A third Protestant, Theodore Agrippa d’Aubigne, grandfather of Madame de Maintenon, has been reckoned here amongst not the councillors, certainly, but the familiar and still celebrated servants of Henry IV. He held no great post, and had no great influence with the king; he was, on every occasion, a valiant soldier, a zealous Protestant, an indefatigable lover and seeker of adventure, sometimes an independent thinker, frequently an eloquent and bold speaker, always a very sprightly companion. Henry IV. at one time employed him, at another held aloof from him, or forgot him, or considered him a mischief-maker, a faction-monger who must be put in the Bastille, and against whom, if it seemed good, there would be enough to put him on his trial. Madame de Chatillon, who took an interest in D’Aubigne, warned him of the danger, and urged him to depart that very evening. “I will think about it, madame,” said he; “I will implore God’s assistance, and I will see what I have to do.” . . . “The inspiration that came to me,” says he, “was to go next morning very early to see his Majesty, and, after having briefly set before him my past services, to ask him for a pension, which up to that time I had not felt inclined to do. The king, surprised, and at the same time well pleased to observe a something mercenary behind all my proud spirit, embraced me, and granted on the spot what I asked of him.” The next day D’Aubigne went to the Arsenal; Sully invited him to dinner, and took him to see the Bastille, assuring him that there was no longer any danger for him, but only since the last twenty-four hours. [La France Protestante, by MM. Haag, t. i. p. 170.] If D’Aubigne had not been a writer, he would be completely forgotten by this time, like so many other intriguing and turbulent adventurers, who make a great deal of fuss themselves, and try to bring everything about them into a fuss as long as they live, and who die without leaving any trace of their career. But D’Aubigne wrote a great deal both in prose and in verse; he wrote the Histoire universelle of his times, personal Memoires, tales, tragedies, and theological and satirical essays; and he wrote with sagacious, penetrating, unpremeditated wit, rare vigor, and original and almost profound talent for discerning and depicting situations and characters. It is the writer which has caused the man to live, and has assigned him a place in French literature even more than in French history. We purpose to quote two fragments of his, which will make us properly understand and appreciate both the writer and the man. During the civil war, in the reign of Henry III., D’Aubigne had made himself master of the Island of Oleron, had fortified it, and considered himself insufficiently rewarded by the King of Navarre, to whom he had meant to render, and had, in fact, rendered service. After the battle of Coutras, in 1587, he was sleeping with a comrade named Jacques de Caumont la Force, in the wardrobe of the chamber in which the King of Navarre slept. “La Force,” said D’Aubigne to his bed-fellow, “our master is a regular miser, and the most ungrateful mortal on the face of the earth.” “What dost say, D’Aubigne?” asked La Force, half asleep. “He says,” repeated the King of Navarre, who had heard all, “that I am a regular miser, and the most ungrateful mortal on the face of the earth.” D’Aubigne, somewhat disconcerted, was mum. “But,” he adds, “when daylight appeared, this prince, who liked neither rewarding nor punishing, did not for all that look any the more black at me, or give me a quarter-crown more.” Thirty years later, in 1617, after the collapse of the League and after the reign of Henry IV., D’Aubigne, wishing to describe the two leaders of the two great parties, sums them up in these terms: “The Duke of Mayenne had such probity as is human, a good nature and a liberality which made him most pleasant to those about him; his was a judicious mind, which made good use of experience, took the measure of everything by the card; a courage rather steady than dashing; take him for all in all, he might be called an excellent captain. King Henry IV. had all this, save the liberality; but to make up for that item, his rank caused expectations as to the future to blossom, which made the hardships of the present go down. He had, amongst his points of superiority to the Duke of Mayenne, a marvellous gift of promptitude and vivacity, and far beyond the average. We have seen him, a thousand times in his life, make pat replies without hearing the purport of a request, and forestall questions without committing himself. The Duke of Mayenne was incommoded by his great bodily bulk, which could not support the burden either of arms or of fatigue duty. The other, having worked all his men to a stand-still, would send for hounds and horses for to begin a hunt; and when his horses could go no farther, he would run down the game afoot. The former communicated his heaviness and his maladies to his army, undertaking no enterprise that he could not support in person; the other communicated his own liveliness to those about him, and his captains imitated him from complaisance and from emulation.”
These politicians, these Christians, these warriors had, in 1600, a grave question to solve for Henry IV., and grave counsel to give him. He was anxious to separate from his wife, Marguerite de Valois, who had, in fact, been separated from him for the last fifteen years, was leading a very irregular life, and had not brought him any children. But, in order to obtain from the pope annulment of the marriage, it was first necessary that Marguerite should consent to it, and at no price would she consent so long as the king’s favorite continued to be Gabrielle d’Estrees, whom she detested, and by whom Henry already had several children. The question arose in 1598, in connection with a son lately born to Gabrielle, who was constantly spreading reports that she would be the king’s wife. To give consistency to this report she took it into her head to have her son presented at baptism as a child of France, and an order was brought to Sully “to pay what was right to the heralds, trumpeters, and hautbois players who had performed at the baptism of Alexander, Monsieur, child of France.” After looking at the order, Sully detained it, and had another made out, which made no mention of Alexander. The men complained, saying, “Sir, the sum we ought to have for our attendance at the baptism of children of France has for a long while been fixed.” “Away, away!” said Sully, in a rage; “I’ll do nothing of the sort; there are no children of France.” And he told the king about it, who said, “There’s malice in that, but I will certainly stop it; tear up that order.” And turning to some of his courtiers, “See the tricks that people play, and the traps they lay for those who serve me well and after my own heart. An order hath been sent to M. de Rosny, with the design of offending me if he honored it, or of offending the Duchess of Beaufort if he repudiated it. I will see to it. Go to her, my friend,” he said to Rosny; “tell her what has taken place; satisfy her in so far as you can. If that is not sufficient, I will speak like the master, and not like the man.” Sully went to the cloister of St. Germain, where the Duchess of Beaufort was lodged, and told her that he came by the king’s command to inform her of what was going on. “I am aware of all,” said Gabrielle, “and do not care to know any more; I am not made as the king is, whom you persuade that black is white.” “Ho! ho! madame,” replied Sully, “since you take it in that way, I kiss your hands, and shall not fail to do my duty for all your furies.” He returned to the Louvre and told the king. “Here, come with me,” said Henry; “I will let you see that women have not possession of me, as certain malignant spirits spread about that they have.” He got into Sully’s carriage, went with him to the Duchess of Beaufort’s, and, taking her by the hand, said, “Now, madame, let us go into your room, and let nobody else enter except you, and Rosny, and me. I want to speak to you both, and teach you to be good friends together.” Then, having shut the door quite close, and holding Gabrielle with one hand and Rosny with the other, he said, “Good God! madame, what is the meaning of this? So you would vex me for sheer wantonness of heart in order to try my patience? By God, I swear to you that, if you continue these fashions of going on, you will find yourself very much out in your expectations. I see quite well that you have been put up to all this pleasantry in order to make me dismiss a servant whom I cannot do without, and who has always served me loyally for five and twenty years. By God, I will do nothing of the kind, and I declare to you that if I were reduced to such a necessity as to choose between losing one or the other, I could better do without ten mistresses like you than one servant like him.”
Gabrielle stormed, was disconsolate, wept, threw herself at the king’s feet, and, “seeing him more strong-minded than had been supposed by those who had counselled her to this escapade, began to calm herself,” says Sully, “and everything was set right again on every side.”
But Sully was not at the end of his embarrassments or of the sometimes feeble and sometimes sturdy fancies of his king. On the 10th of April, 1599, Gabrielle d’Estrees died so suddenly that, according to the bias of the times, when, in the highest ranks, crimes were so common that they were always considered possible and almost probable, she was at first supposed to have been poisoned; but there seemed to be no likelihood of this. The consent of Marguerite de Valois to the annulment of her marriage was obtained; and negotiations were opened at Rome by Arnold d’Ossat, who was made a cardinal, and by Brulart de Sillery, ambassador ad hoc. But a new difficulty supervened; not for the negotiators, who knew, or appeared to know, nothing about it, but for Sully. In three or four weeks after the death of Gabrielle d’Estrees Henry IV. was paying court to a new favorite. One morning, at Fontainebleau, just as he was going out hunting, he took Sully by the hand, led him into the first gallery, gave him a paper, and, turning the other way as if he were ashamed to see it read by Sully, “Read that,” said he, “and then tell me your opinion of it.” Sully found that it was a promise of marriage given to Mdlle. Henriette d’Entraigues, daughter of Francis de Balzac, Lord of Entraigues, and Marie Touchet, favorite of Charles IX. Sully went up to the king, holding in his hand the paper folded up.
“What do you think of it?” said the king. “Now, now, speak freely; your silence offends me far more than your most adverse expressions could. I misdoubt me much that you will not give me your approval, if it were only for the hundred thousand crowns that I made you hand over with so much regret; I promise you not to be vexed at anything you can possibly say to me.” “You mean it, sir, and you promise not to be angry with me, whatever I may say or do?” “Yes, yes; I promise all you desire, since for anything you say it will be all the same, neither more nor less.” Thereupon, taking that written promise as if he would have given it back to the king, Sully, instead of that, tore it in two, saying, a “There, sir, as you wish to know, is what I think about such a promise.” “Ha! morbleu, what are you at? Are you mad?” “It is true, sir; I am a madman and fool; and I wish I were so much thereof as to be the only one in France.” “Very well, very well: I understand you,” said the king, “and will say no more, in order to keep my word to you; but give me back that paper.” “Sir,” replied Sully, “I have no doubt your Majesty is aware that you are destroying all the preparatives for your dismarriage, for, this promise once divulged,—and it is demanded of you for no other purpose,—never will the queen, your wife, do the things necessary to make your dismarriage valid, nor indeed will the pope bestow upon it his Apostolic blessing; that I know of my own knowledge.”
The king made no answer, went out of the gallery, entered his closet, asked for pen and ink, remained there a quarter of an hour, wrote out a second paper like that which had just been torn up, mounted his horse without saying a word to Sully whom he met, went hunting, and, during the day, deposited the new promise of marriage with Henriette d’Entraigues, who kept it or had it kept in perfect secrecy till the 2d of July, the time at which her father, the Count of Entiaigues, gave her up to, the king in consideration of twenty thousand crowns cash.
In the teeth of all these incidents, known or voluntarily ignored, the negotiations for the annulment of the marriage of Henry IV. and Marguerite de Valois were proceeded with at Rome by consent of the two parties. Clement VIII. had pronounced on the 17th of December, 1599, and transmitted to Paris by Cardinal de Joyeuse the decree of annulment. On the 6th of January, 1600, Henry IV. gave his ambassador, Brulart de Sillery, powers to conclude at Florence his marriage with Mary de’ Medici, daughter of Francis I. de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and Joan, Archduchess of Austria and niece of the Grand Duke Ferdinand I. de’ Medici, who had often rendered Henry IV. pecuniary services dearly paid for. As early as the year 1592 there had been something said about this project of alliance; it was resumed and carried out on the 5th of October, 1600, at Florence with lavish magnificence. Mary embarked at Leghorn on the 17th with a fleet of seventeen galleys; that of which she was aboard, the General, was all covered over with jewels, inside and out; she arrived at Marseilles on the 3d of November, and at Lyons on the 2d of December, where she waited till the 9th for the king, who was detained by the war with Savoy. He entered her chamber in the middle of the night, booted and armed, and next day, in the cathedral-church of St. John, re-celebrated his marriage, more rich in wealth than it was destined to be in happiness. Mary de’ Medici was beautiful in 1592, when she had first been talked about, and her portrait at that time had charmed the king; but in 1600 she was twenty-seven, tall, fat, with round, staring eyes and a forbidding air, and ill dressed. She knew hardly a word of French; and Henriette d’Entraigues, whom the king had made Marquise do Verneuil, could not help exclaiming when she saw her, “So that is the fat bankeress from Florence!”
Henry IV. seemed to have attained in his public and in his domestic life the pinnacle of earthly fortune and ambition. He was, at one and the same time, Catholic king and the head of the Protestant polity in Europe, accepted by the Catholics as the best, the only possible, king for them in France. He was at peace with all Europe, except one petty prince, the Duke of Savoy, Charles Emmanuel I., from whom he demanded back the marquisate of Saluzzo, or a territorial compensation in France itself on the French side of the Alps. After a short campaign, and thanks to Rosny’s ordnance, he obtained what he desired, and by a treaty of January 17, 1601, he added to French territory La Bresse, Le Bugey, the district of Gex, and the citadel of Bourg, which still held out after the capture of the town. He was more and more dear to France, to which he had restored peace at home as well as abroad, and industrial, commercial, financial, monumental, and scientific prosperity, until lately unknown. Sully covered the country with roads, bridges, canals, buildings, and works of public utility. The moment the king, after the annulment of his marriage with Marguerite de Valois, saw his new wife, Mary de’ Medici, at Lyons, she had disgusted him, and she disgusted him more every day by her cantankerous and headstrong temper; but on the 27th of September, 1601, she brought him a son, who was to be Louis XIII. Henry used to go for distraction from his wife’s temper to his favorite, Henriette d’Entraigues, who knew how to please him at the same time that she was haughty and exacting towards him. He set less store upon the peace of his household than upon that of his kingdom; he had established his favorite at the Louvre itself, close beside his wife; and, his new marriage once contracted, he considered his domestic life settled, as well as his political position.