Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois
The memoirs of the sister of Charles IX of France, whose wedding to the Protestant Henry of Navarre brought the Huguenot leaders to Paris in August 1572. She tells what she saw and heard in the Louvre on the night of the massacre.
Marguerite was the daughter of Catherine de’ Medici and the sister of Charles IX. Her memoirs open as a reply to an author who had praised her in his own book, and they were written many years after 1572; the publisher’s note of the edition linked here says that they were first printed in 1628, thirteen years after her death in 1615. The division into numbered letters belongs to that edition.
She was a Catholic and newly married to the Protestant king of Navarre when the killing began, and she says that neither side told her anything. What she saw herself is limited to the palace: her mother’s bedchamber the evening before, her husband’s Huguenot gentlemen talking through the night, and the wounded man who burst into her room at dawn pursued by archers. Her account of how the decision was taken is second-hand; she gives it as what she heard afterwards, in part from the king. It puts the responsibility on her mother and her brother Anjou and presents the king as yielding with reluctance, and it is the testimony of a member of the family about the family.
Cited in
- 24 August 1572, firm date