LETTER I.

Introduction.—­Anecdotes of Marguerite’s Infancy.—­Endeavours Used to Convert Her to the New Religion.—­She Is Confirmed in Catholicism.—­The Court on a Progress.—­A Grand Festivity Suddenly Interrupted.—­The Confusion in Consequence.

I should commend your work much more were I myself less praised in it; but I am unwilling to do so, lest my praises should seem rather the effect of self-love than to be founded on reason and justice.  I am fearful that, like Themistocles, I should appear to admire their eloquence the most who are most forward to praise me.  It is the usual frailty of our sex to be fond of flattery.  I blame this in other women, and should wish not to be chargeable with it myself.  Yet I confess that I take a pride in being painted by the hand of so able a master, however flattering the likeness may be.  If I ever were possessed of the graces you have assigned to me, trouble and vexation render them no longer visible, and have even effaced them from my own recollection.  So that I view myself in your Memoirs, and say, with old Madame de Rendan, who, not having consulted her glass since her husband’s death, on seeing her own face in the mirror of another lady, exclaimed, “Who is this?” Whatever my friends tell me when they see me now, I am inclined to think proceeds from the partiality of their affection.  I am sure that you yourself, when you consider more impartially what you have said, will be induced to believe, according to these lines of Du Bellay: 

“C’est chercher Rome en Rome, Et rien de Rome en Rome ne trouver.”

(’Tis to seek Rome, in Rome to go, And Rome herself at Rome not know.)

But as we read with pleasure the history of the Siege of Troy, the magnificence of Athens, and other splendid cities, which once flourished, but are now so entirely destroyed that scarcely the spot whereon they stood can be traced, so you please yourself with describing these excellences of beauty which are no more, and which will be discoverable only in your writings.

If you had taken upon you to contrast Nature and Fortune, you could not have chosen a happier theme upon which to descant, for both have made a trial of their strength on the subject of your Memoirs.  What Nature did, you had the evidence of your own eyes to vouch for, but what was done by Fortune, you know only from hearsay; and hearsay, I need not tell you, is liable to be influenced by ignorance or malice, and, therefore, is not to be depended on.  You will for that reason, I make no doubt, be pleased to receive these Memoirs from the hand which is most interested in the truth of them.

I have been induced to undertake writing my Memoirs the more from five or six observations which I have had occasion to make upon your work, as you appear to have been misinformed respecting certain particulars.  For example, in that part where mention is made of Pau, and of my journey in France; likewise where you speak of the late Marechal de Biron, of Agen, and of the sally of the Marquis de Camillac from that place.