Reine Margot: Hôtel de Sens, rue du Figuier
REINE MARGOT: LEGENDS AND LIES
LOCATION: 1, rue du Figuier, Bibliothèque Forney, Hôtel de Sens
HOURS: Tues, Fri, Sat 1–7:30; Weds, Thurs 10–7:30
MÉTRO: Pont Marie; Sully-Morland
Centuries of chroniclers bearing grudges have left us an ugly portrait of Marguerite de Valois—La Belle Reine Margot—youngest sister of the four Valois sons of Catherine de Medici and at eighteen the first wife of Henri IV (see here). According to the mythmakers, Marguerite as girl and woman amounted to little more than a lying whore, fat, nymphomaniacal, homicidal (like her mother). She deserved every humiliation her families dealt her, the Catholics of the House of Valois and the Protestant House of Bourbon which she entered by marriage. The “Margot” of these so-called historians is made in the image of her treacherous, malevolent mother, gifted in the “arts” of poisoning.
These days, however, historians examining new and old evidence are proving conclusively that Marguerite de Valois—Reine Margot—and Catherine de Medici were not a case of like mother like daughter.1 They depict a far more complex and sympathetic princess than the depraved gargoyle of earlier storytellers.
The cruelty inflicted on Margot (1553–1615) began in the nursery of the Louvre palace where her own mother and brothers colluded on how they could best use her to eliminate their enemies and strengthen their own power.
Black-haired, dark-eyed Marguerite had been the favorite of her father, Henri II. Extremely pretty and bright, she was ignored or controlled by her ruthless mother, whose heart belonged to her son Henri. Catherine’s maternal agenda was to groom her three daughters for power marriages with other royal European thrones. As a teenager Marguerite was severely beaten by her brother King Charles IX and Queen Catherine for flirting with the Duke of Guise and maybe ruining her chances to snare a richer and more prestigious husband than the duke.
The princess’s refuge was books. She read in the sanctuary of her grandfather King François I’s royal library, becoming fluent in Italian, Spanish, and the only member of the royal family who could read, write, and converse in Latin. She was also admired as a graceful dancer, gifted lutenist, and poet. She studied history, art, philosophy, and Catholic theology though pious Catholic hatred ran in her Medici mother’s milk.
At court, her interests aroused suspicion. Defenseless, she became the sacrificial victim of her mother and brothers’ marriage politics. They arranged to marry the “belle of the Valois court” to Henri, the Bourbon son of the Protestant kingdom of Navarre in France’s southwest. This union, they thought, would reconcile the two opposing religious tribes fighting the civil Wars of Religion: by 1572, the year of the marriage, papist Catholics and heretic Protestants had soaked France in the blood of innocents and bankrupted the State. Neither religion would submit to making peace. The marriage, according to Catherine and her sons, would force a peace. Margot, their pawn, wept, begging to be spared a life sentence of a loveless marriage. Witnesses of the wedding, held in front of, not inside the Cathedral of Notre-Dame (Protestant Henri was not fit to enter this heart of Catholic France), noticed the misery of the bride’s expression.
There was dutiful sex but no chemistry between Henri of Navarre and Marguerite de Valois. From the start, the two teenagers mostly maintained an emotional distance, preferring the company of their lovers. The accomplished, cultured Marguerite was said to intimidate the crude garlicky military man of the south. Neither one would consider converting to the faith of the other though Henri IV eventually became adroit at converting from Protestant to Catholic to Protestant to Catholic.
Five days after the grim wedding and the attendant nights of dancing and partying, fireworks accompanying the lovemaking and drunkenness throughout the Louvre and its courtyards, the Catholic Catherine and her fanatical advisers and sons orchestrated the slaughter of those same guests and their co-religionists—the loathsome heretics spawned by Martin Luther. That orgy of murder became known as the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of an estimated five thousand to fifteen thousand Protestants. For more than a century this episode of royal butchery lost France the respect of governments in England, Spain, the Netherlands, and Germany.
Throughout those days and nights of late August 1572, the Protestant bridegroom’s life was in danger. A prize target of the crusading Catholics, with the Catholic Margot’s help, he hid all over the Louvre, under his bed, in the corridors and closets of the bedchambers of both his mistress and his Paris bride, the new Queen of Navarre. Protestant Henri and his Catholic wife realized how close to death the bridegroom—and perhaps his new wife—might be; he in turn wondered if she had betrayed him, if she would lead the ax-wielding soldiers to her bedchamber. She knew that had she chosen to betray him, to lead the Catholic courtiers to the closet where she’d hidden him, she could have escaped the hated marriage into which she had been sold.
Instead Margot saved Henri’s life. She also saved the lives of a number of his Huguenot friends. During the next four years when her husband was held a virtual prisoner in the Louvre, she saved him again despite the humiliation of watching Henri’s nightly visitations to his mistresses and hearing the gossip that entertained the court.
Finally, when he escaped the Louvre, pretending to be off to the hunt, Margot covered for him. Loyalty to her husband and to their marriage vows mattered to her. The disappointing sexual relationship they did not have was far less important than the integrity of her soul. (And she knew the consolations of her lover.) Perhaps her steadfast loyalty evolved in reaction to her mother and brothers’ history of treachery, their betrayals of one another and of their friends. The corrupt Valois brothers and their mother changed sides as fast and as strategically as they changed horses and dogs during the royal hunts at Fontainebleau, Boulogne, and Vincennes. Betrayal was the twisted heart of Valois politics, spying and lying its daily liturgy. Refusing their politics, Marguerite acted as the rebel Queen of Navarre, standing by her man, risking her life.
After Henri got away, Marguerite remained confined to the Louvre. Her brothers and mother had always suspected she had a soul of her own. All those books! The salon discussions, the poets she preferred to all-night dancing (though she loved to dance). She was closely watched, her every attempt to organize a getaway and head south to Navarre foiled.
Six years after her wedding, she was permitted to travel south and reunite with her husband. Henri wanted an heir, she wanted her freedom; possibly she also hoped to find a loving, grateful husband in Gascony. At Nerac they set up their ecumenical court, with Protestants and Catholics getting on together. (Both king and queen liked to party.) Scholars and poets visited the festive court of Navarre, including Montaigne who in his youth as a courtier in the Louvre (see here) had known Margot. He dedicated the first edition of his Essays to her, describing her as resembling “one of those divine, supernatural and extraordinary beauties that one sometimes sees shining like stars through the veils of an earthly body.” Shakespeare heard about the spirited court of Navarre, which inspired his first play Love’s Labour Lost, set in the “kingdom of Navarre.”
At times Henri and Margot got along like old friends. But the massacre on the night of their marriage had damaged Henri’s trust in his Valois bride for life. She had saved his life; but ever since 1572, her brothers had strategized how to eliminate him. The wedding night murders, more than his dalliances (or halitosis) are said now to have ruined their chances of a happy marriage from day (night) one.
Like her husband, she was happiest when she was in love. She’d had and continued to have several passionate affairs; her courtier lovers usually died or were killed in the name of religion. She was “a pioneer of that sex equality,” to quote Charlotte Haldane, that women in her day would not dare to claim publicly.
Her brothers in Paris condemned her disgraceful sensuality. Long before gender studies and the dogmatism of evolutionary psychology, men of power enjoyed their infidelities and promiscuous lives without censure. Then, as now, the “evo-psycho set”—the phrase is Natalie Angier’s—believed, on the basis of a few self-serving surveys, that men are innately more sexual than women, can’t help acting on their desires. Women, on the other hand, want (or should want) a provider, children, monogamy. The discrepancy in male-female sexuality, according to the evolutionary psychologists, is as certain as the difference in male-female anatomy. By their standards, Margot was a common whore. Her whoring brother King Henri III called her out publicly in court during one of her return visits to Paris and eventually exiled her to a remote mountainside château, Usson, for eighteen years.
Instead of going mad, she created a library and salon for intellectuals, philosophers, writers, and poets. Her library held titles by Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ronsard, du Bellay. Montaigne’s niece was her librarian. She began to write her memoirs, which she called “history.” The Académie Française would pronounce them “one of the masterpieces of French literature.”
Husband Henri did not rescue her from Usson. He was occupied fighting more religious wars, outwitting Marguerite’s brother Henri III, and, after Henri III was assassinated (on the toilet), fighting to win the crown he had inherited, besieging Paris, converting, once again, to Catholicism, then drafting divorce papers: Henri knew he needed an heir if his throne was to be safe. Margot had never conceived, perhaps, according to one modern biographer, because she suffered from hypothyroidism, which would also explain her weight gain as she aged. Though what did not suffer was her very active sex life: She took many lovers in “old age”—her forties and fifties—giving her puritan critics ammunition and evidence of how “unnatural” she was.
For the Traveler
The Hôtel de Sens in the Southern Marais figures as the setting of one of the mythical Margot’s most vindictive mad scenes. It is repeated in old biographies and even now, rehashed in popular guidebooks.
Walk west from the Sully-Morland métro, along Quai des Célestins, with its lovely views across the Seine of Quai d’Anjou on Île Saint-Louis; bear right at the pretty Square Marie-Trintignant, stopping at the angle where rue du Figuier and rue du Fauconnier meet. Cross rue du Figuier to the front entrance of the Hôtel de Sens. Or you can approach from the Pont Marie métro, walking east along the Seine and bearing left into rue des Nonnains d’Hyères, cutting through the sunken garden in the back of the Hôtel.
The fifteenth-century residence (1475–1519) of the Archbishops of Sens, older than the Hôtel de Cluny (the only other important example of fifteenth-century domestic architecture in Paris), the building was eventually rented out by the archbishops after they relocated from Paris to Sens.
In 1605, Margot, freed from exile, and divorced—amicably—from Henri IV, became Sens’ most famous resident. Just as Henri had never been without a mistress throughout their twenty-seven-year marriage so the passionate Margot had enjoyed the pleasures of a string of lovers. In the courtyard of the Hôtel de Sens, or so the story goes, she showed one of them the depths of her rage after he had murdered one of her favorites.
The sunken garden behind the castle—walk away from the front entrance (and the Seine) and bear left through the gate on rue du Figuier. Here is a quiet haven, an off-the-beaten-track landscaped garden in which to sit and consider the legendary story of La Reine Margot, which culminates in the front courtyard of this medieval residence. The popular myth has it that this was the site of an atrocity that was used for centuries to defame a female royal, a woman who in fact had refused victimhood, making herself into a respected and courageous advocate for peace despite the murderous enmities between the two barbaric Christian sects of sixteenth-century France, both of which would like to have seen her dead.
With Henri of Navarre finally on the throne and living in the Louvre, Margot was free to return to Paris. She had always loved the capital, its gaiety a life force, long denied her in the Huguenot towns. After she’d agreed to a divorce, it had taken at least five years before the pope had given up his signature. Once legally free, Henri imported a new wife, the wealthy Italian Marie de Medici who had plenty of money to pay France’s war debts as well as the hormonal balance to produce an heir. The future Louis XIII was born, Marguerite arrived, and “so began the most peaceful and congenial years of Marguerite’s life,” in the words of biographer Nancy Goldstone.
She became a close friend of Marie, of baby Louis. At long last she and Henri “got on.” There was warmth and respect between them. In 1605 he installed her in the magnificent Hôtel de Sens, only half a mile from the Louvre. (To reach her childhood home, walk west along the quays—Célestins, L’Hôtel-de-Ville, Gesvres, Mégisserie, and right into rue de l’Amiral-de-Coligny. Cross to enter the Cour Carrée.)
But less than a year in residence at Hôtel de Sens, she had to move again. According to the slanderous chroniclers, one of her ex-lovers had been murdered in the courtyard by her present lover as Marguerite stepped down from her carriage.
In fact, the victim, Saint-Julien, had been her protégé—no evidence exists that they’d been lovers—and the murderer had played a part in a conspiracy against Henri’s throne: He believed the victim had passed along information about the conspiracy to the Crown. The murder was a crime of political revenge having nothing to do with Marguerite’s erotic whims. She complained at once to Henri about the political assassination that had bloodied her courtyard.
King Henri captured the murderer and had him hanged the next day in the same courtyard so that his ex-wife could observe the rite of royal justice from her high window in the Hôtel de Sens. Many fictitious details color the event: that Margot screamed and yelled with glee as the murderer was beheaded and the courtyard ran with his blood (just as her brother had screamed in approval the night of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre). Like brother like sister. Not.
In disgust, she left the Hôtel de Sens six months later to build a splendid château on the Left Bank, across from the Louvre, behind the Quai Malaquais, where the École des Beaux-Arts is now located.
Like Queen Margot herself, her salon became popular for its exuberance and intellectual heft. Paris loved having her in residence again, her taste in fashion and the decorative arts, in poetry and music, creating a sparkling presence in the capital once more. Helpmate to Henri (she spied for him), godmother to his second child, friendly with Marie de Medici, a generous benefactor to the poor, especially the poor Irish refugees fleeing the murderous Tudors, she became a beloved elder royal. Paris was glad to be rid of her mother when she died; it mourned openly when Marguerite died, crowds of Parisians queuing to view her body and pay their respects.
Still. Until recently she was remembered almost exclusively for her sensuality which overshadowed every other aspect of her life. That the sexual behavior of her brothers and husband dwarfed her own did not matter. That most of her love affairs were passionate rather than opportunistic affairs of state has hardly mattered. That Margot was a modern woman centuries ahead of her time, centuries before the feminist movement confronted the hypocrisy and double standards of masculinist sexual mores, has only recently been acknowledged: “The queen of Navarre was so much more than the sum of her affairs,” to quote Nancy Goldstone. And in saving Henri of Navarre’s life on their wedding night, it is no exaggeration to say that La Reine Margot saved France.
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Looking south toward the Seine from rue Charlemagne in the Southern Marais, you see the length of the very pretty rue du Figuier (Fig Street), dating from the thirteenth century. Walking, you pass on the left the Square Roger-Priou-Valjean (named after a Résistant, the founder of Libération-Nord). Legend has it that fig trees were cut down to widen this street for Margot’s carriage. Like the garden of the Hôtel de Sens, the Square, dense with lilac bushes in spring, is a fine place to look across at the turrets of the Hôtel and take aim at the reigning theories surrounding Marguerite de Valois. Like many defiant, sensual, and intellectual women in history, Margot’s life was refigured as a gothic fairy tale by men who for centuries condemned women who do not conform to man-made moral codes. (Ninon de l’Enclos of the Northern Marais seemed to welcome the risks of ignoring these codes—see here.) Today the Hôtel de Sens houses the Bibliothèque Forney, a library of art and architecture. Queen Margot, who loved books and beauty and the arts of interior decoration, would like that. When the sun is shining, the courtyard is a hushed and pleasant place, bibliophiles crossing it to return and withdraw books, stopping to greet friends, maybe unaware of the modern historians who have liberated this ancient place and its notorious royal from the bloody legend that has long disfigured her.
Nearby
THE SHOAH MEMORIAL A few minutes west of Hôtel de Sens, along rue de L’Hôtel-de-Ville, turn right into rue Geoffroy-l’Asnier, no. 17. Open Sun–Fri, 10–6; Thur 10–10; closed Sat. www.memorialdelashoah.org. A moving exhibition of photos, archives, chronologies, with a good library/bookstore at the entrance. The names of 76,000 Jews deported from France—with photos—are engraved on the Wall of Names in the forecourt. The Wall of the Righteous bears the names of those who helped Jews find safety.
CAFÉ LOUIS PHILIPPE Continuing west from Hôtel de Sens on rue de L’Hôtel-de-Ville. At 66, Quai de L’Hôtel-de-Ville. Tel: 01.42.72.29.42. A friendly restaurant, serving hearty French food, with a beautiful view of the Seine and Île Saint-Louis. In the other direction, you face the lovely rue des Barres, behind Église Saint-Gervais and the elegant restaurant Chez Julien.
