Less than a year after her marriage to Louis, the queen was delivered of a girl, Princess Claude. However, as heir presumptive, the nearly four-year-old FranГ§ois, his mother, and his six-year-old sister were invited to move to Blois, and by the end of the year or in early 1499 they had joined the court in Amboise. Although the young count dвЂ™AngoulГЄme, being the only male offspring of the Valois dynasty, would inherit the crown if Queen Anne failed to give the new king a son, such an event seemed a remote possibility because Louis was thirty-six years old and she but twenty-two when she became queen of France for the second time. In compliance with the Treaty of Rennes, Queen Anne was soon married to her husbandвЂ™s cousin, King Louis XII.

Upon the sudden death of King Charles VIII in April 1498, his cousin Louis, son of Charles dвЂ™OrlГ©ans, became king, as the four children born to Charles VIII and Anne, Duchess of Brittany, had died in infancy. Unexpectedly widowed on 1 January 1496, nineteen-year-old Louise and her children remained in Cognac, with Romorantin as a second residence. The AngoulГЄme court at Cognac was known for the artists, painters, and scholars who frequented it, the musicians who played at its concerts and dances, and its superb library of illuminated manuscripts and printed volumes to which were added richly bound works written or translated by contemporary authors. Jean and Octavien de Saint-Gelais resided at the Cognac castle as cultural advisers if not teachers of the young countess dвЂ™AngoulГЄme, who was both intelligent and ambitious. The only daughter of Charles de Valois, Comte dвЂ™AngoulГЄme, and Louise de Savoie, Marguerite was born on 11 April 1492 in AngoulГЄme but raised in Cognac, where her brother FranГ§ois was born two years later. Her belief that eternal salvation could only be received, if given, from the sincerity of oneвЂ™s faith and true repentance for oneвЂ™s sins rather than from rote prayers, pilgrimages, good works, or religious rites antagonized the Faculty of Theology of the University of Paris as well as members of the court who condemned her proselytism as damaging to the stability of the crown. She was also the first woman to play an active role in the efforts of the Evangelical Circle of Meaux and to promote the study and the publication in French of Scriptures translated from Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek, seeking the way to personal salvation only in the Bible rather than in the less reliable Latin translations and the often confusing interpretations of Scriptures by the Roman Church. Marguerite de Navarre was not the only educated woman to write and publish verse during the first half of the sixteenth century, but she was the first woman of the French nobility who carefully compiled from her complete works a selection of poems, prayers, religious meditations, songs, biblical and secular (without biblical characters) plays, and other works that she felt worthy to appear in print.

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