Page:Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre (Robinson 1886).djvu/215

200 portrait of Janet, her court-painter, and brother of the greater Janet. And she seems to us like some calm and gentle abbess, ruling rather a convent than a court. It was, indeed, a quiet and orderly existence which she led, supervising her charities, ordering her household, maintaining an immense correspondence. In the afternoons, as she sat at her broidery (a work in which she excelled), she kept two secretaries by her side. One, on the right, took down her letters from her dictation; and the other wrote the verses she made aloud from time to time in the pauses of her other work.

The mass of poems thus composed—fluent, inconsequent, empty as the verse of an improvisatore—was at this time being set ready for publication, and appeared in 1547, under the title of Les Marguerites de la Marguerite des Princesses. Here we find not only her early spiritual verses, not only the "Myrouer" which so excited the wrath of the Sorbonne, and which Elizabeth of England translated; not only the charming rondeaux and ballads written to the King in captivity, but verse of a much later date. Margaret had never been so busy with her pen as now that her active influence was in abeyance. In 1542 she had written La Coche, a subtle dissertation on the best way of loving, which the praise of Francis inspires for a moment with true poetry and pathetic fervour. In 1544, she had completed the Heptameron. And now she was busy writing and revising a whole accumulation: spiritual songs, with a certain faded pathos in them, charming and not quite sincere; long meditations, prayers, and triumphs of a fluent learned piety, well supplied with texts; innocent boarding-school farces, on marriage, on faith as the best physician, on "Too much, plenty,