If the court of Ferrara was gay, literary, artistic, with more or less of a dilettante tone under Lucrezia, it took quite another color in the reign of her daughter-in-law, the serious and thoughtful Renée. This princess had more solid qualities of intellect, but less beauty and less charm. “She was good and clever, with a mind the best and most acute possible,” says Brantôme. Her father was Louis XII, and her mother Anne of Bretagne, whose talent and independent spirit she inherited. She had Protestant tendencies, and brought strange guests to these stately halls and haunts of poets. Calvin was among them. He was young then, and came under the name of Charles d’Espeville--which was much safer for an arch-heretic. With him came Clément Marot, a poet and a heretic of milder type, who shone brilliantly at the court of the clever Marguerite of Navarre. The stern moralist and ascetic reformer was no friend to women, except as convenient appendages, and these were apt to be troublesome unless kept in their lowly place. He looked upon their government as “a deviation from the original and proper order of nature, to be ranked no less than slavery among the punishments consequent upon the fall of man.” In this case he evidently found the punishment rather pleasant, as he stayed many months in a court where the power of women was very much _en évidence_, though it fell under an eclipse because of him. Perhaps he modified his opinions for the moment in so stimulating an atmosphere. While he never fails to denounce the “inferior sex” in plain terms, he is kind enough to make discreet exceptions as to women in high places, who were not made of common clay. It was certainly inconvenient for the duke to have a wife with convictions, who persisted in compromising him with the higher powers; but what would have become of the superior Calvin, with the door closed upon him and the Inquisition on his track, if this incapable being had been superintending the cook and the maids or working patterns in embroidery, as she plainly ought to have been, instead of courageously and with clear foresight despatching some trustworthy friends to liberate the reverend suspect from his dangerous and uncomfortable surveillance, and send him on his way to a freer air?