The book of the ladies: Illustrious Dames: The Reign and Amours of the Bourbon RégimeBrantôme, Pierre de Bourdeille
History
The book of the ladies: Illustrious Dames: The Reign and Amours of the Bourbon Régime
Brantôme, Pierre de Bourdeille
France -- Biography; France -- Court and courtiers; Queens; Women -- Biography
She was married, in spite of her objections as a good Catholic, to
Henri, King of Navarre, six days before the Saint-Bartholomew (August,
1572). She relates with much naïveté and in a simple tone the scenes of
that night of horror, of which she was ignorant until the last moment.
We see in her narrative that wounded and bleeding gentleman pursued
through the corridors of the Louvre, and taking refuge in Marguerite’s
chamber, and flinging himself with the cry “Navarre! Navarre!” upon her;
shielding his own body from the murderers with that of his queen, she
not knowing whether she had to do with a madman or an assailant. When
she did know what the danger was she saved the poor man, keeping him in
bed and dressing his wounds in her cabinet until he was cured. Queen
Marguerite, so little scrupulous in morality, is better than her
brothers; of the vanishing Valois she has all the good qualities and
many of their defects, but not their cruelty.
After this half-missed blow of the Saint-Bartholomew, which did not
touch the princes of the blood, an attempt was made to unmarry her from
the King of Navarre. On a feast day when she was about to take the
sacrament, her mother asked her to tell her under oath, truly, whether
the king, her husband, had behaved to her as yet like a husband, a man,
and whether there was not still time to break the union. To this
Marguerite played the _ingénue_, so she asserts, apparently not
comprehending. “I begged her,” she says, “to believe that I knew nothing
of what she was speaking. I could then say with truth as the Roman lady
said, when her husband was angry because she had not warned him his
breath was bad, ‘that she had supposed all men were alike, never having
been near to any one but him.’”
Here Marguerite wishes to have it understood that she had never, so far,
made comparison of any man with another man; she plays the innocent, and
by her quotation from the Roman lady she also plays the learned; which
is quite in the line of her intelligence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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