Part 16

Oh! how ill-advised is he who trusts in the people of to-day! Oh! how differently did the Romans recognize the posterity of Augustus Cæsar, who gave them wealth and grandeurs, from the people of France, who received so much from their later kings these hundred years, and even from François I. and Henri II., so that without them France would have been tumbled topsy-turvy by her enemies watching for that chance, and even by the Emperor Charles, that hungry and ambitious man. And thus it is they are so ungrateful, these people, toward Marguerite, sole and only remaining daughter and princess of France! It is easy to foresee the wrath of God upon them, because nothing is to Him so odious as ingratitude, especially to kings and queens, who here below fulfil the place and state of God. And thou, disloyal Fortune, how plainly dost thou show that there are none, however loved by heaven and blessed by nature, who can be sure of thee and of thy favours a single day! Art thou not dishonoured in thus so cruelly affronting her who is all beauty, sweetness, virtue, magnanimity and kindness?

All this I wrote during those wars we had among us for ten years. To make an end, did I not speak elsewhere of this great queen in other discourses I would lengthen this still more and all I could, for on so excellent a subject the longest words are never wearisome; but for a time I now postpone them.

Live, princess, live in spite of Fortune! Never can you be other than immortal upon earth and in heaven, whither your noble virtues bear you in their arms. If public voice and fame had not made common praise of your great merits, or if I were of those of noble speech, I would say further here; for never did there come into the world a figure so celestial.

This queen who should by good right order us By laws and edicts and above us reign, Till we behold a reign of pleasure under her, As in her father’s days, a Star of France, Fortune hath hindered. Ha! must rightful claim Be wrongly lost because of Fortune’s spite?

Never did Nature make so fine a thing As this great unique princess of our France! Yet Fortune chooses to undo her wholly. Behold how evil balances with good!

* * * * *

In the sixteenth century there were three Marguerites: one, sister of François I. and Queen of Navarre, celebrated for her intellect, her Tales in the style of Boccaccio, and her verses, which are less interesting; another, Marguerite, niece of the preceding, sister of Henri II., who became Duchesse de Savoie, very witty, also a writer of verses, and, in her youth, the patroness of the new poets at Court; and lastly, the third Marguerite, niece and great-niece of the first two, daughter of Henri II. and Catherine de’ Medici, first wife of Henri IV., and sister of the last Valois. It is of her that I speak to-day as having left behind her most agreeable historical pages and opened in our literature that graceful series of women’s Memoirs which henceforth never ceases, but is continued in later years and lively vein by Mesdames de La Fayette, de Caylus and others. All of these Memoirs are books made without intending it, and the better for that. The following is the reason why Queen Marguerite took the idea of writing those in which she describes herself with so lightsome a pen.

Brantôme, who was making a gallery of illustrious French and foreign ladies, after bringing Marie Stuart into it, bethought him of placing Marguerite beside her as another example of the injustice and cruelty of Fortune. Marguerite, at the period when Brantôme indited his impulsive, enthusiastic portrait of her, flinging upon his paper that eulogy which may truly be called delirious, was confined at the castle of Usson in Auvergne (1593), where she was not so much a prisoner as mistress. Prisoner at first, she soon seduced the man who held her so and took possession of the place, where she passed the period of the League troubles, and beyond it, in an impenetrable haven. The castle of Usson had been fortified by Louis XI., well-versed in precautions, who wanted it as a sure place in which to lodge his prisoners. There Marguerite felt herself safe, not only from sudden attack, but also from the trial of a long siege and repeated assault. Writing to her husband, Henri IV., in October, 1594, she says to him, jokingly, that if he could see the fortress and the way in which she had protected herself within it he would see that God alone could reduce it, and she has good reason to believe that “this hermitage was built to be her ark of safety.”

The castle which she thus compares to Noah’s ark, and which some of her panegyrists, convinced that she who lived there was given to celestial contemplations, compare to Mount Tabor, was regarded as a Caprea and an abominable lair by enemies, who, from afar, plunged eyes of hatred into it. It is very certain, however, that Queen Marguerite lost nothing in that retreat of the delicate nicety of her mind, for it was there that she undertook to write her Memoirs in a few afternoons, in order to come to Brantôme’s assistance and correct him on certain points. We will follow her, using now and then some contemporary information, without relying too much upon either, but endeavouring to draw with simple truth a singular portrait in which there enters much that was enchanting and, towards the end, fantastic.

Marguerite, born at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, May 14, 1553, was six years old when her father, Henri II., was killed at that fatal tournament which ruined the fortunes of the house of Valois. She tells us several anecdotes of herself and her childish repartees which prove a precocious mind. She takes great pains to call attention to a matter which in her is really a sign, a distinctive note through all excesses, namely: that as a child and when it was the fashion at Court to be “Huguenot,” and when all those who had intelligence, or wished to pass for having it, had withdrawn from what they called “bigotry,” she resisted that influence. In vain did her brother, d’Anjou, afterward Henri III., fling her Hours into the fire and give her the Psalms and the Huguenot prayers in place of it; she held firm and preserved herself from the mania of Huguenotism, which at that date (1561) was a fancy at Court, a French and mundane fashion, attractive for a time to even those who were soon to turn against it and repress it. Marguerite, in the midst of a life that was little exemplary, will always be found to have kept with sincerity this corner of good Catholicism which she derived from her race, and which made her in this respect and to this degree more of an Italian than a Frenchwoman; however, that which imports us to notice is that she _had it_.

Still a child when the first religious wars began, she was sent to Amboise with her young brother, d’Alençon. There she found herself in company with several of Brantôme’s female relations: Mme. de Dampierre, his aunt, Mme. de Retz, his cousin; and she began with the elder of these ladies a true friendship; with the younger, the cousin, the affection came later. Marguerite gives the reason for this very prettily:--

“At that time the advanced age of your aunt and my childish youthfulness had more agreement; for it is the nature of old people to love children; and those who are in the perfection of their age, like your cousin, despise and dislike their annoying simplicity.”

Childhood passed, and the first awakening to serious things was given to Marguerite about the time of the battle of Moncontour (1569). She was then sixteen. The Duc d’Anjou, afterwards Henri III., aged eighteen, handsome, brave, and giving promise of a virtue and a prudence he never justified, took his sister aside one day in one of the alleys of the park at Plessis-lez-Tours to tell her of his desire, on starting for the army, to leave her as his confidant and support with their mother, Catherine de’ Medici, during his absence at the wars. He made her a long speech, which she reports in full with some complacency:--

“Sister, the nourishment we have taken together obliges us, not less than proximity, to love each other.... Until now we have naturally been guided to this without design and without the said union being of any utility beyond the pleasure we have had in conversing together. That was good for our childhood; but now it is time to no longer live like children.”

He then points out to her the great and noble duties to which God calls him, in which the queen, their mother, brought him up, and which King Charles IX., their brother, lays upon him. He fears that this king, courageous as he is, may not always be satisfied with hunting, but will become ambitious to put himself at the head of the armies, the command of which has been hitherto left to him. It is this that he wishes to prevent.

“In this apprehension,” he continues, “thinking of some means of remedy, I believe that it is necessary to leave some very faithful person behind me who will maintain my side with the queen, my mother. I know no one as suitable as you, whom I regard as a second myself. You have all the qualities that can be desired,--intelligence, judgment, and fidelity.”

The Duc d’Anjou then proposes to his sister to change her manner of life, to be assiduous towards the queen, their mother, at all hours, at her _lever_, in her cabinet during the day, at her _coucher_, and so act that she be treated henceforth, not as a child, but as a person who represents him during his absence. “This language,” she remarks, “was very new to me, having lived until then without purpose, thinking of nothing but dancing and hunting; and without much interest even in dressing and in appearing beautiful, not having yet reached the age of such ambitions.” The fear she always felt for the queen, her mother, and the respectful silence she maintained in her presence, held her back still further. “I came very near,” she says, “replying to him as Moses did to God in the vision of the bush: ‘Who am I? Send, I pray thee, by him whom thou shouldest send.’” Nevertheless, she felt within her at her brother’s words a new courage, and powers hitherto unknown to her, and she soon consented to all, entering zealously into her brother’s design. From that moment she felt herself “transformed.”

This fraternal and politic union thus created by the Duc d’Anjou did not last. On his return from the victory of Moncontour she found him changed, distrustful, and ruled by a favourite, du Gua, who possessed him as so many others possessed him later. Henceforth his sister was out of favour with him, and it was with her younger brother, the Duc d’Alençon, that Marguerite renewed and continued as long as she could a union of the same kind, which gave room for all the feelings and all the ambitious activities of youth.

Did she at that time give some ground for the coolness of her brother d’Anjou by her liaison with the young Duc de Guise? An historian who knew Marguerite well and was not hostile to her, says: “She had long loved Henri, Duc de Guise, who was killed at Blois, and had so fixed the affections of her heart from her youth upon that prince of many attractions that she never loved the King of Navarre, afterwards King of France of happy memory, but hated him from the beginning, and was married to him in spite of herself, and against canonical law.”[18] However this may be, the Duc d’Anjou seized the pretext of the Duc de Guise to break with his sister, whose enemy he became insensibly, and he succeeded in alienating her from her mother.

Marguerite, in this flower of her youth, was, according to all testimony, enchantingly beautiful. Her beauty was not so much in the special features of her face as in the grace and charm of her whole person, with its mingling of seduction and majesty. Her hair was dark, which was not thought a beauty in those days; blond hair reigned. “I have seen her sometimes wearing her natural hair without any peruke artifice,” Brantôme tells us, “and though it was black (having inherited that colour from King Henri, her father), she knew so well how to twist and curl and arrange it, in imitation of her sister, the Queen of Spain, who never wore any hair but her own, that such arrangement and coiffure became her as well as, or better than, any other.” Toward the end of her life Marguerite, becoming in her turn antiquated, with no brown hair to dress, made great display of blond perukes. “For them she kept great, fair-haired footmen, who were shaved from time to time;” but in her youth, when she dared to be dark-haired as nature made her, it was not unbecoming to her; for she had a most dazzling complexion and her “beautiful fair face resembled the sky in its purest and greatest serenity” with its “noble forehead of whitening ivory.” Nor must we forget her art of adorning and dressing herself to advantage, and the new inventions of that kind she gave to women, she being then the queen of the modes and fashion. As such she appeared on all solemn occasions, and notably on that day when, at the Tuileries, the queen-mother fêted the Polish seigneurs who came to offer the crown of Poland to the Duc d’Anjou, and Ronsard, who was present, confesses that the beautiful goddess Aurora was vanquished; but more notably still on that flowery Easter at Blois, when we see her in procession, her dark hair starred with diamonds and precious stones, wearing a gown of crinkled cloth of gold from Constantinople, the weight of which would have crushed any other woman, but which her beautiful, rich, strong figure supported firmly, bearing the palm in her hand, her consecrated branch, “with regal majesty, and a grace half proud, half tender.” Such was the Marguerite of the lovely years before the disasters and the flights, before the castle of Usson, where she aged and stiffened.

This beauty, so real, so solid, which had so little need of borrowed charms, had, like all her being, its fantasticalities and its superstition. I have said already that she frequently disguised her rich, brown hair, preferring a blond wig, “more or less charmingly fashioned.” Her beautiful face was presented to view “all painted and stained.” She took such care of her skin that she spoiled it with washes and recipes of many kinds, which gave her erysipelas and pimples. In fact, she was the model and eke the slave of the fashions of her time; and as she survived those days she became in the end a species of preserved idol and curiosity, such as may be seen in a show-case. The great Sully, when he one day reappeared at the Court of Louis XIII. with his ruff and his costume of the time of Henri IV., gave that crowd of young courtiers something to laugh at; and so, when Queen Marguerite, having returned from Usson to Paris, showed herself at the remodelled Court of Henri IV. she produced the same effect on that young century, which smiled at beholding this solemn survival of the Valois.

Like all those Valois, a worthy granddaughter of François I., she was learned. To the Poles who harangued in Latin she showed that she understood them by replying on the spot, eloquently and pertinently, without the help of an interpreter. She loved poetry and wrote it, and had it written for her by salaried poets whom she treated as friends. When she had once begun to read a book she could not leave it, or pause till she came to the end, “and very often she would lose both her eating and drinking.” But let us not forestall the time. She herself tells us that this taste for study and reading came to her for the first time during a previous imprisonment in which Henri III. held her for several months in 1575, and we are still concerned with her cloudless years.

She was married, in spite of her objections as a good Catholic, to Henri, King of Navarre, six days before the Saint-Bartholomew (August, 1572). She relates with much naïveté and in a simple tone the scenes of that night of horror, of which she was ignorant until the last moment. We see in her narrative that wounded and bleeding gentleman pursued through the corridors of the Louvre, and taking refuge in Marguerite’s chamber, and flinging himself with the cry “Navarre! Navarre!” upon her; shielding his own body from the murderers with that of his queen, she not knowing whether she had to do with a madman or an assailant. When she did know what the danger was she saved the poor man, keeping him in bed and dressing his wounds in her cabinet until he was cured. Queen Marguerite, so little scrupulous in morality, is better than her brothers; of the vanishing Valois she has all the good qualities and many of their defects, but not their cruelty.

After this half-missed blow of the Saint-Bartholomew, which did not touch the princes of the blood, an attempt was made to unmarry her from the King of Navarre. On a feast day when she was about to take the sacrament, her mother asked her to tell her under oath, truly, whether the king, her husband, had behaved to her as yet like a husband, a man, and whether there was not still time to break the union. To this Marguerite played the _ingénue_, so she asserts, apparently not comprehending. “I begged her,” she says, “to believe that I knew nothing of what she was speaking. I could then say with truth as the Roman lady said, when her husband was angry because she had not warned him his breath was bad, ‘that she had supposed all men were alike, never having been near to any one but him.’”

Here Marguerite wishes to have it understood that she had never, so far, made comparison of any man with another man; she plays the innocent, and by her quotation from the Roman lady she also plays the learned; which is quite in the line of her intelligence.

It would be a great error of literary judgment to consider these graceful Memoirs as a work of nature and simplicity; it is rather one of discrimination and subtlety. Wit sparkles throughout; but study and learning are perceptible. In the third line we come upon a Greek word: “I would praise your work more,” she writes to Brantôme, “if you had praised me less; not wishing that the praise I give should be attributed to _philautia_ rather than to reason;” by _philautia_ she means self-love. Marguerite (she will remind us of it if we forget it) is by education and taste of the school of Ronsard, and a little of that of Du Bartas. During her imprisonment in 1575, giving herself up, as she tells us, to reading and devotion, she shows us the study which led her back to religion; she talks to us of the “universal page of Nature;” the “ladder of knowledge;” the “chain of Homer;” and of “that agreeable Encyclopædia which, starting from God, returns to God, the principle and the end of all things.” All that is learned, and even transcendental.

She was called in her family Venus-Urania. She loved fine discourses on 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.”