London, October 1892.
1 As I have spoken so strongly of the attempts to identify
the personages of the Heptameron, it might seem
discourteous not to mention that one of the most
enthusiastic and erudite English students of Margaret,
Madame Darmesteter (Miss Mary Robinson), appears to be
convinced of the possibility and advisableness of
discovering these originals. Everything that this lady
writes is most agreeable to read; but I fear I cannot say
that her arguments have converted me.—G. S.
DEDICATIONS AND PREFACE,
PREFIXED TO THE FIRST TWO EDITIONS OF THE TALES OF THE QUEEN OF NAVARRE.
To the most Illustrious, most Humble, and most Excellent Princess,
Madame Margaret de Bourbon,
Duchess of Nevers, Marchioness of Illes, Countess of Eu, of Dreux, Rételois, Columbiers, and Beaufort, Lady of Aspremont, of Cham-Regnault, of Arches, Rencaurt, Monrond, and La Chapelle-d’Angylon, Peter Boaistuau surnamed Launay, offers most humble salutation and perpetual obedience.(1)
1 This dedicatory preface appeared in the first edition of
Queen Margaret’s Tales, published by Boaistuau in 1558 under
the title of Histoires des Amans Fortunez. The Princess
addressed was the daughter of Charles, Duke of Vendôme; she
was wedded in 1538 to Francis of Cleves, Duke of Nevers, and
by this marriage became niece to the Queen of Navarre.—Ed.
Madam, That great oracle of God, St. John Chrysostom, deplores with infinite compassion in some part of his works the disaster and calamity of his century, in which not only was the memory of an infinity of illustrious persons cut off from among mankind, but, what is more, their writings, by which the rich conceptions of their souls and the divine ornaments of their minds were to have been consecrated to posterity, did not survive them. And certainly with most manifest reason did this good and holy man address such a complaint to the whole Christian Republic, touched as he was with just grief for an infinity of thousands of books, of which some have been lost and buried in eternal forgetfulness by the negligence of men, others dispersed and destroyed by the cruel incursions of war, others rotted and spoiled as much by the rigour of time as by carelessness to collect and preserve them; whereof the ancient Histories and Annals furnish a sufficient example in the memorable library of that great King of Egypt, Ptolemy Phila-delphus, which had been formed with the sweat and blood of so many notable philosophers, and maintained, ordered, and preserved by the liberality of that great monarch. And yet in less than a day, by the monstrous and abominable cruelty of the soldiers of Cæsar, when the latter followed Pompey to Alexandria, it was burned and reduced to ashes. Zonarius, the ecclesiastical historian, writes that the same happened at Constantinople in the time of Zeno, when a superb and magnificent palace, adorned with all sorts of manuscript books, was burnt, to the eternal regret and insupportable detriment of all those who made a profession of letters. And without amusing ourselves too curiously in recounting the destruction among the ancients, we have in our time experienced a similar loss—of which the memory is so recent that the wounds thereof still bleed in all parts of Europe—namely, when the Turks besieged Buda, the capital of Hungary, where the most celebrated library of the good King Matthias was pillaged, dispersed, and destroyed; a library which, without sparing any expense, he had enriched with all the rarest and most excellent books, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic, that he had been able to collect in all the most famous provinces of the earth.