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NÉRAC IN 1545.
While mourning and remorse filled the Court of France, the little Court of Nérac had settled into the inactive peace of disillusion. Even the sanguine King believed no more in the promise of Francis to restore his kingdom. Even the visionary Queen could hope no longer for the reconciliation of the Church with Luther. Age, with its calms and compromises, was settling over Navarre.
Margaret, with every year becoming more estranged from her husband, with every year more resigned to this estrangement, occupied herself with good works. She spent the greater part of her income in pensions to the poor of her kingdom, charging herself with a little nation of orphans, of afflicted, of aged and decrepit persons, whose living she provided. She sent large sums also to the Lutheran refugees in Switzerland and Germany. On herself she spent very little.
The black dress, edged with fur, the pleated white chemisette, which she had assumed on the death of her baby son, was a fashion from which she had never since departed. Her hair, neatly put away beneath a nun-like coif; her figure, fuller now than in her youth, in its tightly-fitting sober garb; her face, blonde and placid, with its wistful smile; so we know her, in the
