Eight queens of France there were during the sixteenth century,
and three of these may be accepted as types of purity, piety, and
goodness: Claude, first wife of Francis I.; Elizabeth of France, wife
of Charles IX.; and Louise de Vaudemont, wife of Henry III. These
queens, held up to ridicule and scorn by the depraved followers of
their husbands' mistresses, were reverenced by the people; we find
striking contrasts to them in the two queens-regent, Louise of Savoy
and Catherine de' Medici, who, in the period of their power, were
as unscrupulous and brutal, intriguing and licentious, jealous and
revengeful, as the most wanton mistresses who ever controlled a
king. In this century, we find two other remarkable types: Marguerite
d'Angoulême, the bright star of her time; and her whose name comes
instantly to mind when we speak of the Lady of Angoulême—Marguerite
de Navarre, representing both the good and the doubtful, the broadest
sense of that untranslatable term _femme d'esprit_.

The first of the royal French women to whom modern woman owes a great
and clearly defined debt was Anne of Brittany, wife of Louis XII.
and the personification of all that is good and virtuous. To her
belongs the honor of having taken the first step toward the social
emancipation of French women; she was the first to give to woman an
important place at court. This precedent she established by requesting
her state officials and the foreign ambassadors to bring their wives
and daughters when they paid their respects to her. To the ladies
themselves, she sent a "royal command," bidding them leave their
gloomy feudal abodes and repair to the court of their sovereign.

Anne may be said to belong to the transition period—that period in
which the condition of slavery and obscurity which fettered the
women of the Middle Ages gave place to almost untrammelled liberty.