DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.63221#0148
112
THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE
grandiose shows would have given her scant consolation.
Even now, while her body was being paraded through the
city, Francis was dreaming of a certain Clarissa of Milan
who had been described to him ; contemporaries went so far
as to say that it was mainly to win her that he undertook
that year’s Italian campaign.
Long before her death, Queen Claude had found herself
permanently supplanted by more important rivals. The
woman who ruled the first years of the King’s reign was
Franchise de Foix, Duchesse de Chateaubriand—a true child
of the South, black-haired, olive-skinned, and passionately
in love with the light-hearted King. She must have been
a person of great charm. Her husband, Jean de Brosse,
who knew all about her royal attachment, was under her
spell to the end; and honoured her gifts and virtues by an
epitaph—ordered from Marot—which would be touching if
it were not absurd. She, meanwhile, wrote bitter complaints
to the King of her occasional visits to her home in the
country. “Everything seems difficult when I consider my
present circumstances, and reflect that all my life I shall
probably be nothing better than a woman bound to house-
keeping; a yoke which is the dreariest of all yokes.” The
King’s answers are light; he was not capable of love, but
he hid its absence by amorous conceits. “ Ah ! my friend,”
he exclaims, “ let me bear the burden, since I alone am the
cause of it; it is not reasonable that innocence should suffer
the penalty of guilt. ... I would far rather have the ruins
of love in my memory, than my memory without such
ruins. . . . The misery of parting lies in the longing to
return.”
THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE
grandiose shows would have given her scant consolation.
Even now, while her body was being paraded through the
city, Francis was dreaming of a certain Clarissa of Milan
who had been described to him ; contemporaries went so far
as to say that it was mainly to win her that he undertook
that year’s Italian campaign.
Long before her death, Queen Claude had found herself
permanently supplanted by more important rivals. The
woman who ruled the first years of the King’s reign was
Franchise de Foix, Duchesse de Chateaubriand—a true child
of the South, black-haired, olive-skinned, and passionately
in love with the light-hearted King. She must have been
a person of great charm. Her husband, Jean de Brosse,
who knew all about her royal attachment, was under her
spell to the end; and honoured her gifts and virtues by an
epitaph—ordered from Marot—which would be touching if
it were not absurd. She, meanwhile, wrote bitter complaints
to the King of her occasional visits to her home in the
country. “Everything seems difficult when I consider my
present circumstances, and reflect that all my life I shall
probably be nothing better than a woman bound to house-
keeping; a yoke which is the dreariest of all yokes.” The
King’s answers are light; he was not capable of love, but
he hid its absence by amorous conceits. “ Ah ! my friend,”
he exclaims, “ let me bear the burden, since I alone am the
cause of it; it is not reasonable that innocence should suffer
the penalty of guilt. ... I would far rather have the ruins
of love in my memory, than my memory without such
ruins. . . . The misery of parting lies in the longing to
return.”