Page:Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre (Robinson 1886).djvu/104

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"And so my heart prepares to love her, but is not sure of being loved." This is the tenor of all contemporary verses rhymed to Margaret, whose bittersweet favours Jacques Pelletier deplored. Marot calls her, in reproachful admiration, "La mal-mariée qui ne veult faire amy," and his poems to her breathe a surprised respect. But though the Queen of Navarre was actually a very virtuous woman, we cannot but own that this dangerous atmosphere of Nérac, this subtle intermingling of mysticism and gallantry did gradually vitiate the purity of her thoughts, and prepared the correspondent of Briçonnet to become the author of the Heptameron.

The wife of Henry d'Albret, the unchilded mother of Jeanne, the absent sister of Francis, had need of such unsubstantial and flimsy affections to stuff an unsatisfied heart. The young King of Navarre, eleven years younger than his wife, was very early tired of conjugal fidelity. A vain, fluent, boastful creature, with the eloquent mediocrity of the Méridional, he was at once proud and jealous of the ascendancy of Margaret; and more than once it needed the interference of Francis to persuade this agile, talkative, brilliant young King, with his facile violence and his easy repentance, to treat his faded wife with due respect.

But if the home of Margaret at Nérac was neither quite happy nor quite free from dangerous tendencies, it was a shelter for many who otherwise must have perished. Not entirely noble in itself, it was yet a