The bride was the daughter of Henry II, the pearl of the crown of France, Marguerite de Valois, whom, in his familiar tenderness for her, King Charles IX always called ma soeur Queen Margot. Marguerite at this period was scarcely twenty, and already she was the object of all the poets’ eulogies, some of whom compared her to Aurora, others to Cytherea.
Alexandre Dumas, LA REINE MARGOT
One of several Italian queens of France, Catherine de Médicis, had a daughter, the Reine Margot, Queen Marguerite de Valois, later Marguerite de Navarre, who was in some ways the founder of the neighborhood. Margot was not one of the better-known queens of France, but now I think she is one of the most fascinating, and for me the presiding genius of the bookish and worldly quarter St.-Germain-des-Prés began to become, once it was liberated from the stern monks of the abbey of St.-Germain-des-Prés. These latter had been here for a thousand years, presiding over peasant festivals like the giant Foire de St.-Germain-des-Prés (a sort of precursor of state fairs and the like, known for pickpockets then as now), settling scholarly disputes, conducting diplomacy, and meting out justice.
Marguerite de Valois lived from 1553 to 1615 (approximately contemporary with Shakespeare); and she lived more or less on this spot; our building stands in what was her gardens, and I have mentioned her palace only a few minutes’ walk from here, on what is now Rue de Seine. Queen Margot in many ways seems to have set the tone of St.-Germain-des-Prés, of music, intellectual life, adultery, and massacres, to say nothing of starting the real estate boom, as one of the first royal persons of importance to live on this side of the river (the great princes had long lived nearly within earshot across the river at the Louvre).
Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century portraits never succeed in conveying to our modern eyes the charms of fabled beauties. Ladies in old portraits are apt to seem to us too stout, somewhat chinless, their eyes a bit bulging, their hair too elaborate. How much this is owing to techniques of portraiture and how much to changing standards of beauty is hard to say. Queen Margot’s beauty is not especially obvious from her picture, and she was the daughter of Catherine de Médicis; probably any daughter of this illustrious queen would automatically be agreed to possess beauty, whatever the case. Her portraits show an intelligent, quizzical lady, slender, with her breasts thrust up with a kind of Wonder Bra effect from under her low bodice, wearing the ruff and wide skirts we associate with Queen Elizabeth of England.
Queen Margot was described by Dumas, who was drawing on older accounts, as “comely,” “the pearl of the crown of France,” with black hair (someone else says chestnut), a voluptuous figure, and very small feet, an attribute he seems to have admired and often awarded to his heroines. (In the 1993 Chereau film made from Dumas’s novel La Reine Margot, she is played by normal-footed Isabelle Adjani.) A few details about her life: She was the child of Catherine de Médicis and the Valois king Henri II, born at the royal château at St.-Germain-en-Laye, christened Marguerite, and nicknamed Margot.
Catherine de Médicis (or de Medici, or d’Medici) was the formidable Italian queen who is said to have brought ice cream, an Italian expertise at poisoning, and various other Renaissance fashions with her to France when she married Henri II, himself son of the great King François I. Catherine de Médicis seems to have been a terrifying mother—manipulative, competitive, and sly, at least where her daughter Margot was concerned, though Margot wrote of her mildly enough, “The Queen my mother [was] a woman endowed with the greatest prudence and foresight of anyone I ever knew.”
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.