Margaret of Navarre

Margaret of Navarre, in her youth known as Marguerite d'Angoulême, sister of Francis I. of France, and daughter of Charles of Orleans, Comte d'Angoulême, was born at Angoulême, 11th April 1492. She was carefully educated, and early showed remarkable sweetness and charm added to unusual strength of mind. In 1509 she was married to Charles, Duke of Alençon, who died in 1525; and in 1527 she was married to Henri d'Albret, titular king of Navarre, to whom she bore Jeanne d'Albret, mother of the great French monarch, Henry IV. She encouraged agriculture, the arts, and learning, and sheltered with a courageous generosity such advocates of freer thought in religion as Marot and Bonaventure des Périers. Accusations entirely unfounded have been brought by interested bigotry against her morals. She died 21st December 1549. Her writings include a series of remarkably interesting Letters (ed. by Génin, 2 vols. 1842-43), a miscellaneous collection of poems gracefully entitled Les Marguerites de la Marguerite (ed. by Frank, 4 vols. 1873), and especially the famous Heptaméron des Nouvelles (1558; ed. by Leroux de Lincy, 3 vols. 1855), modelled on the Decameron of Boccaccio, but worked out in an original manner. A company of ladies and gentlemen returning from Cauterets are detained by bad weather, and beguile the time by telling stories, seventy-two in number, which are separated by interludes introducing the persons. The subjects of the stories are similar to those of the Decameron, but the manners delineated are more refined; and they reflect closely the strange combination of religious fervour with religious free-thinking and refined voluptuousness so characteristic of the time. Most critics believe the work to be partly by Des Périers (q.v.). Her Dernières Poesies, discovered in the Bibliothèque Nationale in 1895, were published in 1896. See Lives by Durand (1848), Miss Freer (1854), and Lotheisen (Berlin, 1885); and Saintsbury's introduction to the new translation of the Heptaméron (1894).