Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564
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heads, the leading nobles, their wives, and the family and favorites
of the King, now became the head and front of France, the mirror of
fashion, the mobile perpetual festival of royalty. At the summit of
this whirl was the Master of the King's Household, who organized the
whole and patrolled the protocol; then the Chamberlain, who had charge
of the royal bedchamber; then four Gentlemen of the Bedchamber or
First Lords in Waiting, who were always at the King's elbow to wait on
his desires; these men were changed every three months, to give
other notables a turn at this exhilarating intimacy; lest anyone be
overlooked, there were twenty to fifty-four Lords of the Bedchamber to
serve the highest four; add twelve Pages of the Bedchamber and four
Ushers of the Bedchamber, and the King's sleeping quarters were
adequately cared for. Twenty lords served as stewards of the King's
cuisine, managing a staff of forty-five men and twenty-five
cupbearers. Some thirty enfants d'honneur - boys of awesome pedigree-
functioned as royal pages, shining in silvered livery; and a host of
secretaries multiplied the hand and memory of the King. A cardinal was
Grand Chaplain of the royal chapel; a bishop was Master of the Oratory
or prayer service; and fifty diocesan bishops were allowed to grace
the court and so augment their fame. Honorary positions as "grooms
of the chamber," with pensions of 240 livres, were awarded for
divers accomplishments, as to scholars like Bude and poets like Marot.
We must not forget seven physicians, seven surgeons four barbers,
seven choristers, eight craftsmen, eight clerks of the kitchen,
eight ushers for the audience chamber. Each of the King's sons had his
own attendants- stewards, chancellors, tutors, pages, and servants.
Each of the two queens at court- Claude and Marguerite- had her
retinue of fifteen or ten ladies in waiting, sixteen or eight maids of
honor- filles demoiselles. It was the most characteristic
distinction of Francis that he raised women to high place at his
court, winked expertly at their liaisons, encouraged and enjoyed their
parade of finery and soft charms. "A court without ladies," he said,
"is a garden without flowers"; `062211 and probably it was the
women- dowered with the ageless beauty of art- who gave the court of
Francis I a graceful splendor and gay stimulus unequaled even in the
palaces of Imperial Rome. All the potentates of Europe taxed their
peoples to provide some minor mirroring of this Parisian fantasy.
Beneath the polished surface was an immense base of servantry:
four chefs, six assistant chefs, cooks specializing in soups or sauces
or pastries or roasts, and a countless personnel to supply and serve
the King's table, the cuisine commune of the court, and the needs
and comforts of ladies and gentlemen. There were court musicians,
led by the most notable singers, composers, and instrumentalists in
Europe outside of Rome. A Master of the Horse, twenty-five noble
equerries, and a swarm of coachmen and grooms attended the royal
stables. There were Masters of the Hunt, a hundred dogs, and 300
falcons- trained and cared for by a hundred falconers under a Grand
Falconer. Four hundred archers formed the King's bodyguard, and
brightened the court with their colorful costumes.
For court banquets, balls, marriages, and diplomatic receptions no
one building in Paris sufficed. The Louvre was then a gloomy fortress;
Francis abandoned it for the assorted palaces known as Les
Tournelles (The Little Towers) near the Bastille, or for the
spacious palace where the Parlement had been wont to sit; better
still, loving to hunt, he moved out to Fontainebleau, or down to his
chateaux along the Loire at Blois, Chambord, Amboise, or Tours-
dragging half the court and wealth of France with him. Cellini, with
his wonted hyperbole, described his royal patron as traveling with a
retinue of 18,000 persons and 12,000 horses. `062212 Foreign
ambassadors protested the cost and weariness of catching or keeping up
with the King; and when they found him he was, as like as not, in
bed till noon, recovering from the pleasures of the night before, or
busy preparing a hunt or a tournament. The cost of all this
perambulating glory was enormous. The treasury was always near
bankruptcy, taxes were forever mounting, the bankers of Lyons were
dragooned into risky royal loans. In 1523, perceiving that his
expenditures were losing sight of his revenues, the King promised to
put a limit on his personal indulgences, "not including, however,
the ordinary run of our little necessities and pleasures." `062213
He excused his extravagance as needed to impress envoys, overwhelm
ambitious nobles, and please the populace; the Parisians, he
thought, hungered for spectacles, and admired rather than resented the
splendor of their King.
Now the government of France became bisexual. Francis ruled in
apparent omnipotence, but he was so fond of women that he readily
yielded to his mother, his sister, his mistress, even his wife. He
must have loved Claude somewhat, to keep her so constantly pregnant.
He had married her for reasons of state; he felt entitled to
appreciate other women more artistically designed. the court
followed the lead of the King in making a mannerly art of adultery.
The clergy adjusted themselves after making the requisite
objections. The people made no objections, but gratefully imitated the
easy code of the court- except one girl, who, we are told,
deliberately marred her beauty to deflect the royal lechery
(1524). `062214
The most influential woman at the court was the King's mother.
"Address yourself to me," said Louise of Savoy to a papal legate; "and
we shall go our way. If the King complains we'll just let him
talk." `062215 Very often her advice was good, and when she served
as his regent the country fared better than at his own lax hands.
But her covetousness drove the Duke of Bourbon to treason, and let a
French army starve in Italy. Her son forgave her everything,
grateful that she had made him a god.
III. MARGUERITE OF NAVARRE
-
Probably he loved his sister only next to his mother, and above
his mistresses- whose ministrations gave him something less lasting
and profound than her selfless adoration. Love was her life- love of
her mother, of her brother, of her husbands, Platonic love, mystical
religious love. A pretty story said "she was born smiling, and held
out her little hand to each comer." `062216 She called her mother, her
brother, and herself Notre Trinite, and was content to be "the
smallest angle" of that "perfect triangle." `062217 By her birth she
was Marguerite of Angouleme, Orleans, and Valois. Two years older than
Francis, she shared in bringing him up, and in their childhood games
"she was his mother, his mistress, and his little wife." `062218 She
watched over him as fondly as if he had been some saving divinity
become man; and when she found that he was also a satyr she accepted
that disposition as the right of a Greek god, though she herself seems
to have taken no taint from her environment. She far outstripped
Francis in studies, but she never equaled his connoisseur's
appreciation of art. She learned Spanish, Italian, Latin, Greek, and
some Hebrew; she surrounded herself avidly with scholars, poets,
theologians, and philosophers. Nevertheless she grew into an
attractive woman, not physically beautiful (she too had the long
Valois nose), but exercising a strong fascination by her charms of
character and intellect. She was sympatica, agreeable, generous,
kind, with a frequent dash of sprightly humor. She herself was one
of the best poets of the time, and her court at Nerac or Pau was the
most brilliant literary center in Europe. Everyone loved her and
wished to be near her. That romantic but cynical age called her la
perle des Valois - for margarita was Latin for pearl; and a pretty
legend grew that Louise of Savoy had conceived her by swallowing a
pearl.
Her letters to her brother are among the fairest and tenderest in
literature. There must have been much good in him to draw out such
devotion. Her other loves flowed or ebbed, burned or cooled; this pure
passion was constant through fifty years, and always intense. The
breath of that love almost clears the air of that perfumed time.
Gaston de Foix, nephew of Louis XII, aroused her first romance, then
went off to Italy to conquer and die at Ravenna (1512). Guillaume de
Bonnivet fell deeply in love with her, but found her heart still
full of Gaston; he married one of her ladies in waiting to be near
her. At seventeen (1509) she was wed to Charles, Duke of Alencon, also
of royal pedigree; Francis had requested the marriage to cement an
alliance of troublesomely rival families; but Marguerite found it hard
to love the youth. Bonnivet offered her the consolations of
adultery; she disfigured her face with a sharp stone to break the
spell of her charm on him. Both Alencon and Bonnivet went to fight for
Francis in Italy; Bonnivet died a hero at Pavia; Alencon was
reported to have fled at the crisis of the battle. He returned to
Lyons to find himself universally scorned; Louise of Savoy berated him
as a coward; he fell ill of pleurisy; Marguerite forgave him and
nursed him tenderly, but he died (1525).
After two years of widowhood Marguerite, now thirty-five, married
Henri d'Albret, titular King of Navarre, a youth of twenty-four.
Kept out of his principality by the claims of Ferdinand II and Charles
V to Navarre, Henri was made governor of Guienne by Francis, and
established a minor court at Nerac, sometimes at Pau, in southwest
France. He treated Marguerite as a mother, almost as a
mother-in-law; he did not imitate her fidelity to the marriage vows,
and she had to console herself by playing hostess and protectress to
writers, philosophers, and Protestant refugees. In 1528 she bore Henri
a daughter, Jeanne d'Albret, destined to fame as the mother of Henry
IV. Two years later she gave birth to a son, who died in infancy;
thereafter she wore nothing but black. Francis wrote her a letter of
such tender piety as we might rather have expected from her pen. Soon,
however, he commanded her and Henri to surrender Jeanne to him to be
brought up near the royal court; he feared that Henri would betroth
her to Philip II of Spain, or that she would be reared as a
Protestant. This separation was the profoundest of Marguerite's many
griefs before the death of the King, but it did not interrupt her
devotion to him. It is sad but necessary to relate that when Francis
bade Jeanne marry the Duke of Cleves, and Jeanne refused, Marguerite
supported the King to the point of instructing Jeanne's governess to
thrash her till she consented. Several beatings were administered, but
plucky Jeanne- a girl of twelve- issued a signed document to the
effect that if she were forced into the marriage she would hold it
null. The wedding was arranged nevertheless, on the theory that the
needs of the state were the supreme law; Jeanne resisted to the
last, and had to be carried into the church. As soon as the ceremony
was over she fled, and went to live with her parents at Pau, where her
extravagance in dress, retinue, and charities almost ruined them.
Marguerite herself was the embodiment of charity. She walked
unescorted in the streets of Pau, "like a simple demoiselle,"
allowed anyone to approach her, and heard at first hand the sorrows of
her people. "No one ought to go away sad or disappointed from the
presence of a prince," she said, "for kings are the ministers of the
poor... and the poor are the members of God." `062219 She called
herself the "Prime Minister of the Poor." She visited them in their
homes, and sent them physicians from her court. Henri co-operated
fully in this, for he was as excellent a ruler as he was a negligent
husband, and the public works directed by him served as a model to
France. Together he and Marguerite financed the education of a large
number of poor students, among them the Amyot who later translated
Plutarch. Marguerite gave shelter and safety to Marot, Rabelais,
Desperiers, Lefevre d'Etaples, Calvin, and so many others that one
of her proteges compared her to "a hen carefully calling together
her chicks, and covering them with her wings." `062220
Aside from her charities three interests dominated her life at Nerac
and Pau: literature, Platonic love, and a mystic theology that found
room for Catholicism and Protestantism alike, and tolerance even for
free thought. It was her custom to have poets read to her as she
embroidered; and she herself composed verses of some worth, in which
human and divine love mingled in one obscure ecstasy. She published in
her lifetime several volumes of poetry and drama; they are not as fine
as her letters, which were not printed till 1841. All the world
knows of her Heptameron, because of its reputed indecency; but
patrons of pornography will be disappointed in it, These stories
were in the manner of the time, which found its chief humor in the
pranks, anomalies, and vicissitudes of love, and in the deviations
of monks from their vows; the stories themselves are told with
restraint. They are the tales related by the men and women of
Marguerite's court, or that of Francis; they were written down by or
for her (1544-48), but were never published by her; they appeared in
print ten years after her death. She had intended them to form another
Decameron, but as the book stopped short with the seventh day of the
storytelling, the editor called it Heptameron. Many of the
narratives seem to be authentic histories, disguised with changed
names. Brantome tells us that his mother was one of the
storytellers, and that she had a key to the real persons concealed
by pseudonyms in the tales; he assures us, for example, that the
fourth tale of the fifth day is an account of Bonnivet's attempts upon
Marguerite herself. `062221
It must be admitted that the professed taste of our day would feel
obliged to blush at these stories of seduction, told by French
ladies and gentlemen who thus beguiled their days of waiting for a
flood to abate and let them return from the baths of Cauterets. Some
of the incidental remarks are startling: "You mean to say, then,
that all is lawful to those who love, provided no one knows?" "Yes, in
truth; 'tis only fools who are found out." `062222 The general
philosophy of the book finds expression in a pregnant sentence of
the fifth story: "Unhappy the lady who does not carefully preserve the
treasure which does her so much honor when well kept, and so much
dishonor when she continues to keep it." `062223 The stories are
lightened by many a jolly quip: so we hear of a pious pharmacist of
Pau "who never had anything to do with his wife except in Holy Week by
way of penance." `062224 Half the humor, as in Boccaccio, turns on
monastic gamboling. "These good fathers," says a character in the
fifth story, "preach chastity to us, and want to foul our wives." An
outraged husband agrees: "They dare not touch money, but they are
ready to handle women's thighs, which are much more dangerous." It
should be added that the merry storytellers hear Mass every morning,
and fumigate every second page with arias of piety.
That Marguerite should have enjoyed or collected these tales
points the mood of the age, and cautions us not to picture her as a
saint until her declining years. While she herself seems to have
been sedulously pure, she tolerated much laxity in others, made no
recorded objections to the King's distribution of his powers, and kept
on terms of intimate friendship with his successive mistresses.
Apparently the men, and most of the women, thought of love between the
sexes in unashamedly sexual terms. It was a charming custom of
French women, in that lighthearted reign, to make presents of their
garters to imaginative men. `062225 Marguerite considered physical
desire as quite permissible, but she herself made room in her heart
for Platonic and religious love. The cult of Platonic love had come
down from medieval "courts of love," reinforced by such Italian
strains as Bembo's paean at the end of Castiglione's Courtier. It
was good, Marguerite felt, that women should accept, in addition to
the usual sexual passion, the devotion of men who were to be
rewarded only with a tender friendship and some harmless intimacies;
this association would train esthetic sensitivity in the male,
refine his manners, and teach him moral restraint; so woman would
civilize man. But in Marguerite's philosophy there was a higher love
than either the sexual or the Platonic- the love of goodness,
beauty, or any perfection, and therefore, above all, the love of
God. But "to love God one must first love a human creature
perfectly." `062226
Her religion was as complex and confused as her conception of
love. Just as the selfishness of her brother could not dim her
devotion to him, so the tragedies and brutalities of life left her
religious faith pure and fervent, however unorthodox. She had
skeptical moments; in Le miroir de l'ame pecheresse she confessed
that at times she had doubted both Scripture and God; she charged
God with cruelty, and wondered had He really written the
Bible. `062227 In 1533 the Sorbonne summoned her to answer an
accusation of heresy; she ignored the summons; a monk told his
congregation that she deserved to be sewn in a sack and thrown into
the Seine; `062228 but the King told the Sorbonne and the monks to let
his sister alone. He could not credit the charges against her; "she
loves me so much," he said, "that she will believe only what I
believe." `062229 He was too happy and confident to dream of being a
Huguenot. But Marguerite could; she had a sense of sin, and made
mountain peaks out of her peccadilloes. She despised the religious
orders as idling, wenching wastrels; reform, she felt, was long
overdue. She read some of the Lutheran literature, and approved its
attacks upon ecclesiastical immorality and greed. Francis was amazed
to find her, once, praying with Farel- `062230 the John the Baptist of
Calvin. At Nerac and Pau, while continuing to pray to the Virgin
with trustful piety, she spread her protective skirts over fugitive
Protestants, including Calvin himself. However, Calvin was much
offended to find at her court freethinkers like Etienne Dolet and
Bonaventure Desperiers; he reproved her for her tolerance, but she
continued it. She would gladly have composed the Edict of Nantes for
her grandson. In Marguerite the Renaissance and the Reformation were
for a moment one. `062231
Her influence radiated through France. Every free spirit looked up
to her as protectress and ideal. Rabelais dedicated Gargantua to
her. Ronsard and Joachim du Bellay followed, now and then, her
Platonizing, Plotinizing mysticism. Marot's translations of the Psalms
breathed her half-Huguenot spirit. In the eighteenth century Bayle
sang an ode to her in his Dictionnaire. In the nineteenth century
the Protestant Michelet, in that magnificent, interminable, unwearying
rhapsody called Histoire de France, offered her his gratitude:
"Let us always remember this tender Queen of Navarre, in whose arms
our people, fleeing from prison or the pyre, found safety, honor,
and friendship. Our gratitude to you, lovable Mother of our
Renaissance! Your hearth was that of our saints, your heart was the
nest of our freedom." `062232
IV. THE FRENCH PROTESTANTS
-
No one questioned the need of religious reform. The same
ecclesiastical good and evil appeared here as elsewhere: faithful
priests, devout monks, saintly nuns, here and there a bishop dedicated
to religion rather than politics; and ignorant or lackadaisical
priests, idle and lecherous monks, money-grubbing friars pretending
poverty, weak sisters in the convents, bishops who took the earthly
cash and let the celestial credit go. As education rose, faith fell;
and as the clergy had most of the education, they showed in their
conduct that they no longer took to heart the once terrifying
eschatology of their official creed. Some bishops appropriated to
themselves a luxurious multiplicity of benefices and sees; so Jean
of Lorraine held- and enjoyed revenues from- the bishoprics of Metz,
Toul, and Verdun, the archbishoprics of Reims, Lyons, Narbonne,
Albi, Macon, Agen, and Nantes, and the abbeys of Gorze, Fecamp, Cluny,
Marmoutiers, Saint-Ouen, Saint-de-Laon, Saint-Germer, Saint-Medard
of Soissons, and Saint-Mansuy of Toul. `062233 It was not enough for
his needs; he complained of poverty. `062234 Monks denounced the
worldliness of the bishops; priests denounced the monks; Brantome
quotes a phrase then popular in France: "Avaricious or lecherous as
a priest or a monk." `062235 The first sentence of the Heptameron
describes the Bishop of Sees as itching to seduce a married woman; and
a dozen stories in the book retail the similar enterprises of
various monks. "I have such a horror of the very sight of a monk,"
says one character, "that I could not even confess to them,
believing them to be worse than all other men." `062236 "There are
some good men among them," admits Oisille- which is Margaret's name,
in the Heptameron, for her mother- but this same Louise of Savoy
wrote in her journal: "In the year 1522... my son and I, by the
grace of the Holy Spirit, began to know the hypocrites, white,
black, gray, smoky, and of all colors, from whom God in His infinite
mercy and goodness preserve and defend us; for if Jesus Christ is
not a liar, there is not among all mankind a more dangerous
generation." `062237
Yet the acquisitiveness of Louise, the polygyny of her son, the
anarchic morals of the court, gave no inspiring example to the clergy,
who were so largely subject to the King. In 1516 Francis secured
from Leo X a Concordat empowering him to appoint the bishops and
abbots of France; but since he used these appointments largely as
rewards for political services, the worldly character of the prelacy
was confirmed. The Concordat in effect made the Gallican Church
independent of the papacy and dependent upon the state. In this way
Francis, a year before Luther's Theses, achieved in fact, though
graciously not in form, what the German princes and Henry VIII would
win by war or revolution- the nationalization of Christianity. What
more could French Protestants offer the French King?
The first of them antedated Luther. In 1512 Jacques Lefevre, born at
Etaples in Picardy but then teaching at the University of Paris,
published a Latin translation of Paul's Epistles, with a commentary
expounding, among other heresies, two that ten years later would be
basic with Luther: that men can be saved not by good works but only by
faith in the grace of God earned by the redeeming sacrifice of Christ;
and that Christ is present in the Eucharist by His own operation and
good will, not through any priestly transubstantiation of bread and
wine. Lefevre, like Luther, demanded a return to the Gospel; and, like
Erasmus, he sought to restore and clarify the authentic text of the
New Testament as a means of cleansing Christianity from medieval
legends and sacerdotal accretions. In 1523 he issued a French
translation of the Testament, and, a year later, of the Psalms. "How
shameful it is," said one of his comments, "to see a bishop soliciting
people to drink with him, caring for naught but gambling... constantly
hunting... frequenting bad houses!" `062238 The Sorbonne condemned him
as a heretic; he fled to Strasbourg (1525); Marguerite interceded for
him; Francis recalled him and made him royal librarian at Blois and
tutor to his children. In 1531, when Protestant excesses had angered
the King, Lefevre took refuge with Marguerite in southern France, and
lived there till his death at the age of eighty-seven (1537).
His pupil Guillaume Briconnet, appointed Bishop of Meaux (1516), set