If entirely confused.
* * *
July 1556
Palace of Fontainebleau, France
Marguerite glancedup at the statue on the pedestal before her, and then back down to the sketchbook in her lap as she worked on sketching out the details of the form with the bit of charcoal she had borrowed from her tutor. Well, borrowed was not the right word. She had stolen it. While drawing was a perfectly ladylike pursuit to the stuffy gentleman, he wished her to adhere more strictly to her other studies. She personally felt his other subjects were utterly useless, and instead wished to spend her time drawing.
Honestly, from a practical standpoint, what was the difference between embroidery and drawing? They were both art. But what dismayed her was not that her tutor allowed her to draw, or that he wished her not to. It was that it did not matter.
Perhaps that was it? One was a harmless triviality, something to pass the time, and the other was a talent of honor that could grant rights and money to those who possessed it. There were no famous female painters. She knew it was not because her gender was incapable of such things. It was because the other gender wished them not to be. She could draw just as well as any man, paint as well as any man, but she would never make a living at it.
She still did not understand why, but it did not matter in the end. It was a simple fact of life, and it would not be her place to stop it. Even as the half-daughter to the king, she was powerless in such matters.
But she could choose to ignore it.
And so, she sat on the bench in the hallway of the palace, her skirts pooling around her, and she sketched the figure of a man onto the scrap of paper she had also borrowed from her tutor. Claude d’Urfé would oft roll his eyes at the discovery of her drawings, but as a patron of the arts himself, did not punish her for the simple dalliance that he viewed as merely a misplaced interest in the topic, not an affinity for the creation of it. His mindset on the topic suited her just fine.
Despite that, it was immensely frustrating to her that she was not allowed to take formal lessons in art and yet her male half-siblings were allowed to do whatever they liked. Especially Henri the younger, who preferred art to more scholarly subjects as well. As Catherine’s favorite son, young Henri was…well, Marguerite worked at all opportunities not to cross the impossibly dramatic five-year-old prince.
That was not to say she did not get along with the flamboyant young thing. All the opposite. She would sit beside him in the gardens, and he would allow her to draw as well, often using the same supplies. He would regale her with what he had learned, and she would listen eagerly.
Sometimes it angered him that she was ostensibly better than he was at drawing, but she would calmly point out that she was ten years his elder, and therefore had no extra talent than he, simply ten more years of practice. And that once he reached her age, he would have easily surpassed her, as she would not have access to the tutelage he could have on account of her gender.
That always calmed the boy, who insisted that he was to become whatever he liked to be, no matter the rules.
Honestly, Marguerite hoped he had the chance to do just that. Even at such a young age, the young Henri was an almost overwhelming presence in any room he found himself in, and she often found herself smiling at the boy’s antics.
But better anyone than the eldest prince, Francis. One year Henri’s elder, and in all ways seemingly the younger. Where the young Henri was full of passion and vigor, even if it was sometimes used maliciously, Francis was the opposite. Frail and fragile, she could not abide that child’s incessant whining. But he was the heir apparent, and she was simply a fixture of the court. And so, she attended his wishes and did her best to mind them when their nurse was not around to do so. Ever since Diane had left, the duty fell to Marguerite instead.
She smiled faintly. She missed her half-sister. Diane was the eldest child of the king and a fellow illegitimate daughter. They had bonded over that, and Marguerite had found shelter in her kindness. Often, Diane would point out how very kind Henri was to his children, regardless of their heritage.
It was one of the many reasons Marguerite loved her father. She could complain all she wanted about learning Italian and Latin or being taught to play the lute—which she was abysmal at—but she knew what the alternatives could be. She was not an ungrateful daughter.
She was just a little bit of a lonely one, sometimes. At the age of fourteen, Diane had been wed and was now a duchess. Without a fellow half-daughter around to keep her company, Marguerite found herself spending more and more time with her favorite companion.
“There you are!”
Smiling, she looked up from her scrap of paper. “Hello, Leopold.” She blinked at the young man, just a few years her elder. “Oh! Am I late?”
“Yes, indeed.” He smirked and crossed his arms over the front of his tunic. “How do you expect me to train you to fence if you do not attend your lessons?”
“I lost track of the hour, that is all.” Tucking her drawing into a stack of other papers she had been meant to be reading on some treatise or another, she sprang to her feet. “Shall we, though?”
“Only if you say you are sorry for leaving me standing out there by the woods.” His smirk widened to a grin.
“Yes, yes, I am sorry.” She stood on her tiptoes to give him a harmless kiss on the cheek. “Let us go, then. I am eager to learn more parry techniques.”
“Better you master the first one than learn the rest. And you are quite terrible.”
“I am not!” She frowned. “It is this lousy dress. You are allowed to fight in—in trousers, and I must do so like this.” She picked up the fabric of her skirt and dropped it again. “It is not my fault.”
“So you keep saying.” He laughed. “I do not think I believe you.”
“I do not care if you believe me.” Pouting, she kept her head held high. “I am a princess. You are merely my knight. It is not your place to question me.”
“Oh, is that so?” He shoved her arm playfully. “You are no more a princess than that plant over there.”