I have never read that they were acquaintances, nor even found speculation about whether or not they were, nothing except a comment in an old French encyclopedia that the two had met frequently in Paris before he came to Nérac. Cauvin was the brilliant student of humanists like the German Lutheran Melchior Wollmar, whom Marguerite brought to the university at Bourges and who taught him Greek there. It seems impossible that she could have been unaware of him. Cauvin’s close friend in Paris, Nicolas Cop, was the son of her brother’s physician. Her valet de chambre, the poet Clément Marot, was forced to leave Paris when Cop and Cauvin were, apparently made suspect by the same associations. It is hard to imagine how these lives were lived. But it is clearly true that Marguerite surrounded herself with intellectual and literary people whom Cauvin also would have known, and that she was devoted to encouraging just such gifts as he had displayed. He has been without honor in his own country for a long time now, and perhaps it has seemed ungallant to historians to associate him with this amiable queen. But in fact the world she created around herself created him. And perhaps it is true to say she created him.
It seems to be assumed that Cauvin became acquainted at Nérac with Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, the old priest and humanist who had been Marguerite’s tutor in her childhood, and that he may have “converted” Cauvin to the Reform cause, though he himself never underwent any such conversion. There is no reason to look for one decisive influence. Cauvin’s friend and cousin, Pierre Robert — called Olivetan, which means Midnight Oil — had by this time made a translation of the Bible into French, and was involved in the movement. Cauvin does seem to have been strongly affected by his stay at Nérac, given direction by it, but this need not be interpreted as meaning he underwent a conversion there, especially since he says nothing to encourage the idea that he did. He went from there to the du Tillet household, where he availed himself of their library, and from there to Basel, where he wrote the first version of the Institutes of the Christian Religion, giving distinctive form and expression to a Protestant movement that was French and non-Lutheran. None of this is inconsistent with Marguerite’s having recruited this promising and sympathetic young humanist to be the formulator of a distinctive French Protestantism, nor is the fact that after the publication of the Institutes he went to the court of her niece in Italy, Renée de Ferrara.
At about the same time, Marguerite sent her protégé Clément Marot to shelter with her niece. Although Marot had been arrested twice for heresy (and abjured it once) he was popular and influential as a secular poet, until 1539, when he published rhymed and metrical translations of the first thirty psalms. These were set to music, and swept France, and became the hymns of the churches in Geneva, greatly enriching and advancing Reform worship, and music itself, or so I have read, because it developed to accommodate the great expressiveness of congregational singing. (Such passion surrounds this history that more than usual caution is called for in accepting such judgments — one French authority has said that no matter what contemporaries may have thought, these translations of the psalms were “one of the most lamentable abortions to have been recorded in literary history.”)
Music to be sung by the congregation had already become important among the Lutherans. Marguerite tried her hand at religious lyrics set to popular tunes, which were published in a little book titled Chansons Spirituelles, an allusion to Paul’s encouraging the Christians at Ephesus to sing “hymns and psalms and spiritual songs.” Cauvin himself attempted translations of the psalms that would be suitable for singing. Marot’s translations were immediately embraced by Cauvin in preference to his own, and became as definitive of Calvinism in their way as the Institutes. Marot went to Geneva for refuge when his book of psalms was condemned as heretical by the Sorbonne, but stayed there only briefly and died the next year in Turin.
Marguerite’s importance as a literary patroness cannot have been accidental. Either she chose very gifted writers to be her protégés, or her influence was considerable enough to establish those she favored as the dominant writers of the period. The first seems more probable, since her choices were in no sense obvious or safe, the most famous of them being the heretical defrocked monk and general scapegrace François Rabelais. She could not prevent another of them, Étienne Dolet, from being burned at the stake. She favored those who wrote in French, Rabelais being an early master of the language. Marot, in his later poetry and his psalms, is said to have turned French poetry toward a “modern” vernacular simplicity, relative to prevailing conventions. She encouraged Lefèvre d’Étaples to make a translation of the New Testament into French from the Latin of Jerome. And, of course, she also wrote poetry in French, in a style that might well be seen as modern, like Marot’s, though in anticipation of him, if it were not read as lady’s poetry and therefore as all she asked of herself, or the best she could do. Emily Dickinson comes to mind.
Marguerite wrote poems and plays, almost all on religious subjects, and she wrote The Heptameron, a collection of short stories modeled on Boccaccio’s Decameron. The seventy stories of her collection, like the one hundred of his, are narratives of profane love, many of them crude and anticlerical. To a modern reader, The Heptameron seems rather startling beside the rest of her work. But Boccaccio produced rarefied religious writing also. It seems to have been true of medieval Europe that these two poles of experience could coexist in one sensibility, as a cycle of sin and repentance, perhaps. Then, too, marriage among the aristocracy was made to suit calculations of power and diplomatic advantage, and to produce heirs. It is no great surprise that they regarded it casually or cynically or as a kind of captivity, or that infidelity was acceptable in the circles The Heptameron represents.
Cauvin invented modern marriage, if that is what he did, by basing his vision of it on the Old Testament use of the metaphor of married love to describe the covenant relationship between God and Israel, in which adultery is idolatry and apostasy, and faithfulness is joy and salvation. He was married for nine years, very happily, to Idelette de Bure, a widow with two children. His only child died within days of its birth, and he outlived Idelette by twenty-five years. Throughout his life the idea of marriage seems only to have been more cherished by him. In the enormous positive significance he attached to it, he set himself apart from the religious tradition which idealized virginity and celibacy, and also from the humanist embrace of the sensuality of courtly and pagan literature (which was, nevertheless, published in Geneva, during Cauvin’s prominence there). Perhaps he was fascinated with marriage in part because it integrated these extremes. It is the strongest impulse of his thought to reject polarities. This enshrining of marriage is seen as narrowness in Cauvin, as Puritanism. But perhaps it should be seen as the solution to a problem Marguerite would have acknowledged. In The Heptameron, a fictional party of stranded aristocratic travelers tell stories to pass the time. The ladies in the company are better and brighter than the men, but the tales are so often brutal and charmless, to the detriment of women, that the world they describe seems like a world well lost. The book was not published until nine years after the queen’s death.