endure caresses which make me shudder, because they
are an inheritance from five unfortunate women. Jane, Jane, do you
comprehend what it is to be obliged to embrace a man who has murdered
three wives and put away two? to be obliged to kiss this king whose lips
open just as readily to utter vows of love as sentences of death? Ah,
Jane, I speak, I live, and still I suffer all the agonies of death! They
call me a queen, and yet I tremble for my life every hour, and conceal
my anxiety and fear beneath the appearance of happiness! My God, I am
five-and-twenty, and my heart is still the heart of a child; it does not
yet know itself, and now it is doomed never to learn to know itself; for
I am Henry's wife, and to love another is, in other words, to wish to
mount the scaffold. The scaffold! Look, Jane. When the king approached
me and confessed his love and offered me his hand, suddenly there rose
before me a fearful picture. It was no more the king whom I saw before
me, but the hangman; and it seemed to me that I saw three corpses lying
at his feet, and with a loud scream I sank senseless before him. When
I revived, the king was holding me in his arms. The shock of this
unexpected good fortune, he thought, had made me faint. He kissed me
and called me his bride; he thought not for a moment that I could refuse
him. And I--despise me, Jane--I was such a dastard, that I could not
summon up courage for a downright refusal. Yes, I was so craven also, as
to be unwilling to die. Ah, my God, it appeared to me that life at that
moment beckoned to me with thousands of joys, thousands of charms, which
I had never known, and for which my soul thirsted as for the manna in
the wilderness. I would live, live at any cost. I would gain myself a
respite, so that I might once more share happiness, love, and enjoyment.
Look, Jane, men call me ambitious. They say I have given my hand to
Henry because he is king. Ah, they know not how I shuddered at this
royal crown. They know not that in anguish of heart I besought the king
not to bestow his hand upon me, and thereby rouse all the ladies of his
kingdom as foes against me. They know not that I confessed that I loved
him, merely that I might be able to add that I was ready, out of love to
him, to sacrifice my own happiness to his, and so conjured him to choose
a consort worthy of himself, from the hereditary princesses of Europe.
[Footnote: "La vie d'Elizabeth, Reine d'Angleterre, traduite de
l'Ital