Mary Stuart by Stefan Zweig Read Free Book Online Page A

cristal de vos larmes coulées
    Triste marchiez par les longues allées
    Du grand jardin de ce royal château
    Qui prend son nom de la beauté des eaux.
    (A long veil, soft and clinging, fold upon fold, a mourning garb, swathes your body from head to waist. It bellies and fills like a sail before the wind, urging the barque along. Thus were you clad when, alas, you left the beautiful land whose sceptre you had held in your hand, when, pensive and weeping as you were, tears, like crystals, coursed down your cheeks while you paced the long alleyways in the gardens of that royal castle whose name derives from the beauty of its waters.) Never before had this young and sympathetic and gentle creature been more successfully painted than at this time of her first grief and her first disappointment. Her roving and restless eyes had become steadfast and earnest in expression; the dignity of her bearing is more obvious in the modest and simple garb of mourning than in the portraits which show her bedecked with gems and the insignia of power.
    The same dignified melancholy speaks to us from the lines she herself composed as a lament for her dead husband. These verses are not unworthy of the young Queen’s master, Ronsard. Even if it had not been penned by a queen, the tender elegy would appeal to any heart through the simplicity of its tone and its touching candour. Here we find no passionate regret for the young dead King, since Mary Stuart was always truthful and candid where poetry was concerned, though not invariably so in the world of politics. But we are given a picture of her utter loneliness, and the feeling that she was lost and forsaken.
    Sans cesse mon coeur sent
    Le regret d’un absent.
    Si parfois vers les cieux
    Viens à dresser ma veue
    Le doux traict de ses yeux
    Je vois dans une nue;
    Soudain je vois dans l’eau
    Comme dans un tombeau.
    Si je suis en repos
    Someillant sur ma couche,
    Je le sens qu’il me touche:
    En labeur, en recoy
    Toujour est près de moy.
    (Unceasingly my heart bemoans the absence of my dear. If to the distant skies I lift my mournful gaze, I see his gentle eyes gaze down from the misty heights; and the waters all around seem to me like a grave. When, resting on my couch, I close my eyes and drowse, his hand softly strokes me. In labour and repose his presence never quits my side.) Mary Stuart’s sorrow at the loss of her husband, Francis II, was undeniably genuine, and not merely a poetical fiction. For in losing Francis, Mary not only lost a pleasant and docile companion and an affectionate friend, but at the same time her position among European potentates, her power and her security. This woman, who was still half a child, soon felt how much it signified to her stability and gratification to be the first lady in a great kingdom, and how paltry it was to have to be content with playing second fiddle. Indeed, for proud natures, this is even more galling than to be nobody at all. Mary’s situation was rendered if anything bitterer by Catherine de’ Medici’s open hostility now that that haughtiest member of a haughty house had resumed her old place at Court. It would appear that Mary, in an unwitting moment, goaded by the inconsiderate rashness of youth, had incurred the elder lady’s undying displeasure by hazarding an observation on the commercial origins of the wealthy family of Medici, and referring to the upstart ancestors of this merchant’s daughter, thus making a derogatory comparison with her own long line of kingly forefathers. Such scatterbrained utterances—heedless and ill-advised, she was at a future date to let her tongue run away with her in regard to Elizabeth of England as well—when spoken by one woman to the detriment of another, are more devastating in their consequences than open invectives. Catherine’s ambitions had already been thwarted during two long decades through the power wielded by Diane de Poitiers; then