One of the remarkable features of her Memoirs is that she does not tell all, nor even the half of all, and in the very midst of the odious and extravagant accusations made against her she sits, pen in hand, a delicate and most discreet woman. Nothing can be less like confession than her Memoirs. “We find there,” says Bayle, “many sins of omission; but could we expect that Queen Marguerite would acknowledge the things that would blast her? Such avowals are reserved for the tribunal of confession; they are not meant for history.” At the most, when enlightened by history and by the pamphlets of the period, we can merely guess at certain feelings of which she presents to us only the superficial and specious side. When she speaks of Bussy d’Amboise she scarcely restrains her admiration for that gallant cavalier, and we fancy we can see in the abundance of that praise that her heart overflows. Even the letters that we have from her say little more. Among them are love letters addressed to him whom at one time she loved the most, Harlay de Chanvalon. Here we find no longer the charming, moderately ornate, and naturally polished style of the Memoirs; this is all of the highest metaphysics and purest fustian, nearly unintelligible and most ridiculous. “Adieu, my beauteous sun! adieu, my noble angel! fine miracle of nature!” those are the most commonplace and earthly of her expressions; the rest mount ever higher till lost in the Empyrean. It would really seem, from reading these letters, as if Marguerite had never loved with heart-love, only with the head and the imagination; and that, feeling truly no love but the physical, she felt herself bound to refine it in expression and to _petrarchize_ in words, she, who was so practical in behaviour. She borrows from the false poetry of her day its tinsel in order to persuade herself that the fancy of the moment is an eternal worship. A practical observation is quoted of her which tells us better than her own letters the secret of her life. “Would you cease to love?” she said, “possess the thing beloved.” It is to escape this quick disenchantment, this sad and rapid awakening, that she is so prodigal of her figurative, mythological, impossible expressions; she is trying to make herself a veil; the heart counts for nothing. She seems to be saying to love: “Thy base is so trivial, so passing a thing, let us try to support it by words, and so prolong its image and its play.”