II
TROUBLE OF LOVE: THE WOMAN'S
I.—THE LADY IN "THE GLOVE"
Writing of the unnamed heroine of Count Gismond, I said that she had one of the characteristic Browning marks—that of trust in the sincerity of others. Here, in The Glove, we find a figure who resembles her in two respects: she is nameless, and she is a "great" lady—a lady of the Court. But now we perceive, full-blown, the flower of Court-training: dis-trust. In this heroine (for all we are told, as young as the earlier one) distrust has taken such deep root as to produce the very prize-bloom of legend—that famous incident of the glove thrown into the lion's den that her knight may go to fetch it. . . . Does this interpretation of the episode amaze? It is that which our poet gives of it. Distrust, and only that, impelled this lady to the action which, till Browning treated it, had been regarded as a prize-bloom indeed, but the flower not of distrust, but its antithesis—vanity! All the world knows the story; all the world, till this apologist arrived, condemned alone the lady. Like Francis I, each had cried:
". . . 'Twas mere vanity,
Not love, set that task to humanity!"
But Browning, who could detect the Court-grown, found excuse for her in that lamentable gardening. The weed had been sown, as it was sown (so much more tragically) for the earlier heroine; and little though we are told of the latter lady's length of years, we may guess her, from this alone, to be older. She had been longer at Court; its lesson had penetrated her being. Day after day she had watched, day after day had listened; then arrived De Lorge with fervent words of love, and now she watched him, hearkened him . . . and more and more misdoubted, hesitated, half-inclined and half-afraid; until at last, "one day struck fierce 'mid many a day struck calm," she gathered all her hesitation, yielding, courage, into one quick impulse—and flung her glove to the lions! With the result which we know—of an instant and a fearless answer to the test; but, as well, an instant confirmation of the worst she had dreaded.
It was at the Court of King Francis I of France that it happened—the most brilliant Court, perhaps, in history, where the flower of French knighthood bloomed around the gayest, falsest of kings. Romance was in the air, and so was corruption; poets, artists, worked in every corner, and so did intrigue and baseness and lust. Round the King was gathered the Petite Bande, the clique within a clique—"that troop of pretty women who hunted with him, dined with him, talked with him"—led by his powerful mistress, the Duchesse d'Étampes, friend of the Dauphin's neglected wife, the Florentine Catherine de Médicis—foe of that wife's so silently detested rival, "Madame Dame Diane de Poitiers, Grande Sénéschale de Normandie."