_DEDICATIONS AND PREFACE_,
PREFIXED TO THE FIRST TWO EDITIONS OF THE TALES OF THE QUEEN OF NAVARRE.
_To the most Illustrious, most Humble, and most Excellent Princess_,
Madame Margaret de Bourbon,
Duchess of Nevers, Marchioness of Illes, Countess of Eu, of Dreux,Retelois, Columbiers, and Beaufort, Lady of Aspremont, of Cham-Regnault,of Arches, Rencaurt, Monrond, and La Chapelle-d'Angylon, PeterBoaistuau surnamed Launay, offers most humble salutation and perpetualobedience.(1)
1 This dedicatory preface appeared in the first edition of Queen Margaret's Tales, published by Boaistuau in 1558 under the title of _Histoires des Amans Fortunez_. The Princess addressed was the daughter of Charles, Duke of Vendome; she was wedded in 1538 to Francis of Cleves, Duke of Nevers, and by this marriage became niece to the Queen of Navarre.--Ed.
Madam, That great oracle of God, St. John Chrysostom, deplores withinfinite compassion in some part of his works the disaster and calamityof his century, in which not only was the memory of an infinity ofillustrious persons cut off from among mankind, but, what is more, theirwritings, by which the rich conceptions of their souls and the divineornaments of their minds were to have been consecrated to posterity, didnot survive them. And certainly with most manifest reason did this goodand holy man address such a complaint to the whole Christian Republic,touched as he was with just grief for an infinity of thousands of books,of which some have been lost and buried in eternal forgetfulness bythe negligence of men, others dispersed and destroyed by the cruelincursions of war, others rotted and spoiled as much by the rigourof time as by carelessness to collect and preserve them; whereofthe ancient Histories and Annals furnish a sufficient example in thememorable library of that great King of Egypt, Ptolemy Phila-delphus,which had been formed with the sweat and blood of so many notablephilosophers, and maintained, ordered, and preserved by the liberalityof that great monarch. And yet in less than a day, by the monstrous andabominable cruelty of the soldiers of Caesar, when the latter followedPompey to Alexandria, it was burned and reduced to ashes. Zonarius,the ecclesiastical historian, writes that the same happened atConstantinople in the time of Zeno, when a superb and magnificentpalace, adorned with all sorts of manuscript books, was burnt, to theeternal regret and insupportable detriment of all those who made aprofession of letters. And without amusing ourselves too curiouslyin recounting the destruction among the ancients, we have in our timeexperienced a similar loss--of which the memory is so recent that thewounds thereof still bleed in all parts of Europe--namely, when theTurks besieged Buda, the capital of Hungary, where the most celebratedlibrary of the good King Matthias was pillaged, dispersed, anddestroyed; a library which, without sparing any expense, he had enrichedwith all the rarest and most excellent books, Greek, Latin, Hebrew,and Arabic, that he had been able to collect in all the most famousprovinces of the earth.
Again, he who would particularise and closely examine things will findthat Theophrastes, as he himself declares, wrote and composed threehundred volumes, Chrysippus sixty, Empedocles fifty, Servus Sulpiciustwo hundred on civil law, Gallienus one hundred and thirty on the artof medicine, and Origenes six thousand, all of which St. Jerome attestshaving read; and yet, of so many admirable and excellent authors, therenow remain to us only some little fragments, so debased and vitiated inseveral places, that they seem abortive, and as if they had been tornfrom their author's hands by force.
On account of which, my Lady, since the occasion has offered, I havebeen minded to present all these examples, with the object of exhortingall those who treasure books and keep them sequestered in theirsanctuaries and cabinets, to henceforth publish them and bring them tolight, not only so that they may not keep back and bury the glory oftheir ancestors, but also that they may not deprive their descendantsof the profit and pleasure which they might derive from the labour ofothers.
In regard to myself, I will set forth more amply in the notice which Iwill give to the reader the motive that induced me to put my hand tothe work of the present author, who has no need of trumpet and heraldto exalt and magnify her(1) greatness, inasmuch as there is no humaneloquence that could portray her more forcibly than she has portrayedherself by the celestial strokes of her own brush; I mean by her otherwritings, in which she has so well expressed the sincerity of herdoctrines, the vivacity of her faith, and the uprightness of her morals,that the most learned men who reigned in her time were not ashamedto call her a prodigy and miracle of nature. And albeit that Heaven,jealous of our welfare, has snatched her from this mortal habitation,yet her virtues rendered her so admirable and so engraved her in thememory of every one, that the injury and lapse of time cannot effaceher from it; for we shall ceaselessly mourn and lament for her, likeAntimachus the Greek poet wept for Lysidichea, his wife, with sad versesand delicate elegies which describe and reveal, her virtues and merits.
1 In the French text Boaistuau invariably refers to the author as a personage of the masculine sex, with the evident object of concealing the real authorship of the work. Feminine pronouns have, however, been substituted in the translation, as it is Queen Margaret who is referred to. --Ed.
Therefore, my Lady, as this work is about to be exposed to the doubtfuljudgment of so many thousands of men, may it please you to take it underyour protection and into your safe keeping; for, whereas you are thenatural and legitimate heiress of all the excellencies, ornaments, andvirtues which enriched the author while she adorned by her presence thesurprise of the earth, and which now by some marvellous ray of divinitylive and display themselves in you, it is not possible that you shouldbe defrauded of the fruit of the labour which justly belongs to you, andfor which the whole universe will be indebted to you now that it comesforth into the light under the resplendent shelter of your divine andheroic virtues.
May it therefore please you, my Lady, to graciously accept of thislittle offering, as an eternal proof of my obedience and most humbledevotion to your greatness, pending a more important sacrifice which Iprepare for the future.
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