The Sister
Francis plainly loved his sister Marguerite, after his mother and more than his mistresses. Her heart was full of love: love of her mother, her brother, her husbands, and a Platonic and mystical love. As a charming story has it, "she came into the world with laughing lips and with her little hands called to her every newcomer." She called her mother, her brother and herself "our triple union," and was content to be the "smallest corner" of that "flawless triangle." At birth she was Duchess of Angoulême, Orléans and Valois. Two years older than Francis, she had a large share in his upbringing and in childhood games played "the part of a loving mother," and his little wife. She tended her brother as if he were a god in human form. Though herself a woman of purity, once she saw that her brother was merely a man with human desires she set him among the legendary gods of ancient Greece. Though she had learned more science and art than her brother, she lacked his artistic taste. She learned Spanish, Italian, Latin, Greek and a little Hebrew, and gathered around her many scholars, poets, theologians and philosophers. Though plain of face and, like all the Valois, long-nosed, her agreeable character and accomplishments made her a charming woman. Marguerite was warm, pleasant, generous, kind and witty. She counted among the foremost poets of her age and made her court at Nérac and Pau a gathering place of Europe's most famous men of letters. Everyone loved her and longed to be near her. The people of that romantic yet cynical age called her "the Pearl of the Valois," since margarita in Latin means "pearl." A legend also spread that Louise had conceived her by swallowing a pearl.
Marguerite's letters to her brother are among the most eloquent and affectionate in the literature of the time. Francis must have had virtues that bound his sister so wholly to him. Though her feelings for others were unsteady and shifting, this pure and burning love suffered no harm in fifty years.
Marriages and Daughter
Gaston de Foix, nephew of Louis XII, lit the first spark of love in Marguerite's heart, then marched into Italy and died at Ravenna (1512). Guillaume de Bonnivet also fell in love with her, but finding her heart still bound to Gaston, he contracted a marriage with one of her maids in order to be near her. At seventeen (1509) Marguerite married Charles, Duke of Alençon, also of royal stock. The match was made on Francis's advice, to end the enmity of the two royal houses, but Marguerite could not take the young man to her heart. To console her, Bonnivet proposed a secret affair, but she refused it firmly (the book says she disfigured her face to make him give up; I abridge). The Duke of Alençon and Bonnivet both went to Italy to fight for Francis. Bonnivet died heroically at Pavia, and Alençon fled the field in the heat of battle. When he returned to Lyons everyone blamed him, and Louise called him a coward. He fell ill with pleurisy, and though Marguerite forgave her husband's fault and nursed him tenderly, he died in 1525.
Two years after her husband's death, at thirty-five, Marguerite married Henri d'Albret, a young man of twenty-four who was nominal king of Navarre. Henri, whose claim to rule that region had been cut off by the claims of Ferdinand II and Charles V, was made governor of Guyenne by Francis, and kept a small court of his own, sometimes at Nérac and at others at Pau, in southwestern France. He looked on Marguerite as a mother and was little bound by the marriage vow. For that reason Marguerite busied herself with receiving and protecting writers, philosophers and Protestant refugees. In 1528 Marguerite bore Henri a daughter, Jeanne d'Albret, who was to be the mother of Henry IV. Two years later she bore a son who died in childhood, and from then on Marguerite never took off black clothes. Francis wrote his sister a letter so full of compassion and sympathy that only Marguerite's own letters equal it in eloquence. Soon after, Francis ordered Marguerite and Henri to hand Jeanne over to be raised at court. He feared Marguerite would betroth her daughter to Philip II of Spain or raise her a Protestant. Though separation from her daughter was one of Marguerite's most painful sorrows before the king's death, it did not touch her burning, pure love for Francis. We cannot leave unmentioned that when Francis wanted to marry Jeanne to the Duke of Cleves and the girl refused, Marguerite ordered Jeanne's governess to force her to the marriage by strict punishment (I omit the detail). But the stubborn Jeanne, then twelve, after being punished several times, issued a signed protest that if she were forced to marry the Duke of Cleves she would not recognize the marriage as valid.
The marriage nonetheless went forward on grounds of state. Jeanne resisted to the last moment, so that she was dragged to church to take the marriage vow. After the ceremony she at once fled, rejoined her parents at Pau, and ruined their days with extravagance and spending.
Charity and Patronage
Marguerite herself was charity and humanity incarnate. Without attendants, like "a simple girl," she walked the streets of Pau, mixed with the people and came to know their suffering from near at hand. She said, "No one should return from a prince discouraged and disappointed," since "kings are servants of the poor ... and the poor are God's children." She called herself "prime minister of the poor," visited the houses of the needy and sent the court physicians to attend the sick. Henri joined her in charity. Though a neglectful husband, he became a model among the French through his charitable service as ruler. He and Marguerite paid for the education of many poor students, among them Amyot, translator of Plutarch. Marguerite gave shelter to men like Marot, Rabelais, Des Périers, Lefèvre d'Étaples and Calvin, so that one of her protégés compared her to a hen gathering her chicks under her wings.
Poetry and the Heptameron
At Nérac and Pau, besides charity, Marguerite amused herself with courtesy, Platonic love and a mystical theology that gave room to Catholicism and Protestantism and even to free thought. While embroidering she liked to have poets read to her, and she wrote poems herself in which human love and heavenly love mingle in a mysterious and charming way. In her lifetime she published books of poetry and drama, none of which equals in eloquence her letters, printed from 1841 on. Her Heptameron ("seven parts") is famous in the world for its licentiousness, though connoisseurs of such matter do not rate it highly. Its tales, though told with a degree of veiling, were written for the taste of an age that delighted in stories of amorous intrigue and betrayal. Marguerite herself retold the stories between 1544 and 1548 from the mouths of men and women of her court or the French court; yet the book was not printed until ten years after her death. She meant to write another Decameron, but since the tales did not exceed seven days the publisher named the book the Heptameron. Most of the tales, though their heroes bear invented names, seem authentic. Brantôme says his mother was one of the narrators and knew the people who appear under assumed names, and states that the fourth tale of the fifth day describes Bonnivet's attempt to win Marguerite herself.
It goes without saying that the affected taste of our day finds such tales of trickery shameful, but the men and women of the French court spent their time telling them while waiting for a flood to subside on their return from the baths of Cauterets. Some opinions scattered through the stories are surprising and instructive; one passage says, "So you think anything is allowed and praiseworthy for lovers provided it stays hidden?" "Yes, indeed, it is only fools and the simple who give themselves away." The general philosophy of the book appears in a meaningful line of the fifth tale: a woman's chastity is a treasure, whose keeping is a source of pride and whose over-keeping a source of shame, and unhappy the woman who does not know it. Jests make the stories more charming; for example, a pious apothecary of Pau had no intercourse with his wife except in Holy Week, and then only as penance (I soften the wording). Half the humor of the stories, as in Boccaccio, concerns the moral lapses of monks. In the fifth tale, for instance, someone says, "These good fathers, at the very time they preach piety to us, try to seduce our wives." An angry husband says they dare not touch money but fondle wives, which is far more dangerous (I soften). It should be added that the narrators of the tales attend Mass every morning, and every other page of the book is perfumed with the incense of virtue and piety.
Courtly and Platonic Love
Marguerite's fondness for such tales shows the taste and mood of her age. Though she herself was outwardly a pure and chaste woman, she overlooked the licentiousness of others, did not reproach the king who had handed his powers to others, and got on well with her brother's countless lovers. Evidently men and many women of that age did not form impure thoughts of love relations. It was the custom among French women to give their garters to the man they favored. Though Marguerite allowed sexual love, she herself gave her heart to Platonic and heavenly love. Platonic love, a legacy of the medieval courts, was, as Castiglione wrote at the end of his famous Courtier, mixed with Italian refinements. Marguerite held that women should value men's love and devotion even where no sexual satisfaction is called for, and answer their friendship with gentleness and unaffected warmth, because such relations free of sexual ties refine men's taste, polish their conduct and bind them to moral limits. In this way women should educate men. But Marguerite's philosophy was joined to a love higher than sexual and Platonic love: love of the good and the beautiful, love of perfection and virtue, and so love of God. Love of God, in her view, required that a man first love his fellow man.
A Vague and Tolerant Faith
Marguerite's religious beliefs, like her feelings, were vague and confused. As her brother's selfishness did not lessen her love for him, so the misfortunes and injustices of her life tied her to a pure, burning religious faith, free of bigotry and rigidity. She too sometimes fell into doubt and unbelief. In The Mirror of the Sinful Soul she frankly confesses that at times she doubted the truth of Scripture and the existence of the Creator, thought God a hard and tyrannical being, and asked herself whether Scripture truly came from him. In 1533 Marguerite was summoned to the Sorbonne to answer for a heresy attributed to her, but she ignored the summons. A monk told his chapter that she deserved to be put in a sack and thrown into the Seine. But the king came to his sister's aid and told the Sorbonne and the monks to leave her alone. He thought the ideas attributed to her slanders and said, "She loves me so much that she will accept no creed but mine." The king's easy mind and firm assurance did not let him lean toward the Huguenots' ideas. But for Marguerite, who suffered from her own sinfulness and thought her small sins mountains, it was not hard to sympathize with them. She thought the existing religious systems vain and of little worth, and believed the need for reform of religion had been put off and forgotten. She read some of the Lutheran writings and approved their criticisms of the corruption and greed of the Church's leaders. Francis was astonished to find her once at prayer with Farel. While she prayed to the Virgin at Nérac and Pau, she sheltered Protestant refugees, Calvin himself among them. But Calvin was displeased at her mixing with freethinkers like Étienne Dolet and Bonaventure des Périers and reproached her for her tolerance, and she ignored his reproaches. So tolerant and liberal was she that, had she lived under her grandson Henry IV, she might gladly have drafted the Edict of Nantes with her own hand (the book says "daughter's son," which is her grandson). In her person, for a brief time, the Reformation joined the Renaissance.
Her Memory
Marguerite's influence and popularity in France reached the point that every free spirit turned to her and counted her the perfect symbol of liberalism. Rabelais dedicated his famous Gargantua to her. Pierre de Ronsard and Joachim du Bellay followed her Platonic and Plotinian mysticism. The Psalms of David, translated by Marot, to some extent breathed the spirit of the Huguenots into her. In the eighteenth century Pierre Bayle, in his Historical and Critical Dictionary, wrote an ode in her praise. In the nineteenth, Michelet, the Protestant French writer and historian, in his long, distinguished and charming History of France, says of Marguerite: "Let us keep alive forever the memory of this loving and tender queen of Navarre, in whose arms our nation took refuge from prison and the pile of faggots, and with whom it found safety, honor and respect. O mother of our Renaissance, we shall honor you always! Your house was the refuge of saints, and your heart the shelter of our liberty."