to men of letters for which her
brother is famous was certainly more due to her than to himself; and to
her also was due the partial toleration of religious liberty which for a
time distinguished his reign. It was not till her influence was weakened
that intolerance prevailed, and she was able even then for a time to
save Marot and other distinguished persons from persecution. It is
rather a moot-point how far she inclined to the Reformed doctrines,
properly so called. Her letters, her serious and poetical work, and
even the _Heptameron_ itself, show a fervently pietistic spirit,
and occasionally seem to testify to a distinct inclination towards
Protestantism, which is also positively attested by Brantome and others;
but this Protestantism must have been, so far as it was consistent and
definite at all, the Protestantism of Erasmus rather than of Luther, of
Rabelais rather than of Calvin. She had a very strong objection to
the coarseness, the vices, the idleness, the brutish ignorance of the
cloister; she had aspirations after a more spiritual form of religion
than the ordinary Catholicism of her day provided, and as a strong
politician she may have had something of that Gallicanism which has
always been well marked in some of the best Frenchmen, and which at
one time nearly prevailed with her great-great-grandson, Louis XIV.
But there is no doubt that, as her brother said to the fanatical
Montmorency, she would always have been and always was of his religion,
the religion of the State. The side of the Reformation which must
have most appealed to her was neither its austere morals, nor its bare
ritual, nor its doctrines, properly so called, but its spiritual pietism
and its connection with profane learning and letters; for of literature
Margaret was an ardent devotee and a constant practitioner.

Her best days were done by the time of her second marriage. After the
King's return from Spain persecution broke out, and Margaret's influence
became more and more weak to stop it. As early as 1533 her own _Miroir
de l'Ame Pecheresse_, then in a second edition, provoked the fanaticism
of the Sorbonne, and the King had to interfere in person to protect
his sister's work and herself from gross insult. The Medici marriage
increased the persecuting tendency, and for a time there was even an
attempt to suppress printing, and with it all that new literature which
was the