Into A Paris Quartier

by Diane Johnson

  Catherine was a dangerous enemy, though she doted on all of her king sons: François II—the boy who was married at the age of fourteen to Mary Queen of Scots but died when he was sixteen; Charles IX, the brother of whom Queen Margot was fondest; and Henri III, who was her bitter foe. A sister, Elisabeth, was married to the king of Spain, Philip II, and another to the Duke of Lorraine. All told, Catherine de Médicis produced ten children with Henri II, despite his constant attendance on his mistress, the “ancient” Diane de Poitiers. Some said that one of the roles of this mistress was just to get Henri in the mood for his marital duties.

  In 1572, when Margot was nineteen, her mother arranged for her to be given in a marriage of state to Henri of Navarre, the young king of the region of Navarre, and a Huguenot, that is, a Protestant. The idea was to create harmony between Catholics and Huguenots after a long period of bloody sectarian wars during the 1500s.

  Some might have thought that nineteen was a bit old for a woman to get married in those days, but Margot hadn’t been wasting her time: she had been what would now be called “sexually active” since she was fifteen or sixteen, and she’d planned on marrying her lover, the Duc de Guise. She was also offered to the king of Portugal, negotiations that broke down, and to Don Carlos, the son of the king of Spain. Was it her damaged reputation that put these princes off?

  In any case, at the wedding the groom and bride were both sulky, and Queen Margot had to be made to nod her assent. History doesn’t record anything about the wedding night. Dumas invents a sort of mariage blanc pact between them: “I do not ask you to love me—but if you will be my ally, I could brave everything,” he has Henry tell Queen Margot, but her memoirs suggest that there was something between them. She talks about times when they have fallen out and have separate beds, implying that sometimes they slept together, and even long after the events she is relating, when she tells about some of her husband’s love affairs, her tone is still one of injured pique.

  Whatever their private rapport, six days after the wedding, Queen Margot’s brother, King Charles IX, and her mother Catherine de Médicis instigated or acceded to a terrible massacre, in which huge numbers of Protestants were slaughtered, in the Louvre, in central Paris, and all around France.

  ST.-BARTHOLOMEW’S DAY

  The King of Navarre remained a prisoner in the Louvre while the pursuit of the Huguenots went on hotter than ever. To the terrible night had succeeded a day of massacre still more horrible.

  Alexandre Dumas, LA REINE MARGOT

  The massacre of St.-Bartholomew’s Day happened as follows: Henri’s Huguenot followers had been invited to Paris for his wedding to Margot. As Dumas tells it, “The spacious apartments of the Louvre were filled with those brave Protestants to whom the marriage of their young leader Henri promised an unexpected return of good fortune” after the protracted religious wars that had occupied France in the sixteenth century, when Martin Luther’s reforms continued to spread with fierce enthusiasm over Europe, entangled with the larger geopolitical ambitions of both Spain and England.

  Henri of Navarre, Queen Margot’s reluctant husband, was ruler of a region which lay in both today’s Spain and France in the Pyrenees. His fiercely Huguenot and militant mother Jeanne d’Albret had recently died, so he had became the nominal head of the Protestant faction. As befits a romantic hero, Henri, at least in Dumas’s novel, had “a keen eye, black hair cut very close, thick eyebrows, and a nose curved like an eagle’s” and he was about the same age as his bride, nineteen.

  Henri and his companions were mistaken about forthcoming good fortune. On the night of August 24, 1572, Catholic partisans of Catherine de Médicis and Charles IX by prearrangement fell upon and began slaughtering Protestants, initiating a period of violence in which, by some estimates, thirty thousand people were killed throughout France. Some estimates are higher.

  Writing about the massacre later, Queen Margot’s account tends to excuse certain aspects of it that seem especially infamous, especially the part played by her brother Charles IX, of whom she was fond, tending to blame it on her mother: Charles, “a prince of great prudence,” and “always paying a particular deference to his mother,” and “being much attached to the Catholic religion,” agreed to do as Catherine urged and dispose of the Protestants. “Immediately every hand was at work; chains were drawn across the streets, the alarm-bells were sounded, and every man repaired to his post, according to the orders he had received.”

  The newly married Margot was not told what was going on. The Huguenots were suspicious of her because she was a Catholic, and the Catholics because she had married a Huguenot. “This being the case, no one spoke a syllable of the matter to me,” she writes later. As the massacre was getting underway, she went in to say good night to her mother, and found her sister in tears. Catherine de Médicis abruptly told Margot to go to bed, but her sister said “for the love of God, do not stir out of this chamber.” This earned the sister a severe rebuke from their mother.

  “My sister replied it was sending me away to be sacrificed; for, if any discovery should be made, I should be the first victim of their revenge. The Queen my mother made answer that, if it pleased God, I should receive no hurt, but it was necessary I should go, to prevent the suspicion that might arise from my staying.”

  Apparently Henri of Navarre observed the custom of other kings by going to bed in a public way surrounded by courtiers. When Margot got to her room, Henri sent for her; and she found him already in bed, with thirty or forty of his men around the bed, all of them talking about the attempted assassination of a prominent Huguenot admiral by—Queen Margot does not go into this—her former lover de Guise. It appears the Protestants didn’t at first realize what was happening outside the Louvre, where the vicious slaughter was beginning.

  Henri was in effect a prisoner, but was given a chance to convert to Catholicism, and gracefully did, thus escaping death on the spot. But he was confined to the Louvre. Eventually, with Queen Margot’s help, he would escape and leave the area, and Queen Margot, still suspected by him for her Catholicism and by her family because she was married, thanks to them, to him, continued to be imprisoned for some time in her quarters at the Louvre.

  HUGUENOTS

  What did God do before He created the world? He created Hell, for the curious.

  JOHN CALVIN

  The sixth arrondissement, right around Rue Bonaparte, was the scene of much of the slaughter. This area was something of a Protestant enclave, “little Geneva.” The first Protestant synod in France had been held in the Rue Visconti in secret in 1555. The abbey of St.-Germain itself, under Abbot Guillaume Briconnet, was one of the first places to begin to entertain reformist ideas in the days of Luther, and gather “humanists” around. The Protestant center and library are still in the place of the former grand mansion of Salomon de Brosse, the architect of the Luxembourg Palace, at 54 Rue des Sts.-Pères, who was buried in a Protestant cemetery on the same street until the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

  The sixteenth century, when Marguerite and Henri were born (1553), had been one of constant religious turmoil, a clash of several civilizations—between Protestants and Catholics, and between popular and aristocratic forces, this turmoil one of the more convincing parallels with our own times. Martin Luther had been born in Germany in 1483, and by the early 1500s his protest had spread throughout France and into Italy, Spain, and the Low Countries. The astonishing speed with which Luther’s ideas and popular appeal caught on is explained by one commentator as because he was the “articulate voice of latent, slumbering nationalism.” That is, there was as much or more of politics as of doctrine behind the rise of Protestantism, in that people everywhere were fed up with the greedy kings that ruled them, and also with the abuses they suffered at the hands of the imperious and expensive popes. It’s always hard to sort out principle and expedience, which often feel the same to those that hold them.

  How Protestantism could so quickly invade and divide France is the qu
estion. Certainly it had French roots—John Calvin had studied in Paris—but the royal family, with its Italian connections, was staunchly Catholic. France was still a collection of fiefdoms and small kingdoms ruled by the Bourbons in Navarre, the Duke of Lorraine, and dozens of other what we might now call warlords. The rulers of France were far from secure in forging a nation, let alone imposing religious solidarity. Yet some estimates say that half the French nobility became Protestant in the 1560s (at one point or another, given that conversions were easily reversible in those days).

  Conversion seems to have especially appealed to the nobility and prosperous bourgeoisie, who had the most to lose to the Church, and therefore to gain from the new religion. Queen Margot, looking back on her girlhood, when Luther’s teachings began to interest people in France, noted that at the time she was seven or eight, the “whole Court was infected with heresy, about the time of the Conference of Poissy. It was with great difficulty that I resisted and preserved myself from a change of religion at that time.”

  Courtiers tried to convert her, and did almost succeed in temporarily converting her brother the Duc d’Anjou, later King Henri III of France. He would snatch her prayer books and burn them, and give her books of Huguenot prayers, which she would give to her nanny, a “steadfast” Catholic. Henri would threaten that she’d get a whipping if she didn’t convert; “Well, get me whipped if you can; I will suffer whipping, and even death, rather than be damned,” she claims to have said.

  A political explanation for the appeal of Protestantism makes more sense than an entirely theological one—it is hard to see that anyone would be fired up by the idea of, say, Election, the unpleasant notion introduced by John Calvin that you went to heaven or were damned according to God’s plan for you, never mind how good or pious you were. This discouraging idea and others in both religions were hardly to be welcomed, but the underlying political realities may have made them convenient when it came to self-justification. On the other hand, noted historians have also pointed out that people must have also been sincere: “Only religion could unite the divergent interests of nobles, bourgeois and peasants over an area as large as France” (R. J. Knecht, The French Religious Wars, 1562–1598).

  Max Weber has pointed out that conveniently for Protestants, a recommended method of dispersing religious doubt and allaying religious anxiety was “intense worldly activity.” Moneymaking was one such worldly activity, and military conquest was another. Both were appealing features of the new beliefs. Art, interestingly enough, seemed to have been a third activity: a number of architects (Salomon de Brosse), painters, sculptors, and craftsmen like the tapestry-maker Gobelin, or the potter Bernard Palissy, who was eventually martyred, were Protestants, drawn to it perhaps because of the more subjective and interior nature of artistic work.

  In fact, it is strangely hard, reading French history, to find out who was and wasn’t a Protestant, even among the more visible figures of the period, as if historical tact forbids the mention of a slightly unmentionable quality, like a disease. Even the Bibliothèque Protestante doesn’t have a list of seventeenth-century followers, maybe because for a long time, it was dangerous to profess this faith and people didn’t keep lists. Yet Catholic-Protestant disputes animated the major political events for centuries.

  Long before the St.-Bartholomew’s Day crisis, Queen Margot’s mother, Catherine de Médicis, regent for her son the young Charles IX, and a prudent Italian strategist, had been worrying about the divisive effects for France of religious quarrels, and had convened a conference at Poissy in September 1561 between Protestants and Catholics in an attempt to resolve doctrinal matters and avert threatened military conflict. The conference was unsuccessful; the talks collapsed on the issues of the Eucharist and the role of the pope, two things that still divide the two religions today. The wars began, and Queen Margot and her little brother, the Duc d’Alençon, were taken for safety to the beautiful château of Amboise (still to be seen; it was here that Mary Stuart and her young husband had watched with glee the hanging of Protestants from the battlements). Many ladies of the court went with Margot and her brother, including one duchess who, Queen Margot later noted, had “the good fortune to hear there of the death of her brute of a husband, killed at the battle of Dreux. The husband I mean was the first she had, named d’Annebaut, who was unworthy to have for a wife so accomplished and charming a woman.”

  The slightly facetious tone is typical of her.

  Many people were hidden in and around the abbey of St.-Germain during the days of the massacre and the pogroms that would follow at intervals throughout the next century. I’ve been told that behind our guest-room wall, there are the vestiges of a little staircase leading to a hiding space where Jews were hidden during the Second World War—perhaps Protestants, too, during some earlier time? Some day I mean to uncover the staircase, but meantime can’t figure out where it could be, and, frankly, it does seem that if people had been hidden in all the hiding spaces now claimed in Paris, there would have been no one sent to his death in the camps, as we know happened; is it a bit like the beds Washington, or Napoleon, slept in?

  But the myth of virtuous humanitarianism masks the violent facts. It is sure that it was near Rue Bonaparte, in the garden of the old prison of the abbey, that 372 people—aristocrats and priests detained in the Revolution—were massacred in 1792. Here, as everywhere in France during the Second World War, Jews were made to wear yellow stars, until the day they vanished. There was the Nazi occupation, the effects of which we see in the touching plaques set everywhere in walls around Paris, to mark the place where someone was killed.

  LE DIVORCE

  When we have grown tired of loving, we are delighted at the other’s unfaithfulness, for that releases us from having to be faithful.

  François de La Rochefoucauld, MAXIM #581

  A word or two more about Queen Margot’s history, leading up to the construction of the Chapel of Praises outside my kitchen window. Blood relations seemed not entirely to protect an individual in the chancy circles of a sixteenth-century court. Though she was the daughter of a king of France (Henri II), the (eventually divorced) wife of a king of France (Henri IV), and the sister of three kings of France (Charles IX, Henri III, and François II), in the years after her marriage, poor Margot was often imprisoned or exiled at the whim of one of her brothers, even of her mother, who had promoted her loveless marriage of state. In 1586, she was imprisoned or exiled by her brother Henri III in the castle of Usson, in Auvergne, there to improve her mind, write her memoirs, compose music, and generally pass the time for eighteen years, although not without a lover, the Marquis de Canillac, who was supposed to be guarding her.

  Apropos of this, it was always said of her that she was “lascivious”—Joseph Boniface de La Mole, Jacques de Harlay, Seigneur de Chanvallon, and Bussy d’Amboise are among those listed by historians among her lovers at this time. (The latter was also the boyfriend of her brother Henri.) It does seem that queens are often said to be lascivious—those who are not held to be pious. It’s hard to know how much is just part of the traditional mythology of queens. It was said of Marie-Antoinette, probably unfairly, and with better foundation of Catherine the Great, to name two. On the whole, it’s the lascivious queens who seem better remembered. Perhaps it is just that queens are appointed to behave representatively, living the way ordinary people would like to, at least when it comes to lasciviousness and vengeful fantasies.

  In the lives of queens, probably, much is legend. Like Puccini’s Turandot, Queen Margot was also said to have had lovers executed who didn’t please her (think too of Elizabeth I and the Earl of Essex), and even, bien sûr, to have preserved their hearts and/or heads, as she promises to do, in Dumas’s novel, with those of her lover La Mole after his execution, and as Mme. de Rénal does with the head of Julien Sorel in Stendhal’s The Red and the Black. Perhaps it was some special French fascination with heads that led them to invent the guillotine?

  Writing was
one consolation during her exile at Usson; and it seems she had literary visitors, among them Michel de Montaigne, whose own writings were perhaps another consolation. Earlier, when she had been confined to her apartments in the Louvre, she reported that she “had found a secret pleasure, from the perusal of good books, to which I have given myself up with a delight I never before experienced. I consider this an obligation I owe to fortune, or, rather to Divine Providence, in order to prepare me, by such efficacious means, to bear up against the misfortunes and calamities that awaited me.”

  Eventually, leading the religious/political faction at his command, her husband Henri would go back to Protestantism, then turn Catholic again when he became King Henri IV, succeeding Margot’s brother Henri III as king of France. That was when he made his famous remark that “Paris vaut bien une messe”—Paris was well worth going to Mass a few times.

  In 1592, negotiations were begun to dissolve his marriage to Margot. Was it because, like Henry VIII of England, he wanted to remarry, because of childlessness, or because they didn’t get along? It would take seven years, until 1599, but eventually, the marriage was annulled, preparing the way for Henri to marry Marie de Médicis, another Italian import, who would be mother of Louis XIII, beginning that string of Louises that ended with the beheading of Louis XVI during the Revolution, or in fact with the end of the reign of Louis XVIII in 1824. Marie would herself rule for her young son after Henri IV was assassinated, another of the female regents in French history.