frequently occupied the minds of literary and learned men. Her Letters
have been published with much care; in the edition given of the Poems of
François I. she is almost as much concerned as her brother, for she
contributes a good share to the volume. At the present time [1853] the
Société des Bibliophiles, considering that there was no correct edition
of the tales and _Nouvelles_ of this princess,--because, from the first,
the early editors have treated the royal author with great freedom, so
that it was difficult to find the true text of that curious work, more
famous than read,--have assumed the task of filling this literary
vacuum. The Society has trusted one of its most conscientious members,
M. Le Roux de Lincy, with compiling an edition from the original
manuscripts; and, moreover, wishing to give to this publication a stamp
of solidity, that air of good old quality so pleasing to amateurs, they
have sought for old type, obtaining some from Nuremberg dating back to
the first half of the eighteenth century, and have caused to be cast the
necessary quantity, which has been used in printing the present work,
and will serve in future for other publications of this Society. The
_Nouvelles de la Reine de Navarre_ are presented, with a portrait of the
author and a fac-simile of her signature, in a grave, neat, and elegant
manner. Let us therefore thank this Society, composed of lovers of fine
books, for having thus applied their good taste and munificence, and let
us come to the study of the personage whom they have aided us to know.
Marguerite de Valois, the first of the three Marguerites of the
sixteenth century, does not altogether resemble the reputation made of
her from afar. Born at the castle of Angoulême, April 11, 1492, two
years before her brother, who will in future be François I., she
received from her mother, Louise de Savoie, early a widow, a virtuous
and severe education. She learned Spanish, Italian, Latin, and later,
Hebrew and Greek. All these studies were not made at once, nor in her
earliest youth. Contemporary of the great movement of the Renaissance,
she shared in it gradually; she endeavoured to comprehend it fully, and
to follow it in all its branches, as became a person of lofty and
serious spirit, with a full and facile understanding and more leisure
than if she had been born upon the throne. Brantôme presents her to us
as “a princess of very great mind and ability, both by nature and power
of acquisition.” She continued to acquire as long as she lived; she
protected with all her heart and with all her influence the learned and
literary men of all orders and kinds; profiting by them and their
intercourse for her own advantage,--a woman who could cope with Marot
in the play of verses as well as she could answer Erasmus on nobler
studies.
We must not exaggerate, however; and the writings of Marguerite are
sufficiently numerous to allow us to justly estimate in her the two
distinct parts of originality and simple intelligence. As poet and
writer her originality is of small account, or, to speak more precisely,
she has none at all. Her intelligence, on the contrary, is great,
active, eager, generous. There was in her day an immense movement of the
human spirit, a Cause essentially literary and liberal, which filled all
minds and hearts with enthusiasm as public policy did much later.
Marguerite, young, open to all good and noble sentiments, to _virtue_
under all its forms, grew passionate for this cause; and when her
brother François came to the throne she told herself that it was her
mission to be its good genius and interpreter beside him, and to show
herself openly the patron and protectress of men who were exciting
against themselves by their learned innovations much pedantic rancour
and ill-will. It was thus that she allowed herself to be caught and won
insensibly to the doctrines of the Reformers, which appealed to her, in
the first instance, under a learned and literary form. Translators of
Scripture, they only sought, it seemed to her, to propagate its spirit
and make it better understood by pious souls; she enjoyed and favoured
them in the light of learned men, and welcomed them as loving at the
same time “good letters and Christ;” never suspecting any factious
after-thought. And even after she appeared to be undeceived in the main,
she continued to the last to plead for individuals to the king, her
brother, with zeal and humanity.
The passion that Marguerite had for that brother dominated all else. She
was his elder by two years and a half. Louise de Savoie, the young
widow, was only fifteen or sixteen years older than her daughter. These
two women had, the one for her son the other for her brother, a love
that amounted to worship; they saw in him, who was really to be the
honour and crown of their house, a dauphin who would soon, when his
reign was inaugurated at Marignano, become a glorious and triumphant
Cæsar.
“The day of the Conversion of Saint Paul, January 25, 1515,” says Madame
Louise in her Journal, “my son was anointed and crowned in the church at
Reims. For this I am very grateful to the Divine mercy, by which I am
amply compensated for all the adversities and annoyances which came to
me in my early years and in the flower of my youth. Humility has kept me
company, and Patience has never abandoned me.”
And a few months later, noting down with pride the day of Marignano
[victory of François I. over the Swiss and the Duke of Milan, making the
French masters of Lombardy], she writes in the transport of her heart:--
“September 13, which was Thursday, 1515, my son vanquished and destroyed
the Swiss near Milan; beginning the combat at five hours after mid-day,
which lasted all the night and the morrow till eleven o’clock before
mid-day; and that very day I started from Amboise to go on foot to
Notre-Dame-de-Fontaines, to commend to her what I love better than
myself, my son, glorious and triumphant Cæsar, subjugator of the
Helvetians.
“_Item._ That same day, September 13, 1515, between seven and eight in
the evening, was seen in various parts of Flanders a flame of fire as
long as a lance, which seemed as though it would fall upon the houses,
but was so bright that a hundred torches could not have cast so great a
light.”
Marguerite, learned and enlightened as she was, must have believed the
presage, for she writes the same words as her mother. Married at
seventeen years of age to the Duc d’Alençon, an insignificant prince,
she gave all her devotion and all her soul to her brother; therefore
when, in the tenth year of his reign, the disaster of Pavia took place
(February 25, 1525), and Marguerite learned the destruction of the
French army and the captivity of their king, we can conceive the blow it
was to her and to her mother. While Madame Louise, appointed regent of
the kingdom, showed strength and courage in that position, we can follow
the thoughts of Marguerite in the series of letters she wrote to her
brother, which M. Genin has published. Her first word is written to
console the captive and reassure him: “Madame (Louise de Savoie) has
felt such doubling of strength that night and day there is not a moment
lost for your affairs; therefore you need have no anxiety or pain about
your kingdom or your children.” She congratulates herself on knowing
that he has fallen into the hands of so kind and generous a victor as
the Viceroy of Naples, Charles de Lannoy; she entreats him, for the sake
of his mother, to take care of his health: “I have heard that you mean
to do this Lent without eating flesh or eggs, and sometimes fast
altogether for the honour of God. Monseigneur, as much as a very humble
sister can implore you, I entreat you not to do this, but consider how
fish goes against you; also believe that if you do it Madame has sworn
to do so too; and I shall have the sorrow to see you both give way.”
Marguerite, about this time, sees her husband, who escaped from Pavia,
die at Lyon. She mourns him; but after the first two days she surmounts
her grief and conceals it from her mother the regent, because, not being
able to render services herself, she should think she was most
unfortunate, she says, to hinder and shake the spirit of her who can do
such great things. When Marguerite is selected to go to her brother in
Spain (September, 1525) and work for his deliverance, her joy is great.
At last she can be useful to this brother, whom she considers “as him
whom God has left her in this world; father, brother, and husband.” She
mingles and varies in many ways those names of master, brother, king,
which she accumulates upon him, without their sufficing to express her
affection, so full and sincere is it: “Whatever it may be, _even to
casting to the winds the ashes of my bones to do you service_, nothing
can seem to me strange, or difficult, or painful, but always
consolation, repose, honour.” Such expressions, exaggerated in others,
are true on Marguerite’s lips.
She succeeded but little in her mission to Spain; there, where she
sought to move generous hearts and make their fibre of honour vibrate,
she found crafty dissimulation and policy. She was allowed to see her
brother for a short time only; he himself exacted that she should
shorten her stay, thinking her more useful to his interests in France.
She tears herself from him in grief, above all at leaving him ill, and
as low as possible in health. Oh! how she longed to return, to stay
beside him, and to take the “place of lacquey beside his cot.” It is her
opinion that he should buy his liberty at any price; let him return, no
matter on what conditions; no terms can be bad provided she sees him
back in France, and none can be good if he is still in Spain. As soon as
she sets foot in France she is received, she tells him, as a forerunner,
“as the Baptist of Jesus Christ.” Arriving at Béziers, she is surrounded
by crowds. “I assure you, Monseigneur,” she writes, “that when I tried
to speak of you to two or three, the moment I named the king everybody
pressed round to listen to me; in short, I am constrained to talk of
you, and I never close my speech without an accompaniment of tears from
persons of all classes.” Such was at that time the true grief of France
for the loss of her king.
As Marguerite advances farther into the country she observes more and
more the absence of the master; the kingdom is “like a body without a
head, living to recover you, dying in the sense that you are absent.” As
for herself, seeing this, she thinks that her toils in Spain were more
endurable than this stillness in France, “where fancies torment me more
than efforts.”
In general, all Marguerite’s letters do the greatest honour to her soul,
to her generous, solid qualities, filled with affection and heartiness.
Romance and drama have many a time expended themselves, as was indeed
their right, on this captivity in Madrid and on those interviews of
François I. and his sister, which lend themselves to the imagination;
but the reading of these simple, devoted letters, laying bare their
feelings, tells more than all. Here is a charming passage in which she
smiles to him and tries, on her return, to brighten the captive with
news of his children. François I. at this date had five, all of whom,
with one exception, were recovering from the measles.
“And now,” says Marguerite, “they are all entirely cured and very
healthy; M. le dauphin does marvels in studying, mingling with his
studies a hundred other exercises; and there is no question now of
temper, but of all the virtues. M. d’Orléans is nailed to his book and
says he wants to be wise; but M. d’Angoulême knows more than the others,
and does things that may be thought prophetic as well as childish;
which, Monseigneur, you would be amazed to hear of. Little Margot is
like me, and will not be ill; they tell me here she has very good grace,
and is growing much handsomer than Mademoiselle d’Angoulême ever was.”
Mademoiselle d’Angoulême is herself; and the little Margot who promises
to be prettier than her aunt and godmother, is the second of the
Marguerites, who is presently to be Duchesse de Savoie.
As a word has now been said about the beauty of Marguerite de Navarre,
what are we to think about it? Her actual portrait lessens the
exaggerated idea we might form of it from the eulogies of that day.
Marguerite resembles her brother. She has his slightly aquiline and very
long nose, the long, soft, and shrewd eye, the lips equally long,
refined and smiling. The expression of her countenance is that of
shrewdness on a basis of kindness. Her dress is simple; her _cotte_ or
gown is made rather high and flat, without any frippery, and is trimmed
with fur; her mob-cap, low upon her head, encircles the forehead and
upper part of the face, scarcely allowing any hair to be seen. She holds
a little dog in her arms. The last of the Marguerites, that other Queen
of Navarre, first wife of Henri IV., was the queen of modes and fashions
in her youth; she gave the tone. Our Marguerite did nothing of all that;
she left that rôle to the Duchesse d’Étampes and her like. Marot
himself, when praising her, insists particularly on her characteristic
of gentleness, “which effaces the beauty of the most beautiful,” on her
chaste glance and that _frank speech, without disguise, without
artifice_. She was sincere, “joyous, laughing readily,” fond of all
honest gayety, and when she wanted to say a lively word, too risky in
French, she said it in Italian or in Spanish. In other respects, full of
religion, morality, and sound training; justifying the magnificent
eulogy bestowed upon her by Erasmus. That wise monarch of literature,
that true emperor of the Latinity of his period, consoling Marguerite at
the moment when she was under the blow of the disaster of Pavia, writes
to her: “I have long admired and loved in you many eminent gifts of
God: prudence worthy of a philosopher, chastity, moderation, piety,
invincible strength of soul, and a wonderful contempt for all perishable
things. Who would not consider with admiration, in the sister of a great
king, qualities which we can scarcely find in priests and monks?” In
this last stroke upon the monks we catch the slightly satirical tone of
the Voltaire of those times. Remark that in this letter addressed to
Marguerite in 1525, and in another letter which closely followed the
first, Erasmus thanks and congratulates her on the services she never
ceases to render to the common cause of literature and tolerance.
These services rendered by Marguerite were real; but that which is a
subject of eulogy on the part of some is a source of blame on the part
of others. Her brother having married her for the second time, in 1527,
to Henri d’Albret, King of Navarre, she held her little Court at Pan
which thenceforth became the refuge and haven of all persecuted persons
and innovators. “She favoured Calvinism, which she abandoned in the
end,” says Président Hénault, “and was the cause of the rapid progress
of that dawning sect.” It is very true that Marguerite, open to all the
literary and generous sentiments of her time, behaved as, later, a
person on the verge of ‘89 might have favoured liberty with all her
strength without wishing or even perceiving the approaching revolution.
She did at this period as did the whole Court of France, which, merely
following fashion, the progress of Letters, the pleasure of
understanding Holy Scripture and of chanting the Psalms in French, came
near to being Lutheran or Calvinistic without knowing it. Their first
awakening was on a morning (October 19, 1534) when they read, affixed to
every wall in Paris, those bloody placards against the Catholic faith.
The imprudent ones of the party had fired the train before the
appointed time. Marguerite, good and loyal, knowing nothing of parties
and judging only by honourable persons and the men of letters of her
acquaintance, leaned to the belief that those infamous placards were the
act, not of Protestants, but of those who sought a pretext to compromise
and persecute them. Charitable and humane, she never ceased to act upon
her brother in the direction of clemency.
It was thus that on two or three occasions she tried to save the
unfortunate Berquin, who persisted in dogmatizing, and was, in spite of
all the princess’s efforts with the king, her brother, burned on the
Grève, April 24, 1529. To read the passages of the letters in which she
commends Berquin, one would think she espoused his opinions and his
beliefs; but we must not ask too much rigour and precision of Marguerite
in her ideas and their expression. There are moments, no doubt, in
reading her verse or her prose, when we might think that she had fully
accepted the Reformation; she reproduces its language, even its jargon.
Then, side by side, we see her become once more, or rather continue to
be, a believer after the manner of the best Catholics of her age, given
to all their practices, and not fearing to couple with them her
inconsistencies. Montaigne, who had great esteem for her, could not
prevent himself from noting, for example, her singular reflection about
a young and very great prince, whose history she relates in her
_Nouvelles_, and who has all the look of being François I.; she shows
him on his way to a rendezvous that is not edifying, and, to shorten his
way, he obtains permission of the porter of a monastery to cross its
enclosure. On his return, being no longer so hurried, the prince stops
to pray in the church of the cloister; “for,” she says, “although he led
the life of which I tell you, he was a prince who loved and feared
God.” Montaigne takes up that remark, and asks what good she found at
such a moment in that idea of divine protection and favour. “This is not
the only proof to be adduced,” he adds, “that women are not fitted to
treat of matters of theology.”
And, in truth, Marguerite was no theologian; she was a person of real
piety, heart, knowledge, and humanity, who mingled with her serious life
a happy, enjoying temperament, making a most sincere harmony of it all;
which surprises us a little in the present day. Brantôme relates (in his
“Lives of Illustrious Captains”) an anecdote of Marguerite which paints
her very well in this connection and measure. A brother of Brantôme, the
Capitaine de Bourdeille, had known at Ferrara in the household of the
duchess of that country (daughter of Louis XII.) a French lady, Mlle. de
La Roche, by whom he had made himself beloved. He brought her back with
him to France, and she went to the Court of the Queen of Navarre, where
she died, he no longer caring for her. One day, three months after this
death, Capitaine de Bourdeille passed through Pau, and having gone to
pay his respects to the Queen of Navarre as she returned from vespers,
was well received by her; and talking from topic to topic as they
walked, the princess led him quietly through the church to the spot
where the tomb of the lady he had loved and deserted was placed.
“Cousin,” she said, “do you not feel something moving beneath your
feet?” “No, madame,” he replied. “But reflect a moment, cousin,” she
said. “Madame, I do reflect,” he answered, “but I feel no movement, for
I am walking on solid stone.” “Then I inform you,” said the queen,
without keeping him further in suspense, “that you stand upon the grave
and body of that poor Mlle. de La Roche, who is buried beneath you, whom
you loved so much; and, since souls have feelings after death, it
cannot be doubted that so honest a being, dying of coldness, felt your
step above her; and though you felt nothing, because of the thickness of
that stone, she was moved, and conscious of your presence. Now, inasmuch
as it is a pious deed to remember the dead, I request you to give her a
_Pater noster_, an _Ave Maria_, and a _De Profundis_, and to sprinkle
her with holy water; you will thus obtain the name of a faithful lover
and a good Christian.” She left him and went away, that he might fulfil
with a collected mind the pious ceremonies that were due to the dead. I
do not know why Brantôme adds the remark that, in his opinion, the
princess said and did all this more from good grace and by way of
conversation than from conviction; it seems to me, on the contrary, that
there was belief as well as grace, the conviction of a woman of delicacy
and a pious soul, and that all is there harmonized.
In Marguerite’s own time there were not lacking those who blamed her for
the protection she gave to the lettered friends of the Reformation; she
found denunciators in the Sorbonne; she found them equally at Court. The
Connétable de Montmorency, speaking to the king of the necessity of
purging the kingdom of heretics, added that he must begin with the Court
and his nearest relations, naming the Queen of Navarre. “Do not speak of
her,” said the king, “she loves me too well; she will believe only what
I believe; she will never be of any religion prejudicial to my State.”
That saying sums up the truth: Marguerite could be of no other religion
than that of her brother; and Bayle has very well remarked, in a fine
page of his criticism, that the more we show that Marguerite was not
united in doctrine with the Protestants, the more we are forced to
recognize her generosity, her loftiness of soul, and her pure humanity.
By her womanly instinct she comprehended tolerance, like L’Hôpital,
like Henri IV., like Bayle himself. From the point of view of the State
there may have been some danger in the direction of this tolerance, too
confiding and too complete; it so appeared, in Marguerite’s time, at
this critical moment when the religion of the State, and with it the
constitution of those days, was in danger of overthrow. Nevertheless, it
is good that there should be such souls,--in love, before all else, with
humanity; who insinuate, in the long run, gentleness into public morals
and into laws and justice hitherto cruel; it is good because later, in
epochs when severity begins again, repression, while it may be commanded
by reasons of policy, is still forced to reckon with that spirit of
humanity introduced into customs, and with acquired tolerance. Thus the
rigour of present ages, softened and tempered as it now is by general
manners and morals, would have been a blessing in past centuries; these
are points gained in civil life which are never lost afterwards.
The _Contes et Nouvelles_ of the Queen of Navarre have nothing, as we
can readily believe, that is much out of keeping or contradictory with
her life and the habitual character of her thoughts. M. Genin has
already made that judicious remark, and an attentive reading will only
justify it. Those Tales are neither the gayeties nor the sins of youth;
she wrote them at a ripe age, for the most part in her litter while
travelling, and by way of amusement--but the amusement had its serious
side. Death prevented her from concluding them; instead of the seven
Days which we actually have, she intended to make ten, like Boccaccio;
she wished to give, not an _Heptameron_, but a French _Decameron_. In
her prologue she supposes that several persons of condition, French and
Spanish, having met, in the month of September, at the baths of
Cauterets, in the Pyrenees, separate after a few weeks; the Spaniards
returning as best they can across the mountains, the French delayed on
their way by floods caused by the heavy rains. A certain number of these
travellers, men and women, after divers adventures more extraordinary
than agreeable, find themselves again in company at the Abbey of
Notre-Dame-de-Serrance, and there, as the river Gave is not fordable,
they decide to build a bridge. “The abbé,” says the narrator, “who was
very glad they should make this outlay, because the number of pilgrims
would thus be increased, furnished the workmen, but not a penny to the
costs, such was his avarice. The workmen declaring that they could not
build the bridge under ten or a dozen days, the company, half men, half
women, began to get very weary.” It became necessary to find some
“pleasant and virtuous” occupation for those ten days, and for this they
consulted a certain Dame Oisille, the oldest of the company.