_To the most Illustrious, most Humble, and most Excellent Princess_,
Madame Margaret de Bourbon,
Duchess of Nevers, Marchioness of Illes, Countess of Eu, of Dreux,
Rételois, Columbiers, and Beaufort, Lady of Aspremont, of Cham-Regnault,
of Arches, Rencaurt, Monrond, and La Chapelle-d’Angylon, Peter
Boaistuau surnamed Launay, offers most humble salutation and perpetual
obedience.(1)
1 This dedicatory preface appeared in the first edition of
Queen Margaret’s Tales, published by Boaistuau in 1558 under
the title of _Histoires des Amans Fortunez_. The Princess
addressed was the daughter of Charles, Duke of Vendôme; she
was wedded in 1538 to Francis of Cleves, Duke of Nevers, and
by this marriage became niece to the Queen of Navarre.--Ed.
Madam, That great oracle of God, St. John Chrysostom, deplores with
infinite compassion in some part of his works the disaster and calamity
of his century, in which not only was the memory of an infinity of
illustrious persons cut off from among mankind, but, what is more, their
writings, by which the rich conceptions of their souls and the divine
ornaments of their minds were to have been consecrated to posterity, did
not survive them. And certainly with most manifest reason did this good
and holy man address such a complaint to the whole Christian Republic,
touched as he was with just grief for an infinity of thousands of books,
of which some have been lost and buried in eternal forgetfulness by
the negligence of men, others dispersed and destroyed by the cruel
incursions of war, others rotted and spoiled as much by the rigour
of time as by carelessness to collect and preserve them; whereof
the ancient Histories and Annals furnish a sufficient example in the
memorable library of that great King of Egypt, Ptolemy Phila-delphus,
which had been formed with the sweat and blood of so many notable
philosophers, and maintained, ordered, and preserved by the liberality
of that great monarch. And yet in less than a day, by the monstrous and
abominable cruelty of the soldiers of Cæsar, when the latter followed
Pompey to Alexandria, it was burned and reduced to ashes. Zonarius,
the ecclesiastical historian, writes that the same happened at
Constantinople in the time of Zeno, when a superb and magnificent
palace, adorned with all sorts of manuscript books, was burnt, to the
eternal regret and insupportable detriment of all those who made a
profession of letters. And without amusing ourselves too curiously
in recounting the destruction among the ancients, we have in our time
experienced a similar loss--of which the memory is so recent that the
wounds thereof still bleed in all parts of Europe--namely, when the
Turks besieged Buda, the capital of Hungary, where the most celebrated
library of the good King Matthias was pillaged, dispersed, and
destroyed; a library which, without sparing any expense, he had enriched
with all the rarest and most excellent books, Greek, Latin, Hebrew,
and Arabic, that he had been able to collect in all the most famous
provinces of the earth.
Again, he who would particularise and closely examine things will find
that Theophrastes, as he himself declares, wrote and composed three
hundred volumes, Chrysippus sixty, Empedocles fifty, Servus Sulpicius
two hundred on civil law, Gallienus one hundred and thirty on the art
of medicine, and Origenes six thousand, all of which St. Jerome attests
having read; and yet, of so many admirable and excellent authors, there
now remain to us only some little fragments, so debased and vitiated in
several places, that they seem abortive, and as if they had been torn
from their author’s hands by force.
On account of which, my Lady, since the occasion has offered, I have
been minded to present all these examples, with the object of exhorting
all those who treasure books and keep them sequestered in their
sanctuaries and cabinets, to henceforth publish them and bring them to
light, not only so that they may not keep back and bury the glory of
their ancestors, but also that they may not deprive their descendants
of the profit and pleasure which they might derive from the labour of
others.
In regard to myself, I will set forth more amply in the notice which I
will give to the reader the motive that induced me to put my hand to
the work of the present author, who has no need of trumpet and herald
to exalt and magnify her(1) greatness, inasmuch as there is no human
eloquence that could portray her more forcibly than she has portrayed
herself by the celestial strokes of her own brush; I mean by her other
writings, in which she has so well expressed the sincerity of her
doctrines, the vivacity of her faith, and the uprightness of her morals,
that the most learned men who reigned in her time were not ashamed
to call her a prodigy and miracle of nature. And albeit that Heaven,
jealous of our welfare, has snatched her from this mortal habitation,
yet her virtues rendered her so admirable and so engraved her in the
memory of every one, that the injury and lapse of time cannot efface
her from it; for we shall ceaselessly mourn and lament for her, like
Antimachus the Greek poet wept for Lysidichea, his wife, with sad verses
and delicate elegies which describe and reveal, her virtues and merits.
1 In the French text Boaistuau invariably refers to the
author as a personage of the masculine sex, with the evident
object of concealing the real authorship of the work.
Feminine pronouns have, however, been substituted in the
translation, as it is Queen Margaret who is referred to.
--Ed.
Therefore, my Lady, as this work is about to be exposed to the doubtful
judgment of so many thousands of men, may it please you to take it under
your protection and into your safe keeping; for, whereas you are the
natural and legitimate heiress of all the excellencies, ornaments, and
virtues which enriched the author while she adorned by her presence the
surprise of the earth, and which now by some marvellous ray of divinity
live and display themselves in you, it is not possible that you should
be defrauded of the fruit of the labour which justly belongs to you, and
for which the whole universe will be indebted to you now that it comes
forth into the light under the resplendent shelter of your divine and
heroic virtues.
May it therefore please you, my Lady, to graciously accept of this
little offering, as an eternal proof of my obedience and most humble
devotion to your greatness, pending a more important sacrifice which I
prepare for the future.