Issuing from this brilliant and stormy episode of the history of the sixteenth century, which has been so strongly and judiciously set before us by M. Mignet, full of these scenes of violence, treachery, and iniquity, and without having the innocence to believe that humanity has done forever with such deeds, we congratulate ourselves in spite of everything, and rejoice that we live in an age of softened and ameliorated public morals. We exclaim with M. de Tavannes, when he relates in his “Memoirs” the life and death of Marie Stuart: “Happy he who lives in a safe State; where good and evil are rewarded and punished according to their deserts.” Happy the times and the communities where a certain general morality and human respect for opinion, where a penal Code, and especially the continual check of publicity, exist to interdict, even to the boldest, those criminal resolutions which every human heart, if left to itself, is ever tempted to engender.

Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du Lundi (1851).

DISCOURSE IV.
ÉLISABETH OF FRANCE, QUEEN OF SPAIN.

I WRITE here of the Queen of Spain, Élisabeth of France, a true daughter of France in everything, a beautiful, wise, virtuous, spiritual, and good queen if ever there was one; and I believe since Saint Élisabeth no one has borne that name who surpassed her in all sorts of virtues and perfections, although that beautiful name of Élisabeth has been fateful of goodness, virtue, sanctity, and perfection to those who have borne it, as many believe.[11]

When she was born at Fontainebleau, the king her grandfather, and her father and mother made very great joy of it; you would have said she was a lucky star bringing good hap to France; for her baptism brought peace to us, as did her marriage. See how good fortunes are gathered in one person to be distributed on diverse occasions; for then it was that peace was made with King Henry [VIII.] of England; and to confirm and strengthen it our king made him her sponsor and gave to his goddaughter the beautiful name of Élisabeth; at whose birth and baptism the rejoicings were as great as at those of the little King François the last.

Child as she was, she promised to be some great thing at a future day; and when she came to be grown up she promised it more surely still; for all virtue and goodness abounded in her, so that the whole Court admired her, and prognosticated a fine grandeur and great royalty to her in time. So they say that when King Henri married his second daughter, Madame Claude, to the Duc de Lorraine, there were some who remonstrated against the wrong done to the elder in marrying the younger before her; but the king made this response: “My daughter Élisabeth is such that a duchy is not for her to marry. She must have a kingdom; and even so, not one of the lesser but one of the greater kingdoms; so great is she herself in all things; which assures me that she can miss none, wherefore she can wait.”

You would have said he prophesied the future. He did not fail on his side to seek and procure one for her; for when peace was made between the two kings at Cercan she was promised in marriage to Don Carlos, Prince of Spain, a brave and gallant prince and the image of his grandfather, the Emperor Charles, had he lived. But the King of Spain, his father, becoming a widower by the death of the Queen of England, his wife and cousin-german, and having seen the portrait of Madame Élisabeth and finding her very beautiful and much to his liking, cut the ground from under the feet of his son and did himself the charity of wedding her himself. On which the French and Spaniards said with one voice that one would think she was conceived and born before the world and reserved by God until his will had joined her with this great king, her husband; for it must have been predestined that he, being so great, so powerful, and thus approaching in all grandeur to the skies, should marry no other princess than one so perfect and accomplished. When the Duke of Alba came to see her and espouse her for the king, his master, he found her so extremely agreeable and suited to the said master that he said she was a princess who would make the King of Spain very easily forget his grief for his last two wives, the English and the Portuguese.

After this, as I have heard from a good quarter, the said prince, Don Carlos, having seen her, became so distractedly in love with her, and so full of jealousy, that he bore a great grudge against his father, and was so angry with him for having deprived him of so fine a prize that he never loved him more, but reproached him with the great wrong and insult he had done him in taking her who had been promised to him solemnly in the treaty of peace. They do say that this was, in part, the cause of his death, with other topics which I shall not speak of at this hour; for he could not keep himself from loving her in his soul, honouring and revering her, so charming and agreeable did she seem in his eyes, as certainly she was in everything.

Her face was handsome, her hair and eyes so shaded her complexion and made it the more attractive that I have heard say in Spain that the courtiers dared not look upon her for fear of being taken in love and causing jealousy to the king, her husband, and, consequently, running risk of their lives.