The book of the ladies

In the meantime, about a year ago, there appeared a “History of Marie Stuart” by M. Dargaud, a writer of talent, whose book has been much praised and much read. M. Dargaud made, in his own way, various researches about the heroine of his choice; he went expressly to England and Scotland, and visited as a pilgrim all the places and scenes of Marie Stuart’s sojourns and captivities. While drawing abundantly from preceding writers, M. Dargaud does them justice with effusion and cordiality; he sheds through every line of his history the sentiment of exalted pity and poesy inspired within him by the memory of that royal and Catholic victim; he deserves the fine letter which Mme. Sand wrote him from Nohant, April 10, 1851, in which she congratulates him, almost without criticism, and speaks of Marie Stuart with charm and eloquence. If I do not dwell at greater length upon the work of M. Dargaud, it is, I must avow, because I am not of that too emotional school which softens and enervates history. I think that history should not necessarily be dull and wearisome, but still less do I think it should be impassioned, sentimental, and as if magnetic. Without wishing to depreciate the qualities of M. Dargaud, which are too much in the taste of the day not to be their own recommendation, I shall follow in preference a more severe historian, whose judgment and whose method of procedure inspire me with confidence.

Marie Stuart, born December 8, 1542, six days before the death of her father, who was then combating, like all the kings his predecessors, a turbulent nobility, began as an orphan her fickle and unfortunate destiny. Storms assailed her in her cradle, —

“As if, e’en then, inhuman Fortune

Would suckle me with sadness and with pain,”

as an old poet, in I know not what tragedy, has made her say. Crowned at the age of nine months, disputed already in marriage between the French and English parties, each desiring to prevail in Scotland, she was early, through the influence of her mother, Marie de Guise (sister of the illustrious Guises), bestowed upon the Dauphin of France, the son of King Henri II. August 13, 1548, Marie Stuart, then rather less than six years old, landed at Brest. Betrothed to the young dauphin, who, on his father’s death became François II., she was brought up among the children of Henri II. and Catherine de’ Medici, and remained in France, first as dauphine, then as queen, until the premature death of her husband. She lived there in every respect as a French princess. These twelve or thirteen years in France were her joy and her charm, and the source of her ruin.

She grew up in the bosom of the most polished, most learned, most gallant Court of those times, shining there in her early bloom like a rare and most admired marvel, knowing music and all the arts (divinæ Palladis artes), learning the languages of antiquity, speaking themes in Latin, superior in French rhetoric, enjoying an intercourse with poets, and being herself their rival with her poems. Scotland, during all this time, seemed to her a barbaric and savage land, which she earnestly hoped never to see again, or, at any rate, never to inhabit. Trained to a policy wholly of the Court and wholly personal, they made her sign at Fontainebleau at the time of her marriage (1558) a secret deed of gift of the kingdom of Scotland to the kings of France, at the same time that she publicly gave adherence to the conditions which the commissioners from Scotland had attached to the marriage, conditions under which she pledged herself to maintain the integrity, the laws, and the liberties of her native land. It was at this very moment that she secretly made gift to the kings of France of her whole kingdom by an act of her own good-will and power. The Court of France prompted her to that imprudent treachery at the age of sixteen. Another very impolitic imprudence, which proclaimed itself more openly, was committed when Henri II., on the death of Mary Tudor, made Marie Stuart, the dauphine, bear the arms of England beside those of Scotland, thus presenting her thenceforth as a declared rival and competitor of Elizabeth.

When Marie Stuart suddenly lost her husband (December 5, 1560), and it was decided that she, a widow at eighteen, should, instead of remaining in her dowry of Touraine, return to her kingdom of Scotland to bring order to the civil troubles there existing, universal mourning took place in the world of young French seigneurs, noble ladies, and poets. The latter consigned their regrets to many poems which picture Marie Stuart to the life in this decisive hour, the first really sorrowful hour she had ever known. We see her refined, gracious, of a delicate, fair complexion, the form and bust of queen or goddess, – L’Hôpital himself had said of her, after his fashion, in a grave epithalamium: —

“Adspectu veneranda, putes ut Numen inesse:

Tantus in ore decor, majestas regia tanta est! —

of a long hand, elegant and slender (gracilis), an alabaster forehead dazzling beneath the crape, and with golden hair – which needs a brief remark. It is a poet (Ronsard) who speaks of “the gold of her ringed and braided hair,” and poets, as we know, employ their words a little vaguely. Mme. Sand, speaking of a portrait she had seen as a child in the English Convent, says, without hesitation, “Marie was beautiful, but red-haired.” M. Dargaud speaks of another portrait, “in which a sunray lightens” he says rather oddly, “the curls of her living and electric hair.” But Walter Scott, reputed the most correct of historical romance-writers, in describing Marie Stuart a prisoner in Lochleven Castle, shows us, as though he had seen them, her thick tresses of “dark brown,” which escaped now and then from her coif. Here we are far from the red or golden tints, and I see no other way of conciliating these differences than to rest on “that hair so beautiful, so blond and fair” [si blonds et cendrés] which Brantôme, an ocular witness, admired, – hair that captivity whitened, leaving the poor queen of forty-six “quite bald” in the hands of her executioner, as l’Estoile relates. But at nineteen, the moment of her departure from France, the young widow was in all the glory of her beauty, except for a brilliancy of colour, which she lost at the death of her first husband, giving place to a purer whiteness.

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. The great reformer Knox preached the new doctrine, which found in Scotland stern, energetic souls ready made to receive it. The old struggle of the lords and barons against the kings was complicated and redoubled now by that of cities and people against the brilliant beliefs of the Court and the Catholic hierarchy. The birth of modern society, of civil equality, of respect for the rights of all was painfully working itself out through barbaric scenes, and by means of fanaticism itself. Alone and without counsel, contending with the lords and the nobility as her ancestors had done, Marie Stuart, quick, impulsive, subject to predilections and to antipathies, was already insufficient for the work; what therefore could it be when she found herself face to face with a religious party, born and growing during recent years, face to face with an argumentative, gloomy party, moral and daring, discussing rationally, Bible in hand, the right of kings, and pushing logic even into prayer? Coming from a literary and artificial Court, there was nothing in her that could comprehend these grand and voiceless movements of the people, either to retard them or turn them to her own profit by adapting herself to them. “She returned,” says M. Mignet, “full of regrets and disgust, to the barren mountains and the uncultured inhabitants of Scotland. 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.”

And to complicate the peril of this precarious situation she had for neighbour in England a rival queen, Elizabeth, whom she had first offended by claiming her title, and next, and no less, by a feminine and proclaimed superiority of beauty and grace, – a rival queen capable, energetic, rigid, and dissimulating, representing the contrary religious opinion, and surrounded by able counsellors, firm, consistent, and committed to the same cause. The seven years that Marie Stuart spent in Scotland after her return from France (August 19, 1561) to her imprisonment (May 18, 1568) are filled with all the blunders and all the faults that could be committed by a young and thoughtless princess, impulsive, unreflecting, and without shrewdness or ability except in the line of her passion, never in view of a general political purpose. The policy of Mme. de Longueville, during the Fronde, seems to me of the same character.

As to other faults, the moral faults of poor Marie Stuart, they are as well known and demonstrated to-day as faults of that kind can well be. Mme. Sand, always very indulgent, regards as the three black spots upon her life the abandonment of Chastellard, her feigned caresses to the hapless Darnley, and her forgetfulness of Bothwell.

Chastellard, as we know, was a gentleman of Dauphiné, musician and poet, in the train of the servitors and adorers of the queen, who at first was very agreeable to her. Chastellard was one of the troop who escorted Marie Stuart to Scotland, and sometime later, urged by his passion, he returned there. But not knowing how to restrain himself, or to keep, as became him, to poetic passion while waiting to inspire, if he could, a real one, he was twice discovered beneath the bed of the queen; the second time she lost patience and turned him over to the law. Poor Chastellard was beheaded; he died reciting, so they say, a hymn of Ronsard’s, and crying aloud: “O cruel Lady!” After so stern an act, to which she was driven in fear of scandal and to put her honour above all attainder and suspicion, Marie Stuart had, it would seem, but one course to pursue, namely: to remain the most severe and most virtuous of princesses.

But her severity for Chastellard, though shown for effect, is merely a peccadillo in comparison with her conduct to Darnley, her second husband. By marrying this young man (July 29, 1565), her vassal, but of the race of the Stuarts and her own family, Marie escaped the diverse political combinations which were striving to attract her to a second marriage; and it would have been, perhaps, a sensible thing to do, if she had not done it as an act of caprice and passion. But she fell in love with Darnley in a single day, and became disgusted in the next. This tall, weakly youth, timid and conceited by turns, with a heart “soft as wax,” had nothing in him which subjugates a woman and makes her respect him. A woman such as Marie Stuart, changeable, ardent, easily swayed, with the sentiment of her weakness and of her impulsiveness, likes to find a master and at moments a tyrant in the man she loves, whereas she soon despises her slave and creature when he is nought but that; she much prefers an arm of iron to an effeminate hand.

Less than six months after her marriage Marie, wholly disgusted, consoled herself with an Italian, David Riccio, a man thirty-two years of age, equally well fitted for business or pleasure, who advised her and served her as secretary, and was gifted with a musical talent well suited to commend him to women in other ways. The feeble Darnley confided his jealousy to the discontented lords and gentlemen, and they, in the interests of their faction, prodded his vengeance and offered to serve it with their sword. Ministers and Presbyterian pastors took part in the affair. The whole was plotted and managed with perfect unanimity as a chastisement of Heaven, and, what is more, by help of deeds and formal agreements which simulated legality. The queen and her favourite, apparently before they had any suspicions, were taken in a net. David Riccio was seized by the conspirators while supping in Marie’s cabinet (March 9, 1566), Darnley being present, and from there he was dragged into the next room and stabbed. Marie, at this date, was six months pregnant by her husband. On that day, outraged in honour and embittered in feeling, she conceived for Darnley a deeper contempt mingled with horror, and swore to avenge herself on the murderers. For this purpose she bided her time, she dissimulated; for the first time in her life she controlled herself and restrained her actions. She became politic – as the nature is of passionate women – only in the interests of her passion and her vengeance.

Here is the gravest and the most irreparable incident of her life. Even after we have fully represented to ourselves what the average morality of the sixteenth century, with all the treachery and atrocities it tolerated, was, we are scarcely prepared for this. Marie Stuart’s first desire was to revenge herself on the lords and gentlemen who had lent their daggers to Darnley, rather than on her weak and timid husband. To reach her end she reconciled herself with the latter and detached him from the conspirators, his accomplices. She forced him to disavow them, thus degrading and sinking him in his own estimation. At this point she remained as long as a new passion was not added to her supreme contempt. Meantime her child was born (June 19), and she made Darnley the father of a son who resembled both parents on their worst sides, the future James I. of England, that soul of a casuist in a king. But by this time a new passion was budding in the open heart of Marie Stuart. He whom she now chose had neither Darnley’s feebleness nor the salon graces of a Riccio; he was the Earl of Bothwell, a man of thirty, ugly, but martial in aspect, brave, bold, violent, and capable of daring all things. To him it was that this flexible and tender will was henceforth to cling for its support. Marie Stuart has found her master; and him she will obey in all things, without scruple, without remorse, as happens always in distracted passion.

But how rid herself of a husband henceforth odious? How unite herself to the man she loves and whose ambition is not of a kind to stop half way? Here again we need – not to excuse, but to explain Marie Stuart – we need to represent to our minds the morality of that day. A goodly number of the same lords who had taken part in Riccio’s murder, and who were leagued together by deeds and documents, offered themselves to the queen, and, for the purpose of recovering favour, let her see the means of getting rid of a husband who was now so irksome. She answered this overture by merely speaking of a divorce and the difficulty of obtaining it. But these men, little scrupulous, said to her plainly, by the mouth of Lethington, the ablest and most politic of them all: “Madame, give yourself no anxiety; we, the leaders of the nobility, and the heads of your Grace’s Council, will find a way to deliver you from him without prejudice to your son; and though my Lord Murray, here present (the illegitimate brother of Marie Stuart), is little less scrupulous as a Protestant than your Grace is as a Papist, I feel sure that he will look through his fingers, see us act, and say nothing.”

The word was spoken; Marie had only to do as her brother did, “look through her fingers,” as the vulgar saying was, and let things go on without taking part in them. She did take a part however; she led into the trap, by a feigned return of tenderness, the unfortunate Darnley, then convalescing from the small-pox. She removed his suspicions without much trouble, and, recovering her empire over him, persuaded him to come in a litter from Glasgow to Kirk-of-Field, at the gates of Edinburgh, where there was a species of parsonage, little suitable for the reception of a king and queen, but very convenient for the crime now to be committed.

There Darnley perished, strangled with his page, during the night of February 9, 1567. The house was blown up by means of a barrel of gunpowder, placed there to give the idea of an accident. During this time Marie had gone to a masked ball at Holyrood, not having quitted her husband until that evening, when all was prepared to its slightest detail. Bothwell, who was present for a time at the ball, left Edinburgh after midnight and presided at the killing. These circumstances are proved in an irrefragable manner by the testimony of witnesses, by the confessions of the actors, and by the letters of Marie Stuart, the authenticity of which M. Mignard, with decisive clearness, places beyond all doubt. She felt that in giving herself thus to Bothwell’s projects she furnished him with weapons against herself and gave him grounds to distrust her in turn. He might say to himself, as the Duke of Norfolk said later, that “the pillow of such a woman was too hard” to sleep upon. During the preparation of this horrible trap she more than once showed her repugnance to deceive the poor sick dupe who trusted her. “I shall never rejoice,” she writes, “through deceiving him who trusts me. Nevertheless, command me in all things. But do not conceive an ill opinion of me; because you yourself are the cause of this; for I would never do anything against him for my own particular vengeance.” And truly this rôle of Clytemnestra, or of Gertrude in Hamlet was not in accordance with her nature, and could only have been imposed upon her. But passion rendered her for this once insensible to pity, and made her heart (she herself avows it) “as hard as diamond.” Marie Stuart soon put the climax to her ill-regulated passion and desires by marrying Bothwell; thus revolting the mind of her whole people, whose morality, fanatical as it was, was never in the least depraved, and was far more upright than that of the nobles.

The crime was echoed beyond the seas. L’Hôpital, that representative of the human conscience in a dreadful era, heard, in his country retreat, of the misguided conduct of her whose early grace and first marriage he had celebrated in his stately epithalamium; and he now recorded his indignation in another Latin poem, wherein he recounts the horrors of that funereal night, and does not shrink from calling the wife and the young mother “the murderess, alas! of a father whose child was still at her breast.”

On the 15th of May, three months – only three months after the murder, at the first smile of spring, the marriage with the murderer was celebrated. Marie Stuart justified in all ways Shakespeare’s saying: “Frailty, thy name is Woman.” For none was ever more a woman than Marie Stuart.

Here I am unable to admit the third reproach of Mme. Sand, that of Marie Stuart’s forgetfulness of Bothwell. I see, on the contrary, through all the obstacles, all the perils immediately following this marriage, that Marie had no other idea than that of avoiding separation from her violent and domineering husband. She loved him so madly that she said to whosoever might hear her (April, 1567) that “she would quit France, England, and her own country, and follow him to the ends of the earth in nought but a white petticoat, rather than be parted from him.” And soon after, forced by the lords to tear herself from Bothwell, she reproaches them bitterly, asking but one thing, “that both be put in a vessel and sent away where Fortune led them.” It was only enforced separation, final imprisonment, and the impossibility of communication, which compelled the rupture. It is true that Marie, a prisoner in England, solicited the Parliament of Scotland to annul her marriage with Bothwell, in the hope she then had of marrying the Duke of Norfolk, who played the lover to herself and crown, though she never saw him. But, Bothwell being a fugitive and ruined, can we reproach Marie Stuart for a project from which she hoped for restoration and deliverance? Her passion for Bothwell had been a delirium, which drove her into connivance with crime. That fever calmed, Marie Stuart turned her mind to the resources which presented themselves, among which was the offer of her hand. Her wrong-doing does not lie there; amid so many infidelities and horrors, it would be pushing delicacy much too far to require eternity of sentiment for the remains of an unbridled and bloody passion. That which is due to such passions, when they leave no hatred behind them, that which becomes them best, is oblivion.

Such conduct, and such deeds, crowned by her heedless flight into England and the imprudent abandonment of her person to Elizabeth, seem little calculated to make the touching and pathetic heroine we are accustomed to admire and cherish in Marie Stuart. Yet she deserves all pity; and we have but to follow her through the third and last portion of her life, through that long, unjust, and sorrowful captivity of nineteen years (May 18, 1568, to February 5, 1587) to render it unconsciously. Struggling without defence against a crafty and ambitious rival, liable to mistakes from friends outside, the victim of a grasping and tenacious policy which never let go its prey and took so long a time to torture before devouring it, she never for a single instant fails towards herself; she rises ever higher. That faculty of hope which so often had misled her becomes the grace of her condition and a virtue. She moves the whole world in the interest of her misfortunes; she stirs it with a charm all-powerful. Her cause transforms and magnifies itself. 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. She fills her soul with that rôle; she substitutes it, from the first moment of her captivity, for all her former personal sentiments, which, little by little, subside and expire within her as the fugitive occasions which aroused them pass away. She seems to remember them no more than she does the waves and the foam of those brilliant lakes that she has crossed. For nineteen years the whole of Catholicity is disquieted and impassioned about her; and she is there, half-heroine, half-martyr, making the signal and waving her banner behind the bars. Captive that she was, do not accuse her of conspiring against Elizabeth; for with her ideas of right divine and of absolute kingship from sovereign to sovereign, it was not conspiring, she being a prisoner, to seek for the triumph of her cause; it was simply pursuing the war.

From the moment when Marie Stuart is a prisoner, when we see her crushed, deprived of all that comforts and consoles, infirm, alas! with whitened hair before her time, when we hear her, in the longest and most remarkable of her letters to Elizabeth (November 8, 1582), repeating for the twentieth time: “Your prison, without right, without just grounds, has already so destroyed my body that you will soon see an end if this lasts much longer; so that my enemies have no great time to satisfy their cruelty against me; nought remains to me but my soul, the which it is not in your power to render captive,” – when we dwell on this mixture of pride and plaint, pity carries us along; our hearts speak; the tender charm with which she was endowed, and which acted upon all who approached her, asserts its power and lays its spell upon us even at this distance. It is not by the text of a scribe, nor yet with the logic of a statesman that we judge her; it is with the heart of a knight, or rather, let me say, with that of a man. 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.

What reproach can we make to one who, after nineteen years of anguish and moral torture, searched, during the night that preceded her death, in the “Lives of the Saints” (which her ladies were accustomed to read to her nightly) for some great sinner whom God had pardoned. She stopped at the story of the penitent thief, which seemed to her the most reassuring example of human confidence and divine mercy; and while Jean Kennedy, one of her ladies, read it to her, she said: “He was a great sinner, but not so great as I. I implore our Lord, in memory of His Passion, to remember and have mercy upon me, as He had upon him, in the hour of death.” Those true and sincere feelings, that contrite humility in her last and sublime moments, this perfect intelligence, and profound need of pardon, leave us without means of seeing any stain of the past upon her except through tears.

It was thus that old Étienne Pasquier felt. Having to relate in his “Recherches” the death of Marie Stuart, he compares it with the tragic history of the Connétable de Saint-Pol, and that of the Connétable de Bourbon, which left him under a mixture of conflicting sentiments. “But in that of which I now discourse,” he says, “methinks I see only tears; and is there, by chance, a man who, reading this, will not forgive his eyes?”

M. Mignet, who examines all things as an historian, and gives but short pages to emotion, has admirably distinguished and explained the different phases of Marie Stuart’s captivity, and the secret springs which were set to work at various periods. He has, especially, cast a new light, aided by Spanish documents in the Archives of Simancas, on the slow preparations of the enterprise undertaken by Philip II., that fruitless and tardy crusade, delayed until after the death of Marie Stuart, which ended in the disastrous shipwreck of the invincible Armada.

Issuing from this brilliant and stormy episode of the history of the sixteenth century, which has been so strongly and judiciously set before us by M. Mignet, full of these scenes of violence, treachery, and iniquity, and without having the innocence to believe that humanity has done forever with such deeds, we congratulate ourselves in spite of everything, and rejoice that we live in an age of softened and ameliorated public morals. We exclaim with M. de Tavannes, when he relates in his “Memoirs” the life and death of Marie Stuart: “Happy he who lives in a safe State; where good and evil are rewarded and punished according to their deserts.” Happy the times and the communities where a certain general morality and human respect for opinion, where a penal Code, and especially the continual check of publicity, exist to interdict, even to the boldest, those criminal resolutions which every human heart, if left to itself, is ever tempted to engender.

    Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du Lundi (1851).

DISCOURSE IV.

ÉLISABETH OF FRANCE, QUEEN OF SPAIN

I WRITE here of the Queen of Spain, Élisabeth of France, a true daughter of France in everything, a beautiful, wise, virtuous, spiritual, and good queen if ever there was one; and I believe since Saint Élisabeth no one has borne that name who surpassed her in all sorts of virtues and perfections, although that beautiful name of Élisabeth has been fateful of goodness, virtue, sanctity, and perfection to those who have borne it, as many believe.[11 - She was the daughter of Henri II. and Catherine de’ Medici, married to Philip II., King of Spain, after the death of Queen Mary of England. – Tr.]

When she was born at Fontainebleau, the king her grandfather, and her father and mother made very great joy of it; you would have said she was a lucky star bringing good hap to France; for her baptism brought peace to us, as did her marriage. See how good fortunes are gathered in one person to be distributed on diverse occasions; for then it was that peace was made with King Henry [VIII.] of England; and to confirm and strengthen it our king made him her sponsor and gave to his goddaughter the beautiful name of Élisabeth; at whose birth and baptism the rejoicings were as great as at those of the little King François the last.

Child as she was, she promised to be some great thing at a future day; and when she came to be grown up she promised it more surely still; for all virtue and goodness abounded in her, so that the whole Court admired her, and prognosticated a fine grandeur and great royalty to her in time. So they say that when King Henri married his second daughter, Madame Claude, to the Duc de Lorraine, there were some who remonstrated against the wrong done to the elder in marrying the younger before her; but the king made this response: “My daughter Élisabeth is such that a duchy is not for her to marry. She must have a kingdom; and even so, not one of the lesser but one of the greater kingdoms; so great is she herself in all things; which assures me that she can miss none, wherefore she can wait.”

You would have said he prophesied the future. He did not fail on his side to seek and procure one for her; for when peace was made between the two kings at Cercan she was promised in marriage to Don Carlos, Prince of Spain, a brave and gallant prince and the image of his grandfather, the Emperor Charles, had he lived. But the King of Spain, his father, becoming a widower by the death of the Queen of England, his wife and cousin-german, and having seen the portrait of Madame Élisabeth and finding her very beautiful and much to his liking, cut the ground from under the feet of his son and did himself the charity of wedding her himself. On which the French and Spaniards said with one voice that one would think she was conceived and born before the world and reserved by God until his will had joined her with this great king, her husband; for it must have been predestined that he, being so great, so powerful, and thus approaching in all grandeur to the skies, should marry no other princess than one so perfect and accomplished. When the Duke of Alba came to see her and espouse her for the king, his master, he found her so extremely agreeable and suited to the said master that he said she was a princess who would make the King of Spain very easily forget his grief for his last two wives, the English and the Portuguese.

After this, as I have heard from a good quarter, the said prince, Don Carlos, having seen her, became so distractedly in love with her, and so full of jealousy, that he bore a great grudge against his father, and was so angry with him for having deprived him of so fine a prize that he never loved him more, but reproached him with the great wrong and insult he had done him in taking her who had been promised to him solemnly in the treaty of peace. They do say that this was, in part, the cause of his death, with other topics which I shall not speak of at this hour; for he could not keep himself from loving her in his soul, honouring and revering her, so charming and agreeable did she seem in his eyes, as certainly she was in everything.

Her face was handsome, her hair and eyes so shaded her complexion and made it the more attractive that I have heard say in Spain that the courtiers dared not look upon her for fear of being taken in love and causing jealousy to the king, her husband, and, consequently, running risk of their lives.

The Church people did the same from fear of temptation, they not having strength to command their flesh to look at her without being tempted. Although she had had the small-pox, after being grown-up and married, they had so well preserved her face with poultices of fresh eggs (a very proper thing for that purpose) that no marks appeared. I saw the queen, her mother, very much concerned to send her by many couriers many remedies; but this of the egg-poultice was sovereign.

Her figure was very fine, taller than that of her sisters, which made her much admired in Spain, where such tall women are rare, and for that the more esteemed. And with this figure she had a bearing, a majesty, a gesture, a gait and grace that intermingled the Frenchwoman with the Spaniard in sweetness and gravity; so that, as I myself saw, when she passed through her Court, or went out to certain places, whether churches, or monasteries, or gardens, there was such great press to see her, and the crowd of persons was so thick, there was no turning round in the mob; and happy was he or she who could say in the evening, “I saw the queen.” It was said, and I saw it myself, that no queen was ever loved in Spain like her (begging pardon of the Queen Isabella of Castile), and her subjects called her la reyna de la paz y de la bondad, that is to say, “the queen of peace and kindness;” but our Frenchmen called her “the olive-branch of peace.”

A year before she came to France to visit her mother at Bayonne, she fell ill to such extremity that the physicians gave her up. On which a little Italian doctor, who had no great vogue at Court, presenting himself to the king, declared that if he were allowed to act he would cure her; which the king permitted, she being almost dead. The doctor undertook her and gave her a medicine, after which they suddenly saw the colour return miraculously to her face, her speech came back, and then, soon after, her convalescence began. Nevertheless the whole Court and all the people of Spain blocked the roads with processions and comings and goings to churches and hospitals for her health’s sake, some in shirts, others bare-footed and bare-headed, offering oblations, prayers, orisons, intercessions to God, with fasts, macerations of the body, and other good and saintly devotions for her health; so that every one believes firmly that these good prayers, tears, vows, and cries to God were the cause of her cure, rather than the medicine of that doctor.

I arrived in Spain a month after this recovery of her health; but I saw so much devotion among the people in giving thanks to God, by fêtes, rejoicings, magnificences, fireworks, that there was no doubting in any way how much they felt. I saw nothing else in Spain as I travelled through it, and reaching the Court just two days after she left her room, I saw her come out and get into her coach, sitting at the door of it, which was her usual place, because such beauty should not be hidden within, but displayed openly.

She was dressed in a gown of white satin all covered with silver trimmings, her face uncovered. I think that nothing was ever seen more beautiful than this queen, as I had the boldness to tell her; for she had given me a right good welcome and cheer, coming as I did from France and the Court, and bringing her news of the king, her good brother, and the queen, her good mother; for all her joy and pleasure was to know of them. It was not I alone who thought her beautiful, but all the Court and all the people of Madrid thought so likewise; so that it might be said that even illness favoured her, for after doing her such cruel harm it embellished her skin, making it so delicate and polished that she was certainly more beautiful than ever before.

Leaving thus her chamber for the first time, to do the best and saintliest thing she could she went to the churches to give thanks to God for the favour of her health; and this good work she continued for the space of fifteen days, not to speak of the vow she made to Our Lady of Guadalupe; letting the whole people see her face uncovered (as was her usual fashion) till you might have thought they worshipped her, so to speak, rather than honoured or revered her.

So when she died [1568], as I have heard the late M. de Lignerolles, who saw her die, relate, he having gone to carry to the King of Spain the news of the victory of Jarnac, never were a people so afflicted, so disconsolate; none ever shed so many tears, being unable to recover themselves in any way, but mourning her with despair incessantly.

She made a noble end [at. 23], leaving this world with firm courage, and desiring much the other.

Sinister things have been said of her death, as having been hastened. I have heard one of her ladies tell that the first time she saw her husband she looked at him so fixedly that the king, not liking it, said to her: Que mirais? Si tengo canas? which means: “What are you gazing at? Is my hair white?” These words touched her so much to the heart that ever after her ladies augured ill for her.

It is said that a Jesuit, a man of importance, speaking of her one day in a sermon, and praising her rare virtues, charities, and kindness, let fall the words that she had wickedly been made to die, innocent as she was; for which he was banished to the farthest depths of the Indies of Spain. This is very true, as I have been told.

There are other conjectures so great that silence must be kept about them; but very true it is that this princess was the best of her time and loved by every one.