Madame de Taillebourg remorselessly turned her back on her nieces, Louise of Savoy and Margaret of France, as being tainted with the new spirit. Queen Anne personally led the crusade in favour of the old ideas; Antony du Four, her almoner, published semi-officially a collection of the lives of ninety-one pious women, as a counterblast to the Italian collections; and he implored ladies not to succumb to the new contagion, not to run out of their salutary groove, for, he said, France had never produced “more wise and good women than at present,” beginning with Queen Anne, “a bottomless well of virtue.” “Under the mask of science and philosophy” all these “prating and scribbling fellows” who wished to give women a great part to play were only seeking, declared Du Four, to sap their modesty and wreck their good name. In these criticisms there was certainly a modicum of truth. But they went too far in anathemising the good and the evil without distinction. France, like Italy, had its “primitive” women—philosophers, apostles of the philosophy of love; but their numbers and above all their influence, owing to the opposition we have just indicated, were very small. They were women of admirable endowments and sterling qualities, highly educated, afire with energy of that somewhat melancholy cast necessarily developed by contact with a stern world. It is natural to cite, by way of example, that sometime lady of Beaujeu, Anne of France, a figure after Michelangelo’s own heart, grand and severe as a cathedral. We picture her always in her capacity as regent—the politician, soldier, and diplomate upholding the fortunes of France, and displaying in the greatest difficulties her incomparable genius. And yet her heart was not in this work; she filled her part as a family duty, she devoted herself to it entirely, but it was the cross of her life. As soon as she could she forsook her toilsome life of affairs, for no other reason than to return to the life of the affections. She shirked neither toil nor responsibilities, and understood perhaps more fully than anyone else the profound and mysterious joy experienced by lofty souls in impressing their own individuality widely upon others. But she was only too conscious that in plying a man’s trade she was acting like a widow or an elder sister, not like a free woman or a princess, and that neither politics nor military service was directly conducive to happiness. She knew that in crushing rebels she would not make them happy, and that she herself would be the first victim of her devotion. She was right. We know how, in the swing of the political pendulum, she fell beneath the strokes of Louise of Savoy,[154] who owed everything to her. Wounded in her liveliest interests, in her dearest affections, in the sentiment of dignity she held so high, she died proudly, as Caesar died, with her mantle wrapped about her: Elle attendoit venir l’heure opportune Que la justice ou Dieu y mist la main,[155]