Pierre de Bourdeille Brantôme

“ Did not the beautiful Galatea rule in Gaul when Hercules married her after his conquest of Spain?—from which marriage issued our brave, valiant, generous Gauls, who in the olden time made themselves laudable.
Why should the daughters of dukes in this kingdom be more capable of governing a duchy or a county and administering justice (which is the duty of kings) than the daughters of kings to rule the kingdom of France? As if the daughters of France were not as capable and fitted to command and reign as those of other kingdoms and fiefs that I have named! ”

“ I would like to know if this kingdom has found itself any better for an infinitude of conceited, silly, tyrannical, foolish, do-nothing, idiotic, and crazy kings—not meaning to accuse our brave Pharamond, Clodion, Clovis, Pépin, Martel, Charles, Louis, Philippe, Jean, François, Henri, for they are all brave and magnanimous, those kings, and happy they who were under them—than it would have been with an infinitude of the daughters of France, very able, very prudent, and very worthy to govern. ”

“ And even if he be so unnatural as to forget himself and what he owes to me, I prefer, for my honour’s sake and as my courage tells me, to be deprived of his good graces, because I would not seek du Gua to gain his favours, or be even suspected of gaining them by such means and intercession; and if the king, my brother, feels himself worthy to be king, and to be loved by me and by his people, I feel myself, as his sister, worthy to be queen and loved, not only by him but by all the world. ”

“ She loved beyond all things those spheres of enchantment, those Fortunate Isles, alike of Urania and of Calypso, and she was ever seeking to reproduce them in all places and under all forms, whether at her Court at Nérac or amid the rocks of Usson, or, at the last, in that beautiful garden on the banks of the Seine (which to-day is the Rue des Petits-Augustins) where she strove to cheat old age.
“O my queen! how good it is to be with you!” ”

“ I do not believe this; for she loved persons of holy lives, as those men are.
Such was the great constancy and noble firmness of this virtuous queen, which she kept to the end of her days, towards the venerated bones of the king her husband, which she honoured incessantly with regrets and tears; and not being able to furnish more (for a fountain must in the end dry up) she succumbed, and died so young that she was only thirty-five years old at the time of her death. Loss most inestimable! for she might long have served as a mirror of virtue to the honest ladies of all Christendom. ”

“ Withal a lively, graceful, and sportive mind, and French raillery, an ardent soul, capable of passion, open to desire, a heart which knew not how to draw back when flame or fancy or enchantment stirred it. Such was the queen, adventurous and poetical, who tore herself from France in tears, sent by politic uncles to recover her authority amid the roughest and most savage of “Frondes.”
Scotland, since Marie Stuart left it as a child, had undergone great changes; the principal was the Reformed religion which had taken root there and extended itself vigorously. ”

“ If one had a noble majesty the other had none the less; the eyes of all were never surfeited or delighted enough by so agreeable a sight; for the sets were so well danced, the steps so correctly performed, the stops so finely made that we knew not which to admire most, their beautiful fashion of dancing or their majesty in pausing; representing now a gay demeanour and next a noble, crave disdain; for no one ever saw them in the dance that did not say they had seen no dance so fine with grace and majesty as this of the king-brother and the queen-sister. ”

“ Alfonso, the great King of Naples, who was subtle in loving the beauties of women, used to say that beauty is the sign manual of kindness and gentle goodness, as the beautiful flower is that of a good fruit. As to that it cannot be doubted that if our queen had been ugly and not composed of her great beauty, she would have been very bad in view of the great causes to be so that were given her. ”

“ Some said: “The Court is widowed of her beauty;” others: “The Court is gloomy, it has lost its sun;” others again: “How dark it is; we have no torch.” And some cried out: “Why should Gascoigne come here gascoigning to steal our beauty, destined to adorn all France and the Court, Fontainebleau, Saint-Germain, the hôtel du Louvre, and all the other noble places of our kings, to lodge her at Pau and Nérac, places so unlike the others?” ”

“ Spirits, charming and lightsome, who have been, from all time, the grace and the honour of this land of France—ye who were born and played in those iron ages issuing from barbaric horrors; who, passing through cloisters, were welcomed there; the joyous soul of burgher vigils and the gracious fêtes of castles; ye who have blossomed often beside the throne, dispersing the weariness of pomps, giving to victory politeness, and recovering your smiles on the morrow of reverses; ye who have taken many forms, tricksome, mocking, elegant, or tender, facile ever ”

“ It is no longer that of a passionate and heedless woman punished for her frailties and her inconstancy; it is that of the legitimate heiress of the crown of England, exposed in her dungeon to the eyes of the world, a faithful, unshaken Catholic, who refuses to sacrifice her faith to the interests of her ambition or even to the salvation of her life. The beauty and grandeur of such a rôle were fitted to stir the tender and naturally believing heart of Marie Stuart. ”

“ And thus it is they are so ungrateful, these people, toward Marguerite, sole and only remaining daughter and princess of France! It is easy to foresee the wrath of God upon them, because nothing is to Him so odious as ingratitude, especially to kings and queens, who here below fulfil the place and state of God. And thou, disloyal Fortune, how plainly dost thou show that there are none, however loved by heaven and blessed by nature, who can be sure of thee and of thy favours a single day! ”

“ Which is a great respect to the ashes of her husband, and a proof that she loved him well; also an injunction on her children to honour her always. The late M. Strozzi was one of those who courted her and asked her in marriage; but great as he was and allied to the queen-mother, she refused him and excused herself kindly. But what a humour was this! to be beautiful, virtuous, a very rich heiress, and yet to end her days on a solitary feather-bed and blanket, desolate and cold as ice, and thus to pass so many widowed nights! Oh! how many there be unlike this lady—but some are like her, too. ”

“ However that may be, her beauty is such that the blows of said Fortune have no ascendency upon her, for the generous courage she drew at birth from so many brave and valorous kings, her father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and their ancestors, has enabled her hitherto to make a brave resistance.
To speak now of the beauty of this rare princess: I think that all those who are, will be, or ever have been beside it are plain, and cannot have beauty; for the fire of hers so burns the wings of others that they dare not hover, or even appear, around it. ”

“ Thus said the late Queen Isabella of Castile, that wise and virtuous and very Catholic princess: “The fruit of clemency in a queen of great beauty and lofty heart, covetous of honour, is sweeter far than any vengeance whatever, even though it be undertaken for just claims and reason.” ”

“ She was born great in herself, great in mind and very able, so that a royal grandeur could not fail her. She had, if she had wished it, double cause over Germaine de Foix to be haughty and arrogant, for she was daughter of a great King of France, and married to the greatest king in the world, he being not the monarch of one kingdom, but of many, or, as one might say, of all the Spains,—Jerusalem, the Two Sicilies, Majorca, Minorca, Sardinia, and the Western Indies, which seem indeed a world, besides being lord of infinitely more lands and greater seigneuries than Ferdinand ever had. ”

“ Our Marguerite did nothing of all that; she left that rôle to the Duchesse d’Étampes and her like. Marot himself, when praising her, insists particularly on her characteristic of gentleness, “which effaces the beauty of the most beautiful,” on her chaste glance and that frank speech, without disguise, without artifice. She was sincere, “joyous, laughing readily,” fond of all honest gayety, and when she wanted to say a lively word, too risky in French, she said it in Italian or in Spanish. ”

“ Nearing a decrepit old age, the worst of all woes, nearing, too, a poverty which cannot be cured as in our flourishing years when nought is impossible, repenting me a hundred thousand times for the fine extravagances I committed in other days, and regretting I did not save enough then to support me now in feeble age, when I lack all of which I once possessed too much,—I see, with a bursting heart, an infinite number of paltry fellows raised to rank and riches, while Fortune, treacherous and blind that she is, feeds me on air and then deserts and mocks me. ”

“ Here, then, was this poor princess a prisoner, and treated not as a daughter of France or the great princess that she was. But, at any rate, if her body was captive, her brave heart was not, and it never failed her, but helped her well and did not let her yield to her affliction. See what a great heart can do, led by great beauty! For he who held her prisoner became her prisoner in time, brave and valiant though he was. Poor man! ”

“ I ask you what a poor woman could do, left by the death of her husband, with five little children on her arms, and two families in France who were thinking to grasp the crown,—ours and the Guises. Was she not compelled to play strange parts to deceive first one and then the other, in order to guard, as she has done, her sons, who have successively reigned through the wise conduct of that shrewd woman? ”

“ More lovable than able, very ardent and in no way cautious, she returned with a grace that was out of keeping with her surroundings, a dangerous beauty, a keen but variable intellect, a generous but rash soul, a taste for the arts, a love of adventure, and all the passions of a woman joined to the excessive liberty of a widow. ”

“ Those are the beauties of body and mind in this fair princess, which I at this time represent, like a good painter, after nature and without art. I speak of those to be seen externally; for those that are secret and hidden beneath white linen and rich accoutrements cannot be here depicted or judged except as being very beautiful and rare; but this must be by faith, presumption, and credence, for sight is interdicted. Great hardship truly to be forced to see so beautiful a picture, made by the hand of a divine workman, in the half only of its perfection ”

“ Next, King Henri dying, they came to be King and Queen of France, the king and queen of two great kingdoms, happy, and most happy in themselves, had death not seized the king and left her widowed in the sweet April of her finest youth, having enjoyed together of love and pleasure and felicity but four short years,—a felicity indeed of short duration, which evil fortune might well have spared ”

“ I have been told by those who know that after her widowhood, among her most privileged ladies who tried to give her consolation, there was one (for you know among a large number there is always a clumsy one) who, thinking to gratify her said: “Ah, madame, if God instead of a daughter had given you a son, you would now be queen-mother of the king, and your grandeur would be increased and strengthened.” “Alas!” she replied, “do not say to me such grievous things. As if France had not troubles enough without my producing her one which would complete her ruin! ”

“ Besides, if Scripture were taken at its word on this Salic law, there would be no such great harm done, as I have heard great personages say, for they speak thus: “So long as there be males, females can neither inherit nor reign. Consequently, in default of males, females should do so. And, inasmuch as it is legal in Spain, Navarre, England, Scotland, Hungary, Naples, and Sicily that females should reign, why should it not be the same in France? For what is right in one place is right everywhere and in all places; places do not make the justice of the law.” ”

“ Humanity, pity, religion, supreme poetic grace, all those invincible and immortal powers feel themselves concerned in her person and cry to us across the ages. “Bear these tidings,” she said to her old Melvil at the moment of death: “that I die firm in my religion, a true Catholic, a true Scotchwoman, a true Frenchwoman.” These beliefs, these patriotisms and nationalities thus evoked by Marie Stuart have made that long echo that replies to her with tears and love. ”

“ Madame Louise was betrothed to the Emperor when she died. Thus are lovely rosebuds swept away by the wind, as well as full-blown flowers. Youth thus ravished is more to be regretted than old age, which has had its day and its loss is not great. Almost the same thing happened to Madame Magdelaine, their sister, who had no great time allowed her to enjoy the thing in all the world she most desired; which was, to be a queen, so proud and lofty was her heart.
She was married to the King of Scotland ”