Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre (Robinson 1886)/Chapter 8
NÉRAC IN 1530.
Ci entrez, vous, qui le sainct Évangile
En sens agile annoncez, quoi qu'on gronde,
Céans aurez un refuge et bastille.
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Ci entrez, vous, dames de hault parage
En franc courage. Entrez y en bon heur
Fleurs de beaulté, à céleste visage,
À droict corsage, à maintien preude et sage.
En ce passage est le séjour d'honneur.
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Ci entrez, vous, et bien soyez venus,
Et parvenus, touts nobles chevaliers.
Frisques, galliers, joyeux, plaisants, mignons,
En général tous gentils compagnons.
So runs the inscription over the door of the Abbey of Thelema. Whether in designing that perfect Court, whose motto was Fay ce que vouldras, since the virtuous wish nothing else but honour, whose splendour outrivalled Bonnivet or Chantilly, whose library contained all books of Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and French, Spanish and Tuscan, where Lutheran refugees were received and honoured, where all the ladies were noble and honourable, and all the knights were sprightly and joyous: whether in designing this Abbey of Thelema, Rabelais had in mind the little Court of Nérac, we cannot here decide. Let us only say that to the Queen of Navarre, Esprit abstraict ravy et estatic, Rabelais dedicated the third book of his Pantagruel; that he was protected by her friends the three Du Bellays; that he was intimate with Clément Marot, with Étienne Dolet, with Desperriers and Calvin, and others of the persecuted scholars whom she protected. And let us own that much such a Court as Thelema was held at the castles of Nérac and of Pau; a Court of scholars, of poets and thinkers, who fled thither from the stake or from the dreadful convent in pace; a court of charming women, at once good and gay; and of men as light-hearted as the King, and as courteous as the Queen.
Henry and Margaret, early estranged at heart, had one great interest in common: the desire to improve this desolate princedom of Béarn. Henry, at his own cost, drained and cultivated the sandy Landes, planted them with vineyards and cork-oak woods, and imported labourers from Saintonge. Henry built a great cloth-mill, and taught his subjects how to weave the fine Pyrennean wool they sheared from their mountain herds. Henry established courts of justice throughout his kingdom, and reformed the ruin and disorder into which the whole land had fallen. And Margaret rebuilt the castles of Nérac and of Pau, and adorned them with the famous library that she bequeathed to Fontainebleau, founded hospitals, and orphanages throughout her kingdom. Margaret succoured the poor, herself visiting the sick and consoling them. Finally, she made of this nook of Southern France (always hostile to the power of Rome and even now counting its Protestants by thousands) a refuge for whosoever was persecuted, and whosoever was poor or oppressed.
There was much need of such an asylum, for the hatred of the Sorbonne towards the new ideas became with every month more virulent and more capable. In the preceding year, in 1529, Margaret herself, in continued supplication, had been unable to save Loys Berquin, a learned gentleman of Artois, from the stake. He had been burned alive; and the flames of this bonfire lit up many pale and scared faces throughout the whole of France. Roussel, Lefêbvre, Calvin, Baduel, d'Arande, all her old friends and her masters of Meaux; Marot, Desperriers, Antoine Heroet, gay young poets and gallants in her service, suspected of heresy no less than she herself, all these and many others looked to Margaret in anxious appeal. In settling at Nérac, she made a welcome home for all of these. The children of her adoption, and the children of her bearing had alike been taken from her. Margaret at Nérac received all that were exiled and all that were oppressed to be as her sons and her daughters.
Queen Margaret made the exiled Roussel Bishop of Oloron; though he preached in lay dress, and in the tongue of the people. She had Lutheran services held in the castle. Calvin, Michel d'Arande, and Lefêbvre she sheltered in her house. She paid the schooling of Baduel and other young divines. Her court was a home and a refuge for all who fled the wrath of the Sorbonne. Clément Marot, poet and Lutheran suspect, who had been her secretary at Alençon, was made her Gentleman of the Chamber at Nérac; together with Bonaventure Desperriers, le joyeux Bonaventure, whose atheism had brought him into almost equal disrepute. Thus Nérac gradually became an asylum, not only for austere reformers, scholars, and thinkers, but for the lightest singers of airy badinage, the wittiest and most frivolous of men of letters. For all alike were suspected in the eyes of the Sorbonne; and, as Melancthon wrote, "all students and all scholars having the title of Frenchmen put their natural hope in her Majesty, as in a divinity." But the court was not entirely made of theologians and poets, and was by no means a haunt of pedants alone. Many charming ladies, whose names we still remember, added a charm to the safety of that refuge; ladies whom Marot celebrated in his clear, neat, crystalline verses; ladies who, at Margaret's feet, presided over what was virtually the last of the old French Courts of Love: Hélène de Tournon, the beautiful and witty niece of the Cardinal-Minister of Francis; the gentle Florette de Sarra, whom Margaret loved, and whose name alone remains to as; and, fairest of all, Isabeau d'Albret, the sister of the King; "Isabeau, ceste fine mouche," whose white throat and large eyes, whose sweet manners and girlish queenliness, are familiar to us even now, whose petit ris follastre rings still through Marot's verse, Isabeau, whose love-match with M. de Rohan, an impoverished Breton noble, whose debts, disasters, and ruin, made for many years the chief care of her kind and active sister-in-law. For it was Margaret who succoured the charming, thoughtless girl in all her misfortunes, settled her affairs, sheltered her homeless head, and brought up her children as they had been her own.
Margaret had helped the match between Isabeau and her lover M. de Rohan. To Margaret Francis applied whenever the necessities of the court required some difficult alliance, some rebellious young people to persuade, some ruthless parent to soften. She was a kindly match-maker; and though she preached implicit obedience to authority, she would not interfere between lovers: "Between ourselves," she says, "we poor homely women understand not how to spoil such honest love." She was, indeed, the natural protectress of young people: her niece Madeleine, in love with the King of Scotland, betrothed elsewhere; Isabeau de Rohan, falling from misfortune to misfortune, till she becomes the poorest gentlewoman in France; Margaret of France, wan with grief for the death of her sister, the Scottish Queen; Mademoiselle d'Estouteville refusing to marry a man who does not love her; the orphan Charlotte de Laval: all these young girls, and many others, whose names and characters grow familiar to us through the letters of Margaret, are sheltered, as it were, under the folds of her mantle, as the virgins of Saint Ursula in the pictures at Cologne.
In the refined, artificial society of Nérac, old forms of gallantry survived and new ones were invented. "For with regard to gallantry," said Brantôme, "this Queen knew more about it than about her daily bread." The romantic, mystical temper of Margaret, which found no pleasure in the actual looseness of the times, was strongly attracted to the semi-chivalrous rites which were the dangerous shadow of that laxity. The court of Nérac was a veritable Puy d'amour. The heart no less than the soul was regent there; and though Margaret had no lovers, she had more brothers by alliance, sons by alliance, platonic enthusiasts, and adoring protégés than any other queen in Europe:—
Par alliance ay acquis une sœur
Qui en beauté, en grâce et en doulceur
Entre ung millier ne trouve sa pareille ;
Aussi mon cueur à l'aymer s'appareille
Mais d'estre aymé ne se tient pas bien seur.
"And so my heart prepares to love her, but is not sure of being loved." This is the tenor of all contemporary verses rhymed to Margaret, whose bittersweet favours Jacques Pelletier deplored. Marot calls her, in reproachful admiration, "La mal-mariée qui ne veult faire amy," and his poems to her breathe a surprised respect. But though the Queen of Navarre was actually a very virtuous woman, we cannot but own that this dangerous atmosphere of Nérac, this subtle intermingling of mysticism and gallantry did gradually vitiate the purity of her thoughts, and prepared the correspondent of Briçonnet to become the author of the Heptameron.
The wife of Henry d'Albret, the unchilded mother of Jeanne, the absent sister of Francis, had need of such unsubstantial and flimsy affections to stuff an unsatisfied heart. The young King of Navarre, eleven years younger than his wife, was very early tired of conjugal fidelity. A vain, fluent, boastful creature, with the eloquent mediocrity of the Méridional, he was at once proud and jealous of the ascendancy of Margaret; and more than once it needed the interference of Francis to persuade this agile, talkative, brilliant young King, with his facile violence and his easy repentance, to treat his faded wife with due respect.
But if the home of Margaret at Nérac was neither quite happy nor quite free from dangerous tendencies, it was a shelter for many who otherwise must have perished. Not entirely noble in itself, it was yet a radiating centre of benevolence and humanity. The Renaissance of Letters, frightened from Paris by the fires of the Sorbonne, took shelter in the castle there; and when that refuge grew too dangerous, the mistress of Nérac gave her guests the means to travel to safer places, despatching Marot to Ferrara, Calvin to Geneva, others whither was best for them; sending as much as four thousand francs at once to the refugees in Switzerland. For all the artificial chivalry, the elderly philandering, which disfigured the purity of Nérac, it was truly the "sojourn of honour." 'The young were safe there, the old were sheltered there. And this court of literary exiles was none the less the heart of its country; thence justice and law, active beneficence, wealth, and civilisation were circulated through Béarn and Navarre, making of a half-savage kingdom a prosperous and happy place. And so, this little court of Nérac persuades us that a movement—that a woman—intrinsically a little artificial, lax, and worldly, may none the less, by the sheer force of human tenderness, become the salvation of things nobler than itself.