"What can we say of St. Catharine of Siena, who shares the glory of the great writers?" asks Ozanam. M. de Maistre maintains that _a young girl is insane to think of painting._ And yet saints have had this mania. St. Catharine of Bologna was a celebrated miniaturist. She wrote learned treatises and painted _chef-d'oeuvres_; she composed sacred music and perfected musical instruments; even on her death-bed she played on instruments whose conception and execution belong to her. It is for this reason that she is represented over altars holding the lyre or viola invented by herself. Following all these names claimed by the arts as well as by literature comes that of St. Theresa, already cited above. Here M. de Maistre is vanquished. Yes, genius has descended upon a feminine intellect, endowing it with a gift as brilliant as any that can be cited. One might dread the guilt of profanation in using the words _chef-d'oeuvre_ and human genius in speaking of those sublime pages penetrated with a divine light, those marvellous echoes of heaven that stir our souls even on earth. But where can we find the beautiful realized with more vividness, more simplicity, more nature and grandeur? {30} If all these names have been the names of saints whose aim and supreme inspiration was religion, why wonder? I have already said that women had been elevated by Christianity, heart, soul, and understanding. They owed to Christianity the homage of all the gifts it had bestowed upon them, and that homage they rendered. To complete this hasty outline of the history, not so much of learned as of intelligent women, women of mind and heart, of faith and Christian virtue, I will mention that, in times more nearly approaching our own, Christina Pisani wrote admirable memoirs of Charles V., in which we find great moral elevation as well as a charming style. Let me name, also, Elizabeth of Valois and Mary Stuart, who carried on a Latin correspondence for several years concerning the advantages of literary studies. Elizabeth Sarani, one of the most religious painters of the Bolognese school in the seventeenth century; Helena Cornaro, in the sixteenth century, was made doctor at Milan, and died in the odor of sanctity. And then what a charming writer was the Mère de Chaugy in the beginning of the seventeenth century! In conclusion, I will mention Mademoiselle de Légardière, who wrote a work esteemed by M. Guizot as "the most instructive now extant upon ancient French law." It was a woman, then, who consecrated a life, in which severe labor and charitable actions alone found place, to the execution of the first work that opened the way to new discoveries of modern science, a work of prodigious erudition, _The Political Theory of French Laws_. This _savante_, for so we must call her, lived in an isolated chateau, where her piety was an example to all who knew her, and left a memory venerated by her countrywomen.