The Romance of Biography Volume II Part 4

Gentil poux! si Mars et ton courage Plus contraignaient ta Clotilde gmir, De lui montrer en son pet.i.t langage, A t'appeller ferai tout mon plaisir-- Plaisir ne l'est qu'autant qu'on le partage!

Among some other little poems, which place the conjugal and maternal character of Clotilde in a most charming light, I must notice one more for its tender and heartfelt beauty. It is ent.i.tled "Ballade mon premier n," and is addressed to her child, apparently in the absence of its father.

O chr enfantelet, vrai portrait de ton pre!

Dors sur le sein que ta bouche a press!

Dors pet.i.t!--clos, ami, sur le sein de ta mre, Tien doux oeillet, par le somme oppress.

Bel ami--chr pet.i.t! que ta pupille tendre, Goute un sommeil que plus n'est fait pour moi: Je veille pour te voir, te nourir, te defendre, Ainz qu'il est doux ne veiller que pour toi!

Contemplating him asleep, she says,

N'tait ce teint fleuri des couleurs de la pomme, Ne le diriez vous dans les bras de la mort?

Then, shuddering at the idea she had conjured up, she breaks forth into a pa.s.sionate apostrophe to her sleeping child,

Arrte, cher enfant! j'en frmis toute entire-- Reveille toi! cha.s.se un fatal propos!

Mon fils .... pour un moment--ah revois la lumire!

Au prix du tien, rends-moi tout mon rpos!

Douce erreur! il dormait .... c'est a.s.sez, je respire.

Songes lgers, flattez son doux sommeil; Ah! quand verrai celui pour qui mon coeur soupire, Au miens cots jouir de son rveil?

Quand reverrai celui dont as reu la vie?

Mon jeune poux, le plus beau des humains Oui--dja crois voir ta mre, aux cieux ravie, Que tends vers lui tes innocentes mains.

Comme ira se duisant ta premire caresse!

Au miens baisers com' t'ira disputant!

Ainz ne compte, toi seul, d'puiser sa tendresse,-- A sa Clotilde en garde bien autant!

Along the margin of the original MS. of this poem, was written an additional stanza, in the same hand, and quite worthy of the rest.

Voil ses traits ... son air ... voil tout ce que j'aime!

Feu de son oeil, et roses de son teint....

D'o vient m'en bahir? _autre qu'en tout lui mme, Pt-il jamais clore de mon sein?_

This is beautiful and true; beautiful, because it is true. There is nothing of fancy nor of art, the intense feeling gushes, warm and strong, from the heart of the writer, and it comes home to the heart of the reader, filling it with sweetness.--Am I wrong in supposing that the occasional obscurity of the old French will not disguise the beauty of the sentiment from the young wife or mother, whose eye may glance over this page?

It is painful, it is pitiful, to draw the veil of death and sorrow over this sweet picture.

What is this world? what asken men to have?

Now with his love--now in his cold grave, Alone, withouten any companie![25]

De Surville closed his brief career of happiness and glory (and what more than these could he have asked of heaven?) at the seige of Orleans, where he fought under the banner of Joan of Arc.[26] He was a gallant and a loyal knight; so were hundreds of others who then strewed the desolated fields of France: and De Surville had fallen undistinguished amid the general havoc of all that was n.o.ble and brave, if the love and genius of his wife had not immortalised him.

Clotilde, after her loss, resided in the chteau of her husband, in the Lyonnois, devoting herself to literature and the education of her son: and it is very remarkable, considering the times in which she lived, that she neither married again, nor entered a religious house. The fame of her poetical talents, which she continued to cultivate in her retirement, rendered her, at length, an object of celebrity and interest. The Duke of Orleans happened one day to repeat some of her verses to Margaret of Scotland, the first wife of Louis the Eleventh; and that accomplished patroness of poetry and poets wrote her an invitation to attend her at court, which Clotilde modestly declined. The Queen then sent her, as a token of her admiration and friends.h.i.+p, a wreath of laurel, surmounted with a bouquet of daisies, (Margurites, in allusion to the name of both,) the leaves of which were wrought in silver and the flowers in gold, with this inscription: "Margurite d'Ecosse Margurite d'Helicon." We are told that Alain Chartier, envious perhaps of these distinctions, wrote a satirical _quatrain_, in which he accused Clotilde of being deficient in _l'air de cour_, and that she replied to him, and defended herself in a very spirited _rondeau_. Nothing more is known of the life of this interesting woman, but that she had the misfortune to survive her son as well as her husband; and dying at the advanced age of ninety, in 1495, she was buried with them in the same tomb.[27]

FOOTNOTES:

[18] Elton's Specimens.

[19] Querir.

[20] J--jadis (the old French _ja_ is the Italian _gi_).

[21] Ainz:--cependant (the Italian _anzi_).

[22] She calls them "the Vultures of Albion."

[23] Duisant, _sduisant_.

[24] Frmissant.

[25] Chaucer.

[26] He perished in 1429, leaving his widow in her twenty-fourth year.

[27] Les Potes Franais jusqu' Malherbes, par Augin. A good edition of the works of Clotilde de Surville was published at Paris in 1802, and another in 1804. I believe both have become scarce. Her _Posies_ consist of pastorals, ballads, songs, epistles, and the fragment of an epic poem, of which the MS. is lost. Of her merit there is but one opinion. She is confessedly the greatest poetical genius which France could boast in a period of two hundred years; that is, from the decline of the Provenal poetry, till about 1500.

CHAPTER V.

CONJUGAL POETRY CONTINUED.

VITTORIA COLONNA.

Half a century later, we find the name of an Italian poetess, as interesting as our Clotilde de Surville, and far more ill.u.s.trious.

Vittoria Colonna was not thrown, with all her eminent gifts and captivating graces, among a rude people in a rude age; but all favourable influences, of time and circ.u.mstances, and fortune, conspired, with native talent, to make her as celebrated as she was truly admirable. She was the wife of that Marquis of Pescara, who has earned himself a name in the busiest and bloodiest page of history:--of that Pescara who commanded the armies of Charles the Fifth in Italy, and won the battle of Pavia, where Francis the First was taken prisoner.

But great as was Pescara as a statesman and a military commander, he is far more interesting as the husband of Vittoria Colonna, and the laurels he reaped in the battle-field, are perishable and worthless, compared to those which his admirable wife wreathed around his brow. So thought Ariosto; who tell us, that if Alexander envied Achilles the fame he had acquired in the songs of Homer, how much more had he envied Pescara those strains in which his gifted consort had exalted his fame above that of all contemporary heroes? and not only rendered herself immortal;

Col dolce stil, di che il miglior non odo, Ma pu qualunque, di cui parli o scriva Trar dal sepolcro, e fa ch'eterno viva.

He prefers her to Artemisia, for a reason rather quaintly expressed,--

----Anzi Tanto maggior, quanto pi a.s.sai beli' opra, Che por sotterra un uom, trarlo di sopra.

"So much more praise it is, to raise a man above the earth, than to bury him under it." He compares her successively to all the famed heroines of Greece and Rome,--to Laodamia, to Portia, to Arria, to Argia, to Evadne,--who died with or for their husbands; and concludes,

Quanto onore a Vittoria pi dovuto Che di Lete, e del Rio che nove volte L'ombre circonda, ha tratto il suo consorte, Malgrado delle parche, e della morte.[28]

In fact, at a period when Italy could boast of a constellation of female talent, such as never before or since adorned any one country at the same time, and besides a number of women accomplished in languages, philosophy, and the abstruser branches of learning, reckoned sixty poetesses, nearly contemporary, there was not one to be compared with Vittoria Colonna,--herself the theme of song; and upon whom her enthusiastic countrymen have lavished all the high-sounding superlatives of a language, so rich in expressive and sonorous epithets, that it seems to multiply fame and magnify praise. We find Vittoria designated in Italian biography, as _Diva_, divina, maravigliosa, elettissima, ill.u.s.trissima, virtuosissima, dottissima, castissima, gloriosissima, &c.

But immortality on earth, as in heaven, must be purchased at a certain price; and Vittoria, rich in all the gifts which heaven, and nature, and fortune combined, ever lavished on one of her s.e.x, paid for her celebrity with her happiness: for thus it has ever been, and must ever be, in this world of ours, "o les plus belles choses ont le pire destin."

Her descent was ill.u.s.trious on both sides. She was the daughter of the Grand Constable Fabrizio Colonna, and of Anna di Montefeltro, daughter of the Duke of Urbino, and was born about 1490. At four years old she was destined to seal the friends.h.i.+p which existed between her own family and that of d'Avalo, by a union with the young Count d'Avalo, afterwards Marquis of Pescara, who was exactly her own age. Such infant marriages are contracted at a fearful risk; yet, if auspicious, the habit of loving from an early age, and the feeling of settled appropriation, prevents the affections from wandering, and plant a mutual happiness upon a foundation much surer than that of fancy or impulse. It was so in this instance,

Conforme era l'etate Ma 'l pensier pi conforme.