The Memoirs Of Marguerite De Valois

"That was when I really decided to write about her, when I stumbled across her memoirs. It’s like listening to a modern voice. She’s funny, she’s self-deprecating. Writing a memoir is very hard, that’s why I chose memoirs for this piece. It’s much harder than people think. The voice has to be exactly right, otherwise you come across as self-serving, or not interesting. Not Marguerite. I read her memoir like it was a novel. She wrote it when she was in her fifties, looking back over her life. She is, but not as big a character as her older brother, Henri III, or her husband [Henri IV], or her younger brother, Francois. Those are the relationships that dominate the narrative. But her mother is there, as the authority, always. Marguerite also focuses on the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Almost every historian uses Marguerite’s memoirs about the massacre because she is one of the closest people to the event at the highest level who talked about it, who wasn’t personally involved in the plot. She was a victim as much as her husband, so she has a more objective perspective. She’s definitely trying to settle the score against one of Henri III’s henchmen — Du Guast —but apart from that she kind of bends over backwards to be fair to her husband. But still he doesn’t come across well. He’s always chasing some woman and getting himself into trouble and she’s always having to mop it up. I’m sure she is on some level settling the score. But when I went back and checked on her experiences, for example when she goes into the Spanish Netherlands as a spy, all the events that she talked about actually happened according to the dates that she gave. I think you’re just getting an inside perspective. They used public shaming politically. I’m not sure we’re so far from that today. Again, it was the pot calling the kettle black. Her brother Henri III, who publicly shamed Marguerite, was a regular member of orgies. He was already such a poor leader that I didn’t want to put all the stuff that he did in my book. He was somebody who had absolutely no business calling anyone else out on their sexual behaviour. In fairness to Marguerite, she did have a series of affairs, but one of the reasons she did so was that she was married to a man who wanted nothing to do with her. This is perfectly understandable because he was married to her at eighteen and the massacre followed. “They used public shaming politically. I’m not sure we’re so far from that today.” It turns out that when the bride’s family hunts down and murders every single person that the groom cares about in the world five days after the wedding — he lost all his best friends, he lost almost every member of his family, he lost all of his advisers — this does not make for a close and trusting relationship between husband and wife. He thought she was part of the massacre, that she knew it was coming and hadn’t warned him. As a result, he wanted nothing to do with her. So she was trapped in a loveless marriage, and then also she was living such a dangerous life. This woman had one narrow escape after another, after another. Everybody around her died. It’s not like she would leave a lover for somebody else — the person she loved would die, usually from violence at the court. That’s why Marguerite kept having a series of affairs, because she was looking for someone she loved who would actually live. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter That wasn’t the case with her brother, Henri III, he had many favourites. Some people are meant to be rulers and some people are not. He was not, and Catherine was not. They became terrible people because they were put in positions they should never have been in."