As a word has now been said about the beauty of Marguerite de Navarre, what are we to think about it? Her actual portrait lessens the exaggerated idea we might form of it from the eulogies of that day. Marguerite resembles her brother. She has his slightly aquiline and very long nose, the long, soft, and shrewd eye, the lips equally long, refined and smiling. The expression of her countenance is that of shrewdness on a basis of kindness. Her dress is simple; her _cotte_ or gown is made rather high and flat, without any frippery, and is trimmed with fur; her mob-cap, low upon her head, encircles the forehead and upper part of the face, scarcely allowing any hair to be seen. She holds a little dog in her arms. The last of the Marguerites, that other Queen of Navarre, first wife of Henri IV., was the queen of modes and fashions in her youth; she gave the tone. Our Marguerite did nothing of all that; she left that rôle to the Duchesse d’Étampes and her like. Marot himself, when praising her, insists particularly on her characteristic of gentleness, “which effaces the beauty of the most beautiful,” on her chaste glance and that _frank speech, without disguise, without artifice_. She was sincere, “joyous, laughing readily,” fond of all honest gayety, and when she wanted to say a lively word, too risky in French, she said it in Italian or in Spanish. In other respects, full of religion, morality, and sound training; justifying the magnificent eulogy bestowed upon her by Erasmus. That wise monarch of literature, that true emperor of the Latinity of his period, consoling Marguerite at the moment when she was under the blow of the disaster of Pavia, writes to her: “I have long admired and loved in you many eminent gifts of God: prudence worthy of a philosopher, chastity, moderation, piety, invincible strength of soul, and a wonderful contempt for all perishable things. Who would not consider with admiration, in the sister of a great king, qualities which we can scarcely find in priests and monks?” In this last stroke upon the monks we catch the slightly satirical tone of the Voltaire of those times. Remark that in this letter addressed to Marguerite in 1525, and in another letter which closely followed the first, Erasmus thanks and congratulates her on the services she never ceases to render to the common cause of literature and tolerance.