French women of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries,
when studied according to the distinctive phases of their influence,
are best divided into three classes: those queens who, as wives,
represented virtue, education, and family life; the mistresses, who
were instigators of political intrigue, immorality, and vice; and the
authoresses and other educated women, who constituted themselves the
patronesses of art and literature.

This division is not absolute by any means; for we see that in the
sixteenth century the regent-mother (for example, Louise of Savoy and
Catherine de' Medici), in extent of influence, fills the same position
as does the mistress in the eighteenth century; though in the former
period appears, in Diana of Poitiers, the first of a long line of
ruling mistresses.

Queen-consorts, in the sixteenth as in the following centuries,
exercised but little influence; they were, as a rule, gentle and
obedient wives—even Catherine, domineering as she afterward showed
herself to be, betraying no signs of that trait until she became
regent.

The literary women and women of spirit and wit furthered all
intellectual and social development; but it was the mistresses—those
great women of political schemes and moral degeneracy—who were vested
with the actual importance, and it must in justice to them be said
that they not infrequently encouraged art, letters, and mental
expansion.