But Marguerite could do something else besides make love: she could write. At a time when every one else was striving to be distinguished in style Marguerite wrote as simply and clearly as if she were speaking; and her _Memories_ are therefore still delightful to read. Just after her marriage the massacre of St. Bartholomew broke out. Let the royal lady tell how it affected herself. “An hour later, while I was fast asleep, someone came beating at my door with hands and feet, and shouting Navarre, Navarre! My nurse, thinking it was my husband, ran to open the door. It was a gentleman, wounded by a sword-thrust in the elbow, and his arm cut by a halberd, who rushed into my room pursued by four archers. Seeking safety he threw himself on my bed. Feeling this man clutching me I threw myself into the open space between the bed and the wall, where, he still grasping me, we both rolled over, both screaming and both equally frightened. Fortunately the Captain of my Guards, M. de Nancay, came by, and seeing me in such a plight could not help laughing, but drove the archers out of the room, and gave me the life of the poor gentleman, who was still clinging to me, and whom I caused to be tended in my dressing-room till he was quite cured. While I changed my nightdress,”—Marguerite was lucky to be wearing one in 1572—“for he had covered me with his blood, M. de Nancay told me what had happened, and assured me that my husband was in the king’s room and was quite safe. Making me throw on a dressing-gown, he led me to the room of my sister, Madame de Lorraine, which I reached more dead than alive; just as I was going into the anteroom a gentleman, trying to escape from the archers who were pursuing him, fell dead three paces from me. I too fell half-fainting into the arms of M. de Nancay, and felt as if the same blow had pierced us both.” Dumas describes this incident in _Marguerite de Valois_; but his description is no more vivid than Marguerite’s. The temptation to make the poor fugitive the hero of his book was too great, and he turned the ill-fated De la Mole into Marguerite’s unwilling bedfellow on that night of weeping. I dare say that Marguerite was not sorry to be able to save the poor man’s life, even though Dumas makes her behave far from generously to his hero later. If I remember rightly she has him tortured by the “boot.”