Page:Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre (Robinson 1886).djvu/242

Rh stifled voice, she died. The story of de Rémond that she died a Catholic, declaring that she had helped the oppressed Reformers rather from compassion than conviction, has been received with great distrust and anger by the Lutheran historians, from the earliest chroniclers to Miss Freer. It seems to me no truer words could resume the character of Margaret: compassion not conviction. It is at once the rarest value and the limitation of her nature. Hence her sweet, large-hearted mercy, understanding and forgiving all men. Hence, also, her weakness, her lack of a firm standpoint, her hesitations and indecisions. Hence that signal bane of her influence over Francis, "the flux and reflux of uncertain authority," as Gaillard has turned the phrase.

Margaret of Angoulême died at the Castle of Odos, December 21, 1549, at the age of fifty-seven. Her reign was over. She who had been for a lifetime the influence and ideal of the most civilised court in Europe was no more. In all but sheer existence she had died two years ago, when her brother breathed his last at Rambouillet. A different ideal was now set up in her place, a different influence swayed the heart of the King of France:—a woman, two years older than herself, whom some magic, as it seemed, preserved from age. The orb of Diana filled the earth with its pale, cold, romantic, and illusive light. The moon had arisen, and reigned over an altered world; a world without colour, at once vague and hard, all black and white; a world of superstition, of phantasmal ghosts and fears; a world of enchantment, a new Armida's garden, where the young adore the old, where a courtesan is honoured as widowed Fidelity, where Probity is avaricious, treacherous, and a bigot. A moonlit world,