It seems certain, then, that there have been women of variant inclination through the centuries who also possessed literary gifts, and it is probable that exhaustive research would reveal traces of variance in a surprising number of feminine authors from the renaissance on. The purpose of the following chapter is to consider those few whose lives most readily yield suggestive hints, and to correlate such hints with corresponding traces, however carefully masked, in their writing. *Louise Labé.* The first promising subject is Louise Labé, lyric poet of the early sixteenth century and one of a group of brilliant young women who brought considerable distinction upon their native city of Lyons. Until the middle of the last century the best biographical encyclopedias stated as fact that in 1542 she took active part in the Dauphin’s siege of Perpignan and acquitted herself so well that she was thereafter nicknamed “le capitaine Loys.”[1] With advances in historical method, the authenticity of this episode has been questioned (though never flatly disproved), the alternate probability being that she took the part of a knight in a tournament celebrating the same victory. In either event, her horsemanship and conduct of arms are described as masterly. Scholars have expended much effort in attempting to identify the persons to whom her passionate lyrics were addressed. Internal evidence favors the assumption that she had a number of lovers; yet, even the critics who find this idea acceptable have not managed to identify more than one, her fellow poet Olivier de Magny. Several other leading questions also remain unanswered. Why, in view of Labé’s marked poetic gift, does so slim a volume of her verse remain, in comparison to her surviving prose, which is excellent but of lower vitality? And what was the cause of her quarrel with Clémence de Bourges, a younger woman poet to whom she dedicated a volume published in 1555, and, in that dedication, proclaimed as being more gifted and showing brighter promise than herself?