“Your majesty is very flattering,” said Lady Brenda, with a slight blush of pleasure. “But in regard to dress I beg to differ from you. It is much more the thing to be simple nowadays — one is much more respected. And for that matter, the ugly women could dress gorgeously, too.”
“An ugly woman is ridiculous,” said Francis. “The more she bedizens herself the more ridiculous she grows. But a beautiful woman can dress in cloth of gold and diamonds, and the richer her clothes, the more her beauty will shine.”
“You loved to see beautiful women richly dressed —— it is true. I have read of it in your majesty’s life. But the times have changed since then. I imagine the sudden appearance of Madame d’Etampes, in full court dress—”
“Heaven forbid!” ejaculated Francis, crossing himself devoutly.
“I thought your majesty was much attached to her,” said Lady Brenda, calmly.
“So I was — as the horse may be said to be much attached to the cart,” answered the king. “I could not get rid of her. She drove me to distraction — but she drove me, nevertheless. There was nothing I could call my own, from the king’s justice to the king’s jewels. I verily believe that Anne did more harm than I did, which is saying something. The difference was that she did it with premeditation, whereas my evil deeds were chiefly of the lazy kind —— sins of omission, perhaps of wrong conviction.”
“Your majesty did not omit to burn alive a number of persons belonging to my religion,” said Lady Brenda, stiffly.
“Madam,” replied the king, “with your permission we will not discuss religious matters. I will only say that the Protestants with whom I had to do were Calvinists and that their church resembled yours about as nearly as a cellar resembles a court drawing-room — and I will take the liberty of pointing out that your Queen Elizabeth destroyed more Catholics than I ever destroyed Protestants, and that she did it in a more cruel way. I will not speak of my fickle friend Henry of England. His example adds too much weight to the argument. Madam, I would rather speak of Madame d’Etampes than of religious matters — but I would infinitely prefer to talk of neither.”
“If your majesty will select a subject for conversation—” suggested Lady Brenda.
“Let us talk of yourself—”
“No — of yourself.”
“Very well,” said the king, leaning back in his easy chair which his broad shoulders overlapped on each side. “Let us talk of myself — though I suspect that means that you wish to talk of the women I loved. Does it not?”
“Their names are well known to history,” said Lady Brenda.
“Better than their characters. I do not think people generally have any clear conception either of Madame de Châteaubriand, Madame d’Etampes or Madame de Brézé—”
“Your majesty loved Madame de Brézé?” inquired Lady Brenda, with sudden curiosity.
“Diane was a beautiful woman — she was four and twenty years of age when she came to beg for her father’s life and I was but five years older. We were made for each other, and she was a wiser woman than Anne d’Etampes, as Catherine found out. I could have loved her, but I loved another — then. One whom I have long regretted.”
“Françoise de Foix,” said Lady Brenda in a low voice, for the king seemed moved.
“Yes — Madame de Châteaubriand. I can see her now with her fair gentle face, her golden hair, her soft blue eyes, her small graceful figure. Poor Françoise! I can never forget her last look when she said good-bye in the garden. I thought little enough of it then and I called back Primaticcio as though nothing had happened. On my faith! It was very heartless! I hardly know how I could do it. Had I known how she was to die I would not have done it — no! on my faith as a gentleman! I would not have done it.”
“Indeed,” said Lady Brenda, “it would have been better for France had you treated Madame de Château-briand less cruelly. She might have wearied you a little, but she would not have betrayed you to the emperor.”
“It is easy, when once you are dead — or if you live three centuries after an event — to say that a deed was cruel. Living people who read history look at it much as a character of the time looks at it after his death — coldly. It is impossible for you to realise exactly how matters stood, nor what I felt. I was bored, my dear madam — do you understand? Bored—”
“As most people are by what is too good for them,” put in Lady Brenda.
“You are severe, but there is truth in what you say. I am only a dead king, after all, and I daresay I do not judge my own life much more leniently than you do, now that it is over. But pray reflect that when a woman bores a man, the case is serious indeed.”
“Very,” answered Lady Brenda, gravely. “It has recently been said, however, that only people who themselves are bores are bored by others. I mean no disrespect to your majesty; but I believe that if your majesty’s mother, of blessed memory, had not conceived the idea of presenting to you Mademoiselle de Heilly, you would not have wearied poor Françoise as you did, till she began to weary you.”
“Yes, madam,” said the king. “It is also true that if the serpent had not talked of apples to our mother Eve, Paradise would have continued to be a terrestrial institution. But the serpent was a great busybody, and Eve liked apples.”
“It seems to me that your majesty then plays the part of Eve,” remarked Lady Brenda.
“Can you doubt that if the serpent had addressed himself to Adam instead of to his consort, he would have been equally successful?”
“No,” said Lady Brenda. The king laughed.
“It would be very singular if you did,” he answered. “Madame d’Angoulême treated me with the politics of the serpent — and I must say in justice that a more beautiful apple was never selected by the devil himself. It amused me at the time. Unfortunately, when we are dead the heart begins to live.”
“How strange!” exclaimed Lady Brenda.— “I should have thought that it would be the reverse!”
“You would have supposed that after death the affections are wholly destroyed? No. That is not my experience. I was heartless in my lifetime. I treated Françoise abominably, and I made Anne de Heilly’s miserable husband Duc d’Etampes. I made Françoise return the jewels I had given her, because Anne wanted them. She broke all the monograms out of the settings before she sent them back, and I remember being glad that she did it. I knew that Anne was betraying me, and betraying France daily, and yet I let her power increase, because I disliked the annoyance of another separation — and during all that time Françoise was languishing in her dungeon. No one told me of that, however. But when I was dead I found that I had a heart, and my heart persecutes me. I love Françoise. — Faith! madam, I do not know why I tell you these things!”
“Pray go on,” said Lady Brenda, sympathetically. “Your majesty is not the first person who has made me confidences.”
“I am sure of that,” answered the king. “You have a sympathetic face. Women with blue eyes can feel for others. Françoise de Foix had blue eyes — Anne’s eyes were dark.”
“Are they both here?” asked Lady Brenda.
“No,” said Francis, listlessly. “I shall never see them again. Anne loved me for the gifts I gave her, and there are no gifts here. Françoise loved me for myself. That was not much, was it? I took myself from her and she never forgave me. She was right, I deserved not to be forgiven, but I did not find out how sorry I was until I came where I have time to be sorry for ever. I am tormented with a new sense which in life I did not possess — the sense of an undying affection for that lady.”
“How very sad!” exclaimed Lady Brenda.
“It is horrible. Men should not suppose that while they are alive they can be heartless with impunity. When they are dead the heart will awake and cause them bitter anguish — all the more bitter because it is a pain to which they are not accustomed. People have called me perjurer because I would not go back to Madrid. There is less reason for that accusation than for the reproach of heartlessness I
incurred. Charles knew well enough that the treaty he imposed upon me could never be carried out, unless my chivalric instincts made it possible. He reckoned on my stupidity — or rather on my stupid adherence to the details of an antiquated code. What he really wanted was my marriage with Eleonora. He got it. I more than atoned for refusing to return to captivity by letting him go freely through my kingdom on his way to Ghent. Anne advised me to put him into the Bastille. If I had been the perjured wretch people have since described me I would have followed her advice. I was a better gentleman than Charles. Perhaps that is not saying much. In my lifetime I aspired to be the first gentleman in France, or in the world. My faults were such as his majesty, Charles the Sour, could not well comprehend. But he comprehended my virtues in such a way as to attempt to play upon them to his own advantage on every possible occasion. I generally chose those occasions to lapse from virtue — as when I broke my Madrid promise. He had no right to expect me to sacrifice my kingdom and the welfare of my people to my personal convictions concerning the code of honour.”
The king laughed, and in his laughter there was a coarse element which struck very disagreeably upon Lady Brenda’s refined ears.
“You say nothing?” continued the king, as he noticed her silence.
“I do not understand politics,” said Lady Brenda, wisely.
“I fear I did not understand them either,” laughed Francis, good-humouredly. “The lady who ruled my son and my son’s wife always said so. I was persuaded that I understood everything when I was alive — and when a man holds such an opinion of himself he will always find fools to agree with him and women to govern him. Had I known more of myself I might have avoided many complications — and poor Françoise would not have died in the vaults of a Breton castle.”
“Perhaps there need never have been any Françoise for your majesty in that case,” suggested Lady Brenda.
The king looked at her curiously as though not fully understanding her, or fancying that she was jesting. But Lady Brenda was grave and serious.’ “You mean, madam, that I should have loved the queen, because she was queen — first Claude and then Eleonora? That is a very singular notion, but I presume that ideas have changed since my day.”
“Perhaps not so much as they ought to change,” returned Lady Brenda. “There was a publicity in those days—”
“We were more honest.”
“You had less to fear.”
“We were more in earnest,” said the king.
“Then you were worse — because you were more in earnest in doing wrong.”
“Perhaps; but we were misguided by bad example —
“Which your majesty strengthened by doing openly and ostentatiously what ought not to be done at all.”
“I think we were bolder,” objected Francis. “If we did wrong we were not afraid to do it in the face of the world.”
“That is not a high form of courage,” replied the inexorable lady.
“Nevertheless, it was courage,” laughed the king. “But I will not discuss the question. I am sufficiently persuaded of my own badness without further argument. On the other hand a man is never so much in need of a word of encouragement and appreciation as when he is conscious of not deserving it.”
“Am I to pay you compliments?” asked Lady Brenda, laughing in her turn. “It would not be hard. History has found much to say in praise of your majesty’s reign. You were generous on many occasions — and you did much for the arts.”
“By employing jewellers to make trinkets for Françoise and Anne. When any of those things are found nowadays they bring good prices, because they belong to the epoch of Francis the First. Yes — my name is connected with the arts. I meant it should be that of a conqueror and I am most famous for a phrase I did not pronounce when I was conquered. Fate, madam, is ironical. Perhaps I am more famous for having lost the day at Pavia than I should have been had I won it. If Bayard had been with me, instead of Bonnivet I should have had the victory. But Bayard was dead — poor Bayard! He was the truest friend I ever had.”
“Have you found men truer friends than women?” asked Lady Brenda.
“Women have the qualities which attract without retaining affection — men have the faculty of retaining without attracting.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that I always expected to find friends in the women I loved and was always disappointed; and that, though I was not attracted to seek the friendship of man, yet the few men who were my friends were on the whole very faithful to me. Bayard was one — poor Lautrec, Françoise’s brother, was another. Louis de Brézé was faithful—”
“He received a poor return,” said Lady Brenda.
“Madam,” returned the king, with much suavity, “he was old. His wife was young. My son Henri was very wild. What would you have? Diane did very well.”
“It was abominable,” exclaimed Lady Brenda, hotly. “Diane de Poitiers might almost have been your majesty’s son’s mother!”
“It was precisely because she was older than he that she had such an influence over him,” explained Francis. “Beware of reading histories in which everybody is abused for doing in one age what is considered immoral in another; in that way you get a very imperfect idea of the times. It would be as sensible to say that you think me very vulgar for wearing this dress instead of a coat and a tall hat. I cannot get rid of this dress — for I lived in it. In the same way, we of my time cannot get rid of the ideas of our epoch. We were brought up in them, we lived in them and we died in them. Indeed I think we were already improving. In a moral way, I daresay I do not compare badly with Henry the Eighth of England, with Roderigo Borgia, with Giovanni Maria Visconti, or even with my old enemy Charles Quint.”
“Perhaps,” admitted Lady Brenda. “The difference would have been greater had you prevented the attachment of your heir to Diane de Poitiers, and had you had no such affairs of the heart as caused the destruction of Madame de Châteaubriand — and your majesty’s destruction by Madame d’Etampes.”
“As for Diane,” said the king, “Catherine did not object to her husband’s attachment, as you call it. Honestly, would you, in her place, have thought it worth while to be so particular?”
“I? Indeed I would never have spoken to him again — though he was my husband!”
“Really?” exclaimed the king, with a rough laugh. “Are you so severe as that, madam?”
“I cannot understand loving a man who does not love me,” replied Lady Brenda, firmly. “It is enough to make one severe.”
“But suppose that you had never loved him at all—”
“I would not have married him, even for the honour of being your majesty’s daughter-in-law. If I had been married to him, supposing that he loved me, and if he afterwards showed me that he did not — in such a way as that — I would never speak to him again.”
“Consider what would have been the difficulties of Catherine’s position had she refused to pardon Henri,” objected Francis. “She must have led a miserable life. Diane was powerful. She ruled France after my death.”
“I would have been divorced from the king, and he could then have married Madame de Brézé.”
“Divorce in those days was not easy. We had prejudices which did not permit us to imitate our brother of England. We still regarded matrimony as a bond — a view of the rite which seems nowadays to be falling into disrepute.”
“Oh! I do not think so at all,” exclaimed Lady Brenda, in a tone of conviction.
“No? And yet divorces can be had very easily. It appears to me to be only an ingenious method of legalising the very faults with which you reproach me.”
“On the contrary it is a human mode of escape for women who are ill-treated by their husbands. I am sure, if Brenda treated me as you — your majesty — treated Queen Claude and then Queen Eleonora, I would get divorced at once.”
“But then there would be many men who would be certain to be divorced from every wife they married. A man loves a woman
; he marries her; he tires of her and begins to love some one else; his wife at once divorces him and he is then at liberty to marry the next woman. She, in her turn, divorces him — and so on, so long as he can persuade any woman to accept his hand. It is convenient for the man. It will also lead to fraud, for people will only have to say, by agreement, that they are maltreated and they are instantly at liberty. It is bad, madam, very bad. It is better that a few individuals, like myself, if you please, should be sinful, than that in order to legalise sin for the few it should be legally placed within reach of the many.”
“I do not think that is the case at all,” said Lady Brenda, who was puzzled by the king’s argument, but not convinced. “I mean that if a man really and truly treats his wife badly she ought to have some redress.”
“She has. I believe that a woman may bring a suit against her husband; she may obtain a legal separation, and he is obliged to support her. Why should she wish to marry again?”
“If she is young, why should her whole life be ruined by being tied to a brute? Why may she not be happy with some one else?”
“Because if you make it possible for her, you make it possible for the next woman, who perhaps was treated badly, but less badly than the first — and then it is possible for another who has hardly suffered at all, and at last it is possible for every man or woman who chances for a moment to prefer some other person to his or her wife or husband. It is not that in some cases it would not be a positive good; it is that the remedy you provide for such cases soon ends by creating cases in very great numbers, because the remedy is an agreeable one.”
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 307