Page:A cyclopaedia of female biography.djvu/622

 married one of the pleasure-loving ladies of the court, and became, from that time, an enemy and persecutor of the truth.

PARTHENAY, CATHARINE DE, to Anne de Parthenay, and daughter and heiress of John de Parthenay, Lord of Soubise, inherited her father's devotion to the cause of Calvinism. She published some poems in 1572, when she was only eighteen; and is thought to be the author of an "Apology for Henry the Fourth," a concealed but keen satire, which is considered an able production. She also wrote tragedies and comedies; her tragedy of "Holofernes" was acted in Rochelle, in 1574. In 1568, when only fourteen, she was married to Charles de Quellence, Baron de Pont, in Brittany, who, upon this marriage, took the name of Soubise. He fell a sacrifice to his religion, in the general massacre of the Protestants, at Paris, on St. Bartholomew's day, 1571.

In 1575, his widow married Renatus, Viscount Rohan; who dying in 1586, when she was only thirty-two, she resolved not to marry again, but to devote herself to her children. Her eldest son was the celebrated Duke de Rohan, who maintained the Protestant C4inse with so much vigour during the civil wars in the reign of Louis the Thirteenth. Her second son was the Duke de Soubise. She had also three daughters; Henriette, who died unmarried; and Catharine, who married a Duke de Deux-ponts, 1605. It was this lady who made the memorable reply to Henry the Fourth, when, attracted by her beauty, he declared a passion for her; "I am too poor, sire, to be your wife, and too nobly born to be your mistress." The third daughter was Anne, who never married, but lived with her mother, and bore with her all the calamities of the siege of Rochelle. The mother was then in her seventy-fifth year, and they were reduced, for three months, to living on horse-flesh and four ounces of bread a day; yet she wrote to her son, "not to let the consideration of their extremity prevail on him to do anything to the injury of his party, how great soever their sufferings might be." She and her daughter refused to be included in the articles of capitulation, and were conveyed prisoners to the castle of Niort, where she died in 1631, aged seventy-seven.

PARYSATIS, of Darius Nothus, who ascended the throne of Persia in the year 423 B. C, was the mother of Artaxerxes Mnemon and Cyrus. Her partiality for Cyrus led her to commit the greatest injustice and barbarities; and she poisoned Statira the wife of Artaxerxes.

PASTA, JUDITH. born in 1798, at Como, near Milan, of a Jewish family. At the age of fifteen, she was admitted as a pupil to the Conservatorio of Milan, then under the direction of Asioé. Her voice was naturally hard and unequal, and she had great difficulty in satisfying the master of vocalisation. She made her debut in 1815, upon the second rate theatres, such as those of Brescia, Parma, and Leghorn; from that period till 1822, she struggled through the apprenticeship of her profession without any presage of her future celebrity. At that period, during the congress, she obtained a brilliant success at Verona.