The veneration for the monster Marat knew no bounds. Hymns were written in his honor. On divers stamps he was placed by the side of Christ. Men swore by the sacred heart of Marat. The new worship was complete, it had prostitutes for goddesses, and a man of violence and blood for a martyr and a saint. All it yet lacked was to engage in persecution; and it failed not in this worthy business.—De Pressensé.
Marcus (of Arethusa), being hung up in a basket smeared with honey, to be stung to death by bees, exclaimed,[30] "How am I advanced, despising you that are upon the earth!"
Margaret (of Scotland, wife of Louis XI. of France), 1420-1445. "Fi de la vie! qu'on ne m'en parle plus."
Margaret was devoted to literature, and, while she lived, patronized men of learning and genius. Her admiration for the poet Alain Chartier is said to have induced her to kiss his lips as he sat asleep one day in a chair. Her attendants being astonished at this act of condescension, the princess replied that "she did not kiss the man, but the lips which had given utterance to so many exquisite thoughts." She died at the age of twenty-five, before her husband had ascended the throne.
Mrs. Hale's "Sketches of Distinguished Women."
Margaret (of Valois, Queen of Navarre and sister of Francis I., of France), 1492-1549. "Farewell, and remember me." Some say, upon what authority I do not know, that the queen's last words were: "I never departed from the true church."
She inclined to the Protestant faith, but Roman Catholic writers assert that before her death she acknowledged her religious errors, and De Remond even goes so far as to imply that she denied on her death-bed having ever swerved from the standard of Roman authority.—Memoir of Margaret, attached to the English translation of her Heptameron.
She was a brilliant writer in both prose and verse, and was called the "Tenth Muse." Several authors speak of her as "Margaret the Pearl, surpassing all the pearls of the Orient." She composed a religious work called "Miroir de l'âme Pècheresse," which was condemned by the Sorbonne, on the ground that it inclined to Protestant doctrines. She also wrote the "Heptameron, or Novels of the Queen of Navarre."
Marie Antoinette (Marie Antoinette Josephine Jeanne de Lorraine, daughter of Francis I., Emperor of Germany, and Maria Thérèsa, and wife of Louis XVI., of France; she was guillotined October 16, 1793), 1755-1793. "Farewell, my children, forever. I go to your father."
The king perished on the scaffold January 21, 1793. The queen had four children, Marie Thérèse Charlotte, who married the oldest son of Charles X.; the dauphin, Louis, born in 1781 and died in 1789; Charles Louis, who died a victim to the brutality of the cobbler Simon; and a daughter who died in infancy.