as a servant of Francis I. wrote. Her coldness then was assumed, but she kept up the appearance of Stoicism so well that many a man, even among her friends and admirers, really believed in this lamentable insensibility. Again, Anne of France had no love for the vanities, the whole trivial round of court life; “she dismissed Cypris to Paphos,” for which some persons found it difficult to forgive her, particularly Octovien de Saint-Gelais, who nevertheless has extolled her sweetness, calling her “a second Semiramis, a new Queen of the Amazons, come to life again to establish peace.” Her vigorous intellect, her frank and remorselessly sincere disposition, her way of treating everything on broad and general lines, puzzled the rude yet feeble folk around her. The only thing she lacked, as one of her friends said, was love: S’elle avoit un peu de cella, Ce seroit la plus accomplye A qui Dieu donna oncques vie.[156] She had a large, indeed an immeasurable quantity of “that,” but she took it seriously; it might well be said that she did not set “her whole imagination spinning round problems of sentiment.” She had no idea of bringing imagination into her affections, but distrusted it; it was through the soul and the real needs of the soul that she caught glimpses of the ideal life of which we have just spoken. But having faith in, rather than enthusiasm for, these ideas, and considering as she did that the heart’s activities were perfectly reasonable, beneficent and necessary, she saw no reason for ruffling, gilding or engarlanding them. She was somewhat lacking in suppleness, self-sacrificing, of unbounded good-heartedness, staid in demeanour, firm in resolution, but also warm, passionate, loving to devote herself to others and not doing so by halves. In her heart of hearts she adored all that a good woman adores—her son, a poor child whose death almost killed her, her daughter, her son-in-law, whom she loved as a son; she took an ardent delight in friendship, and above all in that special, delicate, tender, profound affection which is only established between a man and a woman; to win love was her sole ambition.[157] She buried deep down in her heart an innocent romance which no historian has related and which even her intimates appear never to have suspected—a reserve which paints her to the life! Till the day of her death she wore a ring on her finger. We have discovered her secret: the ring was the pledge of her betrothal to a young duke of Calabria from whom her father had separated her, who had soon afterwards died, but whom she was never able to forget.