Sidney Dark's biography of Kristina, year 1929, part 2

Source:

Twelve Royal Ladies, pages 165 to 166, by Sidney Dark, illustrations by Mabel Pugh, 1929; original at the University of California

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b3477474&seq=177

The account:

Christina had become a European personality, and the French Ambassador to Sweden was instructed to send a character sketch of her to the French Court. She was, he said, below the average height, with a soft, firm voice, and she combined an extreme passion for glory with love for a lofty virtue. She was devoted to duty, and "her mind, greedy on knowing all things, seeks information of all." Cold and heat were indifferent to her. "In eating she is simple, careless, and entirely without epicureanism." She never slept for more than five hours a day. She cared little about dress and ornaments. "There is nothing feminine in her but her sex", wrote the Confessor to the Spanish Ambassador. She had added to her linguistic equipment and now spoke ten languages and could read Hebrew and Arabic, and she had a strange passion for the study of the obscurer Fathers.

"She had neither the face nor the beauty nor the inclinations of her sex", wrote Mme. de Motteville. "Instead of making men die of love for her, she makes them die of shame and despair. She has no need of Ministers, as she herself, young as she is, manages all alone." Her letters to France, written, of course, in the French language, were admired for "the graceful humour of the thoughts and the beauty of the style", and it was said, so Mme. de Motteville relates, that "the depths of science are for her what needle and distaff are for our sex."

Christina said of herself, "I was distressfully suspicious, ambitious to excess, I was hot-tempered, proud, and impatient, contemptuous and satirical." She had no women friends. She hardly spoke more than a few sentences a day to her attendants. But she attracted to Stockholm scholars from all over Europe, of whom Descartes, the friend of many princesses, who wrote of her sweetness and goodness, was the most famous.

Above: Kristina.

Above: Sidney Dark.