[62] The Women of the Renaissance, p. 290, by R. de Maulde la Clavière, New York, 1901.
[63] Called La Latina, because of her thorough knowledge of the Latin language.
[64] The famous Hellenist, Roger Ascham, tells of his astonishment on finding Lady Jane Grey, when she was only fourteen years of age, reading Plato's Phædo in Greek, when all the other members of the family were amusing themselves in the park. On his inquiry why she did not join the others in their pastime, she smilingly replied: "I wit all their sport in the park is but a shadow to that pleasure I find in Plato. Alas, good folk, they never knew what true pleasure meant."
[65] To the poet Ronsard, she was a woman beyond compare, as is evinced by the following lines of a pastoral ode addressed to her:
"La Royne Marguerite,
La plus belle fleur d'élite
Qu'onques la terre enfanta."
[66] Cf. Œuvres de Lovize Labé, nouvelle edition emprimée en caractères dits de civilité, Paris, 1871.
[67] The French poet, Jean Dorat, who was then professor of Latin in the Collège de France, expresses this fact in the following strophe:
"Nempe uxor, ancillæ, clientes, liberi,
Non segnis examen domus,
Quo Plautus ore, quo Terentius, solent
Quotidiane loqui."
[68] A prominent writer of the time, Jean Bouchet, expressed the prevailing opinion regarding the education of the women of the masses in the following quaint sentence: "Je suis bien d'opinion que les femmes de bas estat, et qui sont contrainctes vaquer aux choses familières et domestiques, ne doivent vaquer aux lettres, parce que c'est chose repugnante à rusticité; mais, les roynes, princesses et aultres dames qui ne se doib vent pour révérence de leur estat, appliquer à mesnage." Cf. Rousellot's Histoire de l'Éducation des Femmes en France, Tom. I, p. 109, Paris, 1883.
His ideal of a woman of the peasant type was apparently Joan of Arc, who, according to her own declaration, did not know a from b—"elle déclarait ne savoir ni a ni b."