This certainly was one of the women most likely to understand and to promulgate throughout France the programme of the quest for happiness. She did not believe with Du Four that a sort of passive naïveté was the ultimate expression of virtue; she sought another goal, anxious, doubtless, that love should give a powerful stimulus to woman’s activities, as it had done for the women of Spain, whose imagination was filled with Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra. Her friend Champier has rounded off her thought by recalling Plato’s saying that “the lover is dead to himself and lives in another.” Deeply read in the church fathers and the philosophers, she hailed with joy the principle of platonic love, “the love of which the philosopher speaks, that is, a love founded on purity.” For all her lofty station, however, Anne of France never found herself able to popularise her ideas in a country where an idea only succeeds when it becomes a fashion; the new philosophy had perforce to come like a flood, sweeping good and evil along with it, and imposing itself by the authority of the court. That is what happened around Francis I.; as soon as it became a mark of good taste to talk philosophy and occult sciences,[158] Hellenism,[159] and above all Italianism, and to adopt ultramontane fashions wholesale, people chattered about Plato. The king dearly loved the ladies, and could not despise anything that glorified the sex. He set some store by “Noble-Heart,” “Feminine Noblesse,”[160] and other subtle evocations of the old chivalry; he hoped that platonism might succeed in renewing them, and requested Castiglione, the oracle of the new school, to furnish a pendant to his _Courtier_, to be called “The Courtesan.” Castiglione declined this flattering invitation. When Francis I. ascended the throne it was as a member of a sort of triumvirate, the other two being ladies—“a single heart in three bodies.” Louise of Savoy, aged and old-fashioned, reserved politics as her sphere, as far as possible; Francis retained the pageantry, the money, the passages at arms, the material satisfactions of power; Margaret of France, in the Italian style, assumed the direction of men’s minds and souls; she was far more queen of intellectual France than Duchess of Alençon or Queen of Navarre. She so completely identified herself with her brother as avowedly to borrow from him her whole status, and particularly her name. People have called her by the most various names without really understanding why, owing to the fact that she usually adopted her brother’s name, which frequently changed. As sister of the count of Angoulême she called herself Margaret of Angoulême; under Louis XII., as sister of the Duke of Valois and the heir to the throne, she called herself Margaret of Valois or of Orleans; as sister of the king she became Margaret of France, her definitive name, under which she accomplished her mission.