III.
The Diana of the country is more amiable; it is the lively and gracious Margaret of Navarre, sister and liberatress of Francis I. She came to these waters with her court, her poets, her musicians, her savants, a poet and theologian herself, of infinite curiosity, reading Greek, learning Hebrew, and taken up with Calvinism. On coming out of the routine and discipline of the middle ages, disputes about dogma and the thorns of erudition appeared agreeable, even to ladies; Lady Jane Grey, Elizabeth took part in these things: it was a fashion, as two centuries later it was good taste to dispute upon Newton and the existence of God. The Bishop of Meaux wrote to Margaret: “Madame, if there were at the end of the world a doctor who, by a single abridged verb, could teach you as much grammar as it is possible to know, and another as much rhetoric, and another philosophy, and so on with the seven liberal arts, each one by an abridged verb, you would fly there as to the fire.” She did fly there and got overloaded. The heavy philosophic spoil oppressed her already slender thought. Her pious poems are as infantile as the odes written by Racine at Port-Royal. What trouble we have had in getting free from the middle ages! The mind bent, warped and twisted, had contracted the ways of a choir-boy.
A poet of the country composed in her honor the following pretty song:—
“At the baths of Toulouse
There’s a spring clear and fair,
And three pretty doves
Came to drink and bathe there;
When at last they had bathed
Thus for months barely three,
For the heights of Cauterets
Left they fountain and me.
But why go to Cauterets,
What is there to be seen?
“It is there that we bathe
With the king and the queen.And the king has a cot
Hung with jasmin in flower;
The dear queen has the same,
But love makes it a bower.”
Is it not graceful and thoroughly southern? Margaret is less poetic, more French: her verses are not brilliant, but at times are very touching, by force of real and simple tenderness.
A moderate imagination, a woman’s heart thoroughly devoted, and inexhaustible in devotion, a good deal of naturalness, clearness, ease, the art of narration and of smiling, an agreeable but never wicked malice, is not this enough to make you love Margaret and read here the Heptameron?
