The Rival Queens (34 page)

There were always messengers and letters going back and forth from Nérac to Paris, and news of Fosseuse’s illegitimate pregnancy inevitably made its way to the royal court. Shrewdly judging that this might be a good time to renew her request for a visit, Catherine sent her daughter not only a heartfelt letter in which she expressed her strong desire to see her again after so long an absence but also
the money necessary to underwrite the sojourn. “
The King and the Queen both wrote
to me,” Marguerite reported. “I received three letters, in quick succession; and that I might have no pretence for staying, I had the sum of fifteen hundred crowns paid me to defray the expenses of my journey. The Queen my mother wrote that she would give me meeting in Saintonge, and that, if the King my husband would accompany me so far, she would treat with him there, and give him every satisfaction with respect to the King. But the King and she were desirous to have him at their Court, as he had been before with my brother.” Catherine and Henri had learned from their recent successful accommodation with François that even a small amount of ready money could be a powerful incentive to return to court. “
The length of time I had been
absent in Gascony, and the unkind usage I received on account of Fosseuse, contributed to induce me to listen to the proposal made me,” Margot admitted.

The money turned out to be a trap that Marguerite could not resist. She saw only escape: escape from a provincial court that no longer suited her; escape from a husband who doted on a troublesome, absurdly puffed-up handmaiden; escape from the dour, unpleasant Huguenots, with their everlasting sermons and complaints. Her brother François was in England, where there were rumors that he was to be wed to Elizabeth I. He had recovered from his initial defeat; his army had relieved the siege of Cambrai and taken the fortress and the immediate surroundings; he was about to be named duke of Brabant, a province some 150 miles to the northeast, which included the city of Brussels, an important position. She wanted to help him, and she could do that much better from Paris than from Nérac.

It wasn’t that she had forgotten what Henri III and his court were like—far from it. But she desperately needed a change, and this was the only avenue open to her. “
I had too long experience of
what was to be expected at their Court to hope much from all the fine promises that were made to me,” she noted, referring to her mother and Henri III. “I had resolved, however, to avail myself of the opportunity
of an absence of a few months, thinking it might prove the means of setting matters to rights. Besides which,” the queen of Navarre continued, “I thought that, as I should take Fosseuse with me, it was possible that the King’s passion for her might cool when she was no longer in his sight, or he might attach himself to some other that was less inclined to do me mischief.”

She nonetheless dutifully tried to get Henry to come with her, but he would only escort her part of the way—the king of Navarre knew better than to put himself within range of the talons of the royal court. Also, he was not nearly as unhappy as his wife. In fact, the only thing that really upset him about her leaving was that she was taking his mistress with her. “
It was with some difficulty
that the King my husband would consent to a removal, so unwilling was he to leave his Fosseuse,” Marguerite observed drily. “He paid more attention to me, in hopes that I should refuse to set out on this journey to France; but as I had given my word in my letters to the King and the Queen my mother that I would go, and as I had even received money for the purpose, I could not do otherwise.”

Because she could pay her own way, Henry was unable to stop her, and she left Nérac at the end of January 1582, to make the slow journey north to the capital. Margot had always loved Paris. She craved the chic ambience of its exclusive salons; she wanted to throw off her old clothes and buy all new luxurious frocks, hear the latest music, read the fashionable poets, lead the dancing at extravagant costume fetes, and in so doing forget what had passed at Nérac. It was this that drove her forward—her desire to once again shine at court, to see her old friends and renew her place in haute society. For this she was willing to risk subjecting herself to her older brother’s whims and temper. She told herself that it could not be worse than what she had endured from her husband and his mistress.

And she had one other compelling motive for abandoning her husband’s southern domains to take her chances at the royal court of France.

She was in love.

H
IS NAME WAS
J
ACQUES DE
Harlay, seigneur de Champvallon. Like Bussy before him, he was in service to her brother François. Margot had probably been introduced to him as early as the summit at La Fère, but Bussy had still been alive then, and it wasn’t until the duke of Anjou and his suite appeared in Gascony in the fall of 1580 to mediate in the aftermath of the Lovers’ War that the flirtation intensified. Champvallon’s date of birth is unknown, but he seems to have been about Marguerite’s age, or perhaps even a little younger, as he was unmarried when he met her and held the position of
grand écuyer,
or chief squire, in François’s household.

It’s easy to see the source of the attraction. The seigneur de Champvallon was universally acknowledged to be one of the finest specimens of masculinity in France. Certainly Marguerite thought so. She
nicknamed him Narcissus
, and in the nineteen surviving love letters she wrote to him over a period of several years, the word
beautiful
is ubiquitous. “
I kiss a million times
those beautiful eyes, that beautiful hair, my dear and sweet fetters; I kiss a million times that beautiful mouth,” she penned. Her lover was a “
beautiful angel, a beautiful miracle
of nature,” she continued adoringly in another.
The queen of Navarre’s infatuation with her younger brother’s servant had been remarked upon during the final months of François’s stay in Gascony; the same Huguenot courtier who had accused her of improper relations with the vicomte de Turenne asserted that she had been caught conspicuously dallying with Champvallon one day while her husband was away from the castle. While this particular report may have been overstated or even spurious—the courtier was openly antagonistic to Marguerite and would later write a scathing satire of the queen of Navarre and her court—there is no doubt at all that Margot fell wholly, passionately, almost absurdly in love with this man.
^*

Champvallon had of course departed Gascony with François and the rest of the duke of Anjou’s entourage in April of 1581, leaving Margot alone to deal with the public humiliation imposed on her by Fosseuse’s pregnancy. Small wonder, then, that the queen of Navarre clung to the memory of her affair with this highly desirable chevalier as proof that she, too, was immoderately loved. By the time she left Nérac for Paris she was nearly twenty-nine years old, a tricky age for any woman. She had been physically rejected by her husband in favor of a younger paramour—actually a series of younger paramours—and longed to feel that she was still the ravishing beauty she had been a decade earlier. The affair with Champvallon fulfilled that need.

The object of her affections was aware that he aspired above his rank by pursuing her and had been humbly grateful for her favors. Champvallon was a far less complicated person than his royal mistress. To him love was an exceedingly pleasant way to while away what might otherwise have been the somewhat tedious hours spent
at a provincial court. The queen of Navarre made for an appropriately impressive conquest, and, as these things go, Champvallon seems to have been genuinely smitten with her in the beginning.

But Margot’s definition of love was far more comprehensive than simple physical attraction. She wanted to lose herself completely—intellectually and spiritually as well as sensually—in intimacy. With so large an emotional void to fill, she sought a love that was purer, deeper, and more profound than any that had come before. She demanded nothing less than a melding of two bodies, two minds, two souls into one. Champvallon did not perhaps fully appreciate her philosophy on this subject when he began the affair.

A
T THE COMMENCEMENT OF
her journey northward, however, it was her husband’s behavior, not her lover’s, that occupied Marguerite. She understood that Catherine and Henri III wanted both the queen
and
king of Navarre to appear at court and that it was her job to get Henry there. That was another reason she took Fosseuse with her; she figured Henry was much more likely to tag along if his mistress were included on the sojourn, and she was right. She got him as far as La Mothe Saint Héray, a small village about halfway between La Rochelle and Poitiers, where Catherine had arranged to meet them at the end of March 1582. The prince of Condé and a large party of Huguenots were present as well, and the company spent three days haggling over the usual Protestant grievances against the Crown. Catherine tried to conciliate Henry in an effort to coax him on to Paris, but the king of Navarre, having experience of his mother-in-law’s promises, chose not to take the bait. He surprised everyone by suddenly decamping for the safety of his own territory of Béarn, even though he had promised Marguerite that he would escort her at least as far as Fontainebleau, where Henri III had traveled to receive his sister and brother-in-law. His abrupt departure compromised Margot’s position with the king of France before she had even set foot at the royal court. “
I beg you very humbly, think what credit
they [Catherine and Henri] can place in any of my
words which concern you, for they can only believe either that I am very ill informed or that I wish to deceive them,” she wrote to her husband. “This is not the way to give me means to help your affairs, a thing which will prejudice you more than myself.”

Despite her misgivings, to Marguerite’s great relief, neither her mother nor her older brother appeared to hold her failure to deliver Henry against her; if anything, they showed her an uncommon degree of respect and sympathy. This was part of an overall strategy on the part of the Crown to try to control François, who despite sustained opposition from his mother and older brother was still committed to intervening militarily in Flanders. Henri and Catherine were well aware that the queen of Navarre exerted considerable influence over her younger brother, and they were determined to transfer Margot’s primary allegiance away from him and toward the king. As they had with François, this encouragement took the form of outright bribery. Knowing her daughter to be hopelessly in debt—Margot had inherited the family love of splendor and continually outspent her resources, a state of affairs that had caused a bitter, long-running squabble with the poor courtier assigned to manage her household accounts—Catherine bestowed upon the queen of Navarre the lucrative duchy of Valois, which had formerly comprised a significant portion of the queen mother’s own estate. For his part, Henri III went through the motions of receiving his sister with honor and affection, although the ambassador from England, observing the family reunion at Fontainebleau, did report back to London that the king’s attachment to his sister seemed a little forced. Notwithstanding this prescient piece of candor, the court then moved on to the capital, arriving on May 28. There, flush with the proceeds of her new duchy, Marguerite immediately purchased a grand house and settled down to renew her life in Paris.

For all the outward appearance of harmony, however, Margot was acutely aware that she was going to need all her diplomatic skills to navigate a path through the many hostile and often conflicting
interests at court. The immediate problem was to reconcile her position as queen of Navarre—for despite Henry’s treatment of her, she still wished to maintain the illusion of a successful marriage—with her family’s desire for her husband to appear at court. Her early letters to Henry reflect her struggle to be true to both sides. She writes in the manner of a helpmeet, forwarding news and her own discerning observations of the atmosphere surrounding Henri III. The king “
professed much in fine language
,” she reported circumspectly. “Very different is the truth to what we were told of Monsieur de Maine [younger brother of the duke of Guise]. He has grown so strangely fat that he is deformed. Monsieur de Guise is very thin and aged. They are little followed, and often give parties for tennis, games of ball, and pall-mall to draw the nobility to them, but those who go twice may be sure of a reprimand [from Henri III’s
mignons,
still very much in power], which is proof enough of a jealousy between them and the Dukes.” From this she segued effortlessly to her role as conciliator between husband and family. “
If you were here you would be
the man on whom both sides depend,” she cajoled. “You would gain the servants you have lost, owing to the length of these troubles, and would acquire more of them in a week than you would all your life time in Gascony…
I beg you very humbly to receive this
as from the person who loves you most, and who most desires your good fortune, as indeed I trust experience will teach you,” she concluded with obvious sincerity.

But no matter how hard she tried to demonstrate her goodwill or be of genuine service to her husband, something always got in the way of their reconciliation, and her stay in Paris was no exception. The story of Henry’s long-running affair with Fosseuse, culminating in the birth of a child, was exactly the sort of naughty tittle-tattle Henri III’s
mignons
loved best. The gossip had preceded Marguerite to court, where even though the baby had died the mere fact of the infant’s brief existence was enough to violate Catherine’s strict rules of propriety. The queen mother, vexed that her daughter would continue to allow someone who had engaged in such publicly
scandalous behavior to remain part of her entourage, took it upon herself to exile Fosseuse from court and send her back to her family in disgrace. Marguerite, again seeking to appease both sides, acquiesced to her mother’s wishes but, cognizant of her husband’s intransigence when it came to Fosseuse, sought to lessen the blow by arranging for the girl to wed an important nobleman and so rescue her reputation, an act that under the circumstances represented a kindness of no little magnitude.

Not that it mattered to Henry, who was so furious when he found out that he immediately dispatched a messenger bearing an irate letter to his wife berating her for dismissing his girlfriend and demanding that Fosseuse be reinstated. But Marguerite was no longer in Nérac, where her husband made the rules. “
You say that there will be
nothing for me to be ashamed of in pleasing you,” she wrote back sharply in reply, clearly striving, despite her anger and humiliation, for a tone of rationality. “I believe it also, judging you to be so reasonable that you will not command me to do anything which may be unworthy of a person of my quality; nor which affects my honor, in which you have too much interest. And, if you demand that I shall keep near my person a girl whom you, in the opinion of every one, have made a mother, you will find that that would be to put me to shame, both by reason of the insult to which you subject me, and on account of the reputation that I should thereby acquire. You write me that, in order to close the mouths of the King, the Queens, and those who speak to me about it, I should tell them that you love her, and that, for this reason, I love her too,” she continued. “This reason would be a good one, if I were speaking of one of your servants, whether male or female, but of your mistress!… I have suffered what, I will not say a princess, but a simple demoiselle does not suffer, having succoured her [Fosseuse], concealed her fault, and always kept her near my person. If you do not call that being desirous of pleasing you, I know not what you can expect,” she finished in exasperation.

Margot would undoubtedly have preferred to keep her husband’s
stinging reprimand to herself, but the messenger bearing Henry’s letter was indiscreet, and within days the whole court knew of the quarrel between the king and queen of Navarre over the dismissal of Fosseuse. Catherine, in particular, was outraged. The problems caused by philandering husbands was a topic dear to her heart, and she was only too eager to dispense advice to her son-in-law. She dashed off her own scathing letter to Henry, interfering in Margot’s favor, one of the very few times she took her daughter’s side on any issue.
“My Son,” she wrote. “I was never so astonished
as to hear the language which Frontenac has repeated to many people as the message which he had carried, by your commandment, to your wife. It is something which I would not have believed if, when I asked him, he had not told me himself that it was true… You are not the first young husband who hasn’t been very wise in affairs of this sort, but I am sure that you are the first and the only one who, after such a thing had happened, could use such language to his wife… She is the sister of your King, who helps you more than you think… That’s not the way to treat women of such a house as hers; to scold them publicly at the wish of a common courtesan—for all the world, not only all France, knows about the child she has borne—and to send her such a message by a little gentleman showing his impudence by accepting such a commandment from his master!” Catherine sputtered. “I advised her to do it and on the spot I sent away that pretty little animal… I am sending you the Sieur de Curton, who will tell you the rest of what I have to say to you.”