FIVE FAMOUS FRENCH WOMEN.* THAT this book is well worth

reading its author's name-is a sufficient guarantee. At the same time, a certain disappoint- ment is in store for those who may expect literary conthmity in what is, after all, a series of articles without any distinct leading idea or theory to connect them with each other. The claims to fame possessed by Mrs. Fawcett's famous women are not of the same nature, and are very unequal in dignity. Only two of them stand out as the principal figures in a widely different society,—Joan of Arc and Margaret of Angonleme. Louise of Savoy, with all her cleverness, can hardly be placed among the women who have really influenced French history, except as mother, grandmother, great-grOilds mother, of the Valois Kings of the sixteenth century. Jeanne d'Albret was of no great importance to France, except as the mother of Henry IV. The position in her own coimtry, of Renee, daughter of Louis XII. and Duchess of Ferrara, was even less significant and distinguished from a worldly point of view. Still, in her own personal way, each Was undoubtedly a famous woman. All held high place intel- lectually. Two, and not more than two, we think, though here we may differ with Mrs. Fawcett and many other students of French history, ranked even more highly in the spirituttl world. "Le noble co3ur de Renee de France" seems to us the one not unworthy companion of the "supremely beautiful soul" of Joan the Maid.

It may be a fanciful view, but the presence of Joan seems to destroy the continuity of the book. This wonder, this "living miracle," whose story, if its evidence were no so strong, would hardly be accepted by scientific historians, belongs to a completely different order from the Princesses

• Piss Fatness French Women. By Hrs. Henry Fawcett. LL.D. With 30 Illustrations, London : Cassell and Co. (33. 05.] and learned ladies, reforming or needing reformation, of a hundred years later. The descent from Joan to Louise is too

abrupt, —a leap from the clear heavenly air of heroism and martyrdom into the unwholesome earthly vapours of un- aerupulous materialism. The young saintly warrior and Tatylot of Barrias's white statue, earnest, with clasped hands, waiting on the will of God, seems intended to dominate the spirit of the book. It does not, of course, any more than .Joan herself dominates the mind of her country. It occurs 'to one to wonder what those women of the Renaissance thought of her. They smiled at the peasant enthusiast,

probably, if she interested them at all. A century later still, the learned Chapelain did his best for her in stilted allegory. But her real fame and glory were of very much later growth. Is it not possible, by the by, that Voltaire wrote his die- gusting La Pucelle partly in order to kill with indecent ridicule a story in which his keen talent may have spied a too powerful witness to Christianity P To pass on to the other chief figure in Mrs. Fawcett's book : Margaret of Angouleme, Duchess of Alencon, Queen of 'Navarre, the idolising sister of Francis I., and the grand- another of Henry IV. " La Marguerite des Marguerites" was in -a very special sense the fine flower of the French Renaissance; this, it seems to us, is the one fair way in which to regard a ,woman whose inconsistencies were as striking as her brilliant ,gifts and sound qualities. The Renaissance in France was Jess pagan, less animal, than its earlier development in Italy. 'The chief features—as Miss Sichel reminded us in her delightful book, Women and Men of the French Renaissance were those which belong to the French nation still : " the gay sphilosophy of common sense and daily life ; the good humour and the scepticism which come of living in the present ; the

graceful imagination, never too great to be useful "; and, it may be added, a passion for ideas, no matter what their origin, which resulted in a wide toleration. This, at least, was a logical consequence in the finest minds of the time, and thepefore in Margaret of Angottleme. This it was, this love for wide and mystical ideas, oddly allied with a kind of smiling, sceptical philosophy, which made her the opponent of persecution, the friend and protector of the Reformers.

We really do not see how any careful study of the time, and of Margaret herself, can result in fixing on hey the character of a devout Protestant, No doubt, as Mrs. Fawcett urges, there was more than mere com-

passion in her attitude towards the Reformers. But it is going too far, surely, to describe this "protector of the new

learning" as also "the humble devotee of a religion which was pure and undefiled." Though broadly liberal in her views, Margaret shrank from heresy, and never openly separated herself from the Church. Calvin, certainly, did not relish her attitude towards freethinkers, who met with the frank hospi- tality she showed to all thinkers of every kind. "Ideas alone satisfied her," writes Miss Sichel, " whether they came from Plato or from Calvin, from Marot or Erasmus." And Margaret, a true creature of her time, had no Puritanism; on the contrary, there was very little room in her wide mind

for- religious reverence. A fibre of ribald coarseness was twisted into the humorous talent of the woman who wrote

not only the Heptameron, but "a tragi-comic translation of the New Testament," and who tolerated such farces as the " Messe n sept points." Here we scarcely have the attitude of a "humble devotee." Mrs. Fawcett goes so far in proving Margaret's reforming fervour that she sees in the stories of the Heptameron—mostly of the sins of monks—an earnest attempt to influence Francis L in favour of the Reformation.

Religion might cry, "Save me from my friends !" But one need only remember how all Christendom, right through the Middle Ages, made its chief laughing-stock 'of unworthy priests and monks, to doubt very much whether Margaret's stories had any object beyond the mere amusement suited to the taste of her time.

Admire Margaret as we will, as the flower of her age, acknowledging to the full her brilliant genius, her charity and tolerance, her charm as a woman and a Queen, it yet must be said that we miss that high note of spirituality, that something the lack of which no power of curlew;

intellect, no width of view, can compensate. And that some. thing was possessed by the delicate, deformed Princess in whom some writers have seen little beyond strictness and pedantry, Renee of France, Duchess of Ferrara, who endured

persecution for her faith in reform and her active protection of reformers.

Some of us may be inclined, with her poet Clement Marot, to see in the Duchess Renee, so strangely situated as the daughter-in-law of Lucrezia Borgia, one of the brightest characters to whom the French Renaissance, or indeed the Europe of that day, gave birth. The intimate friend of Vittoria Colonna, who showed for her part that the new pagan Italy could still produce an elect soul, we do not admire Renee so much for what she did as for what she was. She bad all her cousin Margaret's love for the "new learning," but her freedom of spirit soared higher, and kept a purer strain, than Margaret's. Her reforming zeal was not great enough to satisfy Calvin. Banished from her son's Court for religion's sake, she did not think it necessary to fall into the hands of the Inquisition. It is difficult to read the history of the religious wars of the sixteenth century without feeling that there was not much to choose between the two parties, and French Princesses, whatever their spiritual aspirations after a reformed Church, may very well have known by instinct that the Huguenot faction, as they saw it, never could and never would rule France. In any case, Renee was known to her time as a sincerely religious and noble-minded woman, in whose little Court, either at Ferrara or at Montargis, the refuge of her later years, no evil thing could find place. Less amusing and less many-sided than the great Queen of Navarre, less hard and strong-minded than Jeanne d'Albret, Renee's character shines with a peculiar lustre and dis- tinction in the " naughty world" of the sixteenth century. Mrs. Fawcett has done well to revive interest in this beautiful and pathetic figure; last, but not least, on her roll of famous French women.