It is indeed a lovely creature, yet all of earth, whom we see in Clouet's half life-size portrait in the _château_ of Azay-le-Rideau. Her plentiful blond hair curves back above her fine brow, and her bluish-gray eyes smile out with inviting mischievousness. Yet Brantôme has to own that his goddess was easily first in the _escadron volant_ that sailed under her mother's flag, and we may guess what that meant in the court "whose vices it would be repulsive to suggest, and whose virtues were homicide and adultery."
In this Hôtel de Sens, Madame Marguerite held receptions, twice a week, of men of letters and of the arts, with whom her learning allowed her to converse on equal terms; and her kindliness allowed them to feel at ease. For "from her behavior it could never be discovered that she had once been the wife of the King." But the wayward Margot made trouble for herself that ended her stay here after a year or less. She came home from mass at the Célestins on the morning of Wednesday, April 5, 1606, and as she was helped from her coach by her newest favorite page of eighteen, he was killed by her latest discarded favorite, already twenty. She sat in one of these front windows the next day, having neither eaten nor drunk nor slept meanwhile; she looked out on the beheading of the jaunty assassin; that evening she left the Hôtel de Sens forever. For a while she stayed at her hunting-lodge at Issy, already visited by us in former pages, and then went to her last dwelling, on the southern bank in the Pré-aux-Clercs, which looked out across the river at the Louvre, where Henry was unhappy with her successor. The two women remained always friendly, and were seen together in festivities and processions, and the reigning Queen paid many a debt of the deposed Queen. To the last she rouged to the eyes, and wore a flowing wig and low frocks, albeit she had turned _dévote_, and had found a new idol in her confessor. This was young Vincent de Paul, not yet canonized, whose chaste ministrations made him adored by sinners elderly enough to repent. There she died in the spring of 1615, at the age of sixty-three, the last of the Valois name, leaving everything, mostly debts, to young Louis XIII.