Excerpt from Women of the Valois Court In this social world Of the Valois, so curious to observe from the point of view of ideas and man ners, all the heroines who have made their mark are worthy of the profoundest study. What variety there is in these feminine types, where one discovers every shade of human passion, and where, amidst the most tragical events, vices and virtues are developed under the conditions best fitted to illus trate them. If the levity of many of the beauties who shone at the court made them deserve Bran t6me for a biographer, there were also women in this century where good and evil elbow each other, who are, as the Chronique d'anjou says of Claude of France, a true mirror of chastity, sanctity, and innocence. There are noble Christian women, who, arrayed in their modesty, are the glory of their husbands, the ornaments of their families, and who shed around them a fragrance of grace and goodness; there are women of superior intelligence who, rising above the prejudices of their age, soar into the spheres where the soul is purified and made strong. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.