Unquestionably it is a fact that the feudality in France ceased only with the passing of Louis XI, and the change in the Pyrenean states was contemporary. The Renaissance made great headway in France, after its importation from Italy at the hands of Charles VIII and his followers. Constantinople had been taken; art and letters were everywhere in the ascendency; printing had been invented; and America was on the verge of being discovered. The golden days of the new civilization were about dawning. The Renaissance here in Béarn and Navarre, under the shadow of the Pyrenees, flowered as it did nowhere else out of Italy, so far as its application to life and letters went. Many celebrated litterateurs and poets had been persecuted and chased from France, and here they found a welcome refuge. To remark only two, Desperriers and Marat, it is interesting to note that the sympathetic Marguerite of Navarre took them under her patronage, and even made them _valets de chambre_. Marguerite's passions were, according to the historians, noble, but according to the romancers they were worldly. Said Erasmus: "_Elle était chaste et peu sujette aux passions_," and contemporary historians agree with him; while Marat, the poet _valet de chambre_, wrote the following:-- "Que je suis serf d'un monstre fort étrange, Monstre je dis, car pour tout vrai, elle a Corps féminin, coeur d'homme et tête d'ange." In 1574 Brantome, the chronicler, had finished his military career and was retained by Henri III of France as a gentleman of the bed-chamber. Here he passed through many affairs of intrigue and the heart. In 1581 he received a mission to go and interview the king of Navarre, for which he received the sum of six hundred _écus soleil_. What the subject of this mission was no one knows; there is no further mention of it either in the works of Brantôme or the letters of the king of Navarre, but at any rate he became enamoured of Marguerite, and his account of his first meeting with her is one of the classic documents of French history. "I dare to say," said he, "that she was _si belle et si admirable_ that all the three hundred persons of the assembly were ravished and astounded." It is on Marguerite of Navarre, no less than on the plumed Henry, that the popular interest in Navarre and its history has been built. _A Brief Chronology of French and Spanish Navarre_ Spanish Navarre came to be annexed to the Spanish crown in 1512 through the efforts and energies of Ferdinand the Catholic king of Aragon. French Navarre virtually came to France in 1328, but its independent monarchs since that time have been: