Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre (Robinson 1886)/Chapter 16
NÉRAC IN 1545.
While mourning and remorse filled the Court of France, the little Court of Nérac had settled into the inactive peace of disillusion. Even the sanguine King believed no more in the promise of Francis to restore his kingdom. Even the visionary Queen could hope no longer for the reconciliation of the Church with Luther. Age, with its calms and compromises, was settling over Navarre.
Margaret, with every year becoming more estranged from her husband, with every year more resigned to this estrangement, occupied herself with good works. She spent the greater part of her income in pensions to the poor of her kingdom, charging herself with a little nation of orphans, of afflicted, of aged and decrepit persons, whose living she provided. She sent large sums also to the Lutheran refugees in Switzerland and Germany. On herself she spent very little.
The black dress, edged with fur, the pleated white chemisette, which she had assumed on the death of her baby son, was a fashion from which she had never since departed. Her hair, neatly put away beneath a nun-like coif; her figure, fuller now than in her youth, in its tightly-fitting sober garb; her face, blonde and placid, with its wistful smile; so we know her, in the portrait of Janet, her court-painter, and brother of the greater Janet. And she seems to us like some calm and gentle abbess, ruling rather a convent than a court. It was, indeed, a quiet and orderly existence which she led, supervising her charities, ordering her household, maintaining an immense correspondence. In the afternoons, as she sat at her broidery (a work in which she excelled), she kept two secretaries by her side. One, on the right, took down her letters from her dictation; and the other wrote the verses she made aloud from time to time in the pauses of her other work.
The mass of poems thus composed—fluent, inconsequent, empty as the verse of an improvisatore—was at this time being set ready for publication, and appeared in 1547, under the title of Les Marguerites de la Marguerite des Princesses. Here we find not only her early spiritual verses, not only the "Myrouer" which so excited the wrath of the Sorbonne, and which Elizabeth of England translated; not only the charming rondeaux and ballads written to the King in captivity, but verse of a much later date. Margaret had never been so busy with her pen as now that her active influence was in abeyance. In 1542 she had written La Coche, a subtle dissertation on the best way of loving, which the praise of Francis inspires for a moment with true poetry and pathetic fervour. In 1544, she had completed the Heptameron. And now she was busy writing and revising a whole accumulation: spiritual songs, with a certain faded pathos in them, charming and not quite sincere; long meditations, prayers, and triumphs of a fluent learned piety, well supplied with texts; innocent boarding-school farces, on marriage, on faith as the best physician, on "Too much, plenty, little, and less": a sort of insipid rhymed Proverbs not devoid of a pleasant feminine substitute for humour. Also, strange in the midst of these, a savage passionate outburst against the cruelty of the Inquisition; and, bound up with all this medley of old-fashioned piety and sisterly devotion, a series of four Mysteries, interspersed by exquisite and charming Pastorals.
Of these Mysteries, or Comedies, as Margaret prefers to call them, that on the Nativity far excels the three others: the Desert, the Innocents, and the Adoration of the Kings. Nothing more delicate, more sweetly fantastic, than this strange, light, little comedy, this religious operetta. Joseph sings a tripping sort of Vaudeville to welcome the Holy Babe; and then the scene shifts, and the Bergerie begins.
The shepherds and shepherdesses of Palestine are sitting on the grass at evening, watching their folded flocks. They relate the work of the day to each other and then lie down to sleep—all in a sort of song—when one of them remarks the unusual brightness of the stars. At this point appears a choir of singing angels who tell of the birth of Christ. Then, when the heavenly voices all are hushed, the wondering youths and maidens sing a Nowell, charming in its light-shift touch and dancing metres.
Chorus of Shepherds and Shepherdesses.
Come let us hasten, journeying
To see the Child and Mother bright
Of whom the angels, carolling,
Have sung sweet homilies to-night:
Sing Nowell, let the Nowell ring,
For Christ is given to us outright.
| Sophronius and Philitine: | |
| To their poor household let us bring Of all our store a bounteous freight. | |
| Dorothy: | This cheese shall be my plenishing, In frame of rushes neatly dight. |
| Chorus: | Sing Nowell, let the Nowell ring, For Christ is given to us outright. |
| Christilla: | And I for Mary's nourishing Have milk new-drawn and creamy white. |
| Philitine: | I 'll give my cage: therein shall sing My bird, to please her, an it might. |
| Chorus: | Sing Nowell, let the Nowell ring, For Christ is given to us outright. |
| Elpison: | These faggots of my gathering Shall warm them in their wintry plight. |
| Nephelé: | My flute shall be my offering; The Child shall hear it with delight. |
| Chorus: | Sing Nowell, let the Nowell ring, For Christ is given to us outright. |
| Sophronius: | I'll run upon their heralding, For I the best know wrong from right. |
| Philitine: | His face I'll kiss, in worshipping. |
| Christilla: | Ah no, the heel's too holy, quite. |
| Chorus: | Sing Nowell, let the Nowell ring, For Christ is given to us outright. |
These charming comedies were acted at Nérac, with other farces less innocent and pretty. "Pour nous divertir, nous faisons moineries et farces," writes Margaret; and these monkeries, of which the "Inquisitor" alone remains, were, we may well believe, conceived in the spirit of Marot's Frère Lubin. They, and her patronage of Lutheran refugees, brought Margaret into such disrepute with the Catholic party that an attempt was made to poison her at her own table; and one day Henry of Navarre, it is said, weary of these continual troubles, boxed his illustrious consort on the ears, exclaiming, "Madame, you want to know too much!" It was difficult for Margaret to satisfy at once her husband, her brother, her Lutheran teachers, and her own liberal conscience. Sometimes that credulous and tolerant conscience led her sorely astray. In this year of 1545 she sheltered in her hospitable Court two would-be Lutherans, dressed as monks, named Quentin and Pocques. These men speedily rose to eminence at Nérac. Their vague spiritualism, their insidious, amorous mysticism, was quite to the taste of the little Court there. Margaret, ever dense, and now quite bewildered by a long experience of gallantry and mysticism, saw nothing to blame in their tenets. But, after some while, Calvin, at Geneva, hearing of these new lights of Navarre, made inquiries. He was scandalised when he learned the truth. These men, the principals of the infamous sect of Libertines, or Brothers of the Free Spirit, had been exiled from State to State, shunned by all for their impious and monstrous doctrines, for the debauchery and vice of their behaviour. He wrote to the Queen, his old protectress, and let her hear in no honeyed terms what were these ministers of hers. Then Quentin and Pocques, those prosperous refugees, had to be dismissed. But the spirit of moral relaxation, the vague mysticism, which had tolerated their presence, could not be sent as easily away.
For, in the time of political emptiness, in the pause following the death of the Duke of Orleans, Margaret's spirit, no longer braced by the large air of the world's affairs, had become enervated and languid and dreamy. Her visionary disposition asserted itself more and more. Her imagination, so easily transported, dwelt more and more on subtilised religion and subtilised passion, fused into one strange, all-engrossing mood in that uncritical mind of hers. A pretty tale that Brantôme tells of her at this time gives a sudden insight into this tender and unworldly attitude.
I tell the story almost in Brantôme's words. The brother of Brantôme, Jean de Bourdeille, destined in his youth for the Church, had been sent to Ferrara, then almost a French colony under the Duchess Renée of France, to finish his studies. There he met a charming young French widow, Madame de la Roche, with whom the young seminarist fell passionately in love. He threw up his career, and, bringing his lady to the shelter of Margaret's Court at Nérac, set off to the wars in Piedmont. Six months afterwards Captain de Bourdeille returned. His first visit was to Pau, where his mother was, and also the Queen of Navarre. He met the Queen coming out of church after vespers. She, la meilleure princesse du monde, turned, and led him into the deserted church. There for some time they talked together, walking to and fro, speaking of Italy, Piedmont, of the wars, but not a word of Madame de la Roche. Suddenly Margaret stopped, and, seizing the hand of Bourdeille, she said, in a changed voice, "My cousin, do you fell nothing move beneath your feet?" "No, Madame," he replied. "But, think well, my cousin," she insisted. "I have thought, Madame, but nothing moves; for a firm flagstone is underneath my feet." "Then I will tell you," said the Queen. "You are over the tomb and the body of that poor young Madame de la Roche, who is buried here beneath you, and whom you loved so much. And since our souls still feel after our death, you must not doubt that this honest creature, dead for your sake, felt a thrill as soon as you stepped upon her grave. And if you did not feel it, because of the thickness of the tomb, you must not doubt but it was real. And since it is a pious office to hold the dead in memory, and even those whom one has loved, I pray you to give her a Pater-noster, an Ave Maria, and a De Profundis, and to sprinkle her with holy water. And thus you will acquire the name of a very faithful lover and a good Christian. I will leave you, then, for that, and go away."
In such a mood as this—tenderly cynical, melancholy, dreamy—Margaret ruled over her Court of Navarre in these latter days of general désœuvrement which followed on the death of Charles of Orleans.