Leaving Namur, we have at Liège a touching and pathetic story of a poor young girl, Mlle. de Tournon, who dies of grief for being slighted and betrayed by her lover, to whom she was going in the utmost confidence; and who himself, coming to a better mind too late, rushes to console her, and finds her coffin on arrival. We have here from Queen Marguerite’s pen the finished sketch of a tale in the style of Mme. de La Fayette, just as above we had the drawing of a perfect little Flemish picture. On her return from this journey, the scenes Marguerite passes through at Dinant prove her coolness and presence of mind, and present us with another Flemish picture, but not so graceful as that of Mons and the beautiful nursing countess; this time it is a scene of public drunkenness, grotesque burgher rioting, and burgomasters in their cups. A painter need only transfer and copy the very lines which Marguerite has so happily traced, to make a faithful picture.
After these journeys, being now reunited at her house of La Fère in Picardy with her dear brother d’Alençon, she realizes there for nearly two months, “which were to us” she says, “like two short days,” one of those terrestrial paradises which were at all times the desire of her imagination and of her heart. She loved beyond all things those spheres of enchantment, those Fortunate Isles, alike of Urania and of Calypso, and she was ever seeking to reproduce them in all places and under all forms, whether at her Court at Nérac or amid the rocks of Usson, or, at the last, in that beautiful garden on the banks of the Seine (which to-day is the Rue des Petits-Augustins) where she strove to cheat old age.
“O my queen! how good it is to be with you!” exclaims continually her brother d’Alençon, enchanted with the thousand graceful imaginations with which she varied and embellished this sojourn at La Fère. And she adds naïvely, mingling her Christian erudition with sentiment: “He would gladly have said with Saint Peter: ‘Let us make our tabernacle here,’ if the regal courage he possessed and the generosity of his soul had not called him to greater things.” As for her, we can conceive that she would gladly have remained there, prolonging without weariness the enchantment; she would willingly have arranged her life like that beautiful garden at Nérac of which she constantly speaks, “which has such charming alleys of laurel and cypress,” or like the park she had made there, “with paths three thousand paces long beside the river;” the chapel being close at hand for morning mass, and the violins at her orders for the evening ball.
Whatever ability and shrewdness Queen Marguerite may have shown in various political circumstances in the course of her life, we nevertheless perceive plainly that she was not a political woman; she was too essentially of her sex for that. There are very few women who, like the Princess Palatine [Anne de Gonzaga] or the illustrious Catherine of Russia, know how to be libertine yet sure of themselves; able to establish an impenetrable partition between the alcove and the cabinet of public affairs. Nearly all the women who have mingled in the intrigues of politics have introduced and confused with them their intrigues of heart or senses. Consequently, whatever intelligence they may have, they elude or escape at a certain moment, and unless there be a man who holds the tiller and gives them with decision their course, we find them unfaithful, treacherous, not to be relied on, and capable at any moment of colloguing through a secret window with an emissary of the opposite side. Marguerite, with infinite intelligence and grace, was one of those women. Distinguished but not superior, and wholly influenced by passions, she had wiles and artifices of a passing kind, but no views, and still less stability.
One of the remarkable features of her Memoirs is that she does not tell all, nor even the half of all, and in the very midst of the odious and extravagant accusations made against her she sits, pen in hand, a delicate and most discreet woman. Nothing can be less like confession than her Memoirs. “We find there,” says Bayle, “many sins of omission; but could we expect that Queen Marguerite would acknowledge the things that would blast her? Such avowals are reserved for the tribunal of confession; they are not meant for history.” At the most, when enlightened by history and by the pamphlets of the period, we can merely guess at certain feelings of which she presents to us only the superficial and specious side. When she speaks of Bussy d’Amboise she scarcely restrains her admiration for that gallant cavalier, and we fancy we can see in the abundance of that praise that her heart overflows.
Even the letters that we have from her say little more. Among them are love letters addressed to him whom at one time she loved the most, Harlay de Chanvalon. Here we find no longer the charming, moderately ornate, and naturally polished style of the Memoirs; this is all of the highest metaphysics and purest fustian, nearly unintelligible and most ridiculous. “Adieu, my beauteous sun! adieu, my noble angel! fine miracle of nature!” those are the most commonplace and earthly of her expressions; the rest mount ever higher till lost in the Empyrean. It would really seem, from reading these letters, as if Marguerite had never loved with heart-love, only with the head and the imagination; and that, feeling truly no love but the physical, she felt herself bound to refine it in expression and to petrarchize in words, she, who was so practical in behaviour. She borrows from the false poetry of her day its tinsel in order to persuade herself that the fancy of the moment is an eternal worship. A practical observation is quoted of her which tells us better than her own letters the secret of her life. “Would you cease to love?” she said, “possess the thing beloved.” It is to escape this quick disenchantment, this sad and rapid awakening, that she is so prodigal of her figurative, mythological, impossible expressions; she is trying to make herself a veil; the heart counts for nothing. She seems to be saying to love: “Thy base is so trivial, so passing a thing, let us try to support it by words, and so prolong its image and its play.”
Her life well deduced and well related would make the subject of a teeming and interesting volume. Having obtained, after the persecutions and troubles, permission to rejoin her husband in Gascogne (1578), she remained there three and a half years, enjoying her liberty and leaving him his. She counts these days at Nérac, mingled, in spite of the re-beginning wars, with balls, excursions, and “all sorts of virtuous pleasures,” as an epoch of happiness. Henri’s weaknesses and her own harmonized remarkably, and never clashed. But Henri soon crossed the limit of license, and she, on her side, equally. It is not for us to hold the balance or enter here into details which would soon become indelicate and shameful. Marguerite, who had gone to spend some time in Paris at her brother’s Court (1582, 1583) did not return to her husband until after an odious scandal had made public her frailty.
From that time forth her life did not retain its early, smiling joyfulness. She was now past thirty; civil wars were lighted, never to be extinguished until after the desperate struggles and total defeat of the League. Marguerite, becoming a queen-adventuress, changed her abode from time to time, until she found herself in the castle of Usson, that asylum of which I have spoken, where she passed no less than eighteen years (1587-1605). What happened there? Doubtless many common frailties, but less odious than are told by bitter and dishonourable chroniclers, the only authorities for the tales they put forth.
During this time Queen Marguerite did not entirely cease to correspond with her husband, now become King of France. If the conduct of the royal pair leaves much to be desired with regard to each other, and also with regard to the public, let us at least recognize that their correspondence is that of honourable persons, persons of good company, whose hearts are much better than their morals. When reasons of State determined Henri to unmarry himself, to break a union which was not only sterile but scandalous, Marguerite agreed without resistance,—seeming, however, to be fully conscious of what she was losing. To accomplish the formalities of divorce, the pope delegated certain bishops and cardinals to interrogate separately the husband and wife. Marguerite expresses the desire, inasmuch as she must be questioned, that this may be done “by more private and familiar” persons, her courage not being able to endure publicly so great a diminution; “fearing that my tears,” she writes, “may make these cardinals think I am acting from force or constraint, which would injure the effect the king desires” (Oct. 21, 1599). King Henri was touched by the feelings she showed throughout this long negotiation. “I am very satisfied,” he writes, “at the ingenuousness and candour of your procedure; and I hope that God will bless the remainder of our days with fraternal affection, accompanied by the public good, which will render them very happy.” He calls her henceforth his sister; and she herself says to him: “You are father, brother, and king to me.” If their marriage was one of the least noble and the most bourgeois, their divorce, at any rate, was royal.
[Here Sainte-Beuve does not keep strictly to history. Henri IV. had long urged Marguerite to consent to a divorce; but she, aware that he was taking steps to divorce Gabrielle d’Estrées from her husband, in order to marry her, and feeling the indignity of such a marriage, firmly refused, and continued to do so until the sudden death of Gabrielle in Paris during Holy Week of 1599; on which Marguerite consented at once to the divorce, and Henri married Marie de’ Medici, December 17 of the same year.