Part 16 (1/2)
VIII
LOVE IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
The modern history of love opens with laughter, the rich faunesque laugh of Francois I{er}. In Italy he had lost, as he expressed it, everything--fors l'honneur. For his consolation he found there gallantry, which Montesquieu defined as love's light, delicate and perpetual lie.
Platonism is the melody of love; gallantry the parody. Platonism beautifies virtue, gallantry embellishes vice. It makes it a marquis, gives it brilliance and brio. However it omit to spiritualize it does not degrade. Moreover it improves manners. Gallantry was the direct cause of the French Revolution. The people bled to death to defray the amours of the great sent in their bill. Love in whatever shape it may appear is always educational.
Hugo said that the French Revolution poured on earth the floods of civilization. Mignet said that it established a new conception of things.
Both remarks apply to love. But before it disappeared behind masks, patches, falbalas and the guillotine, to reappear in the more or less honest frankness which is its Anglo-Saxon garb to-day, there were several costumes in its wardrobe.
In Germany, and in the North generally, the least becoming fas.h.i.+ons of the Middle Ages were still in vogue. In Spain was the constant mantilla.
Originally it was white. The smoke of the auto-da-fe had, in blackening it, put a morbid touch of hysteria beneath. In France, a brief bucolic skirt, that of Amaryllis, was succeeded by the pretentious robes of Rambouillet. In England, the Elizabethan ruff, rigid and immaculate--when seen from a distance--was followed by the yielding Stuart lace. Across the sea fresher modes were developing in what is now the land of Mille Amours.
In Italy at the moment, gallantry was the fas.h.i.+on. Francois I{er} adopted it, and with it splendor, the magnificence that goes to the making of a monarch's pomp. In France hitherto every castle had been a court than which that of the king was not necessarily superior. Francois I{er} was the first of French kings to make his court first of all courts, a place of art, luxury, constant display. It became a magnet that drew the n.o.bility from their stupid keeps, detaining them, when young, with adventure; when old, with office, providing, meanwhile, for the beauty of women a proper frame. Already at a garden party held on a field of golden cloth the first Francis of France had shown the eighth Henry of England how a king could s.h.i.+ne. He was dreaming then of empire. The illusion, looted at Pavia, hovered over Fontainebleau and Chambord, royal residences which, Italian artists aiding, he then constructed and where, though not emperor, for a while he seemed to be.
Elsewhere, in Paris, in his maison des menus plaisirs--a house in the rue de l'Hirondelle--the walls were decorated with salamanders--the fabulous emblems of inextinguishable loves; or else with hearts, which, set between alphas and omegas, indicated the beginning and the end of earthly aims.
The loves and hearts were very many, as multiple as those of Solomon.
Except by Brantome not one of them was compromised. Francois I{er} was the loyal protector of what he called l'honneur des dames, an honor which thereafter it was accounted an honor to abrogate for the king.[63]
”If,” said Sauval, ”the seraglio of Henri II was not as wide as that of Francois I{er}, his court was not less elegant.”
The court at that time had succ.u.mbed to the refinements of Italy. Women who previously were not remarkable for fastidiousness, had, Brantome noted, acquired so many elegancies, such fine garments and beautiful graces that they were more delectable than those of any other land.
Brantome added that if Henri II loved them, at least he loved but one.
That one was Dianne de Poytiers. Brantome suspected her of being a magician, of using potable gold. At the age of seventy she was, he said, ”aussy fraische et aussy aymable comme en l'aage de trente ans.” Hence the suspicion, otherwise justified. In France among queens--de la main gauche--she had in charm but one predecessor, Agnes Sorel, and but one superior, La Valliere. The legendary love which that charm inspired in Henri II had in it a troubadourian parade and a chivalresque effacement.
In its fervor there was devotion, in its pa.s.sion there was poetry, there was humility in its strength. At the Louvre, at Fontainebleau, on the walls without, in the halls within, on the cornices of the windows, on the panels of the doors, in the apartments of Henri's wife, Catherine de'
Medici, everywhere, the initials D and H, interlaced, were blazoned.
Dianne had taken for device a crescent. It never set. No other star eclipsed it. When she was sixty her colors were still worn by the king who in absence wrote to her languorously:
Madame ma mye, je vous suplye avoir souvenance de celuy quy n'a jamais connu que ung Dyeu et une amye, et vous a.s.surer que n'aurez poynt de honte de m'avoyr donne le nom de serviteur, lequel je vous suplye de me conserver pour james.[64]
Dianne too had but ung Dyeu et un amy--one G.o.d and one friend. It was not the king. More exactly it was a king greater than he. This woman who fascinated everybody even to Henri's vampire-wife was, financially, insatiable. The exactions of the Pompadour and the exigencies of the Du Barry were trumpery beside the avidity with which she absorbed castles, duchies, provinces, compelling her serviteur to grant her all the vacant territories of the realm--a fourth of the kingdom. At his death, beautiful still, ”aussy fraische et aussy belle que jamais,” she retreated to her domain, slowly, royally, burdened with the spoils of France.
Brantome was right. She did drink gold. She was an enchantress. She was also a precedent for women who in default of royal provinces for themselves got royal dukedoms for their children.
By comparison Catherine de' Medici is spectral. In her train were perfumes that were poisons and with them what was known as moeurs italiennes, customs that exceeded anything in Suetonius and with which came hybrid-faced youths whose filiation extended far back through Rome, through Greece, to the early Orient and who, under the Valois, were mignons du roi. Apart from them the atmosphere of the queen had in it corruption of decay, an odor of death from which Henri II recoiled as from a serpent, issued, said Michelet, from Italy's tomb. Cold as the blood of the defunct, at once sinister and magnificent, committing crimes that had in them the grandeur of real majesty, the accomplice if not the instigator of the Hugenot ma.s.sacre, Satan gave her four children:--Francois II, the gangrened husband of Mary Stuart; Charles IX, the maniac of St.
Bartholomew; Henri III who, pomp deducted, was Heliogabalus in his quality of Imperatrix, and the Reine Margot, wife of Henri IV.
It would have been interesting to have seen that couple, gallant, inconstant, memorable, popular, both, to employ a Gallicism, franchement paillards. But it would have been curious to have seen Margot, as a historian described her, carrying about a great ap.r.o.n with pockets all around it, in each of which was a gold box and in each box, the embalmed heart of a lover--memorabilia of faces and fancies that hung, by night, at her bed.[65]
”All the world published her as a G.o.ddess,” another historian declared, ”and thence she took pleasure all her life in being called Venus Urania, as much to show that she partic.i.p.ated in divinity as to distinguish her love from that of the vulgar, for she had a higher idea of it than most women have. She affected to hold that it is better practised in the spirit than in the flesh, and ordinarily had this saying in her mouth: 'Voulez-vous cesser d'aimer, possedez la chose aimee.'”[66]
The historian added: ”I could make a better story about it than has ever been written but I have more serious matters in hand.”
What Dupleix omitted Brantome supplied. To the latter the pleasure of but beholding Margot equalled any joy of paradise.
Henri IV must have thought otherwise. He tried to divorce her. Margot objected. The volage Henri had become interested in the beaux yeux of Gabrielle d'Estrees. Margot did not wish to be succeeded by a lady whom she called ”an ordinary person.” But later, for reasons dynastic, she consented to abdicate in favor of Marie de Medici, and, after the divorce, remained with Henri on terms no worse than before, visited by him, a contemporary has stated, reconciled, counselled, amused.[67]