_À sa Dame_
Inasmuch as it was by your command, illustrious and exalted lady, that
I have gathered together these stories to form the present little book,
you should the less readily suppose I have presumed to dedicate to your
Serenity this trivial offering because of my esteeming it to be not
undeserving of your acceptance. The truth is otherwise; and your
postulant now approaches as one not spurred toward you by vainglory but
rather by plain equity, and simply in acknowledgment of the fact that
he who seeks to write of noble ladies must necessarily implore at
outset the patronage of her who is the light and mainstay of our age.
In fine, I humbly bring my book to you as Phidyle approached another
and less sacred shrine, _farre pio et salente mica_, and lay before you
this my valueless mean tribute not as appropriate to you but as the
best I have to offer.
It is a little book wherein I treat of divers queens and of their
love-business; and with necessitated candor I concede my chosen field
to have been harvested, and even scrupulously gleaned, by many writers
of innumerable conditions. Since Dares Phrygius wrote of Queen Heleine
and Virgil (that shrewd necromancer) of Queen Dido, a preponderating
mass of clerks, in casting about for high and serious matter, have
chosen, as though it were by common instinct, to dilate upon the amours
of royal women. Even in romance we scribblers must contrive it so that
the fair Nicolette shall be discovered in the end to be no less than
the King's daughter of Carthage, and that Sir Doon of Mayence shall
never sink in his love-affairs beneath the degree of a Saracen
princess; and we are backed in this old procedure not only by the
authority of Aristotle but, oddly enough, by that of reason as well.
Kings have their policies and wars wherewith to drug each appetite.
But their consorts are denied these makeshifts; and love may rationally
be defined as the pivot of each normal woman's life, and in consequence
as the arbiter of that ensuing life which is eternal. Because--as of
old Horatius Flaccus demanded, though not, to speak the truth, of any
woman,--
_Quo fugis? ah demons! nulla est fuga, tu licet usque_
_Ad Tanaim fugias, usque sequetur amor._
And a dairymaid, let us say, may love whom she will, and nobody else be
a penny the worse for her mistaking of the preferable nail whereon to
hang her affections; whereas with a queen this choice is more
portentous. She plays the game of life upon a loftier table,
ruthlessly illuminated, and stakes by her least movement a tall pile of
counters, some of which are, of necessity, the lives and happiness of
persons whom she knows not, unless it be by vague report. Grandeur
sells itself at this hard price, and at no other. A queen must always
play, in fine, as the vicar of destiny, free to choose but very
certainly compelled to justify that choice in the ensuing action; as is
strikingly manifested by the authentic histories of Brunhalt, and of
Guenevere, and of swart Cleopatra, and of many others that were born to
the barbaric queenhoods of a now extinct and dusty time.
For royal persons are (I take it) the immediate and the responsible
stewards of Heaven; and since the nature of each man is like a troubled
stream, now muddied and now clear, their prayer must ever be, _Defenda
me, Dios, de me_! Yes, of exalted people, and even of their near
associates, life, because it aims more high than the aforementioned
Aristotle, demands upon occasion a more great catharsis which would
purge any audience of unmanliness, through pity and through terror,
because, by a quaint paradox, the players have been purged of all
humanity. For in that aweful moment would Destiny have thrust her
sceptre into the hands of a human being and Chance would have exalted a
human being into usurpal of her chair. These two--with what immortal
chucklings one may facilely imagine--would then have left the weakling
thus enthroned, free to direct the pregnant outcome, free to choose,
and free to steer the conjuration either in the fashion of Friar Bacon
or of his man, but with no intermediate course unbarred. _Now prove
thyself!_ saith Destiny; and Chance appends: _Now prove thyself to be
at bottom a god or else a beast, and now eternally abide that choice.
And now_ (O crowning irony!) _we may not tell thee clearly by which
choice thou mayst prove either_.
It is of ten such moments that I treat within this little book.
You alone, I think, of all persons living have learned, as you have
settled by so many instances, to rise above mortality in such a
testing, and unfailingly to merit by your conduct the plaudits and the
adoration of our otherwise dissentient world. You have sat often in
this same high chair of Chance; and in so doing have both graced and
hallowed it. Yet I forbear to speak of this, simply because I dare not
seem to couple your well-known perfection with any imperfect encomium.
_Therefore to you, madame--most excellent and noble lady,_
_to whom I love to owe both loyalty and love--_
_I dedicate this little book._
I