Louise and Marguerite's humble personae
In other, more personal situations, however, Louise and Marguerite at times presented as small, frightened, ill, and helpless. Cardinal Louis of Aragon’s remarks on Louise’s robust health notwithstanding, as of 1519 Louise began to suffer from gout, an organic malady aggravated by stress, and other illnesses, and Marguerite, too, reports frequent sickness.[461]
In the three extant letters from Louise to Marguerite during her trip to Spain to negotiate the king’s release, the regent discards her forceful and prudent
maternal persona in favor of an anxious one.
In the first letter, she worriedly hopes that God will continue to work through Marguerite, allowing the accomplishment of their family goal, the return of Franpois to the kingdom. She prays for Marguerite’s good health and begs her to send news of her well-being often.[462] In the second, Louise again worries about divine favor.[463] She also doubts that things are progressing as well for her children as her informants suggest, telling Marguerite that she has sent “another gentleman” to Spain in order to receive the “veryte nouvelle,” the real truth, about their health. (Louise had reason to worry that she was not being told the whole story: her attachment to her family was perceived as so intense that her family sometimes shielded her from the truth.)[464] In the third letter she recounts the signing of the Treaty of Moore with the English, one of her greatest foreign policy coups, bringing English support against Charles V.[465] Things have turned for the better, the letter affirms. Peace between France and England has been re-established. But Louise could not have endured the situation had it not been for Marguerite’s caring for Franpois in Spain. Mother and daughter have suffered greatly, Louise admits, but the deliverance of Franpois will compensate for that.Louise’s small persona is also prominent in a letter of October 1525 to the king where she worries that she will be unable to keep the Parlement of Paris in line during his absence. She assures him that his affairs are order. Still, she pleads, his presence in France is absolutely necessary. In a letter of November 1525 to Jean de Brinon, her president du conseil throughout Franpois’ captivity, Louise diminishes her and Marguerite’s political activity, describing her daughter’s trip to Spain as if it were the visit of one sibling to another’s sickbed to “see, visit and console the king her brother” rather than a high-stakes diplomatic trip.[466]
These letters show Louise defining herself as devoted mother devoid of personal political ambition and freely acknowledging that that the family’s prosperity depended on Marguerite as much as herself. She is utterly dependent on God and her children’s well-being for her own, and the accomplishment of the family’s goals is her only desire. Recent social theoretical work emphasizes the
Marguerite of Navarre, Louise of Savoy and Intimacy | 137 inextricability of political and libidinal attachments, and within the context of the Trinity, whose political and familial relationships quite literally overlapped, the family created and maintained political attachments, also quite literally, through avowals of love, and they formulated and diffused their political anxieties through avowals of humble dependence.[467]
As for Marguerite, descriptions of herself and Louise as sick and vulnerable characterize her exchange with Briponnet. From Paris, while the Imperial army sacked Ardres and then laid siege to Mezieres, she asks Briponnet to look upon the blindest of all the people, that is, Marguerite, with pity, and through writings, prayers and remembering help pull her from the darkness.[468] From Lyon in 1522 she apologizes for bothering him but insists that she is constrained by necessity to “importune” him “opportunistically” (“importuner opportuneement”) for “alms:” the court lacked (spiritual) bread.[469] At a particularly difficult period in October 1523 as the royal army prepared to move into Italy and Queen Claude lay ill (she would die the next year), Marguerite assured Briponnet that his charity was needed nowhere more than in Blois, asking for comfort for herself, an “ungrateful mirror” in which Jesus sees not his image but only filth (“ordure), a mother (Louise) burdened with cares, and a sick queen.[470] In a letter of that same month, Marguerite begs for more crumbs. After requesting pity, she signs herself “vostre sterile mere.”[471]
But the events of 1524 and 1525—personal losses and the long wait for news about the royal army in Italy—motivate Marguerite’s most pitiful representations of herself and her mother.
Shortly after 9 March 1525 Marguerite writes from Blois of Louise’s frightening illness: a terrible fever accompanied by extreme pain in her side, head, stomach and spleen. Fortunately the fever broke, and Louise survived. But if not for Louise’s tranquility before God, Marguerite could not have borne the “multitude and vehemence” of her mother’s sufferings.[472] She writes to Marechal Anne de Montmorency of the same illness, that never before had she seen her mother “so quickly enfeebled.”[473] Shortly after 27 March, she describes her mother’s body completely wracked with new and diverse tormentsin a letter to Bri9onnet.[474] On 4 May Marguerite informs Briςonnet of the death of her beloved aunt, Philiberte, expressing the sorrow of the “compagnie.” Of herself she writes that her imperfect feebleness cannot bear the “indiscretion” of love (that is, its tendency to make itself felt).[475] On 26 July Marguerite informs Briςonnet of Queen Claude’s death. She struggles in the opening paragraphs of the letter with the notion that to make hard hearts feel a single spark of incomprehensible divine charity God became man and suffered. And yet, Marguerite cannot understand God’s spiritual language any more, indeed, she understands it even less than unreasoning beasts.[476] Louise took the news so hard, she continues, that she began to hemorrhage as if with a terrible fever to the extent that she would not have survived had it not stopped.
The disasters continued. The king’s daughter Charlotte fell ill in August. In early September Marguerite writes from Blois that she has told neither her mother nor her brother of the child’s malady, fearing that Louise will be unable to stand the news and that Francois I already has too much on his mind.[477] On 18 November 1524 Marguerite writes to Briςonnet of Charlotte’s death, which Louise, knowing nothing of the illness, mourned terribly, with one tear following the other, but all the while giving Marguerite the comfort that she, Marguerite, owed Louise.[478] The final blow arrived on 1 March, when Marguerite and Louise learned of the defeat of the French army and the capture of Francois I.
In response to a letter from her recentlycaptured brother, Marguerite writes of her and Louise’s initial despair and compares news of his survival to the appearance of the Holy Spirit after the Passion. The information had filled Louise with such strength that she had redoubled her efforts in the kingdom on his behalf.[479] In a letter to Sigismund von Hohenlohe, reformer and dean of the Cathedral Chapter of Strasbourg, Marguerite describes herself and Louise as “mother and daughter, poor widows, not without affliction.”[480] In a letter to the king just before her departure for Spain, she assures him that her fear will not keep her from him. She is so used to the fear of death, prison, and various evils that she associates
Marguerite of Navarre, Louise of Savoy and Intimacy | 139 these with liberty, life, health, glory and honor. The fears allow her to participate in his fortune.[481]
But Marguerite’s fearful persona is nowhere so evident as in the single extant letter from her to her mother, a verse letter composed in 1530 in celebration of the return home of Francois’s two sons, whose release had been procured by Louise in what has come to be known as the Ladies’ Peace, signed on 3 August of that year.[482] Although the princes’ return was a momentous event, all the more so because they arrived with the king’s new bride, the emperor’s sister Eleanor of Austria, Marguerite could not accompany her brother and mother to Bayonne, where the group from Spain landed, her pregnancy forcing her to remain at Blois. She imagines the celebrating king, Louise, and new queen, a poignant reminder of the family trinity, and entreats them to remember her and how she longs to remain a small point on that perfect triangle.[483]