The century of Columbus

by James J. Walsh

The greatest woman of the French Renaissance and probably the most influential of the women of the time, with the possible exception of Vittoria Colonna, was Marguerite of Angoulême. In English-speaking countries she is better known as Marguerite of Navarre, though in France she is sometimes spoken of also as Marguerite of Valois or of France. She was the sister of Francis I, King of France, and devoted in her affection towards him. Undoubtedly it was she more than any other who inspired her brother with the idea of founding the College of France, and it was she who was the patron and guardian of the French Renaissance. After Francis had been captured at the battle of Pavia and shipped as a prisoner to Spain she made the long, perilous, difficult journey that it was in those days from Paris to Madrid with sisterly devotion, and in spite of trying hardships stayed near her brother during his confinement.

The world generally knows her as the author of the "Heptameron" and has condemned her rather severely because of its too great freedom of manners and morals. Our own generation, however, which from its youngest years reads in our daily newspapers much worse stories than Margaret ever wrote, should not be ready to condemn her. It is difficult to understand her writing of these stories unless one knows the conditions of the time. The license that had come in among the novelists led to the telling of many stories that even our age, accustomed to the greatest license in this matter, finds too frank. Margaret, whom her generation has agreed in calling a saint, hoped to undo the evil of such stories by telling them frankly and adding morals to them. The stories have been read and the morals neglected. Her idea was very much the same as the excuse made for the publication of many [{306}] criminal stories of all kinds in our time, that publicity makes for deterrence. The erroneous psychology of this attempt at justification for a serious breach of ethics is only too patent. Margaret's good intentions in the matter are undoubted. Good intentions, however, do not guarantee that acts will be without evil effects. Margaret was trying to correct the corruption of her time in very much the same way as many women have been aroused into activity in ours, only she made the sad mistake of using the wrong means by thinking that publicity or information would prove a safeguard against evil instead of an incentive to the very forms of vice that she was trying to correct--above all for the young. Her significance in literature is discussed in the chapter on French literature.

Margaret's personal character is one of the most beautiful in history and it fully justifies the praise of her contemporaries and even Vittoria Colonna's words, which would seem fulsome. The most interesting phase of Marguerite's character is her devotion to the sick poor. Down at Alençon the large hospital owed its origin to her and her name was in benediction among the people because of all that she did. Hers was no mere distant service such as a queen might render because of the power she had to employ others, but she devoted herself to personal work for them that made them feel her saintly unselfishness. The king, her brother, gave her a grant for a foundling school in Paris. This was known as La Maison des Enfants Rouges, The House of the Red Children, because of the scarlet dresses which were the uniforms. Francis in his grant says that his sister had told him how these little children that had been picked up on the streets of Paris die when they are taken to the Hôtel Dieu and that they need the more special care of an institution for themselves and he is very glad to come to her assistance.

When her own boy died at the age of a few months Marguerite, whose tender family affection can be very well appreciated from her relations with her brother, was stricken with grief. We have the naive description, however, of the strength of soul with which she bore it: "She went into her room, refusing the aid of any of the women attached to the Court, she thanked the Lord very humbly for all the good it had pleased [{307}] Him to do her." She went even farther than that, however, she forbade that there should be any public grief, had the Te Deum sung for joy in the church because the death meant the welcoming into Heaven of an angel and she had placards made to be posted throughout the city bearing the inscription, "The Lord hath given and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord." And yet she herself wore black after this and never changed it and after a time this became the formal color of ladies' dress at her court.

One of the important women of the century whose administrative ability surpassed that of the men of the time is Mary of Burgundy, whose beautiful tomb is to be seen in Bruges. The monument is one of the gems of the old town, but is not more than befitting the character of the lady it was meant to commemorate. Her dealings with the proud burghers of the Netherlands were those of a sympathetic sovereign trying to assure prosperity to these thrifty towns whose trade made it possible for so many of their people to become wealthy and happy citizens. Had her mode of treating them descended to some of her successors we would have been spared that ugly record of nearly a hundred years of bloodshed and war and famine in the Low Countries, which makes one of the saddest blots on modern history. Her granting of privileges and conferring of rights with recognition of old customs in formal documents is now commemorated in many places in the modern art of the Low Countries, and these constitute her finest tribute and memorial.

The last of the women of this century who deserves to be mentioned and without whom indeed any account of the century would be quite incomplete is probably the greatest of all the women of the period and perhaps the greatest intellectual woman who ever lived. The end of the chapter brings us back to Spain to Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada, whom the world knows as St. Teresa. It is true that most of her work was accomplished after the close of the century, but as she was born in 1515 and was therefore thirty-five years of age before Columbus' Century closed, receiving all of her training and formation of mind in the great Renaissance period, her place is naturally in this epoch. She is the most important [{308}] of the women of the Renaissance, though this is seldom realized, and her reputation instead of decreasing with the years has rather increased. Even within the last twenty years a number of lives of her was written in every language in Europe and no less than a dozen of them have appeared in English. The feminists of the modern time have turned to her as one of the great representative women of all time.

It is worth while recording some of the great tributes to her. Her own Spanish compatriots call her lovingly their Doctor of the Church. At Rome at the entrance of the Vatican Basilica where appear in marble the Fathers and the Doctors of the Church you will see one single statue raised to a woman and bearing this inscription, "Mater Spiritualium"--Mother of Things Spiritual. It is the statue of Teresa who has been gloriously proclaimed the Mother of Spirituality, the Mistress of Mystical Theology and practically a Doctor of the Church, in the principles of the spiritual life.

The French and the Spanish are almost at opposite poles in their critical appreciations, yet Teresa has been honored almost as much in France as in her native country. Men so different as Bossuet and Fénelon have united in proclaiming her their teacher in the science of the saints and have declared her books, "The Way of Perfection," "The Castle of the Soul," "The Book of Foundations" and "Spiritual Advice," the most wonderful contributions to human knowledge that have ever been made.

Nor was her appeal only to the Latin races in Europe. The German mystics have always found a special attraction in St. Teresa's work and this was true not only among the Catholic students in Germany, but also at nearly all times among the Protestants. In the modern time Teresa has been the subject of many monographs by German writers.

In English, though national feeling and religious prejudice might be expected to make Teresa little known or even deliberately neglected, her works came to be very well known. In the middle of the seventeenth century Crashaw became enamored (no other word will express his lofty sentiments) of her writings and literally thought that no one had ever had so high a vision of things other-worldly. George Eliot paid [{309}] her tribute in the preface to "Middlemarch," and while her own dissatisfaction with life makes that tribute somewhat grudging and half-hearted, there is no doubt that our greatest woman novelist of the nineteenth century had been very deeply influenced by the writings of the calm light of the sixteenth.