had been another of the prisoners taken at Pavia, was eleven years her
junior and exceptionally good-looking. Charles V. remarked of him
later that, save for Francis, he was the one _man_ he had seen in
France. Margaret should have known that to keep the affections of a
handsome husband, over whom she possessed the disadvantage of eleven
years' seniority, was anticipating the impossible. But at the time of
their first meeting they had intellectually many interests in common,
and Margaret, it seems, fell in love with his fascinations. The
marriage was not to prove happier than the previous one; but in the
beginning everything promised the creature of _joyeuse vie_ a more
congenial existence than she had known for many years. Henri de
Navarre was an able and conscientious administrator; Bordeaux says of
him, "Had he not been so given to women as he was, he would have been
irreproachable. He loved his people like his children."
At Navarre, Margaret made her court the home of three kinds of
people--the intellectual, the gay, and the persecuted; for while
Francis had been a prisoner in Spain, Louise had established the
Inquisition in France. The scholar Berguin was the first notable
personality to be martyred by it; but the precedent once established,
there followed a never-ending list, drawn from every class of society.
Margaret had tried to save Berguin, and, indeed, was all her life,
from that date onwards, trying to save some one from the furnaces of
the Inquisition. Florimond de Rémond, in his "Historie du Progres de
l'heresie," says--and he was not upon her side, and refers to her
elsewhere as a good but too easy-going princess--"She had a marvellous
dexterity in saving and sheltering those in peril for religion's
sake." As a further corroboration, there is Sainte Marthe's pretty
reference, "She made herself a harbour and refuge for the
despairing.... Seeing them surrounding this good lady, you would have
said it was a hen who carefully calls and assembles its little
chickens to cover them with her wings."
Etienne Dolet, another remarkable scholar, who was at one time the
friend of Rabelais, she strove to the last to rescue. She was twice
successful, but Dolet was more difficult to save than most people,
being by nature inherently quarrelsome. Among the charges made by the
Sorbonne against him was the remark he had made, that he preferred the
sermon to the mass, while in his writings he had seemed to doubt the
immortality of the soul. The first charge alone was considered
sufficient reason for burning him. Orriz, the Inquisitor, whom later
Renée was to have bitter dealings with in Ferrara, headed the Paris
Inquisition; and Orriz, of the feline persuasive manners, is said to
have found no occupation so congenial as that of hunting, trying, and
making ashes of heretical people. Dolet himself had already said of
him, "I never knew any one more ignorant, more cunning, or more
lustful after the death of a Christian." Lanothe Laizon adds an
interesting touch to this impression. He writes: "Orriz was grim only
to those who did not finance his purse. He became soft and lenient to
those who paid him, ... and for a round sum one could get from him
excellent certificates of Catholicity." This leniency, however, could
not be relied upon; Orriz had a trick of letting prisoners go and then
rearresting them upon another accusation.
Dolet was very brilliant and very eloquent. His epigrams were held to
be so good that one of his friends begged him to make one on him, so
that his name might go down to posterity. Margaret had invited Dolet
to shelter in the safety of Bourges, but he was too reckless to be
permanently rescued. He escaped once from prison, and was re-caught,
it is said, because he could not keep himself from coming back to see
his little son. He had written in his Commentaries, "I now come to the
subject of Death, the extreme boundary of life, terrible to those
about to die." It is a wonderful phrase, solemn with a simply worded,
haunting veracity.
Margaret herself had, it is said, become touched with more than pure
compassion for the new doctrines. And martyrs were being made not only
for Lutheranism; a rival reformer--no less abusive--had arisen in
Calvin, whom Margaret was supposed among others to have sheltered at
Navarre. She certainly corresponded with him, and Calvin upon one
occasion censured her for harbouring godless people among her flock.
It is, however, wonderful and disturbing to realize how these
Protestants, through a sustaining passion for right conduct, bore the
unbearable. There are stories of death after death which cannot be
read without anguish. These martyrs of the Sorbonne rendered even
hideous facts heartbreaking and sweet. In 1557, for instance, Calvin
wrote to comfort some doomed disciples in the Inquisition prisons at
Paris. Among them was a certain Lady Phillipine de Luny. When the day
for her burning came, "the executioners beheld her approach with a
smile of happiness on her face, and dressed in white as for a
festival." How did they do it? Phillipine de Luny was not yet
twenty-four years of age.
At another bonfire Louis de Marsac was offended because they did not,
in leading him to the stake, put a halter round his neck as they had
done to the rest of the party; the indignity had been spared him on
account of his noble birth. He asked why he was refused the collar of
that "excellent order" of martyrs. Another victim, Peter Berger,
shortly before, had exclaimed, like Stephen when the flames reached
him, "I see the heavens opened."
These burnings destroyed a good deal of Margaret's original joyousness
of temperament. But nothing lasts; an event that whitens a person's
very lips with horror is over by the morrow; the week after, thousands
of trivial incidents have swept between. Domestic existence is full of
sanity and healing. Margaret had an engrossing daily life apart from
her pitiful struggle to save people who exulted in new conceptions of
the soul and immortality. She was often at Paris, and she was also
busy at this time with her babies.
Before the birth of her first, the little Jeanne D'Albret of the brave
heart and strenuous life, Margaret wrote the following letter to
Francis: "I hope, nevertheless, that God will permit me to see you
before my hour arrives; but if this happiness is not to be mine, I
will cause your letter to be read to me, instead of the life of Sainte
Marguerite" (the patron saint of pregnant women), "as having been
written by your own hand it will not fail to inspire me with courage.
I cannot, however, believe that my child will presume to be born
without your command; to the last, therefore, I shall eagerly expect
your much-desired arrival." The little lady, who was always to prove
of an independent spirit, did apparently presume to be born without
Francis's command.
The relation between Margaret and her daughter is the least
satisfactory part of Margaret's life. She was upon one occasion
actually cruel to the child--a thing incomprehensible from a heart so
motherly and kind. Francis was the reason but not the excuse for
Margaret's behaviour. There were rumours that she and her husband were
negotiating to marry the child to a prince of Spain. Navarre--held in
fief from Spain--would then be free once more, which Francis, for
personal political reasons, did not desire. When Jeanne was two years
old, therefore, he took her from her mother and placed her in the
gloomy castle of Plessis Les Tours, where Louis XI. had shut himself
up behind bolts and bars during the last years of his life. It was
like educating a child in prison. In all her writings Margaret has not
left one word of protest, and yet at two years old a child to its
mother is a miracle and an intoxication.
Later, when Francis promised the child in marriage to the Duke of
Cleves, Margaret was really cruel. The marriage could only have been
bitter both to her and to Henri of Navarre. But Francis desired it,
and that was sufficient for Margaret. The duke was a heavy,
unattractive person; and Othagaray says that Francis originally "named
the lady to the Duke of Cleves without the consent of father and
mother." When he named him to the lady herself--not quite twelve years
old--a supreme surprise occurred for her elders. The child became
passionate with disgust. She would not marry him--a hideous foreign
creature, whose language she did not even understand. There were many
scenes with the disobedient child at Plessis. Her father, who would
have helped her if he could, had not the power to do so, and Margaret
remained like ice to the appeals of her sickened daughter.
Now, Margaret had once written to Montmorency in reference to some
woman Francis wished her to persuade into a marriage for her daughter
which the lady disliked: "You know that my disposition and hers are so
different that we are not fairly matched; for to vanquish the will of
a woman whom no one has yet been able to persuade through the medium
of one who is persuaded by everybody, seems to me to promise little
except that she will conduct herself in her usual manner towards me."
This "who is persuaded by everybody" had its heart-sprung quality, but
in the matter of Jeanne's marriage it showed a colder and more
weak-willed element. She wrote to Francis an almost frantic letter,
expressing her "tribulation" at her daughter's "senseless" appeal
that she might not be married to the Duke of Cleves. Then, as Jeanne
continued rebellious, Margaret wrote to her governess that she must be
beaten into obedience. True, a child of twelve years old could not
very well be in a position to select a suitable husband, and whipping
was a recognized and much-used discipline at that period. But Margaret
of Navarre should have known better: she had been brought up in a
different school of feeling.
Presently Francis--afraid that Henri might save his daughter--gave
orders that the betrothal and marriage should take place immediately.
It was under these circumstances that the child wrote her well-known
protest, signing it with her own brave, childish hand, and having it
witnessed by three members of her household. This is what she said:
"I, Jeanne de Navarre, persisting in the protestations I have already
made, do hereby again affirm and protest, by those present, that the
marriage which it is desired to contract between the Duke of Cleves
and myself is against my will; that I have never consented to it nor
will consent, and that all I may say and do hereafter by which it may
be attempted to prove that I have given my consent, will be forcibly
extorted against my wish and desire from my dread of the king, of the
king my father, and the queen my mother, who has threatened me, and
has had me whipt by my governess, the Baillive of Caen. By command of
the queen, my mother, my said governess has also several times
declared that if I did not give my consent, I should be so severely
punished as to occasion my death, and that by refusing I might be the
cause of the total ruin and destruction of my father, my mother, and
of their house."
Jeanne was married, notwithstanding, but happily the sequel showed an
unusual quality of mercy. She never really became the wife of the Duke
of Cleves after all. After the marriage ceremony had taken place, she
was left for two years with her mother, pending the time when she
should be old enough to join her husband. At the end of the two years
the Duke of Cleves surrendered to the emperor, and abandoned all
claims to his bride, the marriage, therefore, being at once declared
non-existent.
Jeanne did not, in fact, marry until the next reign; but there is one
story of her after life so charming that it is a pity not to tell it
here. Her father promised her a golden box he wore on a long chain
round his neck, if she would sing an old Bearn-folk song while in the
pains of child-birth. She agreed, and kept her promise, singing with
brave persistence at a time when most women wish that they were dead.
Margaret's own marriage had proved unhappy some time before her
daughter's futile first wedding. She had written long ago, in one of
her letters to Montmorency, concerning her husband: "As you are with
him, I fear not that everything will go well, excepting that I am
afraid you cannot prevent him from paying assiduous court to the
Spanish ladies." It comes as a digression; but there is, about the
same period, an interesting appeal from Margaret to Montmorency,
concerning her brother: "It strikes me it would be advisable for you
to praise the king in your letters for the great attention he pays to
affairs." The suggestion holds the essence of the relationship of a
woman to the man she loves. No woman but manages and cajoles the
creature cared for, like a mother trying to coax a child into good
behaviour.
Margaret and her husband disagreed upon religious questions as well as
about the subject of other ladies. Jeanne, who lived with them for the
two years she was waiting to join the Duke of Cleves, wrote, many
years after her mother's death, that her father grew very angry and
beat her if she showed any interest in the new doctrines, and that
she remembered on one occasion, when a Protestant teacher had been
with her mother, his coming furiously to drive him out. Margaret
having been warned, had already got rid of the man; but Henri, too
angry instantly to abstain from violence, went up and boxed Margaret's
ears, saying passionately, "You want to know too much, madam." His
conduct became so undesirable that Brantome says, "Henri D'Albret
treated the queen, his wife, very badly, and would have treated her
worse, had it not been for her brother Francis, who rated him soundly,
and ended by threatening him because he had been disrespectful to his
sister, in spite of her high rank."
Margaret, happily, was many-sided; one unhappiness did not render her
obdurate against the entry of the rest. Probably she went through an
interval of supreme heart-sickness. But a middle-aged woman has under
every circumstance a painful phase to go through. There is one period
in every woman's life hard to face and hard to bear--the period of
relinquishments. The sweets of youth are over; for the future there is
only the swift, chill journey into old age to front with calm and
dignity. Margaret's face in middle age suggests that she made her
relinquishments with completeness and courage.
But--though the statement is a repetition--no person's life can be
laid unremittingly upon the rack. Margaret, surrounded by people--her
ladies, poets, scholars, painters, and others--was kept pleasantly
preoccupied. The second Clouet painted her; Leonard Limousin, the
great enamellist, wrought her exquisite enamels. Like most royalties
of her day, she took great interest in her garden, and in the love
affairs of her ladies she was unfailingly sympathetic and kind. A
contemporary wrote of her as "the precious carnation in the flower
garden of the palace. Her fragrance had drawn to Bearn, as thyme draws
the honey-bee, the noblest minds in Europe."
It is true that many of the "noblest minds of Europe" were drawn to
Margaret. Even Rabelais, the last man to take pleasure in praising
women without good reason, dedicated the third book of his
"Pantagruel" to her. Rabelais, though he was the epitome of the
Renaissance spirit in France, is too capacious to mention
fragmentarily in the life of another person. And yet few men of the
period convey a sweeter impression. He was colossal in everything; in
compassion as well as laughter.
After the publication of his "Gargantua" and "Pantagruel," Rabelais
narrowly escaped the Sorbonne. But he was wise, and had no taste for
being roasted. In the life of Pantagruel, referring to Toulouse, then
the great centre of persecution, he said, ostensibly of Pantagruel, in
reality of himself, "But he remained little time there, when he
perceived that they made no bones about burning their regents alive
like red herrings, saying, 'The Lord forbid that I should die in this
manner, for I am dry enough by nature, without being heated any
further.'"
It is purposeless here to refer to Rabelais's coarseness. At the
present time no woman could read him. But, then, no woman for pleasure
would read Margaret's "Heptameron," and Margaret, for all the
grossness of a large number of her stories, had the capacity for a
very delicate and artificial refinement.
She and Rabelais never came to a sufficient knowledge of each other
for friendship; but there is a legend of Rabelais's death which
touches her outlook upon spiritual things very closely. A messenger
had been despatched by Rabelais's friend, Cardinal du Bellay, to
inquire how he felt. Rabelais lay dying when the messenger arrived,
but he sent back the following answer: "I go to find the great
Perhaps." A little later, still conscious of the pettiness of all
human circumstances, he rallied sufficiently to make a last good
phrase. "Pull the blind," he is said to have whispered; "the farce is
played out."
This, "I go to find the great Perhaps," was a sentence Margaret might
have echoed had she known of it. There is an incident in her own life
curiously in tune with the statement.
It must have occurred when she was, at any rate, middle aged, and the
thought of death had become hauntingly vivid. One of her
ladies-in-waiting lay dying. As the girl gradually sank into
unconsciousness, the duchess insisted upon sitting by her bed. The
attendants begged her to go away, but she refused to move, and sat
staring silently at the dying figure. There seemed something unnatural
in the absorption of her eyes, and her women were puzzled. When the
girl was at last dead, Margaret turned away; visibly she betrayed
disappointment. One of her ladies then asked her why she had leant
forward and watched with such unmoving intensity the lips of the dying
girl. Her answer is pathetic behind its callousness. She had been
told, she said, that the soul leaves the body at the actual moment of
death. She had looked and listened to catch the faintest sound of its
emergence through the lips of the dying body, but she had seen and
heard nothing. The watching had been, to a great extent, cold-blooded,
but the result was a tragic discouragement of thought. There seemed
nothing to strengthen belief with at all.
Nevertheless, if Margaret felt occasionally like a rat caught in a
trap, since being alive one must inevitably and shortly die, she
continued to the end to enjoy the present as far as possible. She
shivered with spiritual dubieties; but at the same time she wrote the
"Heptameron," a book above everything earthy, caustic, and shrewd. It
is said to have been written for Francis I. during his last illness.
He had been inordinately amused by Boccaccio, and Margaret tried to
give him stories in the same vein.
They are and they are not. The outline and the idea are similar; but
Margaret was not a second Boccaccio. She wrote easily and
naturally--she would have written a novel every year had she lived at
the present time; but where Boccaccio was witty and light, Margaret
was relentless and crude. Her brutality gives as great a shock as her
indelicacy. It seems incredible, for instance, that she should have
written the following termination to one of her stories. In the tale a
priest was discovered to have made his sister his mistress. The woman
was about to have a baby. The judges waited until the child was born;
then brother and sister were burnt together. The very simplicity with
which the statement is made adds to its horror. Margaret wrote: "They
waited till his sister was brought to bed. Then when she had made a
beautiful son, the sister and brother were burnt together." The
sentence, "when she had made a beautiful son," renders the incident
alive and unbearable.
It is difficult to say much of Margaret's "Heptameron." The stories
are a curious mixture of appalling grossness, and the most soft and
grieving mysticism. What one chiefly gathers from them in connection
with her temperament is that, side by side with a noteworthy charm and
sympathy, she possessed a slender strain of ruthlessness. Margaret's
nose was too long. To have a nose so much in excess, so thin and
pointed, is always dangerous. Some want of balance must accompany its
disproportion, some streak of cruelty its ungenerous narrowness. As a
matter of fact, notwithstanding her nose, Margaret was a miracle of
lovely kindlinesses, but it conquered in the matter of her
daughter--she was a cold, unprofitable mother. Again, in the
"Heptameron," it is the temperament belonging to the long unbalanced
feature whose detestation of the priests found outlet in such
relentless vengeances. To some extent Margaret's little chin saved
her. Counterpoised, as it were, between two excesses--the cold,
deceitful nose, and the yielding, enthusiastic chin--she contrived to
retain balance between either, and to be, on the whole, an intricacy
of characteristics, none of which surged into overwhelming
predominance. The ascendant characteristics were all good--her
sheltering instincts and her half-fearsome mystical aspirations. She
had, long before the Maeterlinck utterance of it, the sense of a world
in which everything was in reality spiritual and portentous. In one of
the stories of the "Heptameron" she makes a lady--in reality herself,
for the tale is said to be true--bring a fickle lover to the grave of
his forgotten love, to see if no subtle communication issues from the
dead body beneath them. When he feels nothing, her disappointment is
almost painful, for no trait in Margaret renders her so endearing as
this disquieted craving to be assured that existence was something
more profound and worthy than a brief term of suffering consciousness.
During the latter years of her existence Margaret suffered from ill
health. In 1542 Mario Cavelli wrote of her: "The Queen of Navarre
looks very delicate, so delicate, I fear she has not long to live. Yet
she is so sober and moderate that, after all, she may last. She is, I
think, the wisest, not only of the women, but of the men of France."
She must have been pleasant company. So many men of sound insight
could not have valued her society unless she had possessed unusual
sense and heartiness. Her conversation is repeatedly mentioned as
brilliant, eloquent, full of thought and sympathy.
Francis I. died in March, 1547. Margaret had said that when he died
she did not want to go on living, but she had more brains and more
vitality than she knew of. Everything interested her, even when she
was not happy. To the last she did what she could to help the
Reformers--her husband made it impossible for her to do much. Under
the stimulus of Henri and Diane the Sorbonne had increased in
laboriousness. Upon the subject of its added licence there is one
humorous story, told by Duchatel, the witty secretary of Francis I.,
who used to say of him that he was the only man whose knowledge he had
not exhausted after two years' intimacy.
[Illustration: MARGARET D'ANGOULÊME
ABOUT 1548 (AFTER CORNEILLE DE LYON)]
Duchatel preached the funeral sermon upon Francis, and said, with
complimentary intention, that the soul of the king had gone straight
to heaven. The doctors of the Sorbonne--swollen with courage under the
known bigotry of the new king and the king's mistress--complained at
once of the horrible utterance. Pious as the late king had been, his
soul could not have escaped purgatory. They sent deputies to Henri II.
charging Duchatel with heresy; there existed an old grudge against
him. The deputies were received, and given a conciliatory dinner by
the king's _maître d'hôtel_, Mendoza, and advised not to proceed
further with the charge. "I knew the character of the late king
intimately," said Mendoza, wittily. "He never could endure to be in
one place long. If he did go to purgatory, he would only stay there
sufficient time to drink a stirrup cup and move on."
It was Margaret's time to "move on." She went, in the autumn of 1549,
to drink some mineral waters, but they did her no good. She was
consumptive, and in a condition past being cured. During her last
illness she is reported to have said, concerning her protection of
heretics, "All I have done, I have done from compassion." She could
have given no better reason.