Marguerite de Navarre: Mother of the Renaissance

By Rouben C. Cholakian

Sister to the king of France, queen of Navarre, gifted writer, religious reformer, and patron of the artsin her many roles, Marguerite de Navarre (1492-1549) was one of the most important figures of the French Renaissance. In this, the first major biography in English, Patricia F. Cholakian and Rouben C. Cholakian draw on her writings to provide a vivid portrait of Marguerite's public and private life. Freeing her from the shadow of her brother François I, they recognize her immense influence on French politics and culture, and they challenge conventional views of her family relationships.

The authors highlight Marguerite's considerable role in advancing the cause of religious reform in France-her support of vernacular translations of sacred works, her denunciation of ecclesiastical corruption, her founding of orphanages and hospitals, and her defense and protection of persecuted reformists. Had this plucky and spirited woman not been sister to the king, she would most likely have ended up at the stake. Though she remained a devout catholic, her theological poem Miroir de l'âme pécheresse, a mystical summa of evangelical doctrine that was viciously attacked by conservatives, remains to this day an important part of the Protestant corpus.

Marguerite, along with her brother the king, was a key architect and animator of the refined entertainments that became the hallmark of the French court. Always eager to encourage new ideas, she supported many of the illustrious writers and thinkers of her time. Moreover, uniquely for a queen, she was herself a prolific poet, dramatist, and prose writer and published a two-volume anthology of her works. In reassessing Marguerite's enormous oeuvre, the authors reveal the range and quality of her work beyond her famous collection of tales, posthumously called the Heptaméron.

The Cholakians' groundbreaking reading of the rich body of her work, which uncovers autobiographical elements previously unrecognized by most scholars, and their study of her surviving correspondence portray a life that fully justifies Marguerite's sobriquet, "Mother of the Renaissance."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Mar 29, 2006
• ISBN: 9780231508681

Book preview

Marguerite de Navarre

Marguerite de Navarre

MOTHER OF THE RENAISSANCE

Patricia F. Cholakian and

Rouben C. Cholakian

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS    NEW YORK

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York  Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2006 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-50868-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cholakian, Patricia Francis.

Marguerite de Navarre : mother of the Renaissance / Patricia F. Cholakian and Rouben C. Cholakian

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-231-13412-6 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Marguerite, Queen, consort of Henry II, King of Navarre, 1492-1549.

2. Queens—Navarre (Kingdom)—Bibliography.

3. Authors, French—16th century—Biography.

I. Cholakian, Rouben Charles, 1932– II. Title.

DC112.M2C56    2005

946'.52042'092—dc22

[B]            2005048438

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [e-mail].

Patricia F. Cholakian, 1933-2003

Scholar and Companion

Non inferiora sequor

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

Chronology

Map

Genealogy

1. Mother of the Renaissance

2. Education of a Lady (1492–1515)

3. Queen in All but Name (1515–1520)

4. The Bishop of Meaux (1521–1524)

5. Envoy Extraordinary (1524–1526)

6. Queen of Navarre (1526–1533)

7. Politics and Religion (1534–1539)

8. Courtly Love—and Marriage (1539–1543)

9. And Then There Was One (1543–1547)

10. Pearls from the Pearl of Princesses (1547–1549)

Notes

References

Index

Illustrations

1. Marguerite de Navarre, ca. 1544

2. Louise de Savoie

3. François I

4. Guillaume Gouffier, seigneur de Bonnivet

5. Marguerite and François playing chess

6. Henri d’Albret, king of Navarre

7. Anne de Montmorency

8. Anne d’Heilly (Anne de Pisseleu), duchess of Étampes

9. Claude de France

10. Eleanor of Portugal

11. Jeanne d’Albret

12. Another portrait of Marguerite

An autograph letter from Marguerite to her brother.

Preface

The biographer’s task is always a formidable one, for any human being is ultimately unknowable, no matter how many facts one gathers about her. But when one is reconstructing the life of a woman who lived in a time—five hundred years ago—and a milieu—the French royal court—so different and so far removed in every way from twenty-first century America, then it becomes nearly overwhelming. Official records document the comings and goings of a woman like Marguerite de Navarre, who lived in history’s limelight, but it is extremely difficult to get any sense from these of what she was really like, what she thought and felt, or how she lived her day-to-day existence. To do that it is necessary to find primary sources, which are usually very rare. In Marguerite’s case, however, we are privileged, for her writings—her poems, plays, and the collection of novellas known as the Heptaméron—are a gold mine of information. Yet, strangely, they have not really been explored for their biographical implications. Our aim here is to do just that, to supplement what can be learned about the official and public Marguerite of archival sources with what can be gleaned from her writings. For we firmly believe that just as her life undoubtedly shaped what she wrote, what she wrote offers some insight into who she was.

As we are well aware, such an enterprise is not without peril, for it must rely heavily on conjecture. The most literal-minded critics will reject many of our conclusions, aligning themselves with Marguerite’s first serious modern biographer, Pierre Jourda, who refused to acknowledge the veracity of any text not supported by incontrovertible historical evidence; to them we can only reply that it has always been common practice for writers to camouflage personal experience with fictitious details. Others, although they do not argue that the autobiographical must coincide in all respects with the historical, may disagree with our deductions; in reply to them, we promise that we will provide as much documentation as possible to support our conclusions, and that we will always endeavor to make it clear when we are dealing with fact and when we are advancing our own hypotheses.

We also realize that the text, any text, even one that outwardly purports to be autobiographical, is subject to the ambiguities inherent in all forms of expression. There are not only the inevitable gaps that students of language readily acknowledge between words and the ideas they convey, but the important breach between conscious and unconscious intention that modern psycholinguists have more recently brought to our attention. Meaning, they tell us, is forever visible and invisible. Without wanting to turn our biography into a labyrinth of psychological double-talk, we intend to keep these cautionary remarks in mind.

We have embarked on this project because no up-to-date biography of Marguerite de Navarre exists in English, in spite of the fact that, thanks to feminism’s reevaluation of early texts by women, she is now viewed as one of the most important writers of her time—the ideal and unequalled ancestor of the greatest women of letters, as Pierre Jourda has called her. For while her writings are at last receiving the scholarly attention they merit, her life continues to be viewed through the prism of the life of her brother, François I, the French Renaissance king who admittedly deserves much credit for turning France into a modern nation and his court into an artistic mecca. But history is only now beginning to acknowledge the significant role in these achievements also played by François’s brilliant sister, Marguerite; it is our earnest hope in these pages to draw attention to the need for reassessing her contributions.

This is not to say that the Queen of Navarre has been totally neglected as a biographical subject. The year after her death, a devoted officer of her household, the poet Charles de Sainte-Marthe, delivered a funeral oration that eulogistically recounted the life of his patroness. Although often overstated and embellished, his remarks are nevertheless valuable as an evaluation of how Marguerite was viewed by her contemporaries. And at the end of the century, Pierre de Bourdeille, abbot of Brantôme, importantly included the Queen of Navarre in his two-volume social history of French royal women, Recueil des dames (1665–66 [posthumous]; Ladies’ stories). No one who wishes to write about Marguerite can overlook this priceless documentation. As we shall see, much of what we are able to reconstruct about the Heptaméron’s autobiographical elements can only be corroborated thanks to Brantôme’s remarks.

In more recent times, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Queen of Navarre has been regularly featured in gender-specific anthologies with titles like Ladies of the Reformation (1857), Les Femmes de la cour des derniers Valois (1870; Women in the court of the last of the Valois), Les Femmes de lettres en France (1890; Women writers in France), Five Famous French Women (1905), or Famous Women of France (1941). It is fair to say, however, that very little of what appears in these superficial biographical essays provides much that is worthy of serious attention. They invariably fall into what the French disparagingly call petite histoire.

As to full-length biographies, perhaps her gender did inspire some women biographers to choose her as a subject, for three of them wrote books about her in the nineteenth century—a French countess, Louise de Broglie Haussonville (1870); and two Englishwomen, Mary Robinson (1886 and 1900)¹ and Martha Walker Freer (1895)—whereas only one man, Victor Luro (1866), did so. And in the twentieth century, there are the biographies by Hedwige de Chabannes (1973), Nicole Toussaint du Wast (1976), and Marie Cerati (1981), although, curiously, there are more by men: in English, H. Noel Williams’s (1916), and Samuel Putnam’s (1936); and in French, not only Jourda’s massive work (1930) but more recently, Jean-Luc Déjean’s (1987). While many of these works are informative as well as engaging, except for Jourda’s they tend to suffer from two weaknesses: either they embed Marguerite’s story in the history of the reign of François I, with the result that they end up telling his story rather than hers; or they appeal to the popular taste for royal gossip, often failing to document sources or to distinguish fact from legend.

As for more substantive scholarship devoted to Marguerite’s life, in the nineteenth century, this took the form of biographical notices attached to editions of the Heptaméron—notably those of Paul Lacroix, also known as the bibliophile Paul L. Jacob (1841); Le Roux de Lincy (1853); and Félix Frank (1879). The definitive work, however, is the magisterial, two-volume compendium, Marguerite d’Angoulême, published in 1930 by Pierre Jourda. Indeed, the sheer magnitude of Jourda’s achievement may explain why few have since ventured onto the ground he covered. Nevertheless, and notwithstanding the thoroughness of Jourda’s research, his study is limited not only by the sexual prejudices of his time but by a somewhat pedantic literalism.

Marguerite de Navarre’s life warrants the same sophisticated critical and scholarly attention that has been focused on her texts over the last decade. Until now, biographers have viewed her writing as a sideline of her complex and productive life, while literary critics have used her life to learn more about the texts that are their primary concern. By and large, neither group has looked at the autobiographical dimensions of her work. Here we intend to remedy this deficiency by reading her texts deconstructively backwards, in order to find out what can be learned from them about her. It is our hope that in so doing we shall enrich our readers’ appreciation of both the life and the writing of the remarkable French woman whom the nineteenth-century historian Jules Michelet called "la mère aimable de la Renaissance," benevolent mother of the Renaissance.

Author’s Note

Alas, in the midst of preparing this manuscript, my coauthor, Patricia F. Cholakian, succumbed to cancer. Any success that accrues to this enterprise, however, belongs in good measure to her. Patricia’s Rape and Writing in the Heptaméron of Marguerite de Navarre, published in 1991, immediately made her one of the major voices in Marguerite de Navarre scholarship, and much of what has gone into this work has drawn heavily from her extensive knowledge of Marguerite’s work, acquired over many years of research.

Most authors are glad to have one good editor. I had three: Corona Machemer, who helped to shape a first draft into a more readable and polished text and whose astute observations and suggestions were responsible for the expansion of key themes and the sharpening of important arguments; Michael Haskell, who patiently shepherded the manuscript to publication; and Wendy Lochner, who saw the merit of our project from the start. To all I am grateful.

A few preliminary stylistic remarks are in order. Marguerite de Navarre was, perhaps above all, a writer, and this is a literary biography. It seems reasonable, therefore, that each chapter begin with an epigraph from one of her texts.

In dealing with foreign titles, we have distinguished between titles with given names, maintained in the original (Marguerite de Navarre), and those without, translated into English (duchess of Navarre); where there is no real English equivalent for a title, we have retained the French (seigneur de Bonnivet). As for textual translations, unless otherwise specifically mentioned, they are Patricia’s and mine; the original texts of Marguerite alone are given in the notes. Whenever feasible, we have consulted all editions of major works. Though we have favored throughout Michel François’s excellent 1960 edition of L’Heptaméron, we did not neglect others, and in certain instances (particularly in chapter 2), we have drawn upon the valuable English translation by P. A. Chilton.

Marguerite’s abundant correspondence was first gathered together in a pair of publications by F. Génin in 1841 and 1842. A few years later, Aimé Champollion-Figeac collected the correspondence associated with the captivity of François I in Spain. Marguerite’s correspondence with Guillaume Briçonnet, Bishop of Meaux, is now widely available in the two-volume set edited by Christine Martineau, Michel Veissière, and Henry Heller and published from 1975 through 1979.

Because Génin and Champollion-Figeac are less accessible, all citations from these collections have been cross-referenced with Pierre Jourda’s extremely useful chronological listing of the correspondence, Répertoire analytique et chronologique de la correspondence de Marguerite d’Angoulême, indicated by "R," plus the corresponding number of the letter.

Even a literary biography cannot ignore context, especially when it involves such an important historical figure as Marguerite de Navarre. Among the many useful sources we consulted along the way, R. J. Knecht’s excellent biography of Marguerite’s brother, Renaissance Warrior and Patron: The Reign of Francis I, has to be singled out. His careful research has served throughout as an indispensable guide.

In the list of references, works by Marguerite de Navarre are distinguished from secondary sources. While we have included an extensive bibliography, it should be noted that Marguerite de Navarre studies have so exploded in recent years that in order to keep up, one has to consult regularly such sources as the annual MLA listings. Nonetheless, H. P. Clive’s 1983 annotated bibliography continues to be of invaluable service to scholars in the field.

ROUBEN C. CHOLAKIAN

NEW YORK CITY, JULY 2004

Chronology

1. Mother of the Renaissance

And the pleasure of sweet writing

To which I was so naturally inclined.

—LA COCHE

In an isolated palace in the woodlands of Berry, in central France, a Flemish lady of high birth and her brother, a noble lord of high estate, are paying a call on an old friend. It is late, and the princess is preparing to retire. She bids goodnight to her host and his aged mother, who has brought her a bedtime snack of preserved fruit. She climbs into her bed and a lady-in-waiting pulls the bed curtains around her. She is tired after a long day in the open air watching the men, who have been hunting deer, gallop through the woods. She drifts off to sleep.

Unbeknownst to the princess, the old lady who normally sleeps in the room below has been convinced by her son to sleep elsewhere so as not to disturb their guest with her coughing. And he has taken her place. At the moment, he is gazing at himself in his mirror, admiring the figure he cuts in his fine nightshirt and assuring himself that the lady in the room above will find him irresistible when he puts into motion the daring plan he has devised. After all, she is high spirited and fun loving, and despite her virtuous reputation and her refusal to accept him as her official admirer, she clearly enjoys his company. Why, just now, she has permitted him to stay in her room until bedtime.

He listens to the sounds in the lady’s chamber. He hears her attendant walk across the floor and lie down on her cot. At last, when all is quiet, he enters a secret passageway, creeps up a narrow staircase, and removes a trap door cunningly concealed behind the wall hangings next to the princess’s bed. Before she knows what is happening he has taken her into his arms and begun making love to her. She does not, however, react as he had imagined. She fights him off, literally tooth and nail, clawing at his face and screaming for help. Her lady-in-waiting rushes to her side, and her assailant, bruised and bleeding, makes his escape before the alarm can be raised.

The princess has no doubt as to the identity of her attacker and, shaking with fury, vows that he will pay with his head for this outrageous assault. Her attendant, who is older and wiser, discourages her, however. Be careful, she warns, or instead of avenging your honor, you may well lose it. If your brother punishes this man as you demand, and he is put to death, it will be noised about that he had his way with you; and most people will say that he could not have done so unless you encouraged him. You are young and beautiful and it is no secret that you like to have a good time. There is no one at court who has not seen the way you treat this gentleman and everyone will say that if he carried out this deed it was your own fault. And you, who have always held your head high, will be the subject of gossip and rumor wherever this story is told. The princess realizes that there is more than a little truth in what the older woman is saying. She decides to do nothing and keep the incident a secret. She and her brother depart the next day; needless to say, their battered host sends word that he is too ill to bid them farewell.

Pierre de Bourdeilles, abbot of Brantôme,¹ the social chronicler known to literary critics simply as Brantôme, categorically identifies the heroine of this story, the fourth in Marguerite’s collection of narratives called the Heptaméron, as the author herself. The brother mentioned in the story’s opening paragraph is none other than Marguerite’s own brother, François I of France. As for the would-be rapist, Brantôme connects him with Guillaume Gouffier, seigneur de Bonnivet, a close friend of the family. The evidence is unimpeachable, for both Brantôme’s grandmother, Louise de Daillon, and his mother, Anne de Vivonne, had been ladies-in-waiting in Marguerite’s entourage, and witnessed some of the events he later described in his gossipy memoirs. The incident in question probably took place at Bonnivet’s own château, during a state visit that Marguerite and the king of France made there about 1520. She would have been in her twenties.²

Brantôme’s disclosure is of critical importance to Marguerite’s biographers, for it not only reveals the identity of the principal actors in a novella in which the pivotal event is a sexual assault; it suggests that others of the Queen of Navarre’s works may be looked upon as autobiographical. Yet despite the fact that no one disputes the accuracy of Brantôme’s assertion, scholars have seldom reflected seriously on the question of why Marguerite decided to write about this distressing event, let alone the more intriguing question of what she revealed about herself in doing so. Moreover, as we shall see, there is good reason to believe that novella ten, in which the young heroine, Floride, is assaulted not once but twice, represents another personal rape story.³ Whether the three episodes described in novellas four and ten represent separate encounters or, rather, indicate that Marguerite was so distressed by her one frightening experience that she returned obsessively to the stinging remembrance of it, we are encouraged to look more closely for other autobiographical signs in her writings.

It is our considered conviction that Marguerite’s early traumatic experience or experiences with male aggression was one of several factors that importantly changed the direction her life was to take, not only in the writing of the Heptaméron, in which rape and seduction are prominent themes,⁴ but in her overall spiritual and literary development. When, in the early 1520s, she decided to contact the eminent evangelist and religious reformer Guillaume Briçonnet, it was not because of guilt over sibling incest, as one theorist has suggested,⁵ but because of a series of psychological pressures, not least of which was her ordeal with Bonnivet.

Was Marguerite scarred beyond ever experiencing genuine love? This we do not know, though we suspect that the speculations to this effect have been greatly exaggerated, at least with respect to her second marriage. We do know that by and large women of aristocratic standing were not permitted to make their true feelings a factor in matchmaking, and Marguerite was no exception. In 1509, at the age of seventeen, she was married off to the duke of Alençon, a lackluster personage who was disgraced for allegedly cowardly behavior at the battle of Pavia (1525), accused of abandoning the contest at a key moment in the French king’s campaign to seize control of the Duchy of Milan. He died later that same year, leaving his widow childless. Two years after that, still very much a matrimonial catch, Marguerite was married again, this time to a virile and much-admired hero from that same battle at Pavia. Her junior by ten years, Henri d’Albret was king of the tiny, independent territory of Navarre, a prize piece of land nestled up against the Pyrenees, which was eventually annexed to France in 1589. It may be that this union, too, was loveless, but in any event, it was not childless. Marguerite and Henri had a daughter, Jeanne, and a son who died in infancy.

Whatever her private sufferings, Marguerite never shrank from her public responsibilities. She and her ambitious brother constituted an almost inseparable pair. From the moment François mounted the French throne in 1515, his articulate, charming, and intelligent sister was close at hand. Since 1328 the Valois courts had been noted for their brilliance; under François I they reached their dazzling apogee, and his sister, Marguerite, was highly visible in virtually all aspects of the court’s life. She was the architect and animator of its refined entertainments, the king’s respected counselor and confidante, and a significant player in his political and diplomatic affairs. After the defeat at Pavia, for example, when the king was taken captive, it was Marguerite who undertook the arduous journey to Madrid, nursed the ailing king back to health, and astutely parlayed for his release.

In addition to her preeminence at court, Marguerite was a leading figure in the intellectual and religious movements of her time, a stalwart and unremittingly generous patron of the major writers and thinkers of the French Renaissance. She was a key figure in the reformist movement, often risking her own position in her fearless battle against corruption and abuse, a cause to which she committed herself throughout her entire adult life. How many times did she come to the rescue of her favorite but foolishly outspoken poet Clément Marot? How often did she shield from attack anticlerical writers like Louis de Berquin, who, despite her serious efforts, finally came to his martyr’s end when he was burned at the stake in 1529?

Marguerite’s courageous interference in religious matters not only made her suspect in the eyes of the powerful, conservative Faculty of Theology at the University of Paris, the highest ecclesiastical authority in France at a time when church and state were at once intertwined and often in competition for supremacy; it several times came close to making her lose the affection and protection of her brother. In 1534, for example, hot-headed reformists boldly plastered inflammatory anti-Catholic broadsides on the walls of royal buildings. The so-called Placard Affair, which intensified the conflict between religious conservatives and those who, like the queen of Navarre, sought to reform the church, caused severe tensions. Only the year before, Marguerite had been condemned by the theologians at the University of Paris for the reformist ideas in her controversial poem Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse (Mirror of a sinful soul). After this difficult moment, her relationship with François was never quite the same.

Marguerite’s most significant role as supporter of the reformist movement came through her connection with the Cercle de Meaux, whose leader, Guillaume Briçonnet, bishop of that important northern city and early advocate for change in the church, became her personal spiritual advisor. Many of the reformists from Briçonnet’s entourage—Gérard Roussel, Michel d’Arande, Pierre Caroli, Guillaume Farel, and Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, all of whom were at one time or another in conflict with prevailing attitudes—enjoyed the queen of Navarre’s magnanimous protection.⁶

She was not, however, a Protestant. Like the reformers of Meaux, she sought not separation from the mother church but correction of its major abuses. Like them she believed in challenging the autocratic rule of clerics who did not wish to share the interpretation of sacred text. Like them she believed in making the Bible available to everyone and thus, as a generous patron, encouraged its translation into the vernacular. They in turn recognized her as a true and loyal promoter of their cause and often turned to her for help. Indeed, the most famous of these Meaux disciples, the humanist scholar Lefèvre d’Étaples, breathed his last in Marguerite’s residence at Nérac, where he had taken refuge.

Marguerite practiced what the reformers preached. She worked industriously to improve the deplorable conditions in hospitals and to create safe havens for orphaned children. She was a generous donor to religious establishments, seeking to remove incompetent leaders and to make certain that the monastic rules were intelligently and sensibly applied. Not surprisingly, she was constantly asked for assistance and more often than not, gladly gave it. And as it turned out, her reformist views were passed along to a future king of France. Her daughter, Jeanne d’Albret, was to become the mother of Henri IV, who, in 1598, issued the famous Edict of Nantes, which protected French Protestants for nearly a hundred years, until its revocation by Louis XIV in 1685.

Political and religious conflict eventually took their toll on Marguerite. As time went by, "la doulce escripture" (sweet writing) became more and more of a solace to her, the private place to which the queen of Navarre retreated when she needed to escape from the din and confusion of the public forum. The sheer volume of words she put to paper is astounding when one takes into account how active she was in the king’s court and how many just causes she espoused. The number of letters alone that have come down to us constitutes an extraordinary output. As for her literary accomplishments, their extent and variety are only now coming to light and being fully appreciated. Marguerite composed inspirational plays on biblical, evangelical, and philosophical themes, and others that raised important questions about love and the relations between men and women. Her poetry ranged from the theological to the comedic and historical. In whatever genre she chose, she could be witty, thought provoking and, within the limits of what convention allowed, personal and self-reflective.

Marguerite came to her self-awareness as a writer hesitantly. Both her lifestyle and her gender worked against her. The success of Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse, which was printed in 1531 by the reformist publisher Simon du Bois, astonished her. But once she had had a taste of the power of the written word, once she had overcome the stigma of being a woman who puts her thoughts into print for public view, she grew professionally, until, in 1547, near the end of her life, she conceived of a carefully selected collection of most of her oeuvre and saw it through to publication. This was a gesture of enormous significance for her, and for all the women writers who were to come after her.

The most famous of Marguerite’s works, and for good reason, is her risqué and provocative collection of novellas, the Heptaméron. Though the queen of Navarre probably had been thinking about such a writing project for some time, it was during the early 1540s that she began organizing its frame and determining the ultimate form she wanted to give to the work. Clearly her model for the structure was Boccaccio’s Decameron, one of the many books in her family’s library that she had undoubtedly read when she was a girl.⁷ Whether Marguerite ran out of stories or did not live long enough to finish the intended one hundred tales,⁸ the Heptaméron, which has seventy-two narratives, did not get into print until 1559, a decade after its creator’s death.

If Boccaccio was her model, however, he was not her master. As he had done, Marguerite invented a disaster that forced her devisants (narrators/commentators) to while away the time by exchanging entertaining and instructive tales. But her frame device is far more complex than Boccaccio’s. Marguerite’s narrators discuss at length and comment on each other stories, emerging thus as very real people with strong and opposing views. Indeed, as the term "devisant" implies, these narrators are also conversationalists, and in any analysis of the novellas, commentaries and tales are of a piece. By contrast, the storytellers of the Decameron are little more than talking stick figures.

Moreover, the French writer almost certainly put much of herself into the outspoken and remarkable narrator she calls Parlamente, a fact that understandably prompts anyone looking for autobiographical details to examine more closely not only the tales she relates but also her remarks in the discussions that follow all the stories.⁹ Parlamente’s sometimes sardonic but often amusing and always psychologically perceptive observations and arguments in the heated discussions that engage the ten devisants reflect Marguerite’s own mature views (even as the thoughts of certain characters in some of the stories represent a younger Marguerite). In particular, it is Parlamente who most vigorously assumes the role of forthright and stern censor of male sexual mores.

In the competition between public and private in Marguerite’s life, it was the need for quiet and reflective peace that in the end won out. Following her brother’s death in 1547, she withdrew to the most remote and peaceful of her estates, a relatively unpretentious residence at Odos, near the southern city of Tarbes, which she had purchased sometime in 1542. It was as if she knew that the time had come to separate herself from her once very busy life. There the aging queen of Navarre contentedly divided her time between writing and performing daily spiritual exercises and there, nearly alone save for a skeletal staff of devoted people who remained with her to the very end, she took to bed with fever, and in the night hours of December 21, 1549, died at the age of fifty-seven.

Some 450 years later, we wonder: Who was this princess who became a writer and saw herself as one when to be identified as such was rare indeed? Official documents help to situate the princess in this place at that time but tell us little about her inner life, what she thought, what she felt. A swirl of intriguing questions plague us. Some of these are inextricably bound up with contemporary politics. What, in fact, were her religious beliefs? Did she have a philosophy of governance? How did she define the role of women, especially an educated and privileged woman such as herself? Other questions are harder to get at. What were her family relations like? Did her love for her brother skirt the temptations of incest? Did she, as she often intimated, really feel herself the least important member of the famous Angoulême trinité, consisting of Marguerite; her brother, François; and their mother, Louise de Savoie? How did she envision her responsibilities toward motherhood? Was there anything that approached real love between her and either of her two husbands?

Because it is our good fortune as biographers to have at our disposal the considerable body of Marguerite’s own writings, we have the rare opportunity to get at least a glimpse of the workings of her mind. The mores of her time would not have permitted her to do the kind of deep psychological self-probing we have come to expect from our modern writers. But with the right perspective, and by asking the right questions, this mother lode of words can nonetheless offer up valuable nuggets of information about the private person behind the public persona, some useful insights into the mentality and intellect of this gifted religious reformer, political operator, and cultural midwife who was also sister to a king, wife to another, and grandmother to a third.

2. Education of a Lady 1492–1515

In my opinion, said Hircan, the tall lord of your story lacked nerve, and didn’t deserve to have his memory preserved.

—L’Heptaméron (NOVELLA FOUR)

In the year 1491, Louise de Savoie (Savoy), Countess of Angoulême, went on a pilgrimage to the medieval fortress-château Plessis-lez-Tours, located in today’s department of Indre et Loire, where the late king Louis XI had installed the Italian monk François de Paule (Francesco da Paola).¹ She implored the saintly hermit to cure her of sterility. Since she was only fourteen at the time, her anxiety seems somewhat premature unless one understands two things. First, her husband, Charles d’Angoulême, stood in direct line for the throne of France, immediately after his cousin Louis, the Duke of Orléans; for neither Louis nor the current king, Charles VIII, had a male heir, and according to France’s Salic law, only men could accede to the throne. Second, the household where Louise had arrived as a bride fully two years before was governed by her husband’s mistress, Antoinette de Polignac, who had already borne him two daughters.

François de Paule responded to Louise’s appeal by predicting that she would give birth to the future king of France. Soon after, she did become pregnant, whereupon she is supposed to have developed an inordinate craving for oysters and dreamed that she swallowed a pearl.² The next spring, in the early morning hours of April 11, 1492, she gave birth—to a daughter. She named her Marguerite, which means pearl.³ No celebrations marked the event, for the Angoulêmes were poor relations of the royal family and led a somewhat shabby existence in the provinces: a daughter’s birth was not sufficient reason to spend any of their limited funds on celebrating. They had her baptized without fanfare in the family chapel in Angoulême. And later that year, the birth of a son, Charles-Orland, to Charles VIII seemed to cast even more doubt on the reliability of François de Paule as a prophet.

Louise, who was barely seventeen when her daughter was born, had thus far known little in the way of joy or affection. Like her husband, she came from a minor branch of the royal family. Her father, Philippe de Bresse, a younger son of the second duke of Savoy, was typical in that, subordinate in the family hierarchy, he did not stand to inherit much, a fact indicated in his sobriquet, Monsieur Sans Terre (Landless man). Handsome but feckless, he spent most of his time scheming to improve his status. While he was journeying around the countryside in pursuit of this goal, he consigned his wife and children to his gloomy castle in Pont-d’Ain, a feudal monstrosity with crenellated towers and a huge dungeon in the modern department of Brasse Bourguignonne in southeastern Burgundy. In 1483, when Louise was five, she lost even that grim haven. Her mother, Marguerite de Bourbon, died, and she and her younger brother, Philibert, were packed off to a female relative, Anne de Beaujeu, elder sister of the then boy-king, Charles VIII, for whom she acted as regent.

Although to the modern mind Philippe’s decision to send his young children away may appear selfish and irresponsible, virtually an act of abandonment, it was common then for well-born children to be raised by prosperous or powerful relatives. French aristocrats belonged to an elaborate cousinage that imposed responsibility for bringing up offspring on all its members. Although Philippe de Bresse did not give much in the way of paternal affection to his motherless children, by sending them to Anne, who was at once their aunt (her husband was Marguerite de Bourbon’s brother) and their first cousin (her mother had been Philippe de Bresse’s sister), he made sure they would be brought up as befitted their rank and given opportunities and advantages he could not provide for them in Pont d’Ain.

Anne de Beaujeu, also known as Anne de France and Anne de Bourbon, was then the most powerful woman in the kingdom, for it was her father, Louis XI, on his deathbed earlier that year, who had placed the young king in her charge and designated her and her husband, the duke of Bourbon, regents. Then twenty-two, she was the only one of Louis XI’s children not genetically flawed by centuries of royal inbreeding. What is more, she was highly intelligent. Even her father, who refused to admit that there could be such a thing as a wise female, had begrudgingly called her the least foolish of women.

She was healthy, tall and well-proportioned, with a long neck and abundant hair, straight as a dart and of immense dignity … proud and magnificent (Dorothy Mayer, The Great Regent, 4). Deeply devout, she often had herself painted in an attitude of prayer, and in these portraits, she has the pure, delicate features of a Flemish Madonna. Above all, she was noted for her cool rectitude and political acumen. Two generations later, Brantôme, who characterized her as vindictive and hypocritical, nevertheless had to concede that during her regency she had governed so wisely and virtuously that she deserved to be called a great king of France (Recueil des dames, 167).

Louise, and ultimately her daughter, would owe a great deal to this kinswoman’s guidance and example. Indeed, there can be little doubt that Marguerite’s wide cultural attainments, her refined habits of mind, and her moral and intellectual integrity can be traced to the training her mother received at Anne’s court. Herself one of the best educated women of her time, Anne took seriously the task of preparing those destined by birth to preeminence. Under her governance, the sickly, ill-favored Charles VIII developed cultivated tastes in art and music and learned Latin well enough to deliver speeches in that language. When Louise and Philibert came to live with her, she was also supervising the education of Marguerite d’Autriche (Marguerite of Austria), daughter of Maximilian, the ruler of the Hapsburg territories,⁴ to whom Charles was betrothed and whose mother, like theirs, had died prematurely.

Anne prepared her young charges for their future responsibilities in what has been called a court school. She appointed as their tutor Madame de Segré, under whose guidance Louise acquired the love of books and reading that she would pass on to her daughter, but it was Anne herself who schooled the girls in the refined manners, complex etiquette, and involuted politics of court life. Indeed, she composed a teaching manual intended for her own daughter Suzanne, Les enseignements d’Anne de France à sa fille Suzanne de Bourbon (Anne de France’s instructions for her daughter Suzanne de Bourbon), which became an important handbook for many of the young women of the court.⁵ Perhaps most important, as Anne’s ward, Louise was given the opportunity to observe at first hand the subtle strategies that enabled a clever woman to exercise power successfully—strategies better learned through example than study.

Anne had inherited not only her father’s intelligence but his cunning, and whatever her private ambitions, she knew that women had to appear submissive. Only by giving the impression of knowing their place could they exercise power without calling down opprobrium. The secret of Anne’s success as regent was to make herself as invisible as possible, and her example was a powerful influence on the young Louise de Savoie, who would likewise conceal her ambitions behind impeccable virtue and seeming self-effacement. Anne also knew that a woman who hoped to become mistress of her own destiny and achieve public power had to be above reproach: she was a firm advocate of female chastity. She did not look kindly, however, on those who vilified her gender. It was she who commissioned the noted Lyonnais humanist Symphorien Champier to write La Nef des dames vertueuses (Ship of virtuous women), a compendium extolling exemplary women from the past, both mythical and historical. Her library at the Bourbon castle in the city of Moulins contained a number of other works that advocated women’s empowerment and defended them against their critics, for example, Christine de Pizan’s Le Livre de la cité des dames (1405; The Book of the City of Ladies) and Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; The book of three virtues), and Le Livre à l’enseignement des dames (1371?; The book for the education of ladies), by the Chevalier de la Tour-Landry.

While Louise received an excellent upbringing under the tutelage of this strong, astute woman, it was not a happy one. The regent made sure her ward had the necessities, but she bestowed little on her beyond them: once a year, on New Year’s Day, Louise received eighty livres to buy a court gown. Her lowly status was all the more galling because while she and her brother subsisted on the fringes of the court, their playmate Marguerite d’Autriche, who was being raised to be the queen of France, was kept in the lap of luxury: surrounded by ninety ladies-in-waiting and a multitude of horses and dogs, she was served with the best silver, and her rooms were richly furnished and hung with precious paintings. Despite these disparities, the three children became fast friends. And as it turned out, Marguerite did not marry Charles, who jilted her to marry Anne de Bretagne (Brittany) and thus procure the duchy of Brittany for France. Instead she married the far handsomer Philibert, in one of the few love matches of the age. Many years later, as we shall see, she and Louise would negotiate the Paix des Dames, the treaty that temporarily brought to an end, in 1529, the series of wars for the Italian succession that had culminated, disastrously for France, in the capture of François I at Pavia in 1525.⁶

Louise’s portraits show a skinny little girl with a high, round forehead and tight lips. The poor relation, who had only one good gown per year to her name, grew up only too conscious of her inferior position at court. Discreet, withdrawn, and perhaps a bit too well-behaved (Henry-Bordeaux, Louise de Savoie, 26), she silently assimilated not only her mentor’s code of conduct but the strategies it masked.

On February 16, 1488, Anne married off her ward with the cool efficiency that marked all her transactions. When she was only two, Louise had been betrothed by the wily Louis XI to his cousin, Charles d’Angoulême, in order to prevent him from making a more advantageous match with a rich heiress. Ten years later, Charles was comfortably cohabiting with the daughter of the governor of Angoulême, Antoinette de Polignac, but this mattered not a whit to Anne de Beaujeu. She reminded Charles of his agreement to marry Louise and insisted that he go ahead with the nuptials. Charles had little choice but to comply, for in 1487 he had foolishly joined the duke of Orléans in an ill-conceived conspiracy against Anne’s regency, which became known as la Guerre folle, the Crazy War. Caught, ‘like a waffle between two irons’ (Knecht, Renaissance Warrior, 3), he bowed to the regent’s will, acceding to a marriage contract that was highly advantageous to Louise who, by it, was assured an important inheritance of land.

Present at the wedding in February 1488 was Philippe de Bresse, Louise’s long-absent father, who had himself recently remarried.⁷ By a strange fluke, a letter he wrote to his new spouse has survived. In it he divulges the fact that his daughter had showered him with questions about what she should do to arouse her husband’s ardor, which just goes to show that she is already hungering to ply the trade of all you old married women (Henry-Bordeaux, Louise de Savoie, 31). There is something pathetic in the thought of this motherless twelve-year-old seeking information on these delicate matters from a father she barely knew. Was there no woman at Anne’s court to whom she could turn for enlightenment? At the same time the episode says something about Louise’s steely determination to get ahead in the world. She probably knew about Charles’s lack of enthusiasm for the marriage and the reasons behind it, and she was certainly aware of what she stood to gain by producing a male heir. Surely it was this that prompted her questions to Philippe, as it would later inspire her pilgrimage to François de Paule at Plessis—not the hungering her father attributes to old married women.

Louise’s bridegroom, though not yet thirty, seemed older. He was small, fragile, and unprepossessing, a refined dilettante whose one virtue from Louise’s point of view (aside from his proximity to the throne) was his love of literature and the arts. Neither rich nor powerful, he led an agreeable existence given over to hunting, feasting, concerts, and literary diversions. He divided his time between Romorantin, the family’s fortified castle in the Loire valley, and his favorite abode, a small château his father had built opposite the fortress of Lusignan in Cognac, where the Charente River, bordered by poplars, flows through peaceful fields. There, like his Milanese grandmother, Valentina Visconti, who had gathered a circle of poets around her, Charles presided over a small court, in some ways more Italian than French, attracting to the congenial setting a number of artists—the organist Imbert Chandelier; the illuminator Robinet Testard, who created for him some 400 miniatures to illustrate various of his manuscripts; and several men of letters, notably the Saint-Gelais brothers, Jean, who was to become official historian to the court of Louis XII, and Octavien, a poet. His mother, Marguerite de Rohan—our Marguerite’s namesake, along with Louise’s mother, Marguerite de Bourbon—was also a connoisseur, who had amassed a valuable collection of silver, gold, and jewels.⁸

Like Louise, Charles had hardly known his father, Jean d’Angoulême. During the dynastic struggle between the royal houses of France and England commonly known as the Hundred Years War (1337–1453), Jean had been sent as a hostage to England, where he had remained for thirty-two years. He was forty when, having exhausted his fortune to purchase his freedom, he finally returned to France; in an age when the life expectancy of even the nobility was not very long, he married as soon as a match could be arranged for a man of high birth but little wealth, and he fathered a son, Charles. He then devoted himself to collecting books, amassing, despite his slender means, 150 manuscripts, which he stored at Cognac in a great cupboard with four doors and finely crafted locks.⁹ So eager was he to possess certain texts that he copied out nine of them himself, making do with humble bindings for the sake of what they contained. When he died in 1467, his son Charles was only seven but fully aware of his father’s exceptional love for books; the library at Cognac was a legacy that he gladly carried on in his own life and passed on to his children.

Charles d’Angoulême was probably a less knowledgeable bibliophile than his father, however, and more eclectic in his tastes. Still, at his death, he possessed over two hundred volumes, among them fine, illuminated parchment manuscripts of works by Boccaccio, Dante, and Aristotle. When the printing press came into use, he began at once to order books from the celebrated house of Vérard in Paris, including its first publication, a translation of the Decameron.¹⁰ From the same source, he ordered medieval romances, such as Le Roman de Tristan (The romance of Tristan) and Le Chevalier de la table ronde (Knight of the Round Table); the masterpiece of the sixth-century philosopher Boethius, De Consolatione philosophiae (The Consolation of Philosophy); and theological texts like L’Ordre des Chrestiens (Christian religious orders). Other early printed works in his collection included Lancelot du Lac (Lancelot of the lake); Chroniques de France (French chronicles); Ovid’s Metamorphoses; the Facetiae (Witty sayings) of the Italian humanist Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini; Jean Boutilliers’s fourteenth-century juridical essay, La Somme rurale (Rural regulations); and Jean de Meung’s Testament, as well as the writings of Saint-Anselme, Petrarch, and Christine de Pizan, all of which would one day influence his daughter’s thinking and writing.

This rich library must have delighted Louise when she arrived at Cognac, for she was a great reader; it undoubtedly became a source of consolation and an escape from a situation that was not terribly different from the one she had endured at Anne’s court. Charles had kept his part of the bargain and married her, but he made no changes in his living arrangements. Antoinette de Polignac continued to preside over his household and to share his bed. Her daughters, along with the daughter of another mistress, Jeanne Comte, would be brought up alongside Marguerite and become her playmates. Other members of the Polignac family also remained in positions of responsibility in the household, becoming attendants of Louise and, later, her children.¹¹

Well-schooled in self-effacement, Louise seemingly accepted this ménage à trois without demur. Was she stoically biding her time, or in her loneliness did she find a companion, an older sister, even, in Antoinette? In any event, the Polignacs continued to be part of the family after Charles’s death and even after 1498, when his cousin Louis d’Orléans became Louis XII and established Louise and her children at the royal palace in Amboise. As we shall see, it was finally the king, and not Louise, who put an end to what prudish outsiders viewed as a scandalous state of affairs.

By the end of 1494, there was again reason to hope that François de Paule’s prophesy would come to pass. The dauphin was a sickly child—and on September 12 Louise gave birth to a son, who was named François for the saintly monk who had foretold his birth. From that moment, her life was dominated by agonizing suspense as she, and later her daughter as well, hoped and prayed that François would become king of France. That the waxing and waning of his prospects dominated their existence is not surprising, for it was Francois’s place in the succession that determined how his mother and his sister were regarded by the world at large. Especially was this so in the case of Marguerite. Eventually, of course, she would become important in her own right, but if anyone paid attention to her when she was a little girl, it was because of her brother. He was the source of her identity, and we would know almost nothing about her in her early years if he had not been in line for the throne.

When the little dauphin died in December 1495, the Angoulêmes were one step closer to their goal. Charles and Louise set off at once to pay obeisance to cousin Louis, who was again the heir apparent. Their courtly intentions were ill-advised, however, for the winter weather proved too much for Charles’s frail constitution. He fell ill on the first day of the journey and the party was forced to stop at Châteauneuf. There, despite his doctors’ efforts to save him and his young wife’s devoted nursing, he died on the first of January, 1496.¹² At the age of nineteen, Louise de Savoie, duchess of Anglouême, was left a widow with two children under the age of four. From this moment, she dedicated herself single-mindedly to François, her César.

Scholars have commented on the disparity between Louise’s obsessive devotion to her son and her seeming lack of regard for her daughter. Thus Jourda writes: We are persuaded that she should be reproached for one thing, that she may not have loved her daughter as much as she deserved (Marguerite d’Angoulême, 1:20). On the surface, his judgment seems valid. Certainly, Louise almost never mentioned Marguerite in her journal, nearly all of whose entries are devoted to François. But it is important not to confuse present-day attitudes toward family relationships with those of French aristocrats at the end of the fifteenth century; they were imbued then with a sense of family obligation that made them show far more concern for dynastic interests than for the emotional well-being of their children. Private feelings had little place in this mindset. In fact, it would have been stupid for a woman in Louise’s situation not to dedicate all her energy to her son, for without his expectations, neither she nor Marguerite could look forward to anything but poverty and obscurity. If he became king, the world would be theirs.

Marguerite’s thoughts on this matter were necessarily the same as her mother’s. From early childhood, she learned to see in François the embodiment of Angoulême hopes, as well as whatever prospect she had of improving her own lot. She identified herself totally with his future and could not have imagined that her interests were separate from his. The modern concept of the role of family relationships in determining a person’s emotional health, and the harm done to a child by a cold or unloving parent, would have been incomprehensible to women like Louise and Marguerite. Rather than feeling emotionally deprived because her mother didn’t love her as much as François, Marguerite shared Louise’s anxieties and preoccupations wholeheartedly. And their devotion to a common cause created a strong bond between mother and daughter, a bond like that between a husband and wife who share concern for their children’s future. Insofar as Marguerite had a sense of individual identity when she was a girl, it was necessarily defined by her place in the "trinité" formed by her brother, her mother, and herself. Far from being jealous of her younger brother, Marguerite adored him, and despite some rough patches, remained close to him until his death.¹³

The fact that with the demise of Charles d’Angoulême, Louise’s son stood second in line to the throne after himself did not escape the attention of Louis, the duke of Orléans. His unhappy marriage to Louis XI’s daughter Jeanne, reputed to be the ugliest woman in France, had produced no male heir. He was, therefore, determined to exercise close surveillance over the child who stood to succeed him should he become king. The battle that ensued sheds light on the legal status of women in fifteenth-century France.

Before his death, Charles d’Angoulême had made it clear that if he was unwilling to give up the mistress to whom he had bound himself before his marriage, he was nonetheless determined to place the future of his line in the hands of his wife: his will designated her and her alone as the children’s guardian. Louis d’Orléans immediately took steps to abrogate the will on the grounds that Louise was under twenty-five—the age of legal majority for women in France. Louise now showed her mettle. She responded that her husband had unequivocally specified that she, and not the duke of Orléans, was to bring up the children and that under the law in the southern region of Angoumois, where Cognac was situated, women were allowed to exercise the right of guardianship at the age of fourteen. The king’s council (his principal governing body) worked out a compromise.¹⁴ The children were left in Louise’s care, provided she did not remarry, with their uncle as their honorary guardian. Louis was not entirely beaten, however: his guardianship may have been honorary, but he took it upon himself to act as his late cousin’s executor and, to Louise’s consternation, did all in his power to keep her on a tight rein. When he became king he would do even more.

In 1498, Charles VIII hit his head as he was riding through one of the entryways to the royal château at Amboise. He suffered a concussion and died soon after. The duke of Orléans was now Louis XII, and François was his heir. He immediately summoned Louise and her children to the royal palace at Chinon, southwest of Tours on the river Vienne. From this time forward, they would be ruled by him. They had to live where he decreed and submit without question to his orders. This would not have been so bad if Louis had seen fit to install them honorably at his court and publicly acknowledge François as his heir, but he consigned them first to the château at Blois and then to Amboise, two royal palaces on the Loire, at which he and the court seldom put in an appearance.¹⁵ Worse still, he placed them under the surveillance of his right-hand man, Pierre de Rohan, seigneur de Gié and marshal of France, who was related to the late Charles d’Angoulême on his mother’s side of the family.

But if Gié was the guardian at the gate, it was Louise who continued to oversee the education of both her daughter and her son. Louise believed, as had her mentor Anne de Beaujeu, that royal women (and men) should be well educated. Consequently she gave her daughter (and her son) a far broader and more liberal education than was usual for noblewomen (or noblemen) in her day. Indeed, she treated Marguerite and François equally. From the outset they had the same tutors and followed the same course of studies. Both learned Spanish and Italian from their mother, who conversed with them in those languages. Two humanist scholars and churchmen, François Demoulin and François de Rochefort, abbot of Saint-Mesmin, near Orléans, taught them Latin and biblical history. Another "érudit, Robert Hurault, gave Marguerite her first lessons in philosophy" (Jourda, Marguerite d’Angoulême, 1:25–26).¹⁶

Were they also, as Marguerite’s eulogist Sainte-Marthe insisted, assigned readings in the Scriptures? If so, the readings were in Latin, for a French translation of the Bible was not yet available. It is more likely that their religious education was based on moral treatises, such as the one Louise commissioned Demoulin to compose in 1507. This was a simplified guide to confession and penitence, written in the form of a dialogue and illustrated with illuminated miniatures designed to capture its young readers’ attention. It was probably this treatise and others like it that stimulated Marguerite’s interest in spiritual and moral questions. Like many such late-medieval commentaries intended for the edification of the laity, it made heavy use of allegory, but in the humanist mode it also contained many allusions to classical authors, including Sallust, Plato, Juvenal, Cicero, and Virgil, so that it served as an introduction to the texts of antiquity.¹⁷

Most important, however, was the influence and example of this intellectually energetic and strong-willed mother, whose motto was libris et liberis, [my] books and [my] children. With the aid of the illuminator Robinet Testard, she had carried on the family’s bibliophilic tradition after her husband’s death, adding continually to the collection of books and manuscripts amassed by him and his father, and she encouraged her children to profit from them all. When the family moved to the Loire valley, they brought many of their precious books with them; eventually these found their way into the royal library at Blois, which already possessed the collection of Charles d’Orléans, Louis XII’s famous poet father.¹⁸ A 1518 inventory shows that many of the books at Blois had originally been in Cognac. Among these were Boccaccio’s De Casibus illustrium virorum (1355–74; On the fates of famous men) and De Claris mulieribus (1360–74; Concerning famous women); Petrarch’s Triumphs; Dante’s Divine Comedy; Octavien de Saint-Gelais’s translation of Ovid’s Epistles, and French versions of Saint Paul’s letters and the Book of Revelations. Until Gié interfered, Louise also continued to include artists and writers in the family’s inner circle. Thus Marguerite and her brother grew up in constant contact with men of letters, overhearing their talk and later conversing with them.

While brother and sister received equal educations when it came to book learning, there were bound to be differences between them, because of gender, certainly, and because of temperament. Thus, while her vigorous brother was outside with his comrades hunting, jousting, and playing at making war, Marguerite remained indoors reading or busying herself with more womanly activities. Her governess, Madame de Châtillon, who would later serve as her lady-in-waiting and confidante, supervised her manners and deportment; for inspiration she most likely made extensive use of Anne de Beaujeu’s Enseignements, which had been Louise’s social guidebook during her own growing up a generation before.

Marguerite was taught to carry herself with dignity and self-assurance. Her manner was to be firm and