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
What did she after the battle of Saint-Laurens, when the State was
shaken and the king had gone to Compiègne to raise a new army? She so
espoused affairs that she roused and excited the gentlemen of Paris to
give prompt succour to their king, which came most apropos, both in
money and in other things very necessary in war.
Also, when the king was wounded, those who were of that time and saw it
cannot be ignorant of the great care she took for his cure: the watches
she made beside him without ever sleeping; the prayers with which, time
after time, she importuned God; the processions and visitation of
churches which she made; and the posts which she sent about everywhere
inquiring for doctors and surgeons. But his hour had come; and when he
passed from this world into the other, she made such lamentations and
shed such tears that never did she stanch them; and in memory of him,
whenever he was spoken of as long as she lived, they gushed from the
depths of her eyes; so that she took a device proper and suitable to her
tears and her mourning, namely: a mound of quicklime, on which the drops
of heaven fell abundantly, with these words writ in Latin: _Adorem
extincta testantur vivere flamma_; the drops of water, like her tears,
showing ardour, though the flame was extinct. This device takes its
allegory from the nature of quicklime, which, being watered, burns
strangely and shows its fire though flame is not there. Thus did our
queen show her ardour and her affection by her tears, though flame,
which was her husband, was now extinct; and this was as much as to say
that, dead as he was, she made it appear by her tears that she could
never forget him, but should love him always.
A like device was borne in former days by Madame Valentine de Milan,
Duchesse d’Orléans, after the death of her husband, killed in Paris, for
which she had such great regret that for all comfort and solace in her
moaning, she took a watering-pot for her device, on the top of which was
an S, in sign, so they say, of _seule_, _souvenir_, _soucis_,
_soupirer_, and around the said watering-pot were written these words:
_Rien ne m’est plus; plus ne m’est rien_--“Nought is more to me; more is
to me nothing.” This device can still be seen in her chapel in the
church of the Franciscans at Blois.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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