The narrative is that of a Protestant condemned to the galleys under Louis XIV.; but it may serve as a picture of how Geneva acted in the sixteenth century when the small city of 13,000 souls received and protected nearly 6000 refugees driven from many different lands for their religion.
§ 1. _Marguerite d'Angoulême and the "group of Meaux."_
Perhaps no one so thoroughly represents the sentiments which inspired the beginnings of the movement for Reformation in France as Marguerite d'Angoulême,[162] the sister of King Francis I. A study of her letters and of her writings--the latter being for the most part in verse--is almost essential for a true knowledge of the aspirations of the noblest minds of her generation. Not that she possessed creative energy or was herself a thinker of any originality, but her soul, like some clear sensitive mirror, received and reflected the most tremulous throb of the intellectual and religious movements around her. She had, like many ladies of that age, devoted herself to the New Learning. She had mastered Latin, Italian, and Spanish in her girlhood, and later she acquired Greek and even Hebrew, in order to study the Scriptures in their original tongues. In her the French Renaissance of the end of the fifteenth was prolonged throughout the first half of the sixteenth century. She was all sentiment and affection, full of that gentle courage which soft feminine enthusiasm gives, and to her brother and more masculine mother (Louise of Savoy)[163] she was a being to be protected against the consequences of her own tender daring. Contemporary writers of all parties, save the more bitter defenders of the prevalent Scholastic Theology, have something good to say about the pure, bright, ecstatic Queen of Navarre. One calls her the "violet in the royal garden," and says that she unconsciously gathered around her all the better spirits in France, as the wild thyme attracts the bees.