The Rival Queens (53 page)

*
“
No sooner [had] he lost sight of her
than he forgot her,” Margot commented drily of her rival from Pau.

*
Reputedly, in response to François’s warning that he would be ostracized for his behavior, Bussy replied: “
I might be more shunned
—for everybody would totally avoid me, if my personal appearance was as ill-conditioned as your own.”

*
The prince of Condé and his German soldiers were also redirected northward and were a great help to François in his Flanders campaign.

*
Of all her correspondence it would be these letters that survived. They are one of the reasons Margot’s prominent role as a political figure in France has been overlooked or discounted by historians. They are the sort of letters that everyone writes at one time or another, usually late at night after too much wine. They make her look ridiculous, and this has been her enduring image. But the affair with Champvallon represents only one small episode in a long life of wielding considerable influence and should be weighted as historical evidence accordingly.

*
It has never been established what grievance Henri III held against the duchess of Nevers that caused him to engineer her downfall. It is interesting to note, however, that this incident occurred at the time of the Lovers’ War, for which the king blamed his sister. It is just possible that, being unable to punish Margot herself, Henri III avenged himself on her friend instead.

*
Whatever the nature of her illness, it was not a pregnancy. With all her love affairs, Marguerite never bore a child.

*
An astonishing coincidence that both Marguerite’s and her mother’s marital bêtes noires should be named Diane.

*
Catherine once described Henry in this way to a foreign diplomat: “
Nobody in the world
leads a more strenuous life than he does. He never has a fixed time for sleeping or eating; he lies down to sleep with his clothes on. He sleeps on the ground. He eats at any time. I brought him up with my sons and he gave me more trouble than all the rest of the boys put together.”

*
Impossible to know what happened with any certainty but it seems far more likely that she suspected Lignerac was untrustworthy (as indeed he proved to be) and was using the apothecary’s son, whom she had met when she was ill, as a spy or to smuggle messages out of the castle. Either that or the boy was delivering medicines and simply found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Margot never had more than one lover at a time throughout her life, and this position, as events later developed, was clearly held by Aubiac.

*
Claude had died more than a decade earlier, in 1575, at the start of Henri III’s reign. By the time of this peace summit with the king of Navarre, Marguerite and Henri III were Catherine’s only surviving children.

*
The Abbey of Saint-Denis, completed in the thirteenth century, was the official burial site for kings of France and their families.

*
Henri III had also arrested and executed a third brother, the cardinal of Guise, soon after the murder of Guise himself.

*
Elizabeth, it will be remembered, was Catherine de’ Medici’s eldest daughter (Marguerite’s sister), who had been married as a teenager to the much older Philip II. Elizabeth died in childbirth twenty-five years earlier, in 1568.

*
A Huguenot chronicler openly antagonistic to Margot reported that upon reading this testimony, Henry teared up and cried, “
Ah! The wretched woman!
She knows well that I have always loved and honored her, and that she cared nothing for me, and that her bad behavior has for a long time been the cause of our separation.” It is very difficult to picture Henry responding with an emotion (other than sarcasm) to anything Marguerite said or did at this point. All one can say about this recitation is that if this was indeed the way the king of Navarre felt about the queen during their marriage, he certainly hid it well.

*
By contrast, Henry’s latest mistress referred to Marie as “
that fat banker’s daughter
,” a sneer eerily reflective of the sort of prejudice Catherine de’ Medici had faced seventy years earlier, when she first came to France as a young bride. And Henry, who did not love Marie and had not wanted to marry her, treated his Italian wife exactly as Henri II had treated Catherine—he used Marie for breeding but otherwise openly humiliated her by flaunting his many mistresses, whom he insisted live in the Louvre with the royal couple. Some things never change.

*
The École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts is now located where Marguerite’s beautiful mansion once stood.

*
Marguerite always believed the assassination to be the work of her old enemy the duke of Épernon. The evidence for this came from one of Margot’s former servants who claimed to have proof of a connection between the murderer and the duke. But the servant was subsequently confined to a lunatic asylum, and it is generally accepted today that Henry’s killer operated on his own.

Copyright © 2015 by Nancy Goldstone

All rights reserved.

Jacket design by Lauren Harms

Jacket art: (left) Catherine de’ Medici (oil on panel), style of Corneille de Lyon (c. 1500–1575) / Polesden Lacey, Great Bookham, Surrey, UK / The McEwan Collection / National Trust Photographic Library /Derrick E. Witty / Bridgeman Images; (right) Marguerite de Valois c. 1561 (oil on panel), François Clouet (c. 1510–1572) / Musée Condé, Chantilly, France / Giraudon/Bridgeman Images

Jacket © 2015 Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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ISBN: 978-0316409674

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