Notwithstanding their abjuration, the King of Navarre and Condé were still regarded with suspicion and remained in a sort of quasi-captivity. Their position was a difficult one, and it must have needed all their self-control to prevent them from openly resenting the sneers and taunts which the nobles of the Court felt themselves safe in levelling at them. “On All Hallows’ Eve,” writes L’Estoile, “the King of Navarre was playing tennis with the Duc de Guise, when the scant consideration which was shown this little prisoner of a kinglet, at whom he threw all kinds of jests and taunts, deeply pained a number of honest people who were watching them play.”[96]
The “kinglet,” however, knew how to accommodate himself to circumstances, and was often able to turn the laugh on his own side by some lively repartée. After a while, too, Charles IX., who had always entertained a strong liking for Henri, began to treat him with kindness and even affection, in consequence of which even the Guises felt obliged to show him a certain degree of deference.
HENRI I DE BOURBON, PRINCE DE CONDÉ
FROM A LITHOGRAPH BY DELPECH, AFTER THE PAINTING BY MAUZAISSE
With Condé, however, it was very different. To one of his austere nature, this Court, which had degenerated to such an appalling extent, owing to the corruption of morals produced by the civil wars, that vice had become the mode, and virtue, even ordinary decency, was mocked at and derided, must have seemed the very anti-chamber of hell; and he was at no pains to conceal the disgust with which it inspired him. The King of Navarre might drink and gamble with the murderers of his faithful followers, and make love to the high-born courtesans who had passed obscene jests on the stripped corpses of the Huguenot nobles as they lay in the courtyard of the Louvre on that terrible morning. Policy required, he said, that he and his cousin should dissimulate their feelings. Well, let him do it! For himself, he would have no dealings with them, beyond that which ordinary courtesy demanded. And so he stood aloof, a gloomy, silent figure—an object of suspicion, dislike and derision to King and courtiers alike—with none to sympathize or condole with him in his loneliness and humiliation.
For even his wife had failed him. She was but a giddy butterfly, who, though educated in the Reformed Faith, had never professed any attachment for it, and had forsaken it without a regret. As for her husband, she appears to have married him merely because he happened to be the best match which offered itself, and because her relatives desired it. His sombre nature, embittered by the new trials to which he was being subjected, was but little to her taste, and she infinitely preferred the society of the Duc d’Anjou, who had conceived for her a most violent passion.
If we are to believe Brantôme, this affair had begun some few months before the lady’s marriage to Condé, and Anjou had not been permitted to sigh in vain. “This same prince [Anjou],” he writes, “aware that she [Marie de Clèves] was about to marry a prince [Condé] who had displeased him and very much troubled the State of his brother [Charles IX.], debauched her ... and then, in two months’ time, she was given to the aforesaid prince [Condé] to wife, as a pretended virgin, which was a very sweet revenge.”
We can well believe that the seduction of the promised wife of an enemy would have been just the kind of exploit to appeal to the future Henri III.; but Brantôme is too incorrigible a scandalmonger for much reliance to be placed on his unsupported testimony. However, that may be, Anjou’s admiration for Marie de Clèves was now the talk of the Court, and the poet Philippe Desportes, who prostituted his muse to the services of the last Valois, as we shall see Malherbe, at a later date, minister to the amorous fancies of Henri IV., hastened to immortalize the affair in verse, and composed an elegy, in which the lovers figured under the names of Eurylas and Olympias, and the jealousy of the husband was unmercifully ridiculed.
Anjou was already provided with a mistress in the person of one of Catherine’s maids-of-honour, Renée de Rieux, demoiselle de Châteauneuf—called la belle Châteauneuf—a ravishing blonde of twenty summers, with wonderful blue eyes, a complexion of lilies and roses, and “hair which looked like a crown of gold.” She passed for the most perfect beauty of the Court, and one could pay a lady no higher compliment than to say that she resembled her.[97]