But—though the statement is a repetition—no person’s life can be laid unremittingly upon the rack. Margaret, surrounded by people—her ladies, poets, scholars, painters, and others—was kept pleasantly preoccupied. The second Clouet painted her; Leonard Limousin, the great enamellist, wrought her exquisite enamels. Like most royalties of her day, she took great interest in her garden, and in the love affairs of her ladies she was unfailingly sympathetic and kind. A contemporary wrote of her as “the precious carnation in the flower garden of the palace. Her fragrance had drawn to Bearn, as thyme draws the honey-bee, the noblest minds in Europe.”
It is true that many of the “noblest minds of Europe” were drawn to Margaret. Even Rabelais, the last man to take pleasure in praising women without good reason, dedicated the third book of his “Pantagruel” to her. Rabelais, though he was the epitome of the Renaissance spirit in France, is too capacious to mention fragmentarily in the life of another person. And yet few men of the period convey a sweeter impression. He was colossal in everything; in compassion as well as laughter.
After the publication of his “Gargantua” and “Pantagruel,” Rabelais narrowly escaped the Sorbonne. But he was wise, and had no taste for being roasted. In the life of Pantagruel, referring to Toulouse, then the great centre of persecution, he said, ostensibly of Pantagruel, in reality of himself, “But he remained little time there, when he perceived that they made no bones about burning their regents alive like red herrings, saying, ‘The Lord forbid that I should die in this manner, for I am dry enough by nature, without being heated any further.’”
It is purposeless here to refer to Rabelais’s coarseness. At the present time no woman could read him. But, then, no woman for pleasure would read Margaret’s “Heptameron,” and Margaret, for all the grossness of a large number of her stories, had the capacity for a very delicate and artificial refinement.
She and Rabelais never came to a sufficient knowledge of each other for friendship; but there is a legend of Rabelais’s death which touches her outlook upon spiritual things very closely. A messenger had been despatched by Rabelais’s friend, Cardinal du Bellay, to inquire how he felt. Rabelais lay dying when the messenger arrived, but he sent back the following answer: “I go to find the great Perhaps.” A little later, still conscious of the pettiness of all human circumstances, he rallied sufficiently to make a last good phrase. “Pull the blind,” he is said to have whispered; “the farce is played out.”
This, “I go to find the great Perhaps,” was a sentence Margaret might have echoed had she known of it. There is an incident in her own life curiously in tune with the statement.
It must have occurred when she was, at any rate, middle aged, and the thought of death had become hauntingly vivid. One of her ladies-in-waiting lay dying. As the girl gradually sank into unconsciousness, the duchess insisted upon sitting by her bed. The attendants begged her to go away, but she refused to move, and sat staring silently at the dying figure. There seemed something unnatural in the absorption of her eyes, and her women were puzzled. When the girl was at last dead, Margaret turned away; visibly she betrayed disappointment. One of her ladies then asked her why she had leant forward and watched with such unmoving intensity the lips of the dying girl. Her answer is pathetic behind its callousness. She had been told, she said, that the soul leaves the body at the actual moment of death. She had looked and listened to catch the faintest sound of its emergence through the lips of the dying body, but she had seen and heard nothing. The watching had been, to a great extent, cold-blooded, but the result was a tragic discouragement of thought. There seemed nothing to strengthen belief with at all.
Nevertheless, if Margaret felt occasionally like a rat caught in a trap, since being alive one must inevitably and shortly die, she continued to the end to enjoy the present as far as possible. She shivered with spiritual dubieties; but at the same time she wrote the “Heptameron,” a book above everything earthy, caustic, and shrewd. It is said to have been written for Francis I. during his last illness. He had been inordinately amused by Boccaccio, and Margaret tried to give him stories in the same vein.
They are and they are not. The outline and the idea are similar; but Margaret was not a second Boccaccio. She wrote easily and naturally—she would have written a novel every year had she lived at the present time; but where Boccaccio was witty and light, Margaret was relentless and crude. Her brutality gives as great a shock as her indelicacy. It seems incredible, for instance, that she should have written the following termination to one of her stories. In the tale a priest was discovered to have made his sister his mistress. The woman was about to have a baby. The judges waited until the child was born; then brother and sister were burnt together. The very simplicity with which the statement is made adds to its horror. Margaret wrote: “They waited till his sister was brought to bed. Then when she had made a beautiful son, the sister and brother were burnt together.” The sentence, “when she had made a beautiful son,” renders the incident alive and unbearable.
It is difficult to say much of Margaret’s “Heptameron.” The stories are a curious mixture of appalling grossness, and the most soft and grieving mysticism. What one chiefly gathers from them in connection with her temperament is that, side by side with a noteworthy charm and sympathy, she possessed a slender strain of ruthlessness. Margaret’s nose was too long. To have a nose so much in excess, so thin and pointed, is always dangerous. Some want of balance must accompany its disproportion, some streak of cruelty its ungenerous narrowness. As a matter of fact, notwithstanding her nose, Margaret was a miracle of lovely kindlinesses, but it conquered in the matter of her daughter—she was a cold, unprofitable mother. Again, in the “Heptameron,” it is the temperament belonging to the long unbalanced feature whose detestation of the priests found outlet in such relentless vengeances. To some extent Margaret’s little chin saved her. Counterpoised, as it were, between two excesses—the cold, deceitful nose, and the yielding, enthusiastic chin—she contrived to retain balance between either, and to be, on the whole, an intricacy of characteristics, none of which surged into overwhelming predominance. The ascendant characteristics were all good—her sheltering instincts and her half-fearsome mystical aspirations. She had, long before the Maeterlinck utterance of it, the sense of a world in which everything was in reality spiritual and portentous. In one of the stories of the “Heptameron” she makes a lady—in reality herself, for the tale is said to be true—bring a fickle lover to the grave of his forgotten love, to see if no subtle communication issues from the dead body beneath them. When he feels nothing, her disappointment is almost painful, for no trait in Margaret renders her so endearing as this disquieted craving to be assured that existence was something more profound and worthy than a brief term of suffering consciousness.