Clement Marot and Other Studies Author:henry morley Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: MARGUERITE OF ALENgON. 109 CHAPTER IV. Court, Camp, And Prison. The year is 1520. Clement's age is about twenty-four. His father is still living, and is... more » Valet of the Wardrobe to King Francis I. For himself he has just obtained, what appears to be a settlement in life, as valet in the household of Marguerite, Duchess of Alencon. Brantome tells us that a gallant Neapolitan cavalier who had come to the coast of France, finding this lady absent at the baths — perhaps at Cauterets in the Pyrenees, wherewith she connects the framework of her Heptameron—waited two months for her return, and then said to him: " The Princess of Salerno had such a reputation for her beauty in our town of Naples, that it' any one had been to Naples and not seen that Princess, he was told that he had not seen Naples. If any one had asked me whether I had seen France and its court, I must have said no, if I had not seen the Lady Marguerite. But, now that I have seen her, I may say that I have seen the beauty of the world. Happy are those Frenchmen who may approach her daily!" Happy, then, among such Frenchmen was Clement Marot. Brantome himself was enthusiastic on the subject ofher beauty. Seeing the troubles of her life, Fortune, he thought, owed Nature a grudge for making her so fair that beauties of past, present, and future must be 111 favoured in comparison with her. "Is there," he said, " any unbeliever who doubts the divine miracles, let him but look on her; her form as superb as her face is lovely. In short," says the eulogist, whose enthusiasm, so far as it rests on personal acquaintance, can only refer to a time when Marguerite's age exceeded half a century—for he was but two and twenty when she died at the age of fifty-seven—" to make room, in short, for the publication of her beau...« less