All this I wrote during those wars we had among us for ten years. To make an end, did I not speak elsewhere of this great queen in other discourses I would lengthen this still more and all I could, for on so excellent a subject the longest words are never wearisome; but for a time I now postpone them.
Live, princess, live in spite of Fortune! Never can you be other than immortal upon earth and in heaven, whither your noble virtues bear you in their arms. If public voice and fame had not made common praise of your great merits, or if I were of those of noble speech, I would say further here; for never did there come into the world a figure so celestial.
This queen who should by good right order us
By laws and edicts and above us reign,
Till we behold a reign of pleasure under her,
As in her father’s days, a Star of France,
Fortune hath hindered. Ha! must rightful claim
Be wrongly lost because of Fortune’s spite?
Never did Nature make so fine a thing
As this great unique princess of our France!
Yet Fortune chooses to undo her wholly.
Behold how evil balances with good!
In the sixteenth century there were three Marguerites: one, sister of François I. and Queen of Navarre, celebrated for her intellect, her Tales in the style of Boccaccio, and her verses, which are less interesting; another, Marguerite, niece of the preceding, sister of Henri II., who became Duchesse de Savoie, very witty, also a writer of verses, and, in her youth, the patroness of the new poets at Court; and lastly, the third Marguerite, niece and great-niece of the first two, daughter of Henri II. and Catherine de’ Medici, first wife of Henri IV., and sister of the last Valois. It is of her that I speak to-day as having left behind her most agreeable historical pages and opened in our literature that graceful series of women’s Memoirs which henceforth never ceases, but is continued in later years and lively vein by Mesdames de La Fayette, de Caylus and others. All of these Memoirs are books made without intending it, and the better for that. The following is the reason why Queen Marguerite took the idea of writing those in which she describes herself with so lightsome a pen.
Brantôme, who was making a gallery of illustrious French and foreign ladies, after bringing Marie Stuart into it, bethought him of placing Marguerite beside her as another example of the injustice and cruelty of Fortune. Marguerite, at the period when Brantôme indited his impulsive, enthusiastic portrait of her, flinging upon his paper that eulogy which may truly be called delirious, was confined at the castle of Usson in Auvergne (1593), where she was not so much a prisoner as mistress. Prisoner at first, she soon seduced the man who held her so and took possession of the place, where she passed the period of the League troubles, and beyond it, in an impenetrable haven. The castle of Usson had been fortified by Louis XI., well-versed in precautions, who wanted it as a sure place in which to lodge his prisoners. There Marguerite felt herself safe, not only from sudden attack, but also from the trial of a long siege and repeated assault. Writing to her husband, Henri IV., in October, 1594, she says to him, jokingly, that if he could see the fortress and the way in which she had protected herself within it he would see that God alone could reduce it, and she has good reason to believe that “this hermitage was built to be her ark of safety.”
The castle which she thus compares to Noah’s ark, and which some of her panegyrists, convinced that she who lived there was given to celestial contemplations, compare to Mount Tabor, was regarded as a Caprea and an abominable lair by enemies, who, from afar, plunged eyes of hatred into it. It is very certain, however, that Queen Marguerite lost nothing in that retreat of the delicate nicety of her mind, for it was there that she undertook to write her Memoirs in a few afternoons, in order to come to Brantôme’s assistance and correct him on certain points. We will follow her, using now and then some contemporary information, without relying too much upon either, but endeavouring to draw with simple truth a singular portrait in which there enters much that was enchanting and, towards the end, fantastic.
Marguerite, born at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, May 14, 1553, was six years old when her father, Henri II., was killed at that fatal tournament which ruined the fortunes of the house of Valois. She tells us several anecdotes of herself and her childish repartees which prove a precocious mind. She takes great pains to call attention to a matter which in her is really a sign, a distinctive note through all excesses, namely: that as a child and when it was the fashion at Court to be “Huguenot,” and when all those who had intelligence, or wished to pass for having it, had withdrawn from what they called “bigotry,” she resisted that influence. In vain did her brother, d’Anjou, afterward Henri III., fling her Hours into the fire and give her the Psalms and the Huguenot prayers in place of it; she held firm and preserved herself from the mania of Huguenotism, which at that date (1561) was a fancy at Court, a French and mundane fashion, attractive for a time to even those who were soon to turn against it and repress it. Marguerite, in the midst of a life that was little exemplary, will always be found to have kept with sincerity this corner of good Catholicism which she derived from her race, and which made her in this respect and to this degree more of an Italian than a Frenchwoman; however, that which imports us to notice is that she had it.
Still a child when the first religious wars began, she was sent to Amboise with her young brother, d’Alençon. There she found herself in company with several of Brantôme’s female relations: Mme. de Dampierre, his aunt, Mme. de Retz, his cousin; and she began with the elder of these ladies a true friendship; with the younger, the cousin, the affection came later. Marguerite gives the reason for this very prettily:—