In the title of his 1966 filmed play (starring Paul Scofield), Robert Bolt described Thomas à Becket (martyred Archbishop of Canterbury) as A Man For All Seasons.

On p. 501, of The Reformation, v. VI of his monumental work, The Story of Civilization, Will Durant wrote a paragraph which inspired the title of this Website.

Wrote Durant: "Her religion was as complex ... as her conception of love. ....At Nérac and Pau ... she spread her protective skirts over fugitive Protestants, including Calvin himself. .... In Marguerite the Renaissance and the Reformation were for a moment one. Her influence radiated through France. Every free spirit looked upon her as protectress and ideal. .... In the nineteenth century [the most celebrated historian in France, Jules] Michelet [1798-1874], in [his 2-volume masterpiece] Histoire de France, offered her his gratitude: 'Let us always remember this tender Queen of Navarre, in whose arms our people, fleeing from prison or the pyre, found safety, honor, and friendship. Our gratitude to you, loveable Mother of our Renaissance! Your hearth was that of our saints, your heart was the nest of our freedom!'"

Durant also writes, "Marguerite was the embodiment of charity. She would walk unescorted in the streets of Pau, allowing any one to approach her and would listen at first hand to the sorrows of her people. 'No one ought to go away sad or disappointed from the presence of a prince', she would say. For 'kings are the ministers of the poor ... and the poor are the members of God'. She called herself 'The Prime Minister of the Poor'. Henri, her husband, King of Navarre, believed in what she was doing, even to the extent of setting up a public works system that became a model for France. Together he and Marguerite financed the education of needy students, among whom was Amyo, who later translated Plutarch into French."

A special approbrium comes from Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), French philosopher and critic, whose Dictionnaire historique et critique (Historical and Critical Dictionary, 1697) greatly influenced the French Encyclopedists and the rationalist philosophers of the 18th century, such as Voltaire and Diderot.

Commenting on remarks about Marguerite written by Florimond de Remond says, in his History of the Birth and Progress of Heresy, Bayle writes:
"I do not examine whether Florimond de Remond has it from good authority that she protested at her death that what she had done for the followers of the new opinions proceeded rather from compassion than from any ill-will to the ancient religion of her fathers. But granting her protestation to be sincere, I maintain that there was something more heroic in her compassion and generosity than there would have been had she been persuaded that the fugitives she protected were orthodox. For a princess or any other woman to do good to those whom she takes to be of the household of the faith, is no extraordinary thing, but the common effect of a moderate piety. But for a queen to grant her protection to people persecuted for opinions which she believes to be false; to open a sanctuary to them; to preserve them from the flames prepared for them; to furnish them with a subsistence; liberally to relieve the troubles and inconveniences of their exile, is an heroic magnanimity which has hardly any precedent; it is the effect of a superiority of reason and genius which very few can reach to; it is the knowing how to pity the misfortune of those who err, and admire at the same time their constancy to the dictates of their conscience; it is the knowing how to do justice to their good intentions, and to the zeal they express for truth in general; it is the knowing that they are mistaken in the hypothesis, but that in the thesis they conform to the immutable and eternal laws of order, which require us to love the truth, and to sacrifice to that the temporal conveniences and pleasures of life; it is, in a word, the knowing how to distinguish in one and the same person his opposition to particular truths which he does not know, and his love for truth in general; a love which he evidences by his great zeal for the doctrines he believes to be true."

Bayle continues, "Such was the judicious distinction the Queen of Navarre was able to make. It is difficult for all sorts of persons to arrive at this science; but more especially difficult for a princess like her, who had been educated in the communion of Rome, where nothing had been talked of for many ages but fagots and gibbets for those who err. Family prejudices strongly fortified all the obstacles which education had laid in the way of this princess; for she entirely loved the king her brother, an implacable persecutor of those they called heretics, a people whom he caused to be burned without mercy wherever the indefatigable vigilance of informers discovered them. I cannot conceive by what method this Queen of Navarre raised herself to so high a pitch of equity, reason, and good sense: it was not through an indifference as to religion, since it is certain she had a great degree of piety, and studied the Scriptures with singular application. It must therefore have been the excellence of her genius, and the greatness of her soul, that discovered a path to her which scarcely any one knows. It will be said, perhaps, that she needed only to consult the primitive and general ideas of order, which most clearly show that involuntary errors hinder not a man who entirely loves God, as he has been able to discover him after all possible inquiries, from being reckoned a servant of the true God, and that we ought to respect in him the rights of the true God. But I might immediately answer, that this maxim is of itself subject to great disputes; so far is it from being clear and evident; besides, that these primitive ideas hardly ever appear to our understanding without limitations and modifications which obscure them a hundred ways, according to the different prejudices contracted by education. The spirit of party, attachment to a sect, and even zeal for orthodoxy, produce a kind of ferment in the humors of our body; and hence the medium through which reason ought to behold those primitive ideas is clouded and obscured. These are infirmities which will attend our reason as long as it shall depend on the ministry of organs. It is the same thing to it as the low and middle region of the air, the seat of vapors and meteors. There are but very few persons who can rise above these clouds, and place themselves in a true serenity. If any one could do it, we must say of him what Virgil said of Daphnis:

	Candidus insuetum miratur lumen Olympi,
	Sub pedibusque videt nubes et sidera Daphnis."

En francais.

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