That brings to weary me the hour of rest!
Oh! hear my cry and hasten, Lord, to me,
And put an end to all my misery.'[404]
Some one having observed that the Queen of Navarre had not appended her name to the title of her work, her accuser replied: 'Wait until the end, the signature is there;' and then he read the last line:
The good that he has done to me, his Margaret.[405]
In a short time insinuations and accusations against the sister of the king were heard from every pulpit. Here a monk made his hearers shudder as he described Margaret's wicked heresies; and there another tried to make them laugh. 'These things,' says Theodore Beza, 'irritated the Sorbonne extremely, and especially Beda and those of his temper, and they could not refrain from attacking the Queen of Navarre in their sermons.'[406]
Other circumstances excited the anger of the monks. Margaret did not love them. Monachism was one of the institutions which the reformers wished to see disappear from the Church, and the Queen of Navarre, in spite of her conservative character, did not desire to preserve it. The numerous abuses of the monastic life, the constraint with which its vows were often accompanied, the mechanical vocation of most of the conventuals, their idleness and sensuality, their practice of mendicancy as a trade, their extravagant pretensions to merit eternal life and to atone for their sins by their discipline, their proud conviction that they had attained a piety which went beyond the exigencies of the divine law, the discredit which the monastic institution cast upon the institutions appointed by God, on marriage, family, labour, and the state politic; finally, the bodily observances and macerations set above that living charity which proceeds from faith, and above the fruits of the Spirit of God in man:—all these things were, according to the reformers, entirely opposed to the doctrine of the Gospel.
=THE QUEEN OF NAVARRE'S TALES.=
Margaret went further still. She had not spared the monks, but on the contrary had scourged them soundly. If Erasmus and Ulrich von Hutten had overwhelmed them with ridicule, the Queen of Navarre had in several tales depicted their grovelling character and dissolute life. She had, indeed, as yet communicated these stories to few besides her brother and mother, and never intended publishing them; but, some copies having been circulated among the attendants of the court, a few leaves had fallen into the hands of the monks, and this was the cause of their anger. Margaret, like many others of her time, was mistaken—such at least is our opinion—as to the manner in which the vices of the monasteries ought to be combated. Following the example of Menot, the most famous preacher of the middle ages, she had described faithfully, unaffectedly, and sometimes too broadly the avarice, debauchery, pride, and other vices of the convents. She had done better than this, however; to the silly nonsense and indecent discourses of the grey friars she had opposed the simple, severe, and spiritual teaching of the Gospel. 'They are moral tales,' says a contemporary author (who is not over favourable to Margaret); 'they often degenerate into real sermons, so that each story is in truth only the preface to a homily.'[407] After a narrative in illustration of human frailty, Margaret begins her application thus: 'Know that the first step man takes in confidence in himself, by so much he diverges from confidence in God.' After describing a false miracle by which an incestuous monk had tried to deceive Margaret's father, the Count of Angoulême, she added: 'His faith was proof against these external miracles. We have but one Saviour who, by saying consummatum est (it is finished), showed that we must wait for no successor to work out our salvation.' No one but the monks thought, in the sixteenth century, of being scandalised by these tales. There was then a freedom of language which is impossible in our times; and everybody felt that if the queen faithfully painted the disorders of the monks and other classes of society, she was equally faithful in describing the strict morality of her own principles and the living purity of her faith. It was her daughter, the austere Jeanne d'Albret, who published the first correct edition of these Novels; and certainly she would not have done so, if such a publication had been likely to injure her mother's memory.[408] But times have changed; the book, harmless then, is so no longer; in our days the tales will be read and the sermons passed over: the youth of our generation would only derive harm from them. We acquit the author as regards her intentions, but we condemn her work. And (apologising to the friends of letters who will accuse us of barbarism) if we had to decide on the fate of this book, we would willingly see it experience a fate similar to that which is spoken of in the Bible, where we are told that many Corinthians brought their books together and burned them.[409]
=THE MIRROR SEIZED BY THE SORBONNE.=