The book of the ladies

I have heard tell of her that, one of her waiting-maids whom she liked much being near to death, she wished to see her die; and when she was at the last gasp and rattle of death, she never stirred from beside her, gazing so fixedly upon her face that she never took her eyes away from it until she died. Some of her most privileged ladies asked her why she took such interest in seeing a human being pass away; to which she answered that, having heard so many learned persons discourse and say that the soul and spirit issued from the body at the moment of death, she wished to see if any wind or noise could be perceived, or the slightest resonance, but she had noticed nothing. She also gave a reason she had heard from the same learned persons, when she asked them why the swan sang so well before its death; to which they answered it was for love of souls, that strove to issue through its long throat. In like manner, she said, she had hoped to see issue or feel resound and hear that soul or spirit as it departed; but she did not. And she added that if she were not firm in her faith she should not know what to think of this dislodgment and departure of the soul from the body; but she believed in God and in what her Church commanded, without seeking further in curiosity; for, in truth, she was one of those ladies as devotional as could ever be seen; who had God upon her lips and feared Him also.

In her gay moments she wrote a book which is entitled Les Nouvelles de la Reine de Navarre, in which we find a style so sweet and fluent, so full of fine discourse and noble sentences that I have heard tell how the queen-mother and Madame de Savoie, being young, wished to join in writing tales themselves in imitation of the Queen of Navarre; for they knew that she was writing them. But when they saw hers, they felt such disgust that theirs could not approach them that they put their writings in the fire, and would not let them be seen; a great pity, however, for both being very witty, nothing that was not good and pleasant could have come from such great ladies, who knew many good stories.

Queen Marguerite composed these tales mostly in her litter travelling through the country; for she had many other great occupations in her retirement. I have heard this from my grandmother, who always went with her in her litter as lady of honour, holding the inkstand while she wrote, which she did most deftly and quickly, more quickly than if she had dictated. There was no one in the world so clever at making devices and mottoes in French, Latin, and other languages, of which we have a quantity in our house, on the beds and tapestries, composed by her. I have said enough about her at this time; elsewhere I shall speak of her again.

The Queen of Navarre, sister of François I., has of late years 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.