Page:Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre (Robinson 1886).djvu/72

Rh weaker every month in his unaccustomed restraint, and attaining much facility in making verses, the one amusement of his dreary prison.

Naturally this heroic obstinacy increased yet further his popularity in Spain. The Emperor's sister, the young widow of the King of Portugal, shared the universal passion. Leonor of Austria was at this time about six-and-twenty years of age; not regularly beautiful. Yet her face, preserved to us by a painter of Clouet's school, far exceeds in interest and charm the more regular beauties of her day. A thin face, delicately sharp in outline, a hatchet-face it might be called unkindly, is set in bushy masses of crisp hair, whose reddish gold is wonderfully clear and beautiful in tint. The face, too, is fresh and fair in colour. A charming half-boyish face, with its shock of blonde hair and eager chevaleresque expression; an ardent face, with the Austrian lip modified to the self-willed, resolute pout of a spoiled girl, not breaking hindrance to her generous impulses. Yet this ardent blonde, with her look of chivalrous naïveté, her brilliant hair, and clear rosy colour, her full lips, and alert romantic air, has the dreamy, impassive, light-brown eyes, the thin finely-arched jet-black brows of a quite different type. There is something odd, unmatched, inharmonious, yet not unpleasing, in this brilliant face with the dull and dreamy gate—something which tells us that this grand-child of the fiery Maximilian was the daughter of the mad Juana.

She had already played her romance, this quick-blooded Austrian-Spaniard, who represented all those qualities of their mixed race which her brother Charles ignored. In her girlhood, in her Flemish home, under the wing of her aunt, the politic Margaret, she had