One may easily see that Prevot mistook this Elizabeth for St. Elizabeth, the daughter of king Andrew II., who was never queen of Hungary, but died wife of a landgrave of Thuringia in 1235. But respecting Elizabeth, the wife of king Charles Robert, we know from the information of Hungarian writers[970], that in her will she really did mention two breviaries, one of which she bequeathed to her daughter-in-law, and the other to one Clara von Pukur, with this stipulation, however, that after her death it should belong to a monastery at Buda. It is not impossible, therefore, that one of these books may have come into the hands of Podacather’s ancestors.
I must however confess, that respecting this pretended invention of the Hungarian queen I have doubts; it may be readily conjectured that this Elizabeth must have been extremely vain; but when she wished to make posterity believe that in the seventieth, or seventy-second year of her age she became so sound and so beautiful that a king, at that time a widower, grew enamoured of her, we may justly conclude that she was more than vain—that she was perhaps childish. I have taken the trouble to search for the king, then a widower, who paid his addresses to Elizabeth, but my labour has proved fruitless. This proposal of marriage must have been made about the year 1370; but Casimir III., brother of the Hungarian Elizabeth, reigned in Poland till that year, and was succeeded by her son Louis, who died after her in 1382; and the throne then remained vacant for three years.
It is rather singular that the name of aqua-vitæ, and the practice of distilling spirit of wine upon aromatic herbs, should be known in Hungary so early as the fourteenth century, though I will not pretend to affirm the contrary. But I consider it as more remarkable that the botanists of the seventeenth century should have spoken of and extolled the various properties of rosemary without mentioning Hungary water. It cannot however be denied, that in the sixteenth century, long before Prevot, Zapata[971], an Italian physician, taught the method of preparing rosemary-water: and he has even told us that it was known, though imperfectly, to Arnoldus de Villa Nova; but he does not say that it was an Hungarian invention. It appears to me most probable, at present, that the name l’eau de la reine d’Hongrie, was chosen by those who in later times prepared rosemary-water for sale, in order to give greater consequence and credit to their commodity; as various medicines, some years ago, were extolled in the gazettes under the title of Pompadour, though the celebrated lady from whose name they derived their importance, certainly neither ever saw them nor used them.
FOOTNOTES
[965] Universal Lexicon, vol. xlix. p. 1340.
[966] Traité de la Chemie, par N. le Febure. Leyde, 1669, 2 vols. 12mo, i. p. 474.
[967] In his notes to Blumentrost’s Haus- und Reise-apotheke. Leipzig, 1716, 8vo, cap. 16, p. 47.
[968] Succincta Medicorum Hungariæ et Transilvaniæ Biographia, ex adversariis St. Wespremi. Wien, 1778, 8vo, p. 213.
[969] Selectiora remedia multiplici usu comprobata, quæ inter secreta medica jure recenseas. In page 6 the following passage occurs: “For the gout in the hands and the feet. As the wonderful virtue of the remedy given below has been confirmed to me by the cases of many, I shall relate by what good fortune I happened to meet with it. In the year 1606 I saw among the books of Francis Podacather, of a noble Cyprian family, with whom I was extremely intimate, a very old breviary, which he held in high veneration, because, he said, it had been presented by St. Elizabeth, queen of Hungary, to some of his ancestors, as a testimony of the friendship which subsisted between them. In the beginning of this book he showed me a remedy for the gout written by the queen’s own hand, in the following words, which I copied:—
“‘I Elizabeth, queen of Hungary, being very infirm and much troubled with the gout in the seventy-second year of my age, used for a year this receipt given to me by an ancient hermit whom I never saw before nor since; and was not only cured, but recovered my strength, and appeared to all so remarkably beautiful, that the king of Poland asked me in marriage, he being a widower and I a widow. I however refused him for the love of my Lord Jesus Christ, from one of whose angels I believe I received the remedy. The receipt is as follows: