Page:Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre (Robinson 1886).djvu/113

98 check were removed with the death of Louisa of Savoy. While she had lived, the Catholic party had trusted to her influence on her son and daughter, who passionately loved her; but now the innovating Margaret, unrestrained by her mother, would sit, sole in influence, at the right hand of the King.

For an end had come to the passionate life of Madame. Her genius for intrigue, her scheming avarice, her intense and active nature, lay idle in the grave. She was loth to quit the stage on which she played so principal a part; all her sufferings had not reconciled her to the thought of rest. Constantly ill, never free from gout and colic, she was still resolved to act, to witness. But throughout the summer of 1531, Margaret's letters reveal to us the gradual wasting of the frame which contains this violent spirit. "She is not yet so strong as I desire." "Madame was yesterday so weak, I feared she would have fainted." "She is so variable." Margaret says no more than that in her fear to alarm her brother. But though she refrains from afflicting him more openly, she writes of nothing but her mother's health. Today she is better, she had a good night, she will certainly recover; yet, ah! sometimes she seems so weak! Turning from the fierce history of those times, in which Margaret's gentle name, like a wing-bound dove, is bandied as a missile from one party to another, there is nothing more pathetic than to open the volume of her letters, to read these lines breathing love and anxiety, from which all else is banished, all hint of speculation, all interest in great affairs, to perceive this Lutheran heretic, hushed, self-unconscious, gentle, sitting by the bedside of the Catholic mother she adores, and gazing with anguish into the paling, dying face.