I am Marguerite de Navarre, I was a princess of France, Duchess of Alençon and Berry, and Queen of Navarre by my second marriage to King Henry II of Navarre. My brother became King of France, as Francis I, and the two siblings were responsible for the celebrated intellectual and cultural court and salons of their day in France. I was the ancestress of the Bourbon kings of France, being the mother of Jeanne d'Albret, whose son, Henry of Navarre, succeeded as Henry IV of France, the first Bourbon king. As an author and a patron of humanists and reformers, I was an outstanding figure of the French Renaissance. Samuel Putnam called me"The First Modern Woman".