These services rendered by Marguerite were real; but that which is a subject of eulogy on the part of some is a source of blame on the part of others. Her brother having married her for the second time, in 1527, to Henri d’Albret, King of Navarre, she held her little Court at Pan which thenceforth became the refuge and haven of all persecuted persons and innovators. “She favoured Calvinism, which she abandoned in the end,” says Président Hénault, “and was the cause of the rapid progress of that dawning sect.” It is very true that Marguerite, open to all the literary and generous sentiments of her time, behaved as, later, a person on the verge of ‘89 might have favoured liberty with all her strength without wishing or even perceiving the approaching revolution. She did at this period as did the whole Court of France, which, merely following fashion, the progress of Letters, the pleasure of understanding Holy Scripture and of chanting the Psalms in French, came near to being Lutheran or Calvinistic without knowing it. Their first awakening was on a morning (October 19, 1534) when they read, affixed to every wall in Paris, those bloody placards against the Catholic faith. The imprudent ones of the party had fired the train before the appointed time. Marguerite, good and loyal, knowing nothing of parties and judging only by honourable persons and the men of letters of her acquaintance, leaned to the belief that those infamous placards were the act, not of Protestants, but of those who sought a pretext to compromise and persecute them. Charitable and humane, she never ceased to act upon her brother in the direction of clemency.
It was thus that on two or three occasions she tried to save the unfortunate Berquin, who persisted in dogmatizing, and was, in spite of all the princess’s efforts with the king, her brother, burned on the Grève, April 24, 1529. To read the passages of the letters in which she commends Berquin, one would think she espoused his opinions and his beliefs; but we must not ask too much rigour and precision of Marguerite in her ideas and their expression. There are moments, no doubt, in reading her verse or her prose, when we might think that she had fully accepted the Reformation; she reproduces its language, even its jargon. Then, side by side, we see her become once more, or rather continue to be, a believer after the manner of the best Catholics of her age, given to all their practices, and not fearing to couple with them her inconsistencies. Montaigne, who had great esteem for her, could not prevent himself from noting, for example, her singular reflection about a young and very great prince, whose history she relates in her Nouvelles, and who has all the look of being François I.; she shows him on his way to a rendezvous that is not edifying, and, to shorten his way, he obtains permission of the porter of a monastery to cross its enclosure. On his return, being no longer so hurried, the prince stops to pray in the church of the cloister; “for,” she says, “although he led the life of which I tell you, he was a prince who loved and feared God.” Montaigne takes up that remark, and asks what good she found at such a moment in that idea of divine protection and favour. “This is not the only proof to be adduced,” he adds, “that women are not fitted to treat of matters of theology.”
And, in truth, Marguerite was no theologian; she was a person of real piety, heart, knowledge, and humanity, who mingled with her serious life a happy, enjoying temperament, making a most sincere harmony of it all; which surprises us a little in the present day. Brantôme relates (in his “Lives of Illustrious Captains”) an anecdote of Marguerite which paints her very well in this connection and measure. A brother of Brantôme, the Capitaine de Bourdeille, had known at Ferrara in the household of the duchess of that country (daughter of Louis XII.) a French lady, Mlle. de La Roche, by whom he had made himself beloved. He brought her back with him to France, and she went to the Court of the Queen of Navarre, where she died, he no longer caring for her. One day, three months after this death, Capitaine de Bourdeille passed through Pau, and having gone to pay his respects to the Queen of Navarre as she returned from vespers, was well received by her; and talking from topic to topic as they walked, the princess led him quietly through the church to the spot where the tomb of the lady he had loved and deserted was placed. “Cousin,” she said, “do you not feel something moving beneath your feet?” “No, madame,” he replied. “But reflect a moment, cousin,” she said. “Madame, I do reflect,” he answered, “but I feel no movement, for I am walking on solid stone.” “Then I inform you,” said the queen, without keeping him further in suspense, “that you stand upon the grave and body of that poor Mlle. de La Roche, who is buried beneath you, whom you loved so much; and, since souls have feelings after death, it cannot be doubted that so honest a being, dying of coldness, felt your step above her; and though you felt nothing, because of the thickness of that stone, she was moved, and conscious of your presence. Now, inasmuch as it is a pious deed to remember the dead, I request you to give her a Pater noster, an Ave Maria, and a De Profundis, and to sprinkle her with holy water; you will thus obtain the name of a faithful lover and a good Christian.” She left him and went away, that he might fulfil with a collected mind the pious ceremonies that were due to the dead. I do not know why Brantôme adds the remark that, in his opinion, the princess said and did all this more from good grace and by way of conversation than from conviction; it seems to me, on the contrary, that there was belief as well as grace, the conviction of a woman of delicacy and a pious soul, and that all is there harmonized.
In Marguerite’s own time there were not lacking those who blamed her for the protection she gave to the lettered friends of the Reformation; she found denunciators in the Sorbonne; she found them equally at Court. The Connétable de Montmorency, speaking to the king of the necessity of purging the kingdom of heretics, added that he must begin with the Court and his nearest relations, naming the Queen of Navarre. “Do not speak of her,” said the king, “she loves me too well; she will believe only what I believe; she will never be of any religion prejudicial to my State.” That saying sums up the truth: Marguerite could be of no other religion than that of her brother; and Bayle has very well remarked, in a fine page of his criticism, that the more we show that Marguerite was not united in doctrine with the Protestants, the more we are forced to recognize her generosity, her loftiness of soul, and her pure humanity. By her womanly instinct she comprehended tolerance, like L’Hôpital, like Henri IV., like Bayle himself. From the point of view of the State there may have been some danger in the direction of this tolerance, too confiding and too complete; it so appeared, in Marguerite’s time, at this critical moment when the religion of the State, and with it the constitution of those days, was in danger of overthrow. Nevertheless, it is good that there should be such souls,—in love, before all else, with humanity; who insinuate, in the long run, gentleness into public morals and into laws and justice hitherto cruel; it is good because later, in epochs when severity begins again, repression, while it may be commanded by reasons of policy, is still forced to reckon with that spirit of humanity introduced into customs, and with acquired tolerance. Thus the rigour of present ages, softened and tempered as it now is by general manners and morals, would have been a blessing in past centuries; these are points gained in civil life which are never lost afterwards.
The Contes et Nouvelles of the Queen of Navarre have nothing, as we can readily believe, that is much out of keeping or contradictory with her life and the habitual character of her thoughts. M. Genin has already made that judicious remark, and an attentive reading will only justify it. Those Tales are neither the gayeties nor the sins of youth; she wrote them at a ripe age, for the most part in her litter while travelling, and by way of amusement—but the amusement had its serious side. Death prevented her from concluding them; instead of the seven Days which we actually have, she intended to make ten, like Boccaccio; she wished to give, not an Heptameron, but a French Decameron. In her prologue she supposes that several persons of condition, French and Spanish, having met, in the month of September, at the baths of Cauterets, in the Pyrenees, separate after a few weeks; the Spaniards returning as best they can across the mountains, the French delayed on their way by floods caused by the heavy rains. A certain number of these travellers, men and women, after divers adventures more extraordinary than agreeable, find themselves again in company at the Abbey of Notre-Dame-de-Serrance, and there, as the river Gave is not fordable, they decide to build a bridge. “The abbé,” says the narrator, “who was very glad they should make this outlay, because the number of pilgrims would thus be increased, furnished the workmen, but not a penny to the costs, such was his avarice. The workmen declaring that they could not build the bridge under ten or a dozen days, the company, half men, half women, began to get very weary.” It became necessary to find some “pleasant and virtuous” occupation for those ten days, and for this they consulted a certain Dame Oisille, the oldest of the company.
Dame Oisille responded in a manner most edifying: “My children, you ask me a thing that I find very difficult, namely: to teach you a pastime which shall deliver you from ennui. Having searched for this remedy all my life, I have found but one, and that is the reading of Holy Epistles, in which will be found the true and perfect joy of the soul, from which proceeds the repose and health of the body.” But the joyous company cannot keep wholly to so austere a system, and it is agreed that the time shall be divided between the sacred and the profane. Early in the morning the company assembled in the chamber of Dame Oisille to share in her moral readings, and from there they went to mass. They dined at ten o’clock, after which, having retired each to his or her chamber for private affairs, they met again about mid-day on the meadow: “And, if it please you, every day, from mid-day till four o’clock, we went through the beautiful meadow, on the banks of the river du Gave, where the trees are so leafy that the sun cannot pierce the shadows, or heat the coolness; and there, seated at our ease, each told some story he had known, or else heard from a trustworthy person.” For it was well understood that nothing should be told that was not true; narrators must be content to disguise, if necessary, the names of both persons and places. The company numbered ten; as many men as women, and each told a story daily; so it followed that in ten days the hundred tales would be completed. Every afternoon, at four o’clock, a bell was rung, giving notice that it was time to go to vespers; the company went,—not, however, without sometimes obliging the monks to wait for them; to which delay the latter lent themselves with very good grace. Thus rolled the time away, no one believing that he or she had passed the limits of sanctioned gayety or committed any sin.
The Tales of the Queen of Navarre have nothing absolutely out of keeping with this framework and design. Each story has a moral, a precept, either well or ill deduced; each is related to support some maxim, some theory, on the pre-eminence of one or other of the sexes, on the nature and essence of love, with examples or proofs (often very contestable) of what is advanced. Prudery apart, there is not much in these tales that is really charming. The subjects are those of the time. At moments we exclaim with Dame Oisille: “Good God! shall we never get out of these stories of monks?” We are made aware that even the honourable men and well-bred women of those days were contemporaries of Rabelais. However, it all turns to a good end. There is wit and subtlety in the discussions which serve as epilogue or prologue to the different tales. Most of the histories, being true, are without art, composition, or dénouement. The Queen of Navarre has been very little imitated in the tales and verses made since her day; in fact, she lends herself poorly to imitation. Only once does La Fontaine put her under contribution, but then in what is, as I think, the most piquant of her writings, namely: the tale of La Servante justifiée. In Marguerite’s story a merchant, a carpet-dealer, emancipates himself with another than his wife, and is discovered by a female neighbour. Fearing that the latter will gabble, the merchant, “who knew how to give any colour to carpets,” arranges matters in such a way that his wife is induced of her own accord to walk to the same place; so that when the gossiping neighbour comes to tell the wife what she has seen, the latter replies, “Hey! my crony, but that was I.” This “that was I” repeated many times and in varying tones, becomes comical, like the sayings of the farce called Patelin, or a scene of Regnard; there are, however, not many such sayings in Marguerite’s Tales.
A question which arises on the reading of these Nouvelles, the image and faithful reproduction of the good society of that day, is on the singularity that the tone of conversation should have varied so much among honourable persons at different epochs before it settled down upon the basis of true delicacy and decency. Elegant conversation dates much farther back than we suppose; polished society began much earlier than we think. The character of conversation as we now understand it in society, and that which specially distinguishes it among moderns, is that women are admitted to it; and this it was that led, during the finest period of the middle ages, to charming conversations in certain Courts of the South, and also in Normandy, in France, and in England. In those castles of the South where troubadours disported, and whence the echo of their sweet songs comes to us, where exquisite and ravishing stories were composed (like that of Aucassin et Nicolette), there must have been all the delicacy, all the graces one could wish for in conversation. But taking matters as they appear to us at the end of the 15th century, we notice a mixture, a very perceptible struggle between purity and license, between coarseness and refinement. The pretty little romance Jehan de Saintré, in which the chivalric ideal is pictured from the start in the daintiest manner, and which assumes to give us a little code in action of politeness, courtesy and gallantry,—in a word, the complete education of a young equerry of the day,—this pretty romance is also full of pedantic precepts, essays on minute ceremonial, and towards the end it suddenly turns into gross sensuality and the triumph of the monk, after Rabelais.
The vein of license and wanton language never ceased its flow from the time it originated, disguising itself in brilliant moments and noble companies only to again unmask at the beginning of the sixteenth century, when it seems to borrow still further audacity from the Latin Renaissance. This was the time when virtuous women told and openly discoursed of tales à la Roquelaure. Such is the tone of the society which the Nouvelles of Marguerite of Navarre represent to us, all the more naïvely because their intention is in no way indecent. Nearly a century was needed to reform this vice of taste; it was necessary that Mme. de Rambouillet and her daughter should come to reprimand and school the Court, that professors of good taste and polite language, like Mlle. de Scudéry and the Chevalier de Méré, should apply themselves for years to preach decorum; and even then we shall find many backslidings and vestiges of coarseness in the midst of even their refinement and formalism.
The noble moment is that when, by some sudden change of season, intellects and minds are spread, all of a sudden, in a richer and more equal manner over a whole generation of vigorous souls who then return eagerly to that which is natural, and give themselves up to it without restraint. That noble moment came in the middle of the seventeenth century, and nothing can be imagined comparable to the conversations of the youth of the Condés, the La Rochefoucaulds, the Retzes, the Saint-Evremonds, the Sévignés, the Turennes. What perfect hours were those when Mme. de La Fayette talked with Madame Henriette, lying after dinner on the cushions! Thus we come, across the greatest of centuries, to Mme. de Caylus, the smiling niece of Mme. de Maintenon, to that airy perfection where the mind without reflecting about it, denies itself nothing and observes all.