The court of Queen Marguerite of Navarre was at least as intellectual as that of Queen Anne, and besides it had the advantage of the deeper knowledge of the classics that had come in the meantime. Marguerite encouraged literature, and herself contributed to it. She had the large tolerance of mind of the educated woman and used it to protect some of those who had fallen under the suspicion, so rife at the time because of the religious troubles in Germany, of favoring or attempting to teach heretical doctrines. As a consequence, she has herself fallen under the suspicion of leanings towards heresy and sympathy with the reformers. This was only, however, to the extent in which that sympathy was shared by Erasmus and others of the time, who saw the abuses that needed correction and hoped that the reform movement would correct them, but who broke with it at once when they realized that revolution and not true reformation was intended. The correspondence between Vittoria Colonna and Marguerite is evidence at once of the intimate relations of the learned women of different countries and also of the sympathy existing between these two scholarly women whose influence over their contemporaries meant so much for the intellectual life of the time. The education given Mary Queen of Scots, which is mentioned later in this chapter, shows how much intellectual development was appreciated for the ruling classes of the time in France. There are certain expressions from some of these educated women, especially those without much to do, that are wonderful anticipations of some of the things that are heard very commonly now as regards the attitude of educated women toward man's suppression of her in the preceding time. How strangely familiar are these words from Louise Labé, the French poetess of the middle class, one of whose poems of passion will be found in the chapter on French literature. "The hour has now struck," she declared, "when man can no {332} longer shackle the honest liberty which our sex has so long yearned for, when women are to prove how deeply men have hitherto wronged them." That expression is not, however, any more familiar than one of the comments of a masculine contemporary on this occupation of the educated women of the time with political ideas, which is quoted by Miss Sichel in her "Men and Women of the French Renaissance": "Political women go on chattering as if it were they who did everything."