Marguerite likes and affects all comparisons borrowed from fabulous natural history, and she varies them with reminiscences of ancient history. When, in 1582, they recall her to the Court of France, taking her from her husband and from Nérac, where she had then been three or four years, she perceives a project of her enemies to blow up a quarrel between herself and her husband during this absence. “They hoped,” she says, “that separation would be like the breaking of the Macedonian battalion.” When the famous Phalanx was once broken entrance was easy. This style, so ornate and figurative, usually delicate and graceful, has also its outspokenness and firmness of tone. Speaking of the expedition projected by her brother, the Duc d’Alençon, in Flanders, she explains it in terms of energetic beauty, representing to the king that “it is for the honour and aggrandizement of France; it will prove an invention to prevent civil war, all restless spirits desirous of novelty having means to pass into Flanders and blow off their smoke and surfeit themselves with war. This enterprise will also serve, like Piedmont, as a school for the nobility in the practice of arms; we shall there revive the Montlucs and Brissacs, the Termes and the Bellegardes, and all those great marshals who, trained to war in Piedmont, have since then so gloriously and successfully served their king and their country.” One of the most agreeable parts of these Memoirs is the journey in Flanders, Hainault, and the Liège country which Marguerite made in 1577; a journey undertaken ostensibly to drink the waters of Spa, but in reality to gain partisans for her brother d’Alençon, in his project of wrenching the Low Countries from Spain. The details of her coquettish, and ceremonial magnificence, so dear to ladies, are not omitted:-- “I went,” says Marguerite, “in a litter with columns covered with rose-coloured Spanish velvet, embroidered in gold and shaded silks with a device; this litter was enclosed in glass, and each glass also bore a device, there being, whether on the velvet or on the glass, forty different devices about the sun and its effects, with the words in Spanish and Italian.”