The Rival Queens (42 page)

But more important, against all the odds, she had survived the murderous brutality of her family and her times. She was free of a marriage that she had never wanted, that had been arranged under false pretenses, and that should never have taken place. In this she embodied France itself.

A
LTHOUGH AS PART OF
her compensation Henry had offered his former wife her choice of a number of stately homes in which to reside (the château of Usson was too important a stronghold to remain in
her possession indefinitely), Marguerite at first elected to stay where she was. At least initially, this was likely because after so many death threats and scares the queen wished to ensure that political conditions remained stable and the king’s attitude toward her benign before venturing out of the safety of her fortress. But there was also the difficulty that Henry, worried about the effect she might have on the capital—she was, after all, the last surviving member of her family and could easily have allowed herself to be used as a figurehead by those who sought to oppose his rule—had denied her Paris. And it was clearly to Paris that Margot wished most to return.

So she took her time and planned her strategy well, paving the way for her eventual departure. From her vantage point in the south of France she kept a close watch on both regional affairs and matters of state. When in October 1600, Henry chose Marie de’ Medici as his new wife—not out of respect for Catherine but because he owed the bride’s father, Francesco de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, who had helped support his war effort, a whopping 1,174,000
écus
and this was the only means Henry could find to pay back the debt—Marguerite immediately wrote to Marie, proffering her congratulations as well as her “
good will dedicated
to serving and honoring” her and graciously signing the note “your very humble and obedient servant, sister, and subject.”
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When soon thereafter Marie became pregnant, Margot resolutely put aside what were surely feelings of regret to celebrate the event. “
The happy news
that the Queen is with child will be received nowhere with more joy than by me,” she wrote bravely to Henry in a letter of March 17, 1601.

Having taken pains to place herself on an affectionate footing with her former husband and his new family, Marguerite then sought to further reassure Henry of her good intentions by proving her absolute loyalty to the Crown. This she managed to do by providing the king with information concerning a clandestine revolt against his government formulated by her nephew Charles de Valois, count of Auvergne, who lived nearby. (Charles de Valois was Charles IX’s illegitimate son by Marie Touchet, his Protestant mistress.) Margot wrote to Henry that she knew that the conspirators coveted the stronghold of Usson but that she was determined not to let it fall into their hands. “
The chief care that I have
in preserving this place is that when I quit it I may make a gift thereof to Your Majesty, to whom I had dedicated it,” she apprised him. “This ill-advised boy [Charles de Valois] holds many places in this country, houses which he usurped from the late Queen my mother. But with the aid of God, your Majesty may be assured that he will never set foot here.”

Finally, in 1605, she felt sure enough of herself and her position to make an attempt (despite Henry’s stated restriction) to return to Paris. The previous year Marguerite had started a lawsuit against Charles de Valois, who had been the beneficiary of her mother’s largess when Catherine had seen fit to disinherit her, and Margot used the necessity of following up on this legal action as her excuse for wishing to visit the capital. She wrote to Henry in March, asking for formal permission to travel to the château of Madrid, in the Bois de Boulogne, six miles west of the center of Paris. She was not dissuaded when she received no reply but packed up anyway and left the citadel—“
my ark of refuge
,” Marguerite called it—the first week in July. She had not been outside the immediate vicinity in nearly nineteen years—not since she had first arrived at the château as a prisoner in November 1586. As a final gesture of goodwill, to forestall against any possible objection from Henry to her returning to Paris, she formally left the mighty castle to the Crown. “
From your Majesty I received
it, and to your Majesty I return it,” she said simply.

As her entourage wound its way northward, she met one of
Henry’s ministers on the road near Orléans. He tried to get the queen to change her destination, even offering her the exquisite castle of Chenonceaux, which had been Henri II’s adoring gift to Diane de Poitiers before Catherine had jealously snatched it back after his death, but Marguerite was not to be deterred. She had evidently expected something like this, because she had come armed with a further peace offering: she had information, she advised the minister, regarding a new conspiracy against the king. The official did not believe her—her intelligence “
contained as much falseness
as truth,” he snorted to Henry—but he passed it along anyway. To his great surprise it was discovered to be accurate.

This last expedient proved decisive. Although clearly it was not Henry’s first choice that his former wife take up residence so near to his government, she had made such a show of devotion that he could not reasonably find an excuse to turn her away. Accordingly, he made the best of it. When Marguerite finally arrived at the Bois de Boulogne on August 2, 1605, she found the seigneur de Champvallon, the only one of her previous lovers to survive, and the eleven-year-old duke of Vendôme, Henry’s cherished eldest son by the deceased Gabrielle, waiting for her—the equivalent of a welcome home gift from the king.

S
O BEGAN THE MOST
peaceful and congenial years of Marguerite’s life. The day after her arrival she wrote to Henry to thank him for his thoughtfulness in sending his son to greet her. “
It is easy to see
that he is of royal birth, since he is as beautiful in person as he is in advance of his age in intelligence,” she pronounced. “I was never more enchanted than whilst admiring this marvel of childhood, so full of wisdom and serious conversation.” Such affectionate flattery could obviously not go unrewarded. A few days after receiving her letter, the king himself appeared at her door for an official visit.

If Henry was apprehensive about meeting Marguerite after the passage of so much time, she quickly put him at his ease. She knew, at fifty-two, that she was not the striking beauty she once was. As
so often happens with age, she had put on weight, and her complexion was no longer creamy. “
If I ever were possessed
of the graces you have assigned to me, trouble and vexation render them no longer visible, and have even effaced them from my own recollection,” she sighed in a letter to Brantôme. “So that I view myself in your Memoirs, and say, with old Madame de Rendan, who, not having consulted her glass since her husband’s death, on seeing her own face in the mirror of another lady, exclaimed, ‘Who is this?’ ” Once svelte, Margot’s fuller figure in later life was considerably amplified by the curious, old-fashioned metal plates she insisted on wearing tucked beneath the yards of material that comprised her sweeping skirts, an oddity in the capital. “
There were many doors
through which she could not pass,” sniggered one of Henry’s courtiers, who couldn’t understand why the queen clung to a look so outmoded—but then again, he had never been shot at point-blank range and survived.

Perhaps it was precisely the absence of any flicker of physical attraction between Henry and Margot—or, rather, the relief of no longer needing to pretend to try to create a sexual spark—that freed them from a repetition of their past mistakes and allowed them to approach each other with a civility that by degrees broadened into genuine warmth. As soon as it became clear that there were going to be no more scenes or recriminations, Henry relaxed. He stayed chatting for three hours on that first visit and
even kidded her
, as he took his leave, that she should think about not spending so much money and keeping more reasonable hours, to which she lightly replied that, alas, these traits ran in her family and she was far too old to change them now.

When the king finally departed, it was with a promise to introduce her to the not-quite-four-year-old dauphin, Louis, his eldest son by Marie de’ Medici. True to his word, he sent the child in a carriage the next day; Marguerite spotted the royal insignia and went out to greet him. Louis had evidently been drilled in the etiquette demanded by the occasion, for he stopped short in front of
her, lifted his hat solemnly, and piped up, “
Vous soyez la bien venue
, maman ma fille!” (You are very welcome, mama my girl!) His princely duty accomplished, he ran to give her a hug. Charmed, Margot returned his affection and praised his effort, pronouncing admiringly, “
How handsome you are!
You have certainly the royal air of commanding,” and the next day sent him an exquisite diamond-and-emerald figurine of a boy with a sword sitting on a dolphin, not neglecting to include a jeweled hair ornament for his younger sister, two-year-old Elizabeth.

Her success was complete when, on August 28, less than a month after her arrival, she was received in state at the Louvre by the king and queen of France. Marie de’ Medici, jealous of her position, at first refused to move forward to greet her husband’s first wife until she was publicly reprimanded by Henry, who informed his current spouse that Marguerite was the last of the ruling family of Valois and was therefore entitled to every courtesy by virtue of her rank and blood.

After this Margot was accepted as a member in good standing of the royal dynasty, a sort of favorite family aunt. Henry called her My Sister, and, despite the initial awkwardness, she and Marie de’ Medici became good friends. With no children of her own, Marguerite gravitated toward the royal offspring.
A chronicler related
that he once witnessed the king, the dauphin, and the former queen of Navarre in the bedroom of Marie de’ Medici, Henry and his son sitting on the couch with Marguerite on her knees in front of them, all three of them playing with a little dog.

So friendly did Margot become with her ex-husband and his family that a mere five months after her arrival, her château in the Bois de Boulogne was deemed too remote for the comfortable exchange of the many social visits between the two households. Accordingly, in December she moved into the center of Paris, to the magnificent Hôtel de Sens, the former residence of an archbishop, less than half a mile from the Louvre. She was forced to vacate this address only a few months later, however, when on April 5, 1606, one of her
attendants was murdered just outside her front door as he was in the act of helping his mistress down from her coach.

The victim had been a particular protégé of Marguerite’s; although he had been born into the laboring class (his father was a carpenter), she had ennobled him and brought him with her to Paris from the château of Usson. He was young and good-looking, and for this reason it was assumed that he was the queen’s lover and that the slaying had been a crime of passion, but as the murderer’s family had been implicated in the recent conspiracies against the Crown, the more likely motive was revenge for having passed along damaging information. Marguerite, both frightened and incensed, dashed off a letter to Henry. “
Monseigneur,” she wrote, “an assassination
has just been committed, at the door of my hotel, before my eyes, opposite my coach, by a son of Vermont, who has shot with a pistol one of my gentlemen named Saint-Julien. I beg your Majesty very humbly to order justice to be done… If this crime is not punished, no one will be able to live in security.” It is a measure of just how far Margot had advanced in his opinion that the king had the gunman immediately apprehended, tried, and sentenced to be hanged the following day outside the Hôtel de Sens so that his ex-wife could watch from her window.

But this morbid incident represented an anomaly; on the whole Marguerite enjoyed her time in Paris immensely. The following month, on May 30, 1606, she won a great victory when the lawsuit she had originated challenging her mother’s decision to disinherit her in favor of Charles de Valois was decided in her favor. The verdict, based on her parents’ wedding contract, which very strictly decreed that royal estates could be handed down only to the couple’s legitimate offspring, reversed Catherine’s deathbed instructions. Margot, as the sole surviving member of her family, inherited all her mother’s property. Among other projects, the queen used her newfound wealth to begin work on a splendid villa located directly across from the Louvre. The building was completed in 1608, at
which point Marguerite took up residence.
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So she and Henry, who as king and queen of Navarre had spent as little time as possible in proximity to one another, were now affectionate next-door neighbors.

Once established in her new palace, at the age of fifty-five, Margot fell easily into the role of grande dame. As Henry had never been particularly fond of dressing up, and his wife had limited experience of French customs, Marguerite added some much-needed glamour to the capital. Possessed, finally, of a queenly income (which she managed nonetheless to outspend at an alarming rate), she was able at last to indulge her love of music, culture, and fashion in as opulent a manner as she liked. A young English aristocrat, later ambassador to France, left a description of one of her entertainments: “
I also betook myself
to the Court of Queen Margaret in the palace which bears her name,” he reported. “There I witnessed many ballets and masquerades, during which the queen did me the favor to place me near her chair, not without arousing the astonishment and envy of several of those who were wont to enjoy that honor.”

An eminent Parisian attorney who also attended some of Margot’s parties remarked on what an able hostess she was and on the quality of the philosophical debates, in which she often took part, at her salons. “
After these distinguished gentlemen
finished their discourses, there would follow music of violins and singing, and finally the lutes. All played with a marvelous art, bringing pleasure to the royal mistress and as much to her guests, who felt greatly honored to be of the company,” he recalled. When the new king of Spain, Philip III (Philip II having died in 1598), sent ambassadors to Paris to try to promote better relations, it was Queen Margot who organized the ball in their honor. The meal was both “
magnificent and sumptuous
… which they say cost her four thousand crowns,” the
impressed envoy reported back to Madrid. “Among the strange confections were three silver dishes whereon were displayed a pomegranate tree, an orange tree, and a lemon tree, so cunningly made that not one person present but thought them natural.”