Although surrounded at Ferrara with all the splendors of a court, Renée delighted in the associations of literature and art, and loved above everything to retire to her closet and seek ‘the one thing needful.’ There was in her piety at this period of her life a slight trace of Margaret’s mystical spirit. A contemplative life, however, was not in keeping with her active character; she had rather a practical turn; she loved to attract to her small court the learned men of Italy, and particularly welcomed the evangelicals who had been driven out of France. She was thus beginning to be the object of the most opposite remarks. All were agreed as to her extreme beneficence; but the adherents of the papacy complained that her intellect, which enabled her to excel in philosophy, inclined her, unfortunately, to investigate religious questions; they added, however, that if she came to the aid of certain persons in bad odor among Roman catholics, it was because her inexhaustible goodness filled her with compassion for those whom she thought unjustly treated.[831] ‘She desires to do good to everybody,’ it was said; ‘in one year she assisted ten thousand of her fellow-countrymen. And when the stewards of her household represented to her the excessive expense of this, she only answered: “What would you have?—they are poor people of my own country, all of whom would be my subjects but for that wicked Salic law!”’[832] She was at once a Mæcenas and a Dorcas. [Sidenote: Resurrection Of Christianity.]