Page:Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre (Robinson 1886).djvu/102

Rh Nérac; together with Bonaventure Desperriers, le joyeux Bonaventure, whose atheism had brought him into almost equal disrepute. Thus Nérac gradually became an asylum, not only for austere reformers, scholars, and thinkers, but for the lightest singers of airy badinage, the wittiest and most frivolous of men of letters. For all alike were suspected in the eyes of the Sorbonne; and, as Melancthon wrote, "all students and all scholars having the title of Frenchmen put their natural hope in her Majesty, as in a divinity." But the court was not entirely made of theologians and poets, and was by no means a haunt of pedants alone. Many charming ladies, whose names we still remember, added a charm to the safety of that refuge; ladies whom Marot celebrated in his clear, neat, crystalline verses; ladies who, at Margaret's feet, presided over what was virtually the last of the old French Courts of Love: Hélène de Tournon, the beautiful and witty niece of the Cardinal-Minister of Francis; the gentle Florette de Sarra, whom Margaret loved, and whose name alone remains to as; and, fairest of all, Isabeau d'Albret, the sister of the King; "Isabeau, ceste fine mouche," whose white throat and large eyes, whose sweet manners and girlish queenliness, are familiar to us even now, whose petit ris follastre rings still through Marot's verse, Isabeau, whose love-match with M. de Rohan, an impoverished Breton noble, whose debts, disasters, and ruin, made for many years the chief care of her kind and active sister-in-law. For it was Margaret who succoured the charming, thoughtless girl in all her misfortunes, settled her affairs, sheltered her homeless head, and brought up her children as they had been her own.

Margaret had helped the match between Isabeau