elevated topics of philosophy or sentiment. In her last years, during
her dinners and suppers, she usually had four learned men beside her, to
whom she propounded at the beginning of the meal some topic more or less
sublime or subtile, and when each had spoken for or against it and given
his reasons, she would intervene and renew the contest, provoking and
attracting to herself at will their contradiction. Here Marguerite was
essentially of her period, and she bears the seal of it on her style.
The language of her Memoirs is not an exception to be counted against
the mannerism and taste of her time; it is only a more happy employment
of it. She knows mythology and history; she cites readily Burrhus,
Pyrrhus, Timon, the centaur Chiron, and the rest. Her language is by
choice metaphorical and lively with poesy. When Catherine de’ Medici,
going to see her son, the Duc d’Anjou, travels from Paris to Tours in
three days and a half (very rapid in those times, and the journey put
that poor Cardinal de Bourbon, little accustomed to such discomfort,
entirely out of breath), it is because the queen-mother is “borne,” says
Marguerite, “on the wings of desire and maternal affection.”
Marguerite likes and affects all comparisons borrowed from fabulous
natural history, and she varies them with reminiscences of ancient
history. When, in 1582, they recall her to the Court of France, taking
her from her husband and from Nérac, where she had then been three or
four years, she perceives a project of her enemies to blow up a quarrel
between herself and her husband during this absence. “They hoped,” she
says, “that separation would be like the breaking of the Macedonian
battalion.” When the famous Phalanx was once broken entrance was easy.
This style, so ornate and figurative, usually delicate and graceful, has
also its outspokenness and firmness of tone. Speaking of the expedition
projected by her brother, the Duc d’Alençon, in Flanders, she explains
it in terms of energetic beauty, representing to the king that “it is
for the honour and aggrandizement of France; it will prove an invention
to prevent civil war, all restless spirits desirous of novelty having
means to pass into Flanders and blow off their smoke and surfeit
themselves with war. This enterprise will also serve, like Piedmont, as
a school for the nobility in the practice of arms; we shall there revive
the Montlucs and Brissacs, the Termes and the Bellegardes, and all those
great marshals who, trained to war in Piedmont, have since then so
gloriously and successfully served their king and their country.”
One of the most agreeable parts of these Memoirs is the journey in
Flanders, Hainault, and the Liège country which Marguerite made in 1577;
a journey undertaken ostensibly to drink the waters of Spa, but in
reality to gain partisans for her brother d’Alençon, in his project of
wrenching the Low Countries from Spain. The details of her coquettish,
and ceremonial magnificence, so dear to ladies, are not omitted:--
“I went,” says Marguerite, “in a litter with columns covered with
rose-coloured Spanish velvet, embroidered in gold and shaded silks with
a device; this litter was enclosed in glass, and each glass also bore a
device, there being, whether on the velvet or on the glass, forty
different devices about the sun and its effects, with the words in
Spanish and Italian.”
Those forty devices and their explanation were an ever fresh subject of
gallant conversation in the towns through which she passed. Amid it
all, Marguerite, then in the full bloom of her twenty-fourth year, went
her way, winning all hearts, seducing the governors of citadels, and
persuading them to useful treachery. On this journey she meets with
charming Flemish scenes which she pictures delightfully. Take, for
example, the gala festival at Mons, where the beautiful Comtesse de
Lalain (Marguerite, Princesse de Ligne), whose beauty and rich costume
are described most particularly, has her child brought to her in
swaddling-clothes and suckles it before the company; “which,” remarks
Marguerite, “would have been an incivility in any one else; but she did
it with such grace and simplicity, like all the rest of her actions,
that she received as much praise as the company did pleasure.”
Leaving Namur, we have at Liège a touching and pathetic story of a poor
young girl, Mlle. de Tournon, who dies of grief for being slighted and
betrayed by her lover, to whom she was going in the utmost confidence;
and who himself, coming to a better mind too late, rushes to console
her, and finds her coffin on arrival. We have here from Queen
Marguerite’s pen the finished sketch of a tale in the style of Mme. de
La Fayette, just as above we had the drawing of a perfect little Flemish
picture. On her return from this journey, the scenes Marguerite passes
through at Dinant prove her coolness and presence of mind, and present
us with another Flemish picture, but not so graceful as that of Mons and
the beautiful nursing countess; this time it is a scene of public
drunkenness, grotesque burgher rioting, and burgomasters in their cups.
A painter need only transfer and copy the very lines which Marguerite
has so happily traced, to make a faithful picture.
After these journeys, being now reunited at her house of La Fère in
Picardy with her dear brother d’Alençon, she realizes there for nearly
two months, “which were to us” she says, “like two short days,” one of
those terrestrial paradises which were at all times the desire of her
imagination and of her heart. She loved beyond all things those spheres
of enchantment, those Fortunate Isles, alike of Urania and of Calypso,
and she was ever seeking to reproduce them in all places and under all
forms, whether at her Court at Nérac or amid the rocks of Usson, or, at
the last, in that beautiful garden on the banks of the Seine (which
to-day is the Rue des Petits-Augustins) where she strove to cheat old
age.
“O my queen! how good it is to be with you!” exclaims continually her
brother d’Alençon, enchanted with the thousand graceful imaginations
with which she varied and embellished this sojourn at La Fère. And she
adds naïvely, mingling her Christian erudition with sentiment: “He would
gladly have said with Saint Peter: ‘Let us make our tabernacle here,’ if
the regal courage he possessed and the generosity of his soul had not
called him to greater things.” As for her, we can conceive that she
would gladly have remained there, prolonging without weariness the
enchantment; she would willingly have arranged her life like that
beautiful garden at Nérac of which she constantly speaks, “which has
such charming alleys of laurel and cypress,” or like the park she had
made there, “with paths three thousand paces long beside the river;” the
chapel being close at hand for morning mass, and the violins at her
orders for the evening ball.
Whatever ability and shrewdness Queen Marguerite may have shown in
various political circumstances in the course of her life, we
nevertheless perceive plainly that she was not a political woman; she
was too essentially of her sex for that. There are very few women who,
like the Princess Palatine [Anne de Gonzaga] or the illustrious
Catherine of Russia, know how to be libertine yet sure of themselves;
able to establish an impenetrable partition between the alcove and the
cabinet of public affairs. Nearly all the women who have mingled in the
intrigues of politics have introduced and confused with them their
intrigues of heart or senses. Consequently, whatever intelligence they
may have, they elude or escape at a certain moment, and unless there be
a man who holds the tiller and gives them with decision their course, we
find them unfaithful, treacherous, not to be relied on, and capable at
any moment of colloguing through a secret window with an emissary of the
opposite side. Marguerite, with infinite intelligence and grace, was one
of those women. Distinguished but not superior, and wholly influenced by
passions, she had wiles and artifices of a passing kind, but no views,
and still less stability.
One of the remarkable features of her Memoirs is that she does not tell
all, nor even the half of all, and in the very midst of the odious and
extravagant accusations made against her she sits, pen in hand, a
delicate and most discreet woman. Nothing can be less like confession
than her Memoirs. “We find there,” says Bayle, “many sins of omission;
but could we expect that Queen Marguerite would acknowledge the things
that would blast her? Such avowals are reserved for the tribunal of
confession; they are not meant for history.” At the most, when
enlightened by history and by the pamphlets of the period, we can merely
guess at certain feelings of which she presents to us only the
superficial and specious side. When she speaks of Bussy d’Amboise she
scarcely restrains her admiration for that gallant cavalier, and we
fancy we can see in the abundance of that praise that her heart
overflows.
Even the letters that we have from her say little more. Among them are
love letters addressed to him whom at one time she loved the most,
Harlay de Chanvalon. Here we find no longer the charming, moderately
ornate, and naturally polished style of the Memoirs; this is all of the
highest metaphysics and purest fustian, nearly unintelligible and most
ridiculous. “Adieu, my beauteous sun! adieu, my noble angel! fine
miracle of nature!” those are the most commonplace and earthly of her
expressions; the rest mount ever higher till lost in the Empyrean. It
would really seem, from reading these letters, as if Marguerite had
never loved with heart-love, only with the head and the imagination; and
that, feeling truly no love but the physical, she felt herself bound to
refine it in expression and to _petrarchize_ in words, she, who was so
practical in behaviour. She borrows from the false poetry of her day its
tinsel in order to persuade herself that the fancy of the moment is an
eternal worship. A practical observation is quoted of her which tells us
better than her own letters the secret of her life. “Would you cease to
love?” she said, “possess the thing beloved.” It is to escape this quick
disenchantment, this sad and rapid awakening, that she is so prodigal of
her figurative, mythological, impossible expressions; she is trying to
make herself a veil; the heart counts for nothing. She seems to be
saying to love: “Thy base is so trivial, so passing a thing, let us try
to support it by words, and so prolong its image and its play.”
Her life well deduced and well related would make the subject of a
teeming and interesting volume. Having obtained, after the persecutions
and troubles, permission to rejoin her husband in Gascogne (1578), she
remained there three and a half years, enjoying her liberty and leaving
him his. She counts these days at Nérac, mingled, in spite of the
re-beginning wars, with balls, excursions, and “all sorts of virtuous
pleasures,” as an epoch of happiness. Henri’s weaknesses and her own
harmonized remarkably, and never clashed. But Henri soon crossed the
limit of license, and she, on her side, equally. It is not for us to
hold the balance or enter here into details which would soon become
indelicate and shameful. Marguerite, who had gone to spend some time in
Paris at her brother’s Court (1582, 1583) did not return to her husband
until after an odious scandal had made public her frailty.
From that time forth her life did not retain its early, smiling
joyfulness. She was now past thirty; civil wars were lighted, never to
be extinguished until after the desperate struggles and total defeat of
the League. Marguerite, becoming a queen-adventuress, changed her abode
from time to time, until she found herself in the castle of Usson, that
asylum of which I have spoken, where she passed no less than eighteen
years (1587-1605). What happened there? Doubtless many common frailties,
but less odious than are told by bitter and dishonourable chroniclers,
the only authorities for the tales they put forth.
During this time Queen Marguerite did not entirely cease to correspond
with her husband, now become King of France. If the conduct of the royal
pair leaves much to be desired with regard to each other, and also with
regard to the public, let us at least recognize that their correspondence
is that of honourable persons, persons of good company, whose hearts are
much better than their morals. When reasons of State determined Henri to
_unmarry himself_, to break a union which was not only sterile but scandalous,
Marguerite agreed without resistance,--seeming, however, to be fully
conscious of what she was losing. To accomplish the formalities of
divorce, the pope delegated certain bishops and cardinals to interrogate
separately the husband and wife. Marguerite expresses the desire,
inasmuch as she must be questioned, that this may be done “by more
private and familiar” persons, her courage not being able to endure
publicly so great a _diminution_; “fearing that my tears,” she writes,
“may make these cardinals think I am acting from force or constraint,
which would injure the effect the king desires” (Oct. 21, 1599). King
Henri was touched by the feelings she showed throughout this long
negotiation. “I am very satisfied,” he writes, “at the ingenuousness and
candour of your procedure; and I hope that God will bless the remainder
of our days with fraternal affection, accompanied by the public good,
which will render them very happy.” He calls her henceforth his sister;
and she herself says to him: “You are father, brother, and king to me.”
If their marriage was one of the least noble and the most bourgeois,
their divorce, at any rate, was royal.
* * * * *
[Here Sainte-Beuve does not keep strictly to history. Henri IV. had long
urged Marguerite to consent to a divorce; but she, aware that he was
taking steps to divorce Gabrielle d’Estrées from her husband, in order
to marry her, and feeling the indignity of such a marriage, firmly
refused, and continued to do so until the sudden death of Gabrielle in
Paris during Holy Week of 1599; on which Marguerite consented at once to
the divorce, and Henri married Marie de’ Medici, December 17 of the same
year.
[Illustration: The Coronation of Marie de’ Medici]
Five years later (1605) Marguerite returned from the castle of Usson and
held her Court in Paris at the hôtel de Sens (which still exists) and at
her various châteaux in Languedoc; no longer, alas! the Reine Margot of
our ill-regulated affections, and somewhat open to the malicious
comments of Tallemant des Reaux, but appearing at times with all her
wonted spirit and regal dignity. These were the days when she kept
a brigade of golden-haired footmen who were shorn for the wigs; and the
story goes that her gowns were made with many pockets, in each of which
she kept the mummied heart of a lover. But such tales must be taken for
what they are worth, and a better chronicler than the satirists of the
Valois has given us ocular proof of her last majestic presence at a
public ceremony five years before her death.
In 1610, Henri IV. preparing to leave France for the war in Germany, and
wishing to appoint Queen Marie de’ Medici regent, it became necessary to
have the latter crowned. This was done in the cathedral of Saint-Denis,
May 13, 1610. The Queen of Navarre, as Marguerite, daughter of France
and first princess of the blood, was required to be present at the
ceremony. Rubens’ splendid picture (reproduced in this volume) gives the
scene. Marie de’ Medici, kneeling before the altar, is being crowned by
Cardinal de Joyeuse, assisted by his clergy and two other cardinals;
beside the queen are the dauphin (Louis XIII.) and his sister,
Élisabeth, afterwards Queen of Spain. The Princesse de Conti and the
Duchesse de Montpensier carry the queen’s train; the Duc de Ventadour,
his back to the spectator, bears the sceptre, and the Chevalier de
Vendôme the sword of Justice. To the left, leading the cortège of
princesses and nobles, is the Queen of Navarre, easily recognized by her
small closed crown, all the other princesses wearing coronets. In the
background, to right, in a gallery, sits Henri IV. viewing the ceremony.
As he did so he turned with a shudder to the man behind him and said: “I
am thinking how this scene would appear if this were the Last Day and
the Judge were to summon us all before Him.” Henri IV. was killed by
Ravaillac the following morning, while his coach stood blocked in the
streets by the crowds who were collecting for the public entry of Marie
de’ Medici into Paris.
The young Élisabeth, eldest daughter of the king and Marie de’ Medici,
who appears at the coronation of her mother, was afterwards wife of
Philip IV. of Spain, and mother of the Infanta Maria Theresa, wife of
Louis XIV, also of Carlos II., at whose death Louis XIV. obtained the
crown of Spain for his grandson, the Duc d’Anjou, Philip V. This
Élisabeth of France, Queen of Spain, is the original of Rubens’
magnificent portrait reproduced in this chapter.--TR.]
* * * * *
Queen Marguerite returned from Usson to Paris in 1605; and here we find
her in her last estate, turned slightly to ridicule by Tallemant, the
echo of the new century. Eighteen years of confinement and solitude had
given her singularities, and even manias; they now burst forth in open
day. She still had adventures both gallant and startling: an equerry
whom she loved was killed at her carriage door by a jealous servant, and
the poet Maynard, a young disciple of Malherbe, one of Marguerite’s
_beaux-esprits_, wrote stanzas and plaints about it. During the same
period Marguerite had many sincere thoughts that were more than fits of
devotion. With Maynard for secretary, she had also Vincent de Paul,
young in those days, for her chaplain. She founded and endowed convents,
all the while paying learned men to instruct her in philosophy, and
musicians to amuse her during divine service and at hours more profane.
She gave many alms and gratuities and did not pay her debts. It was not
precisely good sense that presided over her life. But amidst it all she
was loved. “On the 27th day of the month of March” (1615), says a
contemporary, “died in Paris Queen Marguerite, sole remains of the race
of Valois,--a princess full of kindness and of good intentions for the
good and the peace of the State, _who did no harm to any but herself_.
She was greatly regretted. She died at the age of sixty-two.”
Certain persons have attempted to compare her for beauty, for
misfortunes, for intellect, with Marie Stuart. Certainly, at a point of
departure there was much in common between the two queens, the two
sisters-in-law, but the comparison cannot be maintained historically.
Marie Stuart, who had in herself the wit, grace, and manners of the
Valois, who was scarcely more moral as a woman than Marguerite, and was
implicated in acts that were far more monstrous, had, or seemed to have,
a certain elevation of heart, which she acquired, or developed, in her
long captivity crowned by her sorrowful death. Of the two destinies, the
one represents definitely a great cause, and ends in a pathetic legend
of victim and martyr; the reputation of the other is spent and scattered
in tales and anecdotes half smutty, half devout, into which there enters
a grain of satire and of gayety. From the end of one comes many a
tearful tragedy; from that of the other nought can be made but a
_fabliau_.
That which ought to be remembered to Marguerite’s honour is her
intelligence, her talent for saying the right word; in short, that which
is said of her in the Memoirs of Cardinal de Richelieu: “She was the
refuge of men of letters; she loved to hear them talk; her table was
always surrounded by them, and she learned so much from their
conversation that she talked better than any other woman of her time,
and wrote more elegantly than the ordinary condition of her sex would
warrant.” It is in that way, by certain exquisite pages which form a
date in our language, that she enters, in her turn, into literary
history, the noble refuge of so many wrecks, and that a last and a
lasting ray shines from her name.
C. A. SAINTE-BEUVE, _Causeries du Lundi_ (1852).
DISCOURSE VI.
MESDAMES, THE DAUGHTERS OF THE NOBLE HOUSE OF FRANCE.[19]
1. _Madame Yoland de France._
’Tis a thing that I have heard great personages, both men and ladies of
the Court, remark, that usually the daughters of the house of France
have been good, or witty, or gracious, or generous, and in all things
accomplished; and to confirm this opinion they do not go back to the
olden time, but say it of those of whom they have knowledge themselves,
or have heard their fathers and grandfathers who have been at the Court
talk of.
First, I shall name here Madame Yoland of France, daughter of Charles
VII., and wife of the Duc de Savoie and Prince of Piedmont.
She was very clever; true sister to her brother, Louis XI. She leaned a
little to the party of Duc Charles de Bourgogne, her brother-in-law, he
having married her elder sister Catherine, who scarcely lived after
wedding her husband, so that her virtues do not appear. Yoland, seeing
that Duc Charles was her neighbour and might be feared, did what she
could to maintain his friendship, and he served her much in the business
of her State. But he dying, King Louis XI. came down upon her grandeur
and her means, and those of Savoie. But Madame la duchesse, clever lady!
found means of winning over her brother the king;, and went to see him
at Plessis-lez-Tours to settle their affairs. She having arrived, the
king went down to meet her in the courtyard and welcome her; and having
bowed and kissed her and put his arm around her neck, half laughing,
half pinching her, he said: “Madame la Bourgognian, you are very
welcome.” She, making him a great curtsey, replied: “Monsieur, I am not
Bourgognian; you will pardon me if you please. I am a very good
Frenchwoman and your humble servant.” On which the king took her by the
arm and led her to her chamber with very good welcome; but Madame
Yoland, who was shrewd and knew the king’s nature, was determined not to
remain long with him, but to settle her affairs as fast as she could and
get away.
The king, on the other hand, who knew the lady, did not press her to
stay very long; so that if one was displeased with the other, the other
was displeased with the first; wherefore without staying more than eight
days she returned, very little content with the king, her brother.
Philippe de Commines has told about this meeting more at length; but the
old people of those days said that they thought this princess a very
able female, who owed nothing to the king, her brother, who twitted her
often about being a Bourgognian; but she tacked about as gently and
modestly as she could, for fear of affronting him, knowing full well,
and better than even her brother, how to dissimulate, being a hundred
times slyer than he in face, and speech, and ways, though always very
good and very wise.
2. _Madame Jeanne de France._
Jeanne de France, daughter of the aforesaid king, Louis XI., was very
witty, but so good that after her death she was counted a saint, and
even as doing miracles, because of the sanctity of the life she led
after her husband, Louis XII., repudiated her [to marry Anne de
Bretagne]; after which she retired to Bourges, which was given her as a
dowry for the term of her natural life; where all her time was spent in
prayer and orisons and in serving God and his poor, without giving any
sign of the wrong that was done her by such repudiation. But the king
protested that he had been forced to marry her fearing the wrath of her
father, Louis XI., a master-man, and declared positively that he had
never known her as his wife. Thus the matter was allowed to pass; in
which this princess showed her wisdom, not making the reply of Richarde
of Scotland, wife of Charles le Gros, King of France, when her husband
repudiated her, affirming that he had never lived with her as his wife.
“That is well,” she said, “since by the oath of my husband I am maid and
virgin.” By those words she scoffed at her husband’s oath and her own
virginity.