whom the king had recalled from Guyenne, fearing further disturbance;
for the King of Navarre had threatened to make trouble if he were not
recalled. The Queen of Navarre, resentful to the said marshal, took no
notice of him, but disdained him, speaking everywhere very ill of him
and of the insult he had offered her. At last, the marshal, dreading the
hatred of the daughter and sister of his masters, and knowing the nature
of the princess, determined to seek her pardon by making excuses and
humbling himself; on which, generous as she was, she did not contradict
him, but took him into favour and friendship and forgot the past. I knew
a gentleman by acquaintance who came to Court about this time, and
seeing the good cheer the queen bestowed upon the marshal was much
astonished; and so, as he sometimes had the honour of being listened to
by the queen, he said to her that he was much amazed at the change and
at her good welcome, in which he could not have believed, in view of the
affront and injury. To which she answered that as the marshal had owned
his fault and made his excuses and sought her pardon humbly, she had
granted it for that reason, and did not desire further talk about his
bravado at Nérac. See how little vindictive this good princess is,--not
imitating in this respect her grandmother, Queen Anne, towards the
Maréchal de Gié, as I have heretofore related.
I might give many other examples of her kindness in her reconciliations
and forgivenesses.
Rebours, one of her maids of honour, who died at Chenonceaux, displeased
her on one occasion very much. She did not treat her harshly, but when
she was very ill she went to see her, and as she was about to die
admonished her, and then said: “This poor girl has done great harm, but
she has suffered much. May God pardon her as I have pardoned her.” That
was the vengeance and the harm she did her. Through her generosity she
was slow to revenge, and in all things kind.
Alfonso, the great King of Naples, who was subtle in loving the beauties
of women, used to say that beauty is the sign manual of kindness and
gentle goodness, as the beautiful flower is that of a good fruit. As to
that it cannot be doubted that if our queen had been ugly and not
composed of her great beauty, she would have been very bad in view of
the great causes to be so that were given her. Thus said the late Queen
Isabella of Castile, that wise and virtuous and very Catholic princess:
“The fruit of clemency in a queen of great beauty and lofty heart,
covetous of honour, is sweeter far than any vengeance whatever, even
though it be undertaken for just claims and reason.”
This queen most sacredly observes that rule, striving to conform to the
commandments of her God, whom she has always loved and feared and served
devotedly. Now that the world has abandoned her and made war upon her,
she takes her sole resource in God, whom she serves daily, as I am told
by those who have seen her in her affliction; for never does she miss a
mass, taking the communion often and reading much in Holy Scripture,
finding there her peace and consolation.
She is most eager to obtain the fine new books that are composed, as
much on sacred subjects as on human; and when she undertakes to read a
book, however large and long it be, she never stops or quits it until
she sees the end, and often loses sleep and food in doing so. She
herself composes, both in prose and verse. As to which no one can think
otherwise than that her compositions are learned, beautiful, and
pleasing, for she knows the art; and could we bring them to the light,
the world would draw great pleasure and great profit from them. Often
she makes very beautiful verses and stanzas, that are sung to her by
choir-boys whom she keeps, and which she sings herself (for her voice is
beautiful and pleasant) to a lute, playing it charmingly. And thus she
spends her time and wears away her luckless days,--offending none, and
living that tranquil life she chooses as the best.
She has done me the honour to write me often in her adversity, I being
so presumptuous as to send for news of her. But is she not the daughter
and sister of my kings, and must I not wish to know her health, and be
glad and happy when I hear ‘tis good? In her first letter she writes
thus:--
“By the remembrance you have of me, which is not less new than pleasant
to me, I see that you have well preserved the affection you have always
shown to our family and to the few now left of its sad wreck, so that I,
in whatever state I be, shall ever be disposed to serve you; feeling
most happy that ill fortune has not effaced my name from the remembrance
of my oldest friends, of whom you are. I know that you have chosen, like
myself, a tranquil life; and I count those happy who can maintain it, as
God has given me the grace to do these five years, He having brought me
to an ark of safety, where the storms of all these troubles cannot, I
thank God, hurt me; so that if there remain to me some means to serve my
friends, and you particularly, you will find me wholly so disposed with
right good will.”
Those are noble words; and such was the state and resolution of our
beautiful princess. That is what it is to be born of a noble house, the
greatest in the world, whence she drew her courage by inheritance from
many brave and valiant kings, her father, grandfather, great-grandfather,
and all their ancestors. And be it, as she says, that from so great
a shipwreck she alone remains, not recognized and reverenced as she
should be by her people, I believe this people of France has suffered
much misery for that reason, and will suffer more for this war of the
League. But to-day this is not so;[17] for by the valour and wisdom
and fine government of our king never was France more flourishing, or
more pacific, or better ruled; which is the greatest miracle ever seen,
having issued from so vast an abyss of evils and corruptions; by which
it seems that God has loved our queen,--He being good and merciful.
Oh! how ill-advised is he who trusts in the people of to-day! Oh! how
differently did the Romans recognize the posterity of Augustus Cæsar,
who gave them wealth and grandeurs, from the people of France, who
received so much from their later kings these hundred years, and even
from François I. and Henri II., so that without them France would have
been tumbled topsy-turvy by her enemies watching for that chance, and
even by the Emperor Charles, that hungry and ambitious man. And thus it
is they are so ungrateful, these people, toward Marguerite, sole and
only remaining daughter and princess of France! It is easy to foresee
the wrath of God upon them, because nothing is to Him so odious as
ingratitude, especially to kings and queens, who here below fulfil the
place and state of God. And thou, disloyal Fortune, how plainly dost
thou show that there are none, however loved by heaven and blessed by
nature, who can be sure of thee and of thy favours a single day! Art
thou not dishonoured in thus so cruelly affronting her who is all
beauty, sweetness, virtue, magnanimity and kindness?
All this I wrote during those wars we had among us for ten years. To
make an end, did I not speak elsewhere of this great queen in other
discourses I would lengthen this still more and all I could, for on so
excellent a subject the longest words are never wearisome; but for a
time I now postpone them.
Live, princess, live in spite of Fortune! Never can you be other than
immortal upon earth and in heaven, whither your noble virtues bear you
in their arms. If public voice and fame had not made common praise of
your great merits, or if I were of those of noble speech, I would say
further here; for never did there come into the world a figure so
celestial.
This queen who should by good right order us
By laws and edicts and above us reign,
Till we behold a reign of pleasure under her,
As in her father’s days, a Star of France,
Fortune hath hindered. Ha! must rightful claim
Be wrongly lost because of Fortune’s spite?
Never did Nature make so fine a thing
As this great unique princess of our France!
Yet Fortune chooses to undo her wholly.
Behold how evil balances with good!
* * * * *
In the sixteenth century there were three Marguerites: one, sister of
François I. and Queen of Navarre, celebrated for her intellect, her
Tales in the style of Boccaccio, and her verses, which are less
interesting; another, Marguerite, niece of the preceding, sister of
Henri II., who became Duchesse de Savoie, very witty, also a writer of
verses, and, in her youth, the patroness of the new poets at Court; and
lastly, the third Marguerite, niece and great-niece of the first two,
daughter of Henri II. and Catherine de’ Medici, first wife of Henri IV.,
and sister of the last Valois. It is of her that I speak to-day as
having left behind her most agreeable historical pages and opened in our
literature that graceful series of women’s Memoirs which henceforth
never ceases, but is continued in later years and lively vein by
Mesdames de La Fayette, de Caylus and others. All of these Memoirs are
books made without intending it, and the better for that. The following
is the reason why Queen Marguerite took the idea of writing those in
which she describes herself with so lightsome a pen.
Brantôme, who was making a gallery of illustrious French and foreign
ladies, after bringing Marie Stuart into it, bethought him of placing
Marguerite beside her as another example of the injustice and cruelty of
Fortune. Marguerite, at the period when Brantôme indited his impulsive,
enthusiastic portrait of her, flinging upon his paper that eulogy which
may truly be called delirious, was confined at the castle of Usson in
Auvergne (1593), where she was not so much a prisoner as mistress.
Prisoner at first, she soon seduced the man who held her so and took
possession of the place, where she passed the period of the League
troubles, and beyond it, in an impenetrable haven. The castle of Usson
had been fortified by Louis XI., well-versed in precautions, who wanted
it as a sure place in which to lodge his prisoners. There Marguerite
felt herself safe, not only from sudden attack, but also from the trial
of a long siege and repeated assault. Writing to her husband, Henri IV.,
in October, 1594, she says to him, jokingly, that if he could see the
fortress and the way in which she had protected herself within it he
would see that God alone could reduce it, and she has good reason to
believe that “this hermitage was built to be her ark of safety.”
The castle which she thus compares to Noah’s ark, and which some of her
panegyrists, convinced that she who lived there was given to celestial
contemplations, compare to Mount Tabor, was regarded as a Caprea and an
abominable lair by enemies, who, from afar, plunged eyes of hatred into
it. It is very certain, however, that Queen Marguerite lost nothing in
that retreat of the delicate nicety of her mind, for it was there that
she undertook to write her Memoirs in a few afternoons, in order to come
to Brantôme’s assistance and correct him on certain points. We will
follow her, using now and then some contemporary information, without
relying too much upon either, but endeavouring to draw with simple truth
a singular portrait in which there enters much that was enchanting and,
towards the end, fantastic.
Marguerite, born at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, May 14, 1553, was six years
old when her father, Henri II., was killed at that fatal tournament
which ruined the fortunes of the house of Valois. She tells us several
anecdotes of herself and her childish repartees which prove a precocious
mind. She takes great pains to call attention to a matter which in her
is really a sign, a distinctive note through all excesses, namely: that
as a child and when it was the fashion at Court to be “Huguenot,” and
when all those who had intelligence, or wished to pass for having it,
had withdrawn from what they called “bigotry,” she resisted that
influence. In vain did her brother, d’Anjou, afterward Henri III., fling
her Hours into the fire and give her the Psalms and the Huguenot prayers
in place of it; she held firm and preserved herself from the mania of
Huguenotism, which at that date (1561) was a fancy at Court, a French
and mundane fashion, attractive for a time to even those who were soon
to turn against it and repress it. Marguerite, in the midst of a life
that was little exemplary, will always be found to have kept with
sincerity this corner of good Catholicism which she derived from her
race, and which made her in this respect and to this degree more of an
Italian than a Frenchwoman; however, that which imports us to notice is
that she _had it_.
Still a child when the first religious wars began, she was sent to
Amboise with her young brother, d’Alençon. There she found herself in
company with several of Brantôme’s female relations: Mme. de Dampierre,
his aunt, Mme. de Retz, his cousin; and she began with the elder of
these ladies a true friendship; with the younger, the cousin, the
affection came later. Marguerite gives the reason for this very
prettily:--
“At that time the advanced age of your aunt and my childish youthfulness
had more agreement; for it is the nature of old people to love children;
and those who are in the perfection of their age, like your cousin,
despise and dislike their annoying simplicity.”
Childhood passed, and the first awakening to serious things was given to
Marguerite about the time of the battle of Moncontour (1569). She was
then sixteen. The Duc d’Anjou, afterwards Henri III., aged eighteen,
handsome, brave, and giving promise of a virtue and a prudence he never
justified, took his sister aside one day in one of the alleys of the
park at Plessis-lez-Tours to tell her of his desire, on starting for the
army, to leave her as his confidant and support with their mother,
Catherine de’ Medici, during his absence at the wars. He made her a long
speech, which she reports in full with some complacency:--
“Sister, the nourishment we have taken together obliges us, not less
than proximity, to love each other.... Until now we have naturally been
guided to this without design and without the said union being of any
utility beyond the pleasure we have had in conversing together. That was
good for our childhood; but now it is time to no longer live like
children.”
He then points out to her the great and noble duties to which God calls
him, in which the queen, their mother, brought him up, and which King
Charles IX., their brother, lays upon him. He fears that this king,
courageous as he is, may not always be satisfied with hunting, but will
become ambitious to put himself at the head of the armies, the command
of which has been hitherto left to him. It is this that he wishes to
prevent.
“In this apprehension,” he continues, “thinking of some means of remedy,
I believe that it is necessary to leave some very faithful person behind
me who will maintain my side with the queen, my mother. I know no one as
suitable as you, whom I regard as a second myself. You have all the
qualities that can be desired,--intelligence, judgment, and fidelity.”
The Duc d’Anjou then proposes to his sister to change her manner of
life, to be assiduous towards the queen, their mother, at all hours, at
her _lever_, in her cabinet during the day, at her _coucher_, and so act
that she be treated henceforth, not as a child, but as a person who
represents him during his absence. “This language,” she remarks, “was
very new to me, having lived until then without purpose, thinking of
nothing but dancing and hunting; and without much interest even in
dressing and in appearing beautiful, not having yet reached the age of
such ambitions.” The fear she always felt for the queen, her mother, and
the respectful silence she maintained in her presence, held her back
still further. “I came very near,” she says, “replying to him as Moses
did to God in the vision of the bush: ‘Who am I? Send, I pray thee, by
him whom thou shouldest send.’” Nevertheless, she felt within her at her
brother’s words a new courage, and powers hitherto unknown to her, and
she soon consented to all, entering zealously into her brother’s design.
From that moment she felt herself “transformed.”
This fraternal and politic union thus created by the Duc d’Anjou did not
last. On his return from the victory of Moncontour she found him
changed, distrustful, and ruled by a favourite, du Gua, who possessed
him as so many others possessed him later. Henceforth his sister was out
of favour with him, and it was with her younger brother, the Duc
d’Alençon, that Marguerite renewed and continued as long as she could a
union of the same kind, which gave room for all the feelings and all the
ambitious activities of youth.
Did she at that time give some ground for the coolness of her brother
d’Anjou by her liaison with the young Duc de Guise? An historian who
knew Marguerite well and was not hostile to her, says: “She had long
loved Henri, Duc de Guise, who was killed at Blois, and had so fixed the
affections of her heart from her youth upon that prince of many
attractions that she never loved the King of Navarre, afterwards King of
France of happy memory, but hated him from the beginning, and was
married to him in spite of herself, and against canonical law.”[18]
However this may be, the Duc d’Anjou seized the pretext of the Duc de
Guise to break with his sister, whose enemy he became insensibly, and he
succeeded in alienating her from her mother.
Marguerite, in this flower of her youth, was, according to all
testimony, enchantingly beautiful. Her beauty was not so much in the
special features of her face as in the grace and charm of her whole
person, with its mingling of seduction and majesty. Her hair was dark,
which was not thought a beauty in those days; blond hair reigned. “I
have seen her sometimes wearing her natural hair without any peruke
artifice,” Brantôme tells us, “and though it was black (having inherited
that colour from King Henri, her father), she knew so well how to twist
and curl and arrange it, in imitation of her sister, the Queen of Spain,
who never wore any hair but her own, that such arrangement and coiffure
became her as well as, or better than, any other.” Toward the end of her
life Marguerite, becoming in her turn antiquated, with no brown hair to
dress, made great display of blond perukes. “For them she kept great,
fair-haired footmen, who were shaved from time to time;” but in her
youth, when she dared to be dark-haired as nature made her, it was not
unbecoming to her; for she had a most dazzling complexion and her
“beautiful fair face resembled the sky in its purest and greatest
serenity” with its “noble forehead of whitening ivory.” Nor must we
forget her art of adorning and dressing herself to advantage, and the
new inventions of that kind she gave to women, she being then the queen
of the modes and fashion. As such she appeared on all solemn occasions,
and notably on that day when, at the Tuileries, the queen-mother fêted
the Polish seigneurs who came to offer the crown of Poland to the Duc
d’Anjou, and Ronsard, who was present, confesses that the beautiful
goddess Aurora was vanquished; but more notably still on that flowery
Easter at Blois, when we see her in procession, her dark hair starred
with diamonds and precious stones, wearing a gown of crinkled cloth of
gold from Constantinople, the weight of which would have crushed any
other woman, but which her beautiful, rich, strong figure supported
firmly, bearing the palm in her hand, her consecrated branch, “with
regal majesty, and a grace half proud, half tender.” Such was the
Marguerite of the lovely years before the disasters and the flights,
before the castle of Usson, where she aged and stiffened.
This beauty, so real, so solid, which had so little need of borrowed
charms, had, like all her being, its fantasticalities and its
superstition. I have said already that she frequently disguised her
rich, brown hair, preferring a blond wig, “more or less charmingly
fashioned.” Her beautiful face was presented to view “all painted and
stained.” She took such care of her skin that she spoiled it with washes
and recipes of many kinds, which gave her erysipelas and pimples. In
fact, she was the model and eke the slave of the fashions of her time;
and as she survived those days she became in the end a species of
preserved idol and curiosity, such as may be seen in a show-case. The
great Sully, when he one day reappeared at the Court of Louis XIII. with
his ruff and his costume of the time of Henri IV., gave that crowd of
young courtiers something to laugh at; and so, when Queen Marguerite,
having returned from Usson to Paris, showed herself at the remodelled
Court of Henri IV. she produced the same effect on that young century,
which smiled at beholding this solemn survival of the Valois.
Like all those Valois, a worthy granddaughter of François I., she was
learned. To the Poles who harangued in Latin she showed that she
understood them by replying on the spot, eloquently and pertinently,
without the help of an interpreter. She loved poetry and wrote it, and
had it written for her by salaried poets whom she treated as friends.
When she had once begun to read a book she could not leave it, or pause
till she came to the end, “and very often she would lose both her eating
and drinking.” But let us not forestall the time. She herself tells us
that this taste for study and reading came to her for the first time
during a previous imprisonment in which Henri III. held her for several
months in 1575, and we are still concerned with her cloudless years.
She was married, in spite of her objections as a good Catholic, to
Henri, King of Navarre, six days before the Saint-Bartholomew (August,
1572). She relates with much naïveté and in a simple tone the scenes of
that night of horror, of which she was ignorant until the last moment.
We see in her narrative that wounded and bleeding gentleman pursued
through the corridors of the Louvre, and taking refuge in Marguerite’s
chamber, and flinging himself with the cry “Navarre! Navarre!” upon her;
shielding his own body from the murderers with that of his queen, she
not knowing whether she had to do with a madman or an assailant. When
she did know what the danger was she saved the poor man, keeping him in
bed and dressing his wounds in her cabinet until he was cured. Queen
Marguerite, so little scrupulous in morality, is better than her
brothers; of the vanishing Valois she has all the good qualities and
many of their defects, but not their cruelty.
After this half-missed blow of the Saint-Bartholomew, which did not
touch the princes of the blood, an attempt was made to unmarry her from
the King of Navarre. On a feast day when she was about to take the
sacrament, her mother asked her to tell her under oath, truly, whether
the king, her husband, had behaved to her as yet like a husband, a man,
and whether there was not still time to break the union. To this
Marguerite played the _ingénue_, so she asserts, apparently not
comprehending. “I begged her,” she says, “to believe that I knew nothing
of what she was speaking. I could then say with truth as the Roman lady
said, when her husband was angry because she had not warned him his
breath was bad, ‘that she had supposed all men were alike, never having
been near to any one but him.’”
Here Marguerite wishes to have it understood that she had never, so far,
made comparison of any man with another man; she plays the innocent, and
by her quotation from the Roman lady she also plays the learned; which
is quite in the line of her intelligence.
It would be a great error of literary judgment to consider these
graceful Memoirs as a work of nature and simplicity; it is rather one of
discrimination and subtlety. Wit sparkles throughout; but study and
learning are perceptible. In the third line we come upon a Greek word:
“I would praise your work more,” she writes to Brantôme, “if you had
praised me less; not wishing that the praise I give should be attributed
to _philautia_ rather than to reason;” by _philautia_ she means
self-love. Marguerite (she will remind us of it if we forget it) is by
education and taste of the school of Ronsard, and a little of that of Du
Bartas. During her imprisonment in 1575, giving herself up, as she tells
us, to reading and devotion, she shows us the study which led her back
to religion; she talks to us of the “universal page of Nature;” the
“ladder of knowledge;” the “chain of Homer;” and of “that agreeable
Encyclopædia which, starting from God, returns to God, the principle
and the end of all things.” All that is learned, and even
transcendental.