An honourable French gentleman, whom I could name, seeing her one evening, in her finest lustre and most stately majesty in a ball-room, said to me these words: “Ah! if the Sieur des Essarts, who, in his books of ‘Amadis’ forced himself with such pains to well and richly describe to the world the beautiful Nicquée and her glory, had seen this queen in his day he would not have needed to borrow so many rich and noble words to depict and set forth Nicquée’s beauty; ‘t would have sufficed him to declare she was the semblance and image of the Queen of Navarre, unique in this world; and thus the beauteous Nicquée would have been better pictured than she has been, and without superfluity of words.” Therefore, M. de Ronsard had good reason to compose that glorious elegy found among his works in honour of this beautiful Princess Marguerite of France, then not married, in which he has introduced the goddess Venus asking her son whether in his rambles here below, seeing the ladies of the Court of France, he had found a beauty that surpassed her own. “Yes, mother,” Love replied, “I have found one on whom the glory of the finest sky is shed since ever she was born.” Venus flushed red and would not credit it, but sent a messenger, one of her Charites, to earth to examine that beauty and make a just report. On which we read in the elegy a rich and fine description of the charms of that accomplished princess, in the mouth of the Charite Pasithea, the reading of which cannot fail to please the world. But M. de Ronsard, as a very honourable and able lady said to me, stopped short and lacked a little something, in that he should have told how Pasithea returned to heaven, and there, discharging her commission, said to Venus that her son had only told the half; the which so saddened and provoked the goddess into jealousy, making her blame Jupiter for the wrong he did to form on earth a beauty that shamed those of heaven (and principally hers, the rarest of them all), that henceforth she wore mourning and made abstinence from pleasures and delights; for there is nothing so vexatious to a beautiful and perfect lady as to tell her she has her equal, or that another can surpass her. Now, we must note that if our queen was beauteous in herself and in her nature, also she knew well how to array herself; and so carefully and richly was she dressed, both for her body and her head, that nothing lacked to give her full perfection.