Margaret the First Read Online Free PDF Page A

being fitted: many yards of colored ribbon.
    At home: our house was a salon, William a world-class host. He was witty, laughed easily, set everyone at ease. He was, too, I quickly learned, a rather famous patron—of Dryden, Gassendi, Jonson, and more. I greeted with practiced curtsies, grasped a Chinese fan. Here came William Davenant, poet laureate, who’d lost his nose to syphilis and wore a black cloth in its place. Handsome Lord Widdrington, Bishop John Bramhall, Edmund Waller with his fishy eye, Sir Kenelm Digby, and merry Thomas Hobbes. As for the French: René Descartes, Roberval, and the father of acoustics, Marin Mersenne, who stared openly at my breasts.
    Of what did they speak as they stood or sat near the fire?
    In the beginning they came to eat; William was generous, even when insolvent, and many of the exiles had fled with nothing but their shirts. On the buffet sat wine, cheeses hard and soft, bread, poached apples, berries or asparagus, fish with horseradish, sliced salted ham.
    A man from Japan folded paper into frogs.
    An Austrian played rondeaux upon the harpsichord.
    One evening someone asked what modern scheme would replace the collapsed Aristotelian system, the Middle Ages with their air, wind, earth, and fire, their Ptolemaic structure of the heavens. Soon, beside empty glasses and snuffboxes, strange homemade instruments materialized on our tables: telescopes, compasses, captoptics, more. They spoke of new philosophies, in English or French, of bustling worlds in microscopes, the human body and mind, atomic operations and mechanical arrangement. It was all perfectly new to my thinking. I’d never seen a baro-meter, or cupped a lens in my palm. I sat in the corner, pretending to read or sew.
    One especially spirited night, William himself proposed that each star we see is a sun, with planets above and below. “It stands to reason,” he explained, “that the universe is filled with planets we cannot perceive, due to the strength of their suns. Invisible, you see, yet teeming with life.” “Yes, if—” someone started; “No, but—” another broke in. Lively debate ensued, and a newcomer, seeing me listen, asked me for my thoughts. I demurred, claiming my sex as reason. A second man then sportingly suggested they debate the nature of woman. “You will find, sir,” I abruptly spoke, “women as difficult to be known and understood as the universe.” The room fell silent. I was surprised as any man. Madame de La Fayette called the following week.
    Indeed I was, for the very first time, totally à la mode . Talk of the place and role of women had been circulating through fashionable salons in each district of the city. Sex a physical distinction, not a quality of mind? A writer, they insisted, must be totally unique. What shape are the atoms at the bottom of the sea? The language of the universe is music. No, math! Hobbes insisted he’d been first to attain a theory of light. Descartes rejected any bodily perception. Someone claimed the right kind of ship might as easily sail up as east. You cannot move from “I am thinking” to “I am thought.” Passions flared. William stood in the middle, attempting to keep peace. I listened from my chair or upstairs in my room. As quickly as I’d entered their conversation, I slipped out of it again. My mind, I often felt, was like a little cave of mud. I never spoke to Master Hobbes, said nothing to Descartes. In fact—William couldn’t fail to notice—his wife spoke less and less.
    In March, in London, my niece died from consumption. In April, my sister Mary. In Ireland that summer my brother Tom was crushed by his horse. The following autumn, our mother was taken.
    Alone in my room in Paris, I felt oblivion creep near.
    I wrote: “Mother liv’d to see the ruin of her Childrin in which was her ruin and then died.”
    I wrote: “I did a silent mourning Beautie spy.”

TWO YEARS OF MARRIAGE PASSED AND STILL I WAS NOT PREGNANT . Remedies were