This event brought some improvement into Margaret’s life. Francis cared for both his mother and sister; nobody flattered him with the same undoubted sincerity as these two. After his accession the Duchesse D’Alençon was often with her brother’s court at Paris. But the intervals between these visits were still dull and melancholy. Her famous correspondence with the Bishop of Meaux, Guillaume Briconnet, could not have commenced until some five years after her brother’s accession, when Martin Luther had uprisen to preach against the Pope. These letters are steeped in complainfulness. Written from Alençon, they read as the letters of a young person—unhappy, but not too unhappy to make a sort of pretty plaintiveness out of melancholy. Questions of the soul had begun to vex her. According, also, to the new and curiously convincing doctrines, it was not so easy to elude punishment for this life’s licences as the priests protested. The new theories found obscure, hesitant acquiescences in her own intelligence. Their spiritual clearness possessed a renewing freshness after the iniquities into which the old religion had fallen. Margaret was insatiably curious; she craved to know everything, and when she started her correspondence with Briconnet—at that time sympathetic to the new religion—she both desired more knowledge of the Lutheran doctrine, and some one who could attune conflicting uncertainties.
The correspondence is extraordinary. Briconnet—impassioned of complexity in style—was half the time not comprehensible. In answer to some letter of Margaret’s dealing with spiritual bewilderments, he wrote to her: “The extent of your kingdom’s goods and honours should be a voice to stimulate, and a great breath to light a torrent of fire of love for God. Alas, madam, I fear that it is in some uneasiness; for, as Jeremiah said, the bellows that should light the fire has failed—defect sufflatorium in igne!... Madam, who is deserted in a desert, in a desert is lost, seeking solitude and cannot find it; and when he finds it is then prevented, is a bad guide to guide others out of the desert and lead them to the desired desert. The desert starves them with mortal hunger, even though they should be full up to the eyes, sharpening desire only to satiate it, and impoverish him to hunger.”
Margaret could make no sense of this. She wrote back humorously—nobody was more quickly moved to laughter—“The poor wanderer cannot understand the good which is to be found in the desert for lack of knowing she is benighted there. I pray you that in this desert, out of affection and pity, you will not hasten forwards so swiftly that you cannot be followed, in order that the abyss, through the abyss which you invoke, may not engulf the poor wanderer.”
But the request for clarity passed unheeded. Briconnet seized the word “abyss,” and the following paragraph was his answer. I give it in the original French, as translation is almost impossible. “L’Abysme, qui tout abysme présent, pour en le désabysment l’abysmes en l’abysme (sans l’abysmes). Auquel abysme est fond sans fond voie des errants,” etc.
Margaret must have abandoned hope of enlightenment; but Briconnet, happily, had intelligible intervals. When he chose he could write with the same lucidity as other people. Once, for instance, after Margaret had written more sadly than usual, he replied sensibly enough: “Madame, you write to me to have pity on you because you are lonely. I do not accept this proposition. Who lives in the world and has her heart in it remains alone through being badly accompanied. But she whose heart sleeps to the world and lives for the gentle and debonnair Jesus, lives in all that is necessary, and certainly is not alone.” Margaret refused to respond to this; she had such need of men and women, of friendship, of intellectual friction, of a perpetual output of loving-kindnesses. She wrote again to Briconnet, saying, “It is so cold—one’s heart is frozen;” and signed herself, “Worse than dead.”
Briconnet may have been moved; young women should not be neglected and unhappy. But he remained sensible, and reproved the method of signature. Then Margaret, with a defiant meekness, signed her next letter, “Worse than ill.”
This humorous docility shows that the depression she complained of was not yet grief—merely the illusive melancholy of juvenility. After the days of Alençon there was no repetition of it. Youth once traversed, the realities of death, of irretrievable sorrow—nothing is irretrievable until thirty—put an end to imaginative melancholy. Conscious of the familiar agonies always so close, the intelligent grow to hug what gaiety they can. Certainly there is no longer the playfulness in regard to sorrow, to sign “Worse than death” in a mood of amused defiance.
Some time before Francis started upon the disastrous Italian campaign, Margaret went through the last episode in her love-story with Bonnivet. Except for the light it throws upon the morals of the period, it would be as well omitted; and but for Monsieur de Claviere’s assertion of its veracity, one would gladly leave the story at its last dramatic moment. Bonnivet had married again, and during one of Margaret’s visits to Paris he invited royalty to pay a visit at his estate in the country, in order to take part in a great hunt he had organized. Margaret gives in the “Heptameron” a very full account of what occurred; but, condensed, it comes to this—that Bonnivet, having previously made a trap-door for the purpose, penetrated one night into the princess’s bedroom. This time Margaret did not scratch her own face, but her adversary’s. Before her lady-in-waiting rushed into the room, and her conscienceless admirer fled back through the carefully arranged trap-door, Bonnivet’s appearance had been rudely disfigured. He could not appear next day; it was necessary to plead illness to avoid unanswerable questions, and Margaret never saw him again. He was killed at the battle of Pavia. They had fought, but she grieved at his death, and to the end of her life loved to talk of him as one dear and tender in her memory.
Among other friends of this period, the poet Marot ought to be included. Marot’s father, also a poet, had been attached first to the court of Anne, and then to that of Francis. Marot himself had been brought up in an atmosphere of royalty. He was an interesting personality—incurably light and incurably honest. His poetry, of which Sainte Beuve remarked that good manners in poetry were born with him, was never deep, but always fascinating, natural, light-hearted. He wrote many verses to Margaret, in the gay and witty manner which was peculiarly his own. An excellently condensed impression of Margaret’s temperament is given in the following lines:—
“Tous deux aimons la musique chantes,