An honourable French gentleman, whom I could name, seeing her one evening, in her finest lustre and most stately majesty in a ball-room, said to me these words: “Ah! if the Sieur des Essarts, who, in his books of ‘Amadis’ forced himself with such pains to well and richly describe to the world the beautiful Nicquée and her glory, had seen this queen in his day he would not have needed to borrow so many rich and noble words to depict and set forth Nicquée’s beauty; ‘t would have sufficed him to declare she was the semblance and image of the Queen of Navarre, unique in this world; and thus the beauteous Nicquée would have been better pictured than she has been, and without superfluity of words.”
Therefore, M. de Ronsard had good reason to compose that glorious elegy found among his works in honour of this beautiful Princess Marguerite of France, then not married, in which he has introduced the goddess Venus asking her son whether in his rambles here below, seeing the ladies of the Court of France, he had found a beauty that surpassed her own. “Yes, mother,” Love replied, “I have found one on whom the glory of the finest sky is shed since ever she was born.” Venus flushed red and would not credit it, but sent a messenger, one of her Charites, to earth to examine that beauty and make a just report. On which we read in the elegy a rich and fine description of the charms of that accomplished princess, in the mouth of the Charite Pasithea, the reading of which cannot fail to please the world. But M. de Ronsard, as a very honourable and able lady said to me, stopped short and lacked a little something, in that he should have told how Pasithea returned to heaven, and there, discharging her commission, said to Venus that her son had only told the half; the which so saddened and provoked the goddess into jealousy, making her blame Jupiter for the wrong he did to form on earth a beauty that shamed those of heaven (and principally hers, the rarest of them all), that henceforth she wore mourning and made abstinence from pleasures and delights; for there is nothing so vexatious to a beautiful and perfect lady as to tell her she has her equal, or that another can surpass her.
Now, we must note that if our queen was beauteous in herself and in her nature, also she knew well how to array herself; and so carefully and richly was she dressed, both for her body and her head, that nothing lacked to give her full perfection.
To the Queen Isabella of Bavaria, wife of King Charles VI., belongs the praise of having brought to France the pomps and gorgeousness that henceforth clothed most splendidly and gorgeously the ladies;[13] for in the old tapestries of that period in the houses of our kings we see portrayed the ladies attired as they then were, in nought but drolleries, slovenliness, and vulgarities, in place of the beautiful, superb fashions, dainty headgear, inventions, and ornaments of our queen; from which the ladies of the Court and France take pattern, so that ever since, appearing in her modes, they are now great ladies instead of simple madams, and so a hundredfold more charming and desirable. It is to our Queen Marguerite that ladies owe this obligation.
I remember (for I was there) that when the queen-mother took this queen, her daughter, to the King of Navarre, her husband, she passed through Coignac and made some stay. While they were there, came various grand and honourable ladies of the region to see them and do them reverence, who were all amazed at the beauty of the princess, and could not surfeit themselves in praising her to her mother, she being lost in joy. Wherefore she begged her daughter to array herself one day most gorgeously in the fine and superb apparel that she wore at Court for great and magnificent pomps and festivals, in order to give pleasure to these worthy dames. Which she did, to obey so good a mother; appearing robed superbly in a gown of silver tissue and dove-colour, à la bolonnoise [bouillonnée—with puffs?], and hanging sleeves, a rich head-dress with a white veil, neither too large nor yet too small; the whole accompanied with so noble a majesty and good grace that she seemed more a goddess of heaven than a queen of earth. The queen-mother said to her: “My daughter, you look well.” To which she answered: “Madame, I begin early to wear and to wear out my gowns and the fashions I have brought from Court, because when I return I shall bring nothing with me only scissors and stuffs to dress me then according to current fashions.” The queen-mother asked her: “What do you mean by that, my daughter? Is it not you yourself who invent and produce these fashions of dress? Wherever you go the Court will take them from you, not you from the Court.” Which was true; for after she returned she was always in advance of the Court, so well did she know how to invent in her dainty mind all sorts of charming things.
But the beauteous queen in whatsoever fashion she dressed, were it à la française with her tall head-dress, or in a simple coif, with her grand veil, or merely in a cap, could never prove which of these fashions became her most and made her most beautiful, admirable, and lovable; for she well knew how to adapt herself to every mode, adjusting each new device in a way not common and quite inimitable. So that if other ladies took her pattern to form it for themselves they could not rival her, as I have noticed a hundred times. I have seen her dressed in a robe of white satin that shimmered much, a trifle of rose-colour mingling in it, with a veil of tan crêpe or Roman gauze flung carelessly round her head; yet nothing was ever more beautiful; and whatever may be said of the goddesses of the olden time and the empresses as we see them on ancient coins, they look, though splendidly accoutred, like chambermaids beside her.
I have often heard our courtiers dispute as to which attire became and embellished her the most, about which each had his own opinion. For my part, the most becoming array in which I ever saw her was, as I think, and so did others, on the day when the queen-mother made a fête at the Tuileries for the Poles. She was robed in a velvet gown of Spanish rose, covered with spangles, with a cap of the same velvet, adorned with plumes and jewels of such splendour as never was. She looked so beautiful in this attire, as many told her, that she wore it often and was painted in it; so that among her various portraits this one carries the day over all others, as the eyes of good judges will tell, for there are plenty of her pictures to judge by.
When she appeared, thus dressed, at the Tuileries, I said to M. de Ronsard, who stood next to me: “Tell the truth, monsieur, do you not think that beautiful queen thus apparelled is like Aurora, as she comes at dawn with her fair white face surrounded with those rosy tints?—for face and gown have much in sympathy and likeness.” M. de Ronsard avowed that I was right; and on this my comparison, thinking it fine, he made a sonnet, which I would fain have now, to insert it here.
I also saw this our great queen at the first States-general at Blois on the day the king, her brother, made his harangue. She was dressed in a robe of orange and black (the ground being black with many spangles) and her great veil of ceremony; and being seated according to her rank she appeared so beautiful and admirable that I heard more than three hundred persons in that assembly say they were better instructed and delighted by the contemplation of such divine beauty than by listening to the grave and noble words of the king, her brother, though he spoke and harangued his best. I have also seen her dressed in her natural hair without any artifice or peruke; and though her hair was very black (having derived that from her father, King Henri), she knew so well how to curl and twist and arrange it after the fashion of her sister, the Queen of Spain, who wore none but her own hair, that such coiffure and adornment became her as well as, or better than, any other. That is what it is to have beauties by nature, which surpasses all artifice, no matter what it may be. And yet she did not like the fashion much and seldom used it, but preferred perukes most daintily fashioned.
In short, I should never have done did I try to describe all her adornments and forms of attire in which she was ever more and more beauteous; for she changed them often, and all were so becoming and appropriate, as though Nature and Art were striving to outdo each other in making her beautiful. But this is not all; for her fine accoutrements and adornments never ventured to cover her beautiful throat or her lovely bosom, fearing to wrong the eyes of all the world that roved upon so fine an object; for never was there seen the like in form and whiteness, and so full and plump that often the courtiers died with envy when they saw the ladies, as I have seen them, those who were her intimates, have license to kiss her with great delight.