For thirty years she presided thus over an amazing intellectual movement; the whole thinking soul of France hung upon her smile. She was the incarnation of platonism. In one of the galleries of Chantilly, that sanctuary of the Renaissance, her grand face, with its long, severe, clean-cut, distinguished features, somewhat hard as though chiselled out of alabaster, continually smiles upon us and encourages us. Her eyes are clear and full of fire; her mouth is fine, intellectual, with something of irony, of benevolence and of reserve; something at once yielding and defensive, acerbated and enthusiastic, a singular sibylline countenance, the enigma of a spiritual governance—the rule of mind and heart; a woman to the core, attractive and wishing to attract, but two personalities in one, each interpenetrating the other, concealing her real self within two or three inner entrenchments after the old feudal tactics, like St. Theresa in her “fortresses of the soul.” She reigned with undivided sway, with all the powers of her affection, with her infinite womanly delicacy, with triumphant skill. She was in very truth a woman of fire, this woman who wrote to her brother while a prisoner in Spain: “Whatever may be required of me, though it be to fling to the winds the ashes of my bones to do you service, nought will be strange, or difficult, or painful to me, but solace, ease of mind, honour.” And she was loved; men never tired of praising her. Her name became a household word, and lives on even in our own day in charming books, like that devoted to her by a lady of rare genius, chosen by Nature to revive the traditions of woman’s influence—the Countess d’Haussonville. And yet we are always wondering what is behind that smiling countenance at Chantilly. Margaret is doubly complex, first as a woman, and then as a typical woman of the sixteenth century. She is essentially a woman of her period, and that is why she cannot but interest us. Her thoughts, somewhat hazy, and sometimes wrapped in rather odd garbs, are difficult to co-ordinate because, unlike those of Anne of France, they have no spontaneity or originality. Almost all of them are derived from without. Her lovable mind is like a mountain peak of fair height, with nothing rugged or bleak about it: it promises no sublime effects, no Pisgah sights; it pleases and interests us precisely because we can reach its summit by an easy road, for which many of us are grateful. Is not that better for poor tired folk than lofty masculine heights profitless and perilous to scale? It springs gently from the landscape, like the pleasant mountains in the heart of France, and while enabling us to take observation of the sky, keeps in touch with the earth, and from this standpoint we can contemplate, spread out like a map, a smiling country and highly decorative craters. It is the “Belvedere” _par excellence_. Nowhere could we judge her period better than from the vantage ground of her mind.