Page:Lives of Fair and Gallant Ladies Volume II.djvu/295

Rh him. In fine, she is a good and a wise Princess, and one that is honoured by the grief and respect she did show to the ashes of her husband,—for some while that is, for eventually she did marry again with M. de Luxembourg. So young as she was, was she to consume away in vain regrets forever?

 

HE Duchesse de Guise, Catherine of Clèves, one of the three daughters of the house of Nevers (all three Princesses that can surely never be enough commended, no less for their beauty than for their virtue and on whom I have writ a separate chapter in another place), hath celebrated and doth celebrate all her days in right worthy fashion the irreparable loss of her noble husband; but indeed what a husband was he! He was truly the nonpareil of the world, and this and no less she did call him in sundry of her letters, the which she writ to some of her most familiar friends and lady companions, which myself also did see after her bereavement, showing them plainly therein by the sad and mournful words she used with what sore regrets her soul was wounded.

Her noble sister-in-law, Madame de Montpensier, of whom I do hope to speak further elsewhere, did also bewail her husband bitterly. Albeit she did lose him when still very young, and beautiful and charming for many perfections both of mind and body, she did never think of marrying again, and this although she had wedded him when a mere child in years, and he might have been her grandfather, so that she had tasted but sparely with