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'Alençon 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 _Heptaméron_, 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 cherché nulle fin que l'honnesteté." Honnesteté 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 _Heptaméron_. 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 François 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 _Heptaméron_ 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 was born his soul was drunk with love. Leonora intoxicated it further. Of a type less accentuated than Marguerite she was not more feminine but more gracious. At Ferrara, in the wide leisures of her brother's court, Tasso, Stundenlang, as Goethe wrote, sat with her. "Vita della mia vita," he called her in the easy rime amorose with which in saluting her he saluted the past, Dante and Petrarch, and saluted too the future, preluding behind the centuries the arias wherewith Cimarosa, Rossini and Bellini were to enchant the world. A true poet and a great one, Byron said of him: