Marguerite de Valois (1553-1615) was one of the most beautiful women of her time. Her blue eyes, lovely face, black locks and slender figure made young Marguerite one of the most desired women at the royal court. Don John of Austria was stunned when he saw her and wrote in his diary: “She looks more like a goddess of heaven than a princess ruling on earth. Her charms are better suited to ruin a man than to save him. Her beauty was made to haunt us.”
So it’s no surprise that over her lifetime Marguerite, whom we know as Queen Margot thanks to the novel by Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870), took many lovers. Unfortunately for them, a good number of those lovers came to a rather unpleasant end.
Queen Margot saves her husband during the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre
Margot’s mother, who saw her as nothing more than a pawn in her political chess game, decided in 1572 to marry her to Henri of Navarre (the future Henri IV, r. 1589-1610), the leader of the Protestants in France, in an attempt to end the war of religion that was raging in the kingdom at the time. Margot, who was then in love with the Duke of Guise, refused to marry Henri, who among his other qualities smelled of goats, and the queen had to drag her to the church by force.
In fact, Margot never said “I do” as is customary at Catholic weddings. When the priest asked her whether she agreed to marry Henri of Navarre, Margot chose to stay silent. After a few seconds of awkward silence, Henri, Duke of Anjou (the future Henri III), gave her a push from behind, and as far as the priest was concerned, Margot’s nod was enough to marry them. Very soon, though, it became clear that the wedding was nothing but a trap set by Catherine de’ Medici (1519-1589), whose real goal was to gather all the Protestant leaders in Paris and get rid of them once and for all.
Six days after the wedding the bloodbath began. It became known as the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, and thousands of Protestants were murdered in Paris and in several provincial towns in France. Margot, as I said, didn’t love her husband, but she defended him fiercely against the Catholics and didn’t let anyone harm him. The experience made them allies, and they stayed married purely for political reasons, while each of them took lovers of their own.
Shortly after her wedding, Margot took the first in a long string of lovers. Joseph Boniface de La Môle (1526-1574) was a gifted dancer and one of the most handsome men at the court of the king of France. He soon fell in love with the new Queen of Navarre, but this love story didn’t last long. A wax figurine was found in his room, and he was accused of plotting to kill Margot’s brother, Charles IX (r. 1560-1574), by witchcraft.
Margot’s mother, Catherine de’ Medici, ordered his execution, and before he died, La Môle was put through terrible torture at the Conciergerie. Legend has it that before his head was cut off, he asked the crowd to tell Queen Margot that she was in his last thoughts. When she heard about his execution, Margot put on mourning clothes, and some say she even managed to obtain her lover’s skull so she could give it a proper burial (the bodies of people executed for an attempt on the king’s life were burned, or hung up and left for the crows).
If only Queen Margot had known that La Môle was just the first in a long series of lovers who would hurt her or lose their lives because of their affair with her, she might have chosen to retire to a convent right then…
Fate keeps being cruel to the queen’s lovers
Shortly after the death of her first lover, Margot took her next one, Jacques de Harlay (died 1630), and there were even rumors that at the same time she was sleeping with her younger brother, the Duke of Alençon (1555-1584). Her brother Henri III (r. 1574-1589) despised her sexual freedom and decided to teach her a lesson. He asked his sister to host a ball he was planning at the Louvre palace.
But in the middle of the ball, in front of all the guests, he accused her of being pregnant by de Harlay. The king went on to list all of her romantic affairs without leaving out a single “juicy” detail, and when he was done, he ordered her to spare the royal court her “sickly presence”. Jacques de Harlay realized that staying with Margot could cost him his life and left her (and as a result became one of the few lovers of hers who lived to old age). After the ball, Margot decided to flee Paris and live in Agen, in southwestern France.
Margot’s bad luck in love followed her there too. Some time after she arrived at the castle, she fell ill and nearly died. The man who nursed her back to health was the son of the local apothecary, who fell hopelessly in love with her. But one of Margot’s bodyguards was also in love with her, and one day, in a fit of jealousy, he burst into her bedroom and stabbed her lover to death.
Margot didn’t give up and took another lover, a captain in the army of the king of France. She described him as “a figure who, in earlier centuries, would quickly have become an inspiration for the songs of the troubadours”. But when Henri III heard about the affair, he sent his soldiers to catch the new lover. Margot tried in vain to hide him in the chimney of her room. He was found and executed in front of her. The unlucky lover was hung upside down until his head filled with blood. While he was still breathing, he was thrown into an open grave and buried alive, clutching a scrap from the hem of her dress.
Queen Margot was rid of her brother in 1589, when he was murdered by Jacques Clément. Her husband became King Henri IV, and he decided to divorce her so he could find a younger wife who would give him a legitimate heir (he already had plenty of illegitimate children). Margot agreed in return for keeping the title of queen and quite a lot of money, and so she became one of the richest women in France. But as we all know, money can’t buy love, and Queen Margot kept looking for lovers, whom she took from every level of French society.
Her list of lovers included a tenor from one of the cathedrals, a carpenter’s son, a shepherd, a servant and even a traveling singer. In the end Margot managed to convince Henri IV to let her return to Paris, but by then she was a shadow of her former self. Now in her fifties, Margot had put on weight and lost most of her hair, which she replaced with huge blond wigs. To have enough hair for the wigs, she kept blond servants who at any moment could be asked to donate their hair for a new wig. And despite her age, her unlucky love affairs went on.
Queen Margot’s last lovers
While she waited for her palace on the Left Bank of Paris to be finished, Margot lived at the Hôtel de Sens, and there she took the Comte de Vermond as her lover. However, the count’s performance didn’t satisfy Marguerite’s appetite, and she decided to replace him with another young lover named Julien Datte.
Alas, this affair was short-lived too, because the Comte de Vermond, eaten up by jealousy, killed Julien on her doorstep. Queen Margot was beside herself with anger and grief and ordered the count to be executed the very next day, on the exact spot where he had killed her lover. After watching the execution from the window of her house, the former queen left the Hôtel de Sens and moved to a house near the Louvre. There she got the nickname “Queen Venus”, after the lovers’ parties she threw. Her husband Henri IV begged her to stop keeping company with young lovers and to act her age.
The Archbishop of Paris also spoke out against the queen and claimed that her plunging necklines were a bad influence on young women and corrupted their morals. People said she was too fat to get through some of the doors, and that she hid wigs among her dresses in case of “accidents”. And finally, they even claimed she kept little pouches holding the hearts of her dead lovers.
Despite all this, Queen Margot lived her last years exactly the way she had always lived. Her stormy lifestyle didn’t stop her from outliving all of her family, and even her former husband, who was murdered in 1610. She died in her palace on the Left Bank, surrounded by young lovers, just before her 62nd birthday. Sadly, the palace is long gone, and on its site stands, among other buildings, the Paris school of fine arts (École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts). Which is a pity, because if her magnificent palace were still standing, imagine how many stories its walls could tell…
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