Marguerite de Navarre: A Critical Companion 1843846268, 9781843846260, 9781800105119

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Gallica Volume 48

MARGUERITE DE NAVARRE

Gallica

ISSN 1749–091X Founding Editor: Sarah Kay Series Editors: †Simon Gaunt and Peggy McCracken Gallica aims to provide a forum for the best current work in medieval and early modern French studies. Literary studies are particularly welcome and preference is given to works written in English, although publication in French is not excluded. Proposals or queries should be sent in the first instance to Professor McCracken, or to the publisher, at the addresses given below; all submissions receive prompt and informed consideration. Professor Peggy McCracken ([email protected]) Caroline Palmer ([email protected]) Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the end of this volume.

MARGUERITE DE NAVARRE A CRITICAL COMPANION

EMILY BUTTERWORTH

D. S. BREWER

© Emily Butterworth 2022 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Emily Butterworth to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2022 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge ISBN 978–1–84384–626–0 (hardback) ISBN 978–1–80010–511–9 (ePDF) D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate

Cover image: Marguerite de Navarre, La Coche ou le Débat de l’amour, c. 1540. The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. MS. Douce 91, fol. 44v.

For Thomas and in memory of Simon Gaunt

Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Note on Names and Editions Editions of Reference Introduction: A Brief Literary and Historical Chronology

ix xi xiii xv 1

1 Communities

10

2 Religion

41

3 Politics

75

4 Women and Men

103

5 Desire

132

6 Form and Technique

163

Conclusion: Print and Public

191

Bibliography Index

207 221

Illustrations Genealogical Table 1

Marguerite de Navarre’s immediate family

xii

Figures 1 2

L’Office de sainte Anne, after 1517. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits, Français 1035. Reproduced by permission Ysambert de Saint-Léger (trans), Le Myroer des dames nobles et illustres (c. 1529–1530). Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits, Français 1189. Reproduced by permission

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Acknowledgements Many people have been involved in the conception and production of this book. I’d like to thank in particular Simon Gaunt and Peggy McCracken, Caroline Palmer and Elizabeth McDonald at Boydell and Brewer, and my anonymous reviewer, for their careful reading and invaluable support. This book is the product of many years’ reading, teaching, and thinking about Marguerite de Navarre. But the bulk of the writing was done in 2020–21, during successive periods of lockdown and other measures taken against the global pandemic, COVID-19. This was for many a period of anxiety, distress, and loss. At the very least, many of us were forced, like the storytellers in the Heptameron, into a period of hiatus, of waiting for normal life to resume. Storytelling projects like the New York Times’ Decameron Project emerged to combat the stress and pain of the pandemic. Writing this book kept me sane in the days of confinement, but it would not have been possible if my husband had not taken on the bulk of the home-schooling and childcare and thus protected my writing time. This book was written against a backdrop of fractions as well as fractious debate over lockdown, vaccines, and social distancing. It also emerges from different anxieties of separation, as with exquisite timing, January 2021 marked the definitive exit of the UK from the European Union. As I re-read Marguerite’s work it seemed to speak to these times and offer a space to think about differences, resentments, and reconciliations. I hope this book opens her work for a new generation of readers to find their own answers.

Marguerite de Navarre’s immediate family

Note on Names and Editions Marguerite de Navarre went by a number of names during her lifetime which linked her to noble and royal families and the territories they controlled. She was born Marguerite d’Angoulême, became on her first marriage Marguerite d’Alençon, and then, on marrying Henri d’Albret, Marguerite de Navarre. This is partly why I call her Marguerite and not Navarre throughout this book, despite the risk of trivialising her cultural achievements; but I am also following a convention by which royal people are known by their first names and not by their last, which indicate their house and family and (in a woman’s case) their husband. For quotations from the Heptaméron, I have chosen to use as my edition of reference Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani’s Livre de poche edition (Paris, 1999). This edition is cheap and readily available, and also has the advantage of using a manuscript already familiar from previous editions. Renja Salminen’s magisterial edition for Droz (Geneva, 1999) is an invaluable resource throughout, but it is expensive and less available in libraries. Marguerite’s Œuvres complètes are being published by Champion under the direction of Nicole Cazauran and promise to become definitive. But for ease of access, I have used earlier editions that are more readily available. For translations, I have used Paul Chilton’s Penguin translation of the Heptameron (London, 2004) and the texts in Selected Writings: A Bilingual Edition translated by Rouben Cholakian and Mary Skemp (Chicago, 2008). Other unattributed translations are my own. For Bible quotations, I have used the King James translation. Details of these and other works can be found in the Bibliography. For transcriptions from early modern texts, I have made minimal changes. I have left punctuation and spelling unchanged, but I have changed the consonantal ‘i’ and ‘u’ to ‘j’ and ‘v’ and resolved any contractions to make reading easier.

Editions of Reference Marguerite de Navarre, L’Heptaméron, ed. Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani. Paris: Librairie générale francaise, 1999 Marguerite de Navarre, The Heptameron, trans. Paul Chilton. London: Penguin, 2004 Marguerite de Navarre, Selected Writings: A Bilingual Edition, trans. Rouben Cholakian and Mary Skemp. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008 The Bible: Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008 La Saincte Bible en francoys [trans. Jacques Lefevre d’Etaples]. Antwerp: Martin l’Empereur, 1530

Introduction: A Brief Literary and Historical Chronology The life and writing of Marguerite de Navarre (1492–1549) bear witness to a troubled but exciting period of French and European history. A powerful and prominent political player through her brother, François I, and in her own right as a peer of the realm and queen of Navarre, Marguerite was at the heart of French diplomacy, religious controversy, and intellectual culture throughout her life. She wrote prolifically and fluently in a wide range of genres including devotional poetry, theatre, verse epistles, spiritual songs, short stories, diplomatic despatches, and political letters; some destined for print publication, some for more limited publics. She witnessed the flourishing of arts, culture, and learning, as the ideas and practices of the Renaissance took hold throughout Europe, and the critique of the established church which became the Reformation, bringing both renewed spirituality and bitter conflict. To a certain extent, these labels – ‘Renaissance’ and ‘Reformation’ – are later attempts to make sense of a history that was experienced as unpredictable and unresolved by people living through it. But they do help us to understand the important changes and concerns of the early sixteenth century, and this Introduction will provide a brief guide to the key dates of Marguerite’s life and how her work fits into a wider cultural, religious, and political history, an account that will be elaborated, developed, and nuanced in subsequent chapters. The Renaissance is the term given to the period from around 1450–1600 in Italy and 1500–1600 elsewhere in Europe. It was a period of exceptional cultural and social development and change, in which the scholars involved saw themselves remaking European knowledge. The ‘Renaissance’ itself refers to the ‘rebirth’ of classical learning and knowledge that began in Italy and spread throughout Europe, thanks in large part to the Greek scholars who fled Constantinople after it was conquered by the Ottoman Empire in 1453. They brought with them previously unknown or forgotten texts of classical Greece which then entered circulation in European intellectual networks. Scholars associated with the Renaissance are known as humanists for their emphasis on the humanities – rhetoric, grammar, history, poetry, moral philosophy – and

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MARGUERITE DE NAVARRE: A CRITICAL COMPANION

their insistence on a return to the sources both of classical learning and of theological teaching. Many humanists saw themselves as making a decisive break with the period that immediately preceded them, now known as the Middle Ages, and this piece of self-promotion was also a popular view among nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians following the Swiss cultural historian Jakob Burkhardt.1 The historical narrative tends to be more nuanced now, as continuities between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance are emphasised rather than definitive breaks or turning points.2 Marguerite was educated with her younger brother, François, in the new humanist learning, under the watchful eye of their mother, Louise. But she drew on both the new humanist learning and medieval traditions in her work, bridging the gap some saw between innovative ideas from Italy and popular French culture. The Reformation was similarly a movement of simultaneous optimism and division. Commonly given a neat starting point in 1517, when a German friar called Martin Luther nailed a list of ninety-five topics for discussion onto a church door in Wittenberg, the Reformation has roots that reach back into medieval criticism of established Catholicism. Luther’s protest against certain church practices and institutional corruption grew into a definitive split in the Western Catholic Church and the establishment of a new Christian church, later known as Protestantism. The Frenchman Jean Calvin played a vital role in defining and establishing a particular form of Protestantism in Geneva, but Protestantism was characterised by its multiple forms and sects. Marguerite was attached to a group of French thinkers, theologians, and clergy who agreed with many of Protestantism’s criticisms of the Catholic Church but never took that final step into schism. They are known as the Evangelicals due to their emphasis on the primacy of the Bible (l’Evangile) in Christian belief. Marguerite explored and disseminated evangelical beliefs and the critique of traditional Catholic practices throughout her work, as we will see in more detail in Chapter 2. In France, Protestantism quickly became politicised. For Marguerite, new ideas of reforming the church were entirely compatible with royal authority and power, but for other more conservative thinkers reform was synonymous with sedition. François I seems at first to have been receptive to reform, but political developments – including his relationship with the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V – influenced his religious policy. During his reign, Evangelicals had moments of optimism when it appeared that their ideas for religious reform might be implemented; but, along with the 1 In his classic work The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), Burkhardt argues that the Renaissance marked the beginning of modernity (trans. S. G. C. Middlemore, London: Penguin, 1990). 2 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).



Introduction: A Brief Literary and Historical Chronology 3

French Protestants (known as Huguenots) they also experienced persecution, exile, and execution. The conflict between Catholics and Protestants and the powerful families that took different sides would culminate in a long series of civil wars, known as the Wars of Religion, that consumed France for thirtysix years from 1562. But Marguerite did not live to experience civil war, and from within a period of division and hostility she tried to identify modes of coexistence that would not result in violence. Marguerite was involved in the most important and remarkable movements of her time and her works are imprinted with this social, cultural, and religious history. Her best-known work, the collection of stories known as the Heptameron, grapples with contemporary questions that remain urgent today, including the relative status of men and women, what love means, how to live a good life, and how to filter and interpret information. But it is also concerned with questions that now seem quite alien for many of us as modern readers: the relationship of the individual to God, salvation, and the disappointments of the material world. This Critical Companion offers readings of Marguerite’s work in their cultural, political, and religious contexts, in order to illuminate what may be obscure and to identify modern resonances and divergences. Many themes and concerns are shared among her works, but some surface more prominently in certain pieces than in others. I read the Heptameron alongside the devotional poetry, the plays, and the diplomacy, in order to pull out the common threads and explore what is specific to each text. Through a mixture of contextual analysis and close readings, I navigate a path towards a more comprehensive understanding of Marguerite’s work. Historical and literary scholarship on Marguerite is extensive and varied, and I often take the critical approaches of this existing scholarship as a guide in my discussions of her work, incorporating my own new readings alongside this critical tradition. Using these diverse tools of literary, social, and historical analysis, this Companion explores the richness of Marguerite’s engagement with the literary, political, and religious culture of her time, aiming to bring her into conversation with the present. Marguerite wrote a wide-ranging and prolific corpus, but not all of it was printed during her lifetime. This does not mean that her works remained completely unknown until they were eventually printed; instead, they would have circulated among more restricted publics in manuscript. It does mean, however, that it is sometimes difficult to date her output precisely, and so the chronology that follows – in which Marguerite’s works are placed alongside the significant moments of her life – is based to a certain extent on conjecture.3 3 For a chronology of printed editions, see Pierre Jourda, ‘Tableau chronologique des publications de Marguerite de Navarre’, Revue du Seizième Siècle 12 (1925), 209–55.

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MARGUERITE DE NAVARRE: A CRITICAL COMPANION

One of her first sustained compositions was the epistolary exchange she pursued with Guillaume Briçonnet, the evangelical bishop of Meaux, between 1521 and 1524, when she was duchess of Alençon (through her first marriage in 1509 to Charles, duke of Alençon) and duchess of Berry (after François gave her this title in 1517). She was by this time an important political and religious patron, and Briçonnet was clearly petitioning her support for his cause, while she turned to him for spiritual guidance. Her letters are considerably shorter than his, but they show her deep commitment to religious belief, her interest in evangelical theology, a taste for powerful and resonant metaphor and image, and an awareness of the intersection of religion and politics in her life. In the sixteenth century, letter writing was an art in itself, and many prominent humanists wrote to each other with one eye on eventual publication. This does not seem to have been the case for Marguerite – she was a princess rather than a scholar – but she did exchange many letters with poets, popes, writers, and diplomats, manipulating the cultures and practices of epistolary convention for her own ends.4 The exchange with Briçonnet was not just an apprenticeship in evangelical thought or a pragmatic correspondence between patron and client; it was also Marguerite’s initiation into writing, as we will see in Chapter 6. Her earliest literary works were religious – and more specifically, evangelical – in inspiration. In 1524, in response to the death of her eightyear-old niece Charlotte, she wrote the Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne (Dialogue in the Form of a Nocturnal Vision), in which Charlotte’s soul comes back from heaven to comfort her bereft aunt. This piece was printed, along with several others, by the evangelical printer Simon du Bois in 1533.5 Around the same time she wrote a verse translation and adaptation of Martin Luther’s reflections on the prayer Our Father, Pater Noster.6 The 1520s were for Marguerite a time of great spiritual reflection, provoked by her correspondence with Briçonnet, her patronage of other Evangelicals such as Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples and Gérard Roussel, and the French translations of Luther that Simon du Bois printed in Paris and then in Alençon, under 4 For a study of Marguerite’s correspondence as evidence of her practices of patronage, see Barbara Stephenson, The Power and Patronage of Marguerite de Navarre (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). 5 Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne entre tresnoble & excellente princesse ma dame Marguerite de France […]. Le Miroir de lame pecherresse […]. Discord estant en lhomme par la contrariete de Lesperit & de la Chair: & sa paix par vie spirituelle. Une Oraison a nostre seigneur Jesus Christ (Alençon: Simon du Bois, 1533). For a modern edition, see Marguerite de Navarre, Dialogue en forme de vision noctorne, ed. Renja Salminen (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1985). 6 Le Pater Noster de Marguerite de Navarre, in W. G. Moore, La Réforme allemande et la littérature française: Recherches sur la notoriété de Luther en France (Strasbourg: Publications de la faculté des lettres de l’université, 1930), pp. 432–41.



Introduction: A Brief Literary and Historical Chronology 5

Marguerite’s protection, where he moved when the capital became too dangerous for his output.7 In 1525 François I was captured by Charles V at the battle of Pavia and imprisoned in Madrid. Marguerite’s husband, Charles, died soon after the battle and Marguerite herself was summoned to Spain to help negotiate her brother’s release. During her journey to Spain and her time in negotiation with the Spanish she wrote both diplomatic and personal letters documenting the progress and anguish of the talks with an adversary whom she could not bring herself to trust, as we will see further in Chapter 3. In 1527 she was married to Henri d’Albret, king of Navarre (a small territory in the Pyrenees) and established courts at Pau and Nérac. In 1528, she gave birth to a daughter, Jeanne; in 1530 followed a son, Jean, who died aged four months. Shortly afterwards, in 1531, Marguerite’s mother, Louise, also died. During these bereavements Marguerite must have been writing, as that same year, 1531, Simon du Bois printed her first major work, the devotional poem Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse (The Mirror of the Sinful Soul).8 This was a landmark in French printing: the first text by a woman to be printed in France while its author was still alive. This anonymous printing seems to have gone relatively unremarked, but then in 1533 another edition was printed by the Parisian printer Antoine Augereau.9 The year 1533 turned out to be an eventful one. Henry VIII definitively broke with Rome and declared himself head of the Anglican Church. In France, there were uprisings in Paris and iconoclastic attacks on statues in Alençon. An explicitly hostile reception met Augereau’s 1533 anonymous printing of the Miroir: because it omitted the printer’s name, a legal requirement for the purposes of censorship, it was condemned by the Faculty of Theology in Paris, the Sorbonne. After the intervention of the king, the condemnation was withdrawn, and Augereau printed two further editions that same year, both with the required bibliographical information and one with the author’s name. The conservative move against the king’s sister was an ominous one for the Evangelicals as it suggested even she was not safe; and yet the Sorbonne’s response to the Miroir does not seem to have stopped Marguerite – or her printers – reissuing it. In all, the Miroir was printed eight times under different titles and with different accompanying texts before Marguerite included it in her selected works in 1547. 7 Simon du Bois was proclaimed a heretic (a Protestant) in 1535 and disappears from the historical record. 8 Le Miroir de l’ame pecheresse, auquel elle recongnoist ses faultes et pechez (Alençon: Simon du Bois, 1531). Included, with an English translation, in Marguerite de Navarre, Selected Writings: A Bilingual Edition, ed. and trans. Rouben Cholakian and Mary Skemp (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), pp. 76–149. 9 Le Miroir de l’ame pecheresse, auquel elle recongnoist ses faultes et pechez ([Paris: Antoine Augereau, 1533]).

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MARGUERITE DE NAVARRE: A CRITICAL COMPANION

However, 1534 was a catastrophic year for French Evangelicals. On 18 October, placards were posted around Paris and other cities attacking the Catholic practice of the Mass. François was furious at an act which he considered to be seditious, as much an attack on his authority as on religious practice. There followed a period of increasing persecution of Evangelicals in which many left France; Marguerite herself left Paris for Navarre. It is in this period following the persecution that many critics place the composition of the four biblical plays and the evangelical plays that explore the clashes between conservative dogmatism and reforming faith, Le Malade (The Invalid) and L’Inquisiteur (The Inquisitor). In 1541 Marguerite and Henri’s daughter, Jeanne, was married against her will (and possibly also her parents’) to William, duke of Cleves, on the insistence of François, who was looking for an alliance among the German Protestant princes against Charles V. It is thought that the courtly poem La Coche (The Coach) was composed around this time, in the midst of Marguerite’s unhappiness at the Cleves marriage; it explores the obligations and difficulties of love.10 In February 1542, as part of the carnival festivities that preceded Lent, the play now known as Quatre femmes was probably the ‘farce’ performed by the king’s daughter and mistress and other court ladies for the king and the cardinal de Tournon that is mentioned by the English ambassador William Paget in a letter to Henry VIII.11 In 1543, the Fable du faux cuyder (The Fable of False Pride) was printed, a poem probably written in 1541 for Marguerite’s niece on her marriage to the duke of Savoy.12 A tale written to warn women of the tricks of men, it was reprinted in 1545 and 1547 and was included in the 1547 selected works. During the 1540s, Marguerite’s circle became interested in Plato and Neoplatonism and printed a number of French translations dedicated to her, perhaps as part of a ‘Plato project’ commissioned by Marguerite herself.13 This Christianised Neoplatonism is explored and challenged in Marguerite’s work, and we will see further in Chapter 5. 10 Marguerite de Navarre, La Coche, ed. Robert Marichal (Geneva: Droz, 1971); on the date of composition, see p. 36, and Patricia F. Cholakian and Rouben C. Cholakian, Marguerite de Navarre: Mother of the Renaissance (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), p. 213. La Coche is included in Selected Writings, pp. 154–231. 11 Théâtre profane, ed. Verdun L. Saulnier (Paris: Droz, 1946), p. 91. 12 La Fable du faulx cuyder contenant L’histoire des Nymphes de Dyane, transmuées en saulles faicte par une notable dame de la court enuoyée a madame Marguerite fille unicque du Roy de France (Adam Saulnier, [1543]). Included with an English translation in Selected Writings, pp. 236–79. 13 Cholakian and Cholakian, Marguerite de Navarre, p. 213. Bonaventure Des Périers’s translation of Plato’s Lysis appeared in the Recueil des Oeuvres de feu Bonaventure des Périers (Lyon: Jean de Tournes, 1544). Simon Silvius translated the Italian humanist Marsile Ficino’s commentary on Plato’s Symposium, the founding text of Neoplatonism: Le Commentaire de Marsille Ficin, florentin: sur le Banquet d’amour de Platon (Poitiers: Marnef, 1546); ed. Stephen Murphy (Paris: Champion, 2004).



Introduction: A Brief Literary and Historical Chronology 7

Marguerite was involved in other notable literary projects during this time. She commissioned Antoine Le Maçon to produce a translation of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, which was printed in 1545.14 She spent the year 1545 travelling with the French court in the chateaux of the Loire. It is at this time that most critics think the original group of stories that eventually became part of the Heptameron was composed at the French court as part of the ‘French Decameron’ project that is described in the Heptameron Prologue (although some scholars think she started writing the stories much earlier).15 The final setting of the Heptameron was drawn from Marguerite’s own experience and travels during this time: in 1546, Marguerite and Henri spent time in the Pyrenean spa of Cauterets. After this, Marguerite probably wrote the Heptameron Prologue and devised the frame narrative, in which the storytellers are returning to France from Cauterets when they are stranded in a monastery in Sarrance, in the Pyrenees. Like the Decameron, the Heptameron is a collection of stories that are told by a group of aristocrats to pass a difficult time and to distract them from their traumatic circumstances: in the Decameron, it is the plague; in the Heptameron, catastrophic floods, theft, and murder. Marguerite’s ten aristocrats plan to tell one story each a day for ten days, on the model of the Decameron, but the collection was still unfinished at her death, numbering just seventy-two stories. Between tales, Marguerite added extensive discussions in which the tellers debate the meaning and significance of what they have just heard. On 31 March 1547, François died while Marguerite was still on her way from Navarre to join him. She had stopped at a priory in Tusson (near Poitiers) and stayed there in retreat after news of his death reached her. Although his death was shattering for her, this period of withdrawal was remarkably productive. She wrote spiritual songs and the long devotional poem La Navire (The Ship), in which François attempts to console her on his death; she finished another long religious poem, Les Prisons; and another play, the Comédie sur le trépas du roi (Play on the Death of the King), which, although saturated with grief, includes an element of reconciliation at the end. She also wrote or revised another ‘mirror’ poem, the Miroir de Jhesus Christ crucifié (The Mirror of Jesus Christ Crucified), a contemplation of the death of Christ.16 Just before his death, François had approved the privilege for his sister’s edition of her selected works which was printed in 1547 by the Lyon printer Jean de Tournes with the title Les Marguerites de la Marguerite des

14 Le Decameron de Messire Jehan Bocace Florentin, nouvellement traduict d’Italien en Francoys par Maistre Anthoine le Macon (Paris: for Estienne Roffet, 1545). 15 Heptaméron, ed. Renja Salminen (Geneva: Droz, 1999), pp. xli–xlii. 16 Miroir de Jhesus Christ crucifié was first printed posthumously in 1552 and more recently edited by Lucia Fontanella (Alessandria: Orso, 1984).

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MARGUERITE DE NAVARRE: A CRITICAL COMPANION

princesses.17 The title is a pun on Marguerite’s name, which means ‘pearl’; these writings are the pearls of the pearl of princesses. Marguerite may have chosen the works she wanted to include and possibly worked with the printer on the edition. It came out in two volumes, Les Marguerites and the Suyte des Marguerites, and includes Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse, the four biblical plays, a selection of chansons spirituelles, letters to her brother and husband, two non-biblical plays, and La Coche.18 François’s death marked the end of many things for Marguerite. She was not close to his heir, Henri II, and with his succession she lost all political influence, and her financial situation became precarious. Religious conflict was on the rise. Nevertheless, she kept writing. She revised the stories of the Heptameron over the course of the autumn of 1547, in Pau. In Lent of February 1548, another evangelical play, La Comédie de Mont-de-Marsan, was performed at Marguerite’s house in Mont-de-Marsan.19 In May of that year, Jeanne and Marguerite spent some unusual time together in Cauterets, and after Jeanne married Antoine de Bourbon in October 1548 Marguerite wrote her verse letters expressing her sorrow at their separation.20 In 1549 a final, short play, Parfaits amants, was performed for Jeanne and Antoine when they visited her in Navarre in the spring. But neither her daughter nor her husband were with her when Marguerite died in her chateau in Odos on 21 December 1549. Not much is known about the circulation of the Heptameron between Marguerite’s death and its first printing in 1558. No doubt it was circulating in manuscript copies, nineteen of which survive, nine of which are complete, including the handsome presentation manuscript which the humanist, translator, and jurist Adrien de Thou made in 1553 with the title Le Decameron.21 Among these manuscripts is an intriguing example that critics take to be a first draft, or first stage, of the Heptameron project. It contains just twenty-eight tales, no Prologue, and no discussions; instead, each tale is preceded by an ‘Argument’ which summarises it and a ‘Conclusion’ which provides moral direction, both of which are reworked in other manuscripts to provide the transitions between stories and debates. The tales are not in the order in which they appear in Marguerites de la Marguerite des princesses, 2 vols. (Lyon: Jean de Tournes, 1547). The letter to Henri, written in Cauterets in 1547, is included in Selected Writings, pp. 63–7. 19 Included in Selected Writings, pp. 304–69. 20 Chrétiens et mondains, poèmes épars, ed. Richard Cooper (Paris: Champion, 2007), pp. 206–22 (with Jeanne’s replies). One of Marguerite’s letters is included in Selected Writings, pp. 66–71. 21 On the De Thou manuscript, see Deborah N. Losse, ‘Underestimating the Reader: The De Thou Manuscript of the Heptaméron’, Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme 7.1 (1983), 42–7. 17

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Introduction: A Brief Literary and Historical Chronology 9

other, later manuscripts, suggesting that the first ten in this manuscript may be the tales that were originally composed for the project conceived in the French royal court in the 1540s.22 The first printed edition of the Heptameron appeared in 1558, and a second, more complete, edition the following year. We will come back to these editions and their idiosyncrasies in the Conclusion. The chapters in this Companion each take a particular theme and trace it through several of Marguerite’s works. Individual works feature more prominently in some chapters than others, but one text remains a constant in all chapters, and that is the Heptameron. Chapter 1 explores the social and literary communities to which Marguerite belonged, from her family circle and the royal court to the virtual communities of scholars and writers. The role of writing in creating imaginary communities is a focus in this chapter. Chapter 2 considers religion and its importance in Marguerite’s writing. I survey the context of the Reformation and its impact on France before examining the recurring religious themes in Marguerite’s writing, including the devotional poems and the Heptameron. Chapter 3, Politics, explores Marguerite’s role as diplomat and political actor as sister of the king of France and queen of Navarre. I study the letters Marguerite wrote from Spain during her brother’s captivity to identify her diplomatic practice and then trace the political ideas that emerge from the Heptameron. The next three chapters focus more narrowly on the Heptameron. Chapter 4 explores the representation of women and men and the assumptions and prejudices that are laid bare in the tales. Chapter 5 looks at the representation of desire as humanity’s flaw and the possible solutions proposed to its challenges, exploring psychoanalytic approaches to desire alongside Christian interpretations. Chapter 6 turns to the question of genre and form, and considers the different techniques that Marguerite used, including dialogue, narrative voice, and exemplarity. I also discuss the terms that she used for her stories – nouvelle and histoire – and their related literary forms. Finally, in the Conclusion, I turn to the publication, adaptations, and translations of Marguerite’s work in the century after her death, focusing on her masterpiece, the Heptameron. I hope that readers will return to this endlessly fascinating and provocative text refreshed and informed by the discussion of Marguerite’s other works. Working with social, political, and religious contexts reveals the recurring themes and concerns it shares with all Marguerite’s work, but also its remarkable originality.

22 The first ten tales in this early manuscript became nouvelles 23, 26, 27, 22, 31, 32, 33, 30, 34, and 10 in the later manuscripts. See Heptaméron, ed. Salminen, p. xliii.

1

Communities Marguerite de Navarre led a sociable and mobile life.1 Sister and trusted advisor to François I, a peer of France as duchess of Berry, and queen of Navarre through her second marriage to Henri d’Albret, she was at the heart of multiple circles and networks. She was exceptionally well connected, even for an aristocrat of her time, and a rare woman in networks of professional, erudite, and elite men.2 She supported writers and theologians, especially the reformists known as Evangelicals; corresponded with many radical thinkers, including Martin Luther, Jean Calvin, and Vittoria Colonna; and negotiated with foreign diplomats on behalf of both France and Navarre. Frequently on the move with her brother’s court or travelling through her own extensive territories, she was a powerful political patron and broker and built up what historian Jonathan Reid refers to as a ‘Navarrian network’ over the course of her life.3 She seems to have been temperamentally inclined to the sociability her status made possible for her. Well educated, witty, and intelligent, she appears in contemporary accounts as the consummate Renaissance princess. In Pierre de Brantôme’s late sixteenth-century histories of illustrious French ladies, Marguerite is seductive company:

1 For Marguerite’s biography, see Pierre Jourda, Marguerite d’Angoulême, duchesse d’Alençon, reine de Navarre (1492–1549): Etude biographique et littéraire, 2 vols (Paris: Champion, 1930); Cholakian and Cholakian, Marguerite de Navarre; and Patricia Eichel-Lojkine, Marguerite de Navarre: Perle de la Renaissance (Paris: Perrin, 2021). Elizabeth Chesney Zegura includes a lively overview of Marguerite’s life in Marguerite de Navarre’s Shifting Gaze: Perspectives on Gender, Class, and Politics in the ‘Heptaméron’ (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 29–64; there is another useful overview in Stephenson, Power and Patronage, pp. 2–8. What follows is indebted to these accounts. 2 Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe, ed. Robert Muchembled, William Monter, and Francisco Bethencourt, 4 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006–2007). 3 See Jonathan A. Reid, King’s Sister – Queen of Dissent: Marguerite of Navarre (1492–1549) and her Evangelical Network, 2 vols (Leiden: Brill, 2009); Stephenson, Power and Patronage; and Chapter 3.

Communities 11

Durand la prison du Roy son frere, elle assista fort à Madame la Regente, sa mere, à regir le Royaume, à contanter les Princes, les Grands, et gaigner la Noblesse; car elle estoit fort accostable, et qui gaignoit bien le cœur des personnes pour les belles partyes qu’elle avoit en elle.4 During the imprisonment of the King her brother, she greatly assisted Madame the Regent, her mother, in governing the kingdom, in pacifying princes and the powerful and in winning over the Nobility; for she was extremely amiable, and easily won people’s hearts for the handsome qualities she had.

In Brantôme’s account, Marguerite appears a witty, warm, and sociable presence; but he also suggests the difficulties and challenges a noblewoman – even an extraordinarily powerful noblewoman like Marguerite – faced in the early sixteenth century. Her role was to pacify and to win round; to build bridges, to cajole, and to persuade. Sixteenth-century rule was a delicate balancing act between imposing authority and mollifying powerful noble families. The forms of sociability available to Marguerite were unquestionably elite, and her power and autonomy were exceptional even in these circles.5 This sociability played a fundamental role in the development of her writing, from her spiritual poetry to her plays, and perhaps most obviously in the intensely social circle of storytellers that she imagined in the Heptameron. This chapter will explore the different communities in which Marguerite moved: her family circle, the royal courts of France and Navarre, networks of patronage of literary and religious figures, and the literary communities she created in her writing. These are all quite different forms of community. The physical community of the royal court and Marguerite’s position within the royal family will be my focus first, before we turn to a more virtual form of community in the networks of literary writers and religious reformers that she protected. Some of her protégés were part of her household, but other relationships were maintained through letter writing and the exchange of gifts, particularly books, which helped to form the literary and political communities in which Marguerite participated. We then turn to Marguerite’s conception of friendship in the poem La Coche, itself imagined as a gift to a powerful member of the royal court. Finally, there are three sections on the literary communities that Marguerite created through writing in her theatre, the Heptameron, and her writing life. While these communities range from the physical to the virtual and the fictional, they are all to a certain extent imaginary: that is, they were created and supported through the cultural and 4 Pierre de Brantôme, ‘Premier Volume des Dames’, in Recueil des Dames, poésies et tombeaux, ed. Etienne Vaucheret (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), p. 181. Brantôme composed his chronicles during his retirement in the 1580s. 5 Stephenson, Power and Patronage, p. 2.

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MARGUERITE DE NAVARRE: A CRITICAL COMPANION

social imaginations of their members. Marguerite’s writing is a particularly rich witness to these communities. Family Marguerite grew up part of a trio with her mother and her brother, so closely knit that they became known as the royal trinité after François came to the throne. She was born in 1492, in the family chateau in Cognac on the banks of the river Charente, to Charles, count of Angoulême and Louise de Savoie when her mother was sixteen; her brother, François, was born two years later, in 1494. Louise was overjoyed to have given birth to a son who, she was convinced, would become king (he was at that point third in line to the throne, so his accession was possible, if unlikely). Her devotion to her son, her ‘César’ as she called him, became legendary; she described his coronation as the recompense for all the humiliations and hardships of her early life.6 Marguerite’s birth was not nearly as significant for her mother, and she was taught from an early age to devote herself to her brother. But Louise also ensured that Marguerite shared François’s humanist education. Louise took a personal interest in the education of her son and daughter and remained devoted in her widowhood (Charles died in 1495, when she was just nineteen) to their upbringing and education. When François became heir apparent at the age of four, the trinité moved from Cognac to the royal castles of Blois and Amboise and consolidated their intimacy around their shared belief in François’s greatness and destiny to be king. Charles and Louise had made Cognac an intellectual and artistic centre, and Marguerite grew up instructed in Italian humanism and the classics and tutored in the noble etiquette and feminine diplomacy of her mother’s tutor, Anne de Beaujeu, whose educational programme for her daughter was printed as Les Enseignements d’Anne de France.7 Marguerite also had access from an early age to a wide range of literature that would shape and influence her own writing. The library in the chateau in Cognac was extensive: around two 6 ‘Pour ce suis-je bien tenue et obligée à la divine misericorde, par laquelle j’ay esté amplement recompensée de toutes les adversités et inconveniens qui m’estoient advenues en mes premiers ans, et en la fleur de ma jeunesse’ (For this [the coronation] I am indebted and grateful to divine mercy, by which I have been amply compensated for all the adversities and disadvantages I suffered when I was young, in the flower of my youth). Journal de Louise de Savoye, duchesse d’Angoulesme, mère de François I, in Collection complète des mémoires relatifs à l’histoire de France, ed. M. Petitot, vol. 16 (Paris: Foucault, 1826), pp. 389–408 (p. 397). For the birth of ‘François, par la grace de Dieu, roi de France, et mon Cesar pacifique’ (François, by the grace of God, king of France, and my pacific Caesar), see p. 390. 7 Anne de Beaujeu, Les Enseignements d’Anne de France, duchesse de Bourbonnois et d’Auvergne, à sa fille Susanne de Bourbon, ed. A.-M. Chazaud (Moulins: C. Desroziers, 1878).

Communities 13

hundred books in Latin, French, and Italian, including works of philosophy and theology by Aristotle, St Augustine, and Boethius, alongside Dante’s Divine Comedy, the short stories of Chaucer, and Boccaccio’s De Claris mulieribus (Illustrious Women); later, in Blois, Marguerite would also have found the medieval courtly allegory Le Roman de la Rose, Petrarch’s Triumphs, and Plato’s Phaedo and Symposium.8 Louise was ‘a striking example of female agency’ for the young Marguerite, achieving remarkable successes behind a mask of submissive femininity, as she had learned from Anne de Beaujeu.9 Marguerite was loyal to her mother, a faithful lieutenant during her regency when François was an imperial prisoner in Madrid in 1525, and by her side when she died (calling for her César) in 1531, but their relationship was arguably not one of affection. Louise was a hard woman to please; her religious convictions were also more orthodox than her reforming daughter’s. When Marguerite moved to Normandy after her first marriage in 1509 to Charles, duke of Alençon – a man not noted for his learning or his wit – she found a more congenial companion in his mother, Marguerite de Lorraine.10 Following her mother-in-law’s pious pursuits, Marguerite put her energies into charitable works and reforming the abbeys and monasteries under her control. It was to her brother that she pledged her greatest loyalty, and their bond survived the later divergence in their beliefs and principles. He referred to her affectionately as ‘mignonne’ (‘darling’, a term from courtly gallantry); she described herself as ‘plus que soeur’ (more than a sister).11 Marguerite was by François’s side for a substantial part of his reign, a brilliant, witty, and charming figure at his court, ‘queen in all but name’.12 Together they shaped France into a model of Renaissance learning with extensive institutional support for humanist scholars, architects, and artists. They championed French Renaissance architecture and decorative art, as François constructed chateaux Jourda, Marguerite, vol. 1, pp. 5 and 21–2, 26–7. Zegura, Marguerite de Navarre’s Shifting Gaze, p. 36. 10 Even in the idealising Prisons, Marguerite represents Charles as unlettered: ‘Car luy n’ayant jamais leu ni apris …’ (For he, having never read or studied …) Marguerite de Navarre, Les Prisons, ed. Simone Glasson (Geneva: Droz, 1978), p. 211, Book 3, line 2291. 11 For example, she signs herself ‘Très humble et très obéissante subjecte et plus que seur’ in a letter to François from the end of November 1525: Nouvelles lettres de la reine de Navarre, adressées au roi François Ier, son frère, ed. François Génin (Paris: Crapelet, 1842), p. 50. The nineteenth-century editor of her letters, François Génin, reads an excessive love into these declarations on Marguerite’s part (‘Supplément à la notice’, Nouvelles lettres, pp. 1–15); but there is nothing here beyond the exaggerations of sixteenthcentury diplomacy. Brantôme reports that François called Marguerite ‘mignonne’: Pierre de Brantôme, Recueil, p. 177; she signs herself ‘Vostre très humble et très obéissante subjecte et mignonne’ in her letters (e.g. one from 1537, Nouvelles lettres, p. 137). 12 Cholakian and Cholakian, Marguerite de Navarre, p. 40. 8 9

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MARGUERITE DE NAVARRE: A CRITICAL COMPANION

such as Chambord and decorated dreary palaces like Fontainebleau with Italianate art, founded the Collège Royal with chairs in Greek and Hebrew, and invited Leonardo da Vinci to France, who brought with him the Mona Lisa, still in the French national collection in the Louvre. Marguerite’s was the role of the court lady that is set out in Baldassare Castiglione’s European best-seller The Book of the Courtier, in which the grace, beauty, and eloquence of the lady is the perfect foil for a new breed of courtier.13 Castiglione’s book both described and precipitated a shift in European court culture in the Renaissance. No longer simply expected to fight, the courtier was required to develop other skills: conversation, wit, grace, and athleticism, all burnished by what Castiglione calls sprezzatura: the art of making everything seem effortless. The great evil is affectation, revealing how hard you are working: the ‘universal rule’ is ‘to practise in all things a certain nonchalance which conceals all artistry and makes whatever one says or does seem uncontrived and effortless’.14 These rules provoked some anxiety in elite circles, some of which is reflected in the Courtier itself: written as a dialogue between nobles, it contains different points of view and disagreements. One troubling point was that the emphasis on being agreeable and concealing effort encouraged hypocrisy, and as the sixteenth century wore on, the courtier was singled out for particular critique in this regard.15 Another was that social mobility might be facilitated by the insistence on courtliness; it was no longer necessary to come from old warrior stock in order to succeed at court. This point is debated early on in the Courtier, when one participant deems nobility of birth unnecessary for the courtier, while another insists on it ‘if only because of the immediate impression this makes on all concerned’.16 This emphasis on impressions and appearances did nothing to allay anxieties about hypocrisy and deceit. Marguerite herself seems generally to have taken to the part of courtier; but there are times when she chafes against these expectations, the assumptions of which are ruthlessly exposed in the Heptameron. Castiglione’s work strongly influenced Marguerite’s, another dialogue featuring noble men and women debating their place in the changing world. 13 Il Cortegiano was published in 1524 and first translated into French in 1537. Castiglione claimed that François I had encouraged him to keep writing it. Marguerite owned a copy in Italian and may well have initiated a manuscript French translation. See Peter Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione’s ‘Cortegiano’ (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), pp. 173, 149. 14 Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. George Bull (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 67. ‘Nonchalance’ is the English translation of the Italian ‘sprezzatura’. 15 See Pauline Smith, The Anti-Courtier Trend in Sixteenth-Century France (Geneva: Droz, 1966). 16 Castiglione, The Courtier, p. 56.

Communities 15

Marguerite represented her relationship with her brother as an indissoluble unity, though she also emphasised her subordinate position. There were times when her influence waned and a rift opened between them. But her letters to François that survive are fulsome expressions of love, respect, and gratitude. In a letter to him from around 1537, she described him as her entire family, a counsellor, and a refuge: ‘veu que je n’ay parent ny amy ou je puisse et doive chercher conseil et parler priveement, je ne regard point que vous estes mon roy et seigneur, mais seulement que vous m’estes père, frere et filz’ (since I have no family or friend in whom I can or should seek counsel and talk intimately, I do not see that you are my king and lord, but only that you are a father, brother, and son to me).17 After his death, she described them as a unit, ‘Ung corps, ung cueur, ung vouloir, une envye’ (one body, one heart, one will, one desire).18 This vocabulary of unity is an allusion to the myth of the androgyne from Plato’s Symposium, in which happy, composite human beings are split in two by Zeus, and doomed to search forever for their missing other half; a staple image of perfect love, the androgyne also features in mystical writing on the soul’s connection to God. But here, it is the perfect unity between brother and sister that Marguerite seeks to emphasise. The androgyne is also evoked in a miniature portrait of François that Barbara Meyer has argued was commissioned by Marguerite: a curious manuscript illumination in which the king appears as a feminised soldier, his bearded head on a woman’s body, one arm bare, the other encased in armour.19 The verse underneath compares him to Mars, Diana, Minerva, Mercury, and Love; in the miniature he carries attributes of these deities. It is possible that, as well as evoking ‘universal man’, the portrait incorporates an allusion to Marguerite, who is represented as Minerva in a rondeau by Clément Marot and by other poets.20 Meyer connects this portrait of composite deities to the words that Marguerite gives her brother in her poetic lament of his death, La Nouvelles lettres, ed. Génin, p. 151. ‘Epître de la Reine de Navarre au Roy, Henri II, son neveu, après la mort du feu roy François, son frere’ (c.1547), Les Dernières poésies de Marguerite de Navarre, ed. Abel Lefranc (Paris: Armand Colin, 1896), p. 4. 19 Barbara Hochstetler Meyer, ‘Marguerite de Navarre and the Androgynous Portrait of François Ier’, Renaissance Quarterly 48.2 (Summer 1995), 287–325. She suggests the date of 1536 for its composition, the year Antoine Héroët was commissioned to produce a translation of Marsile Ficino’s De Amore, a Christian meditation on Plato. See the image on Gallica, the online repository of the Bibliothèque nationale de France: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ ark:/12148/btv1b52504989g.r=Francois%20I?rk=107296;4 20 ‘De la Paix traictée à Cambray par trois Princesses’, Clément Marot, Œuvres poétiques, ed. Gérard Defaux, 2 vols (Paris: Garnier, 1996), vol. 1, pp. 171–2. See also an ode by Etienne Dolet, in Lettres de Marguerite d’Angoulême, sœur de François Ier, reine de Navarre, ed. F. Génin (Paris: Jules Renouard, 1841), pp. 143–4. See Meyer, ‘Marguerite de Navarre’, pp. 313–15. 17 18

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MARGUERITE DE NAVARRE: A CRITICAL COMPANION

Navire: ‘Resjouy toy, car le temps sera bref / Que tous en un ensemble nous serons’ (Rejoice, for the time will be short before all in one whole we will be).21 The poem celebrates the future mystical union of brother and sister in heaven; the portrait represents the composite creature that they were on earth, one life, one body, one will. La Navire, written in the immediate, traumatic aftermath of François’s death, brings the brother’s soul back to earth to provide consolation to the sister. It is largely a dialogue between the two siblings – Marguerite, stubbornly attached to mourning her lost brother, and François, somewhat exasperated, reminding her that God’s love surpasses all earthly love. Marguerite conjured other family relationships in her poetry. Among her first pieces of writing was a poem, Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne, in which she stages a dialogue with the soul of her niece, Charlotte, written soon after her early death in 1524.22 Les Prisons, a complex allegory that details the soul’s escape from a series of worldly prisons, conjures up the deathbed speeches of her mother-in-law, Marguerite de Lorraine, her first husband, Charles d’Alençon, and her mother, and the final hours of her brother. Although in these deathbed scenes the gaze of the dying is firmly turned away from the world, away from the living whom they are leaving, and directed towards Heaven, Marguerite nevertheless uses writing to recreate the relationships that marked her and to question incessantly the future. In La Navire, François promises his sister they will be together again soon; in Les Prisons, Charles d’Alençon does the same.23 But the lasting impression these pieces leave is not one of consolation but rather of anxiety: at not being party to the truth, at not being assured of God’s grace. Poets Marguerite was an important patron of the arts throughout her lifetime.24 Pierre de Brantôme is typically admiring; referring to the most learned writers of the kingdom (‘les plus sçavans du Royaume’), he writes: ‘tous l’honoroient tellement, qu’ilz l’appelloyent leur Moecenas; et la pluspart de leurs livres, qui se composoient allors, s’adressoit au Roy son frère, qui estoit bien sçavant, ou 21 La Navire, ed. Robert Marichal (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1956), p. 303 (lines 1430–31). Meyer, ‘Marguerite de Navarre’, p. 313. 22 See Reinier Leushuis, ‘Speaking with the Dead: Spirituality, Mourning, and Memory in the Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne and La Navire’, in A Companion, pp. 161–210. 23 ‘Adieu pour ung bien peu de temps, / Lequel passé nous nous verrons contans’ (Farewell for a very short time, after which we will happily see each other again). Les Prisons, lines 2427–8, p. 216. 24 Pierre Jourda, ‘Le mécénat de Marguerite de Navarre’, Revue du Seizième Siècle 18 (1931), 253–71; Reid, King’s Sister, vol. 2, ch. 10, ‘The “Sons of Apollo” in Service of Christ’, pp. 447–95; including a list of Marguerite’s protected writers and their principal publications, vol. 2, pp. 451–7.

Communities 17

à elle’ (she was honoured so much by all that they called her their Maecenas; and most of their books, which were written at the time, were dedicated to her brother, who was very learned, or to her).25 Her correspondence and possible patronage was sought by one of the greatest European humanists, Erasmus, who praised her virtue and piety in an otherwise rather disgruntled letter in 1527 in which he wondered if her reply to his previous had been lost on its way to him.26 Barbara Stephenson (following V.-L. Saulnier and others) is inclined to put this failed correspondence down to Erasmus’s untactful tone and (more importantly) the fact that he was counsellor to Charles V, François’s great rival.27 His first attempt to engage the queen in correspondence had been in 1525, when François was the prisoner of the emperor, and Marguerite was occupied in negotiating his release. In his letter, Erasmus urges her to continue to protect literature and the ‘sincere friends of Christ’ against the malice of their enemies, something she continued to do throughout the sectarian turbulence that marked her life.28 She gathered under her protection in Alençon and then at her court in Nérac groups of reformist writers and religious dissidents. The poet Clément Marot was her valet de chambre and the writer Bonaventure Des Périers her secretary. She commissioned translations of important works including Plato’s Lysis by Des Périers in 1541 and Boccaccio’s Decameron from Antoine Le Maçon in 1545. She also protected and sometimes found ecclesiastical positions for reformers including Louis Berquin, Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples, Gérard Roussel, and Guillaume Farel. The future Protestant leader Jean Calvin found refuge from the Sorbonne’s persecution at her court in Nérac in 1534 before the rift that turned him against her and the French Evangelicals as uncommitted reformers. Her ability to protect religious dissidents depended, however, to a great extent on François’s sympathy and collusion, which shifted over the course of their lives. In the early days of François’s reign, Marguerite’s influence and power was assured. When the young poet Clément Marot followed his father, Jean, into her household in 1519 he joined the circle of reformist thinkers and writers that she had already gathered around her. He soon became known as a leading evangelical poet and made enemies among the defenders of religious orthodoxy in the Sorbonne, whose animosity forced him into exile more than once. Marot’s poems about Marguerite praise her as a patron of poets and a model of Renaissance virtue. In his poetic request for a position addressed to her – a poem in the category that Neil Kenny has called ‘payroll poetry’ – the 1519 ‘Epistre du despourveu’ (Epistle of a destitute man), he is assured that Marguerite is indeed

25 26 27 28

Brantôme, Recueil, p. 177. Lettres, pp. 229–31 (French translation) and pp. 468–9 (Latin original). Stephenson, Power and Patronage, pp. 179–80. Lettres, p. 230 (French) and p. 469 (Latin).

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a friend to writers, ‘qui plus tost leurs miseres desboute’ (who is the first to expel their distress).29 In another poem, written before 1527, Marguerite appears as a chaste, constant, and intellectual composite Renaissance creature, ‘Corps femenin, cueur d’homme, et teste d’Ange’ (feminine body, man’s heart, and Angel’s head).30 Marot ironically calls this assemblage ‘un monstre fort estrange’ (a very strange monster, line 8) in the sixteenth-century sense of a wonder that defies human understanding; he also calls her a ‘marvel’ (‘merveille’, line 7). Marguerite is a wonder, embodying the best of all virtues: feminine beauty and chastity, masculine constancy and courage, and angelic intellect. Marot’s poetry extends over a wide range of genres and functions, from vituperative satire, through witty court poetry, to translations of the psalms. His Epigrammes are polished pieces of court performance, short, witty presents addressed to potential generous patrons. They are also deeply embedded in a court sociability that Marguerite also shared. She is the putative author of two ten-line epigrams in an edition of Marot’s poetry printed in Lyon by Etienne Dolet in 1538.31 The first is part of a conversation that works around the conceit of the poem as currency: which, of course, in a very real sense (at least for Marot), it was. The first poem in the series is written by Marot to one of Marguerite’s ladies-in-waiting, Hélène de Tournon, as payment of a debt: if only, the poet concludes, my other creditors were content with ‘semblable monnoye’ (this kind of currency).32 In response, a poem is attributed to Marguerite de Navarre, ‘La Royne de Navarre respond à Marot, pour Tournon’ (the queen of Navarre replies to Marot, for Tournon), in which she praises his poetry as worth more than silver. Marot’s response to this is a tightly patterned poem thanking the queen for her regard which has raised his worth with his creditors, whom he imagines reading her poem and treating him with more respect: La sœur du Roy a pour moy faict ce dict: Lors eulx cuydants, que fusse en grand credit, M’ont appelé Monsieur à cry, & cor …33 29 ‘L’Epsitre de despourveu’, Œuvres poétiques, vol. 1, pp. 72–7, line 128. See Mary B. McKinley, ‘Marot, Marguerite de Navarre, et “L’Epistre du despourveu”’, in Clément Marot, ‘Prince des poëtes françois’, ed. Gérard Defaux and Michel Simonin (Paris: Garnier, 1997), pp. 613–23. On ‘payroll poetry’, see Neil Kenny, Born to Write: Literary Families and Social Hierarchy in Early Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 261–9. 30 Marot, ‘De Madame la duchesse d’Alençon’, Oeuvres poétiques, vol. 2, pp. 204–5, line 10. 31 Les Epigrammes de Clement Marot, divisez en deux livres (Lyon: Dolet, 1538). 32 ‘Epigramme, qu’il perdit contre Heleine de Tournon’, Marot, Œuvres poétiques, vol. 2, p. 249, line 10; the exchange is also in Marguerite de Navarre, Chrétiens et mondains, poèmes épars, pp. 375–8. 33 ‘Replicque de Marot à la Royne de Navarre’, Œuvres poétiques, vol. 2, p. 250, lines 4–6.

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The King’s Sister has written this Ditty for me: then they, believing I was in good credit, have called me Monsieur by proclamation.

Here the term ‘credit’ does a lot of work, suggesting both trust and reputation, the establishment of which is worth ‘aultant qu’or’ (as much as gold). Marot’s witty performance here reveals the major role poetry played in the social economy of the court; as we will see below, Marguerite also imagines her own writing as part of this social economy. Marguerite was linked to another prominent French evangelical humanist, François Rabelais, although there is no evidence of their ever meeting. They may have crossed paths in 1542 when she was travelling with her brother’s court and he was in France. Rabelais is an elusive figure in French Renaissance literature: leaving a literary legacy as enormous as his giant protagonists, he has a biography full of holes, disappearances, and guesswork. His books were permanently on the Sorbonne’s list of forbidden titles from 1543 for their criticism of Catholic practices, their advocation of reform, and their merciless mockery of the Faculty of Theology. In 1546, despite François’s now well-established hostility to reform, Marguerite succeeded in persuading him to grant the royal authorisation, or privilège du roi, to Rabelais’s Tiers Livre, the third book in his series Gargantua and Pantagruel. In gratitude, Rabelais dedicated the book to Marguerite, or rather to her ‘esprit abstraict, ravy, et ecstatic’ (‘Abstracted Mind, enraptured, true ecstatic’) in a rather lofty preliminary poem, in which he requests that she should leave the intellectual heights and deign to return to earth.34 She is present here as an absence, a mystic whose attention has long since been turned away from earth and directed towards the heavens. Rabelais ends the dedication with some bathos: Vouldrois tu poinct faire quelque sortie De ton manoir divin, perpetuel? Et ça bas veoir une tierce partie Des faictz joyeux du bon Pantagruel. Deignest thou not to make a lively sortie From thine abode divine, perpetual, This Third Book here with thine own eyes to see Of the joyful deeds of good Pantagruel?

34 Francois Rabelais, Le Tiers Livre, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Mireille Huchon (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), p. 341; Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. M. A. Screech (London: Penguin, 2006), p. 399.

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As Mary McKinley argues, Rabelais is pulling on the hem of Marguerite’s robe, bringing her back down to earth and away from the contemplation of divine mysteries that can be so disquieting for those of us left behind.35 This picture of Marguerite as a religious contemplative does conform to the type of writing that she published during her own lifetime, which before 1546 was primarily religious poetry.36 By this time, however, she had begun the composition of the Heptameron stories in earnest, stories that were close to the spirit of Rabelais’s own bawdy critique, but we do not know whether Rabelais knew this. Rabelais may well be making a request of his own, and a plea against indifference. Mary McKinley draws our attention to the violent religious persecution that marked the period after the affaire des placards in 1534 and intensified in the 1540s. In April 1545, François I authorised the massacre of thousands of Waldensian ‘heretics’ in the villages around Mérindol in the Luberon. Marguerite was reportedly horrified at the massacre and bitterly condemned its leader, a local baron. Rabelais may be urging Marguerite not to avert her gaze from the brutal realities of religious persecution; to suspend her mystical contemplation in order to return to earth and to protect the vulnerable.37 These were not ungrounded fears. Censorship and execution had come close to both Rabelais and Marguerite. Rabelais’s first two books were censured by the Sorbonne, as was Marguerite’s mystical poem Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse; the intervention of her brother put the Faculty into retreat, but she remained a target of conservative criticism throughout her life. She featured as a woman on horseback led by devils in a masquerade at Notre Dame de Paris in 1525 and as a cruel and despotic ideologue in a play by students at the Collège de Navarre in 1533. Both writers had witnessed the brutality of the censorship laws through the execution of their printers. Antoine Augereau, the Parisian printer who had produced the controversial 1533 edition of the Miroir de l’âme pécheresse, was executed in 1534; Rabelais’s printer Etienne Dolet was burned in 1546. Printers were held responsible for the books they printed, and those in Marguerite’s circle – like the writers – were closely associated with reform. Marguerite corresponded with some of the most notable dissidents and reformists in Europe. One particularly interesting exchange is with her contemporary Vittoria Colonna, the renowned Italian poet and stateswoman who was, like Marguerite, deeply committed to her faith and involved in reformist circles. In 1540 or 1541, a bound manuscript selection of Colonna’s 35 Mary B. McKinley, ‘Rabelais, Marguerite de Navarre, et la dédicace du Tiers Livre: Voyages mystiques et missions terrestres’, Romanic Review 94.1 (2003), 171–83. 36 Le Miroir de l’ame pécheresse (1531) and Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne (1533); Le Fable du faux cuyder (1543) is an allegory with a secular theme. 37 McKinley, ‘Rabelais’, p. 178.

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sonnets was sent to Marguerite, at her request. Colonna’s sonnets move from traditional Petrarchan love lyric to an exploration of divine love comparable to the dynamic of Marguerite’s chansons spirituelles and devotional poetry. The women exchanged a number of letters expressing their religious faith and a mutual respect and esteem that preceded and indeed precipitated the correspondence.38 It is an interesting association, as their husbands fought and died on opposing sides at the battle of Pavia in 1525 – a bitter memory for Marguerite, marking the disgrace as well as the death of her first husband and the imprisonment of her brother – but their warmth is tangible. Marguerite writes of her regard for Colonna, whom she calls her ‘Cousin’, which their correspondence has increased: it is necessary that you continue to pray and write your useful letters without becoming tired of sending them, since the friendship that was started by reputation has now grown so much because I have found it reciprocated in your letters. I therefore desire your letters more than ever, but my greater wish is to be so fortunate as to hear you speak in this world of the happiness of the one to come.39

Letters here act as more than go-betweens, vessels or vehicles of reciprocated friendship. Colonna, in turn, wrote to Marguerite of the desperate need for female moral and spiritual guides who would be able to support other women, suggesting that Marguerite might perform that role. The humility and diffidence with which both women express themselves suggests that they were aware that their correspondence was far from private but destined – as so much sixteenth-century correspondence between humanists was – for eventual publication; and indeed it was printed in a collection by the famous Venetian printer Aldus in 1542.40 This was not the only time the two women appeared in print together: there is an Italian sonnet in praise of Colonna attributed to Marguerite in an anthology of Petrarchan lyrics also printed in Italy in 1542.41 Both women’s enthusiasm for reform put them under suspicion. The gift manuscript of Colonna’s verse was taken by Anne de Montmorency, the Grand Constable of France (the most powerful office in the kingdom), whose conservative religious views pitted him against Marguerite; he scrutinised 38 Abigail Brundin, ‘Vittoria Colonna and the Virgin Mary’, The Modern Language Review 96.1 (2001), 61–81. 39 Quoted and translated in Barry Collett, A Long and Troubled Pilgrimage: The Correspondence of Marguerite d’Angoulême and Vittoria Colonna, 1540–1545 (Princeton: Princeton Theological Seminary, 2000), p. 114 (Marguerite wrote in Italian). 40 Lettere volgari di diversi nobilissimi huomini (Venice: Aldus, 1542). 41 Libro Quarto delle rime di diversi excellentiss. autori nella lingua volgare (Bologna: Anselmo Giaccarello, 1551), p. 13.

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the poems for signs of heresy, with the intention of discrediting and even condemning the queen. François, typically, laughed off the very idea, and ordered the manuscript to be delivered to his sister. But it was not the only time that Montmorency tried to remove Marguerite from her sphere of influence. The gift manuscript from an Italian poet associated with reform was a further indication of Marguerite’s affinity with dissidence and unorthodoxy. Books Books like Colonna’s were frequently offered as gifts in the sixteenth century. The social historian Natalie Zemon Davis has explored the significance and circulation of books in print and in manuscript in the social economies of patronage and friendship.42 Authors very rarely made any money from selling their books in the sixteenth century; indeed, they were often involved in the financing of the printing process, which required a lot of money upfront for labour, equipment, paper, and other materials. Instead, a book would be offered to a powerful patron as a kind of advertisement for the skills and services of its author, or to friends as part of an intricate network of gifts and obligations that reinforced allegiances. Erasmus noted wryly of another scholar in 1518: ‘Since he isn’t able to sell his books, he goes about offering them as gifts to important people; he makes more that way than if he had sold them.’43 As Pierre de Brantôme noted, Marguerite and her brother François were at the centre of a culture in which scholars and poets would dedicate their books to powerful potential patrons. Often, as in the case of Clément Marot, this was in the hope of financial support or a position in the household. But, as Davis argues, this gift culture went beyond the search for immediate financial return and represented a more indefinable economy of mutual obligation and respect. Vittoria Colonna’s gift manuscript of poems is part of this economy and shows how manuscript production was still a central part of literary culture in the sixteenth century alongside the innovation of printing. Marguerite appears in a number of manuscript illuminations giving or receiving the gift of a book. An anonymous devotional manuscript in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, L’Office de Sainte Anne (Saint Anne’s Prayer-Book), is dedicated to ‘Madame Marguerite de France, duchesse d’Alençon et de Berry’ (which dates it to after 1517, when Marguerite was given the duchy of Berry), under a richly detailed and intensely coloured 42 Natalie Zemon Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 43 Opus Epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, ed. P. S. Allen, H. M. Allen and H. W. Garrod (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906–58), vol. 3, p. 424, quoted in Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Beyond the Market: Books as Gifts in Sixteenth-Century France’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 33 (1983), 69–88 (p. 69).

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illumination that shows the book being presented to Marguerite by a tonsured monk (see Figure 1).44 Marguerite is seated on a throne, surrounded by her ladies-in-waiting. Outside are parkland and trees, but the interior scene crowds up against the windows and walls of the room, full of gestural movement: Marguerite graciously signals acceptance with her hand, and her ladies gesture, point, and reassure each other with a hand on a shoulder. A second kneeling figure, an expensively dressed nobleman, also points towards the book. The book itself is in the centre of the image, incorporated into the public ceremony which witnesses and authorises it. In the frontispiece illumination of another manuscript dedicated to Marguerite around 1529–30, Ysambert de Saint-Léger offers her his translation of a manual for princesses, Le Myroer des dames nobles et illustres (The Mirror of Noble and Illustrious Ladies; see Figure 2).45 Seated on a similar throne, Marguerite is again accompanied by ladies who witness the gift of the book (though there are only two this time). This is an interior scene full of domestic detail. A small grey dog in a stiffened pose eyes Ysambert warily. The ladies appear as if they might have colds, and one seems to be checking the other in the act of speaking. At the back of the room (our eyes are drawn to it by the rectangular tiles on the floor, painted in careful perspective) is an open door into another room, with a servant peering round the frame. He belongs to the medieval iconography of the spy, who is usually a secret witness to an erotic encounter and a crucial link in the chain of exposure and dissemination of the scandalous story. Here he witnesses the gift of the book and – just as importantly – Marguerite’s acceptance of it. In a final manuscript illumination (reproduced on the front of this book), it is Marguerite herself who offers the book. Dating from much later in her life – around 1541 – the image shows Marguerite dressed in sober black, handing her debate on love, La Coche, to Anne de Pisseleu, the duchess of Etampes, her sometime ally and François I’s mistress.46 Anne is in the court finery that Marguerite wears in the previous images: the representative of spectacular courtly display. As in the Ysambert image, the hands of both donor and receiver hold the book; the book, right in the centre of the image, serves as a material bridge or connection between them. Other courtiers are present around the edges of the image, but they do not seem particularly 44 https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b52000991j/f6.item.r=l’office%20de%20 sainte%20anne# 45 https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8540951t/f16.item.r=saint-leger%20le%20 miroir%20des%20dames. See also Ysambert de Saint-Léger, Le Miroir des Dames, ed. Camillo Marazza (Lecce: Milella, 1978), for the dating of the manuscript, p. 41. Marazza emphasises the conservative nature of the text (pp. 39–40). 46 https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/c9285d19-8aa6-4132-9779-48dc2de0705c/ surfaces/48f80601-641c-4c58-98ae-a91d29d110ab/

Figure 1.  L’Office de sainte Anne, after 1517. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits, Français 1035. Reproduced by permission

Figure 2.  Ysambert de Saint-Léger (trans), Le Myroer des dames nobles et illustres (c. 1529–1530). Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits, Français 1189. Reproduced by permission

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interested in witnessing the gift this time. Rather, they are eagerly inspecting other gorgeous things, discussing a piece of textile or peering into a trunk. The prominent position of the book belies the indifference of the courtiers, and we, the readers, are drawn into the circle to witness the gift. Friendship La Coche was probably written in 1541, a difficult year for Marguerite, marked by tensions between her brother and her husband over her daughter’s unhappy first marriage to the German duke of Cleves. It exists in a number of manuscripts – some, like the Bodleian’s, beautifully illustrated, that Marguerite gave to her friends – and it was included in Les Marguerites. The printed version is illustrated with woodcuts similar to the manuscript illuminations. This history illustrates neatly the multiple forms of circulation that coexisted in the sixteenth century: manuscript copies were made for restricted circulation or for gifts, much like the book Marguerite is handing the duchess of Etampes in the illumination; printing aimed at a wider audience. At its conception, La Coche was destined for a small group of intimates who knew the queen well. In the poem, the poet (identified as Marguerite) finds herself one day in a beautiful meadow with other conversing nobles, but only wants to be alone – ‘Pour n’avoir plus à leur passetemps part’ (to no longer join in their pastimes, line 20). She then meets three sorrowful court ladies, who ask her to adjudicate who is the most wretched in love. In its theme (the troubles of courtly love and the perfidy of men), its setting (the beautiful meadow), and its form (a discussion between several different and distinct voices), La Coche anticipates the Heptameron. La Coche is more obviously indebted to the medieval debate tradition, in which contradictory opinions are advocated and then referred to a judge; indeed, the three unhappy women explicitly call their discussion a ‘debat’. Alain Chartier’s Livre des quatre dames (Book of the Four Ladies, c. 1415) is explicitly referenced and is an obvious model. In Chartier’s work, the poet wanders alone through a meadow, like Marguerite, and meets four ladies who ask him to judge which of them is the unhappiest in love. Marguerite was evidently familiar with the wider medieval debate tradition from her early reading, including Christine de Pizan’s Débat des deux amans (Debate of the Two Lovers, 1400–2) and Le Dit de Poissy (Story from Poissy, c. 1400). But there are differences: Marguerite’s narrator remains stubbornly immune to the beauty of her surroundings and the enthusiasm of the spring. She is melancholic and despondent, having lost not just the sensation of love but all memory of it; she has even been abandoned by ‘le plaisir de la doulce escripture’ (the pleasure of sweet writing).47 These features 47

La Coche, p. 143 (line 5).

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may well have been recognised as autobiographical by the group of intimates in which the poem was first circulated. The poem is also a meditation on the nature of friendship and community.48 The three unhappy women are bound by the literary convention of courtly love to their lovers – the poem calls them amys – all of whom are problematic in some way: the first is uncertain whether her lover is as faithful as he swears; the second woman’s lover has abandoned her to pursue the first lady; the third feels bound to dismiss her faithful lover in sympathy with her friends’ distress. So, while courtly love is the ostensible connection that structures the poem, the women are in fact also bound together by a different convention, that of friendship: as Reiner Leushuis puts it, agape replaces problematic courtly eros.49 The poem describes the bond between the women as a union of hearts and souls: they are a ‘trinité’, their hearts united by Love (p. 147, lines 84–6); the first woman says that ‘l’une est de l’autre la moyctié’ (one is the other’s half; p. 150, line 149); the third woman wonders how she could live if her friends died, ‘les deux partz de mon corps’ (the two parts of my body, p. 169, line 534). Marguerite uses here the Neoplatonic vocabulary of the perfect union of the androgyne and the ‘other half’ that she also uses to describe her relationship with her brother. The friends’ mutual affection appeals to the narrator, who is from the start emotionally entangled in their unhappiness (she also recognises them as three of the most beautiful and virtuous ladies of the court). Female friendship is an unusual subject for the sixteenth century. The bonds of ideal friendship were more often represented as a male preserve, based on classical models in Aristotle and Cicero’s De Amicitia (Of Friendship). Perfect friendship, for Cicero, is an extremely rare occurrence: it is entirely disinterested, a free association unbound by familial, professional, or hierarchical obligations. It implies a radical equality between two individuals: ‘[A friend] is, as it were, a second self’.50 In France, perfect friendship’s most famous expression comes in an essay by Michel de Montaigne, ‘De l’amitié’ (‘Of Friendship’), in which he describes a mutual, reciprocal bond experienced exclusively by men: ‘la suffisance ordinaire des femmes n’est pas pour respondre à cette conference et communication’ (‘the ordinary 48 Mary L. Skemp, ‘Reading a Woman’s Story in Marguerite de Navarre’s La Coche’, Explorations in Renaissance Culture 31.2 (2005), 279–304; Colette Winn, ‘Aux origines du discours féminin sur l’amitié: Marguerite de Navarre, La Coche (1541)’, Women in French Studies 7 (1999), 9–24. 49 Reiner Leushuis, ‘Marguerite de Navarre’s Rewriting of the Courtly Dialogue: Speaking of Love in La Coche’, French Forum 42.3 (2017), 453–69 (p. 457). 50 Cicero, De Amicitia, in De Senectute, De Amicitia, De Divinatione, trans. William Armistead Falconer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923), 21.80 (p. 189); ‘qui est tamquam alter idem’ (p. 188).

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capacity of women is inadequate for that communion and fellowship’).51 In La Coche, female friendship is emphatically described in the terms of Ciceronian perfect friendship, of reciprocity and mutuality, but the bond also takes on an institutional quality. As the ladies describe it, a contractual undercurrent emerges: they have taken an oath of allegiance to each other that unites them but also places them under an obligation. ‘Plaisir avez,’ says the first lady, dismissing the third’s suffering as less than her own, ‘gardant la longue foy / Que nous devez’ (You have the pleasure of keeping the faith that you owe us, p. 176, lines 675–7). These familles or amitiés d’alliance were contractual promises of mutual aid and support and there are a number of celebrated examples in the sixteenth century: Cardinal Wolsey and Marguerite, Montaigne and Etienne de la Boétie, Montaigne and Marie de Gournay. Critics have read the representation of female friendship in La Coche as empowering: Mary Skemp, for example, calls it a ‘remedy against the alienation and powerlessness women feel in literary and social milieus’.52 This is persuasive, but perhaps the compelling qualities of female friendship come as much from its deviation from Ciceronian models as its conformity to them. Marguerite is not just interested in the pleasures and benefits of friendship, but in the choices that lie behind it. The third woman – who has sacrificed her amy in order to share in her friends’ misery – is the prominent spokesperson for this perspective. ‘Si mon ennuy perdoye pour leur plaisir, / Pour leur ennui perdre je doy aussi / Tout mon plaisir’ (If I would forget my misery for their pleasure, for their misery I should also forget my pleasure, p. 169, lines 539–41). Their union is predicated on shared unhappiness as well as shared happiness. It is also not self-sufficient but requires mediation from outside. Their debate is, after all, a quarrel between them, over who is suffering the most. The narrator feels moved to ‘oster le discord / De leurs propos et les mectre d’accord’ (remove the discord of their speech and bring them to agreement, p. 193, lines 1037–8). One of the illustrations for the work seems to suggest the ‘discord’ between the three friends. In it, they get into Marguerite’s eponymous coach as rain beats down on the pastoral scene (in sympathy, says the narrator, with the tears of the ladies, p. 192, line 1023). This illustration is more striking in woodcut than in illumination, with the rain an insistent and disturbing series of heavy lines cutting across and almost obscuring the image.53 It is a remarkable instance of 51 Michel de Montaigne, ‘De l’amitié’, Essais, ed. Pierre Villey and V.-L. Saulnier (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2004), I, 28, p. 186; ‘Of Friendship’, Complete Works, trans. Donald M. Frame (New York: Everyman, 2003), p. 167. 52 Skemp, ‘Reading a Woman’s Story’, p. 279. 53 See the digital reproduction of the Suyte des Marguerites on Gallica: https:// gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b86095677/f314.item The corresponding illumination in the Bodleian manuscript can be seen here: https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/c9285d198aa6-4132-9779-48dc2de0705c/surfaces/69762635-271a-449d-9229-149aa348d725/. The

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pathetic fallacy, as indicated in the text: the weather imitates the cries and tears of the unhappy trio. Marguerite is already in the coach – which is more of a covered wagon – and the three women she has been listening to are following her in, perhaps to the shelter of the arranged ‘accord’ (agreement) that she is promising. They eventually choose the duchess of Etampes to adjudicate their debate: the narrator assures them that this is a good choice, and that the duchess will relay to the king himself anything she deems fit for his ears. The narrator writes down their debate as faithfully as she is able and hands the resultant book to the duchess as in the illustration, stepping outside the narrative frame and into the world of the court and its shifting alliances, predicated on the same concerns and renunciations that are depicted in the poem. Theatre The evocation of friendship and, indeed, of the court community in La Coche is echoed throughout Marguerite’s writing. It is there, of course, in the Heptameron, where the small group of storytellers is a microcosm of their larger court community, as we will see later in this chapter. This community is evoked more performatively in Marguerite’s theatre. She wrote plays throughout her life to be performed by her ladies and relatives for her court’s entertainment; in a letter sent from her court in Nérac in January 1543, she wrote: ‘Nous y passons nostre temps a faire mommeries et farces’ (we spend our time here putting on mummeries and farces).54 Eleven of her plays have survived either in manuscript or in print, four based closely on the biblical story of Jesus’s birth and childhood, all of which she printed in her selected works, the 1547 Marguerites; and seven others which, although they do not stage specific Bible stories, are still concerned with matters of faith, love, and dogmatism and deeply marked by Marguerite’s evangelical Christianity.55 She drew on the lively theatrical traditions of farce, morality, and court mummery, that is, the court theatricals incorporating songs, masks, and other disguises that were typically performed during carnival, the winter period between Christmas and Lent. The non-biblical plays were arguably produced during carnival, like the Comédie de Mont-de-Marsan (Play of Mont-de-Marsan) which explains in its title that it was performed at Montrain is rendered as drops rather than heavy diagonal lines. On the woodcuts in La Coche, see Tom Conley, ‘Inklines and Lifelines: About “La Coche” (1547) by Marguerite de Navarre’, Parallax 6.1 (2000), 92–110. 54 Quoted in Théâtre profane, p. xviii. 55 See the newest edition of Marguerite’s plays, Théâtre, ed. Geneviève Hasenohr and Olivier Millet, Marguerite de Navarre, Œuvres complètes vol. 4 (Paris: Champion, 2002); and on Marguerite’s theatre, Olivier Millet, ‘Staging the Spiritual: The Biblical and NonBiblical Plays’, in A Companion, pp. 281–321.

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de-Marsan, where Marguerite had a house, ‘le jour de Caresme-Prenant’ (Shrove Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday).56 The biblical plays were probably composed for specific church feast days such as the La Comédie de la nativité de Jésus Christ (Play of the Birth of Christ) on Christmas Day and the Comédie des Innocents (Play of the Innocents) on the Feast of the Holy Innocents (28 December). Marguerite’s theatre was thus written and performed as part of a wider celebration or communion. The court would participate in these performances that evoked and reinforced a sense of belonging within the court itself and the wider Christian community. Sixteenth-century theatrical performances were not separated from the audience by the ‘fourth wall’ that later became customary; players would frequently address the audience, who were drawn into the representation. In the Comédie des Innocents, kings both on- and offstage are interpellated by God in the first scene: ‘Roys de là bas, escoutez promptement’ (Kings down below, listen readily).57 The audience occupies a space that is continuous with the theatrical space which, in the conventions of the mystery play which Marguerite makes use of, would itself have been divided into sections or levels representing heaven and earth. Especially in her biblical plays, which stage events from sacred history, the theatrical space appears much like the composite space of devotional paintings, in which the donors, contemplating the image from its edges, nevertheless share the same frame with saints and the holy family. As Olivier Millet argues, she constructs this kind of rapport with the audience so that they might contemplate the meaning of sacred history as its contemporaries.58 In the Comédie de la Nativité, for example, God addresses the audience beyond the angels and shepherds onstage, commanding them to see and to understand, at the same time staging a quotation from Mark’s gospel as happening before their eyes: ‘Or voyez vous cy mon cher Fils eslu, / Mon tresaymé, auquel me suis complu: / C’est cestuy cy, en luy vous devez croire’ (Behold my chosen Son, my beloved, in whom I am well pleased: this is he, you should believe in him).59 Elsewhere, the theatrical action can move seamlessly into communal ritual. The Comédie des quatre femmes (Play of Four Women, also known as the Comédie à dix personnages or Play with Ten Characters), ends in a court Théâtre profane, p. 274. For the year of the play (1458), see p. 241. Marguerite de Navarre, Les Comédies bibliques, ed. Barbara Marczuk (Geneva: Droz, 2000), p. 216, line 31. Millet discusses this and other instances of direct address in ‘Staging the Spiritual’, pp. 289–90. 58 Millet, ‘Staging the Spiritual’, p. 296. 59 Comédies bibliques, p. 127, lines 1216–18. See Matthew 17.5: ‘This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him.’ The gospel quotation is from later in Jesus’s life; Marguerite collapses the chronology of the Bible story here and suggests that it is contained in the moment of the Messiah’s birth. 56 57

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ball, in which the players must have stepped down or out from the theatrical space to join the rest of the court in the continuing celebration.60 Like La Coche, Quatre femmes stages a debate about love, this time between two unmarried girls, two married women, and an old woman, La Vieille; this last character is an old cynic, pulled from both carnival culture and the pages of Le Roman de la Rose.61 The two pairs are both at odds: one girl rejects love in the name of freedom, while the other is love’s champion; one married woman complains about her husband’s jealousy, while the other despairs at her unfaithful spouse. They all defer to La Vieille but cannot accept her advice of expedient infidelity; an old man and four young gentlemen then make a sudden appearance, and the dance begins as a challenge from the young men to the old. The extra-theatrical reconciliation of the ball takes the place of any internal agreement between the characters. Quatre femmes could have been the play mentioned in a letter of February 1542 to Henry VIII from his ambassador William Paget, performed by François’s daughter and his mistress before the cardinal of Tournon and the king as a sign that the cardinal had been returned to royal favour through the mediation of ‘Madame d’Estampes and the queen of Navarre’.62 If this identification is right, the ball at the end would constitute a reconciliation in the real world of the court as well as the theatrical world of the play. A similar dynamic occurs in the Comédie sur le trépas du roi (Play on the Death of the King), where the Marguerite figure starts the play in despair and is revivified into hope by the end. Marguerite’s theatre is about community and communion; it encourages a sense of belonging, first to court society, and more widely to a community of Christian believers. Heptameron The best known of Marguerite’s communities is doubtless the fictional one she created in the Heptameron. In the Prologue’s frame narrative, ten aristocrats are stranded in a monastery in Sarrance, in the Pyrenees, by catastrophic floods and other traumatic disasters. They decide to tell each 60 Théâtre profane, pp. 96–125. This play was also included in the 1547 Suyte des Marguerites, alongside similar pieces, La Coche and Les quatre Dames, & les quatre Gentilzhommes. 61 See Scott Francis, ‘Marguerite de Navarre and Jean de Meun’s “vieil langage” in the Comédie des quatre femmes and the Heptaméron’, French Forum 42.3 (Winter 2017), 425–39; Millet, ‘Staging the Spiritual’, pp. 315–16. 62 ‘the players wherein were the Kinges daughter, Madame d’Estampes, Madame de Nevers, Madame Montpensier and Madame Belley’. Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, ed. James Gairdner and R. H. Brodie, 22 vols (London: for HM Stationery Office by Norfolk Chronicle Company, 1862–1932), Vol. 17, no. 128, 26 February 1542, Paget to Henry VIII, pp. 52–5 (p. 55). Quoted in Théâtre profane, p. 92.

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other stories while they wait for the bridge to be rebuilt. Marguerite’s explicit model here is Giovanni Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century collection of stories, the Decameron. In Boccaccio’s text, seven noblewomen and three noblemen take refuge from the Black Death ravaging Florence in a beautiful villa in the country. There, they pass the time in courtly games, singing, and telling stories, one each for ten days, producing a hundred stories of love, trickery, adventure, and human ingenuity. In the Prologue, Boccaccio’s narrator, having suffered himself in love, offers his book as ‘solace’ to those made miserable by love, especially women, who, he says, have fewer distractions than men from their unhappiness.63 Ostensibly a remedy for unhappy love, its subtitle also suggests it is an enabler: ‘the book called Decameron, otherwise known as Prince Galahalt’ (p. 1), after the king who acts as gobetween for Lancelot and Guinevere in medieval Arthurian romance. The storytelling group in the Heptameron is already bound by ties of friendship, kinship, class, and servitude. Parlamente and Hircan are married; he is a strong advocate for men’s rights and prerogatives, while she is a champion of women’s virtue and spirituality. Parlamente and Hircan have travelled to the thermal baths of Cauterets with another aristocratic couple, Longarine and her husband, who is killed in a fight with bandits; the women have been followed on their travels by two courtly suitors, Saffredent and Dagoucin, who are, we are told, more interested in accompanying the women than testing the health benefits of the spa. The French term used for this relationship is serviteur, reflecting the medieval courtly ethic of male service and self-sacrifice to a lady, in principle with no hope of physical reward; though, as we shall see, the stories told by these men – especially Saffredent – champ at the bit of courtly restraint. Parlamente, we learn later, has another serviteur, Simontaut, who barely escapes with his life from an ill-advised attempt to cross the swollen river; he and Oisille, the older figure of spiritual authority, are already at the monastery in Sarrance. The rest of the group make the arduous journey through the mountains to join them. The first thing they do on the first morning together is to hear Mass and take communion; in the narrator’s words, ‘le sainct sacrement de unyon, auquel tous chrestiens sont uniz en ung’ (‘the holy sacrament of union, in which all Christians are united in one’).64 They begin their close association with a ritual that draws them together and (supposedly) reconciles their differences. The ritual of communion also constitutes them as a kind of church, very much like the 63 Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. G. H. McWilliam (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 2. 64 Marguerite de Navarre, Heptaméron, ed. Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani (Paris: Librairie générale française, 1999), p. 85; The Heptameron, trans. P. A. Chilton (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 65. These are the editions of reference.

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early church St Paul refers to in his letters: not so much an institution as a group of believers.65 The group is, then, bound together by marriage, friendship, flirtation, and rivalry, and these connections will make themselves heard and felt during the time of storytelling. As in the Decameron, whose storytellers are in retreat from the Florentine plague, the storytelling in Sarrance represents a pause in everyday life; the travellers have been momentarily stopped on their journeys back home. But the Heptameron’s world is closely linked to the world outside the fictional frame, notably through the storytelling project itself. When Parlamente suggests storytelling as a way to pass the time and to ward off the melancholic effects of their traumatic experiences, she refers back to an old project of the French court, in which the Dauphine (Catherine de Medici) and ‘Madame Marguerite’ (most likely Marguerite, the king’s daughter, though possibly the author herself) were inspired by a new translation of the Decameron, commissioned by Marguerite de Navarre, to create a French version, but were interrupted by personal and state affairs.66 Parlamente proposes that the group in Sarrance complete the project and take it back to the royal court: there are ten of them, and if they tell a story each for the ten days it takes the bridge to be built, they will complete the hundred. Parlamente describes their stories as a ‘labeur’ that will be given as a gift on their return: ‘nous leur en ferons present au retour de ce voyage, en lieu d’ymaiges ou de patenostres’ (p. 91; ‘we shall make them a present of them when we get back, instead of the usual [icons and rosaries]’, p. 69). The completed one hundred stories will become part of the gift economy of the court, far preferable to the material trappings of Catholic spirituality that were the usual souvenirs from similar pilgrimages. There are seventy-two stories in the Heptameron: Marguerite did not finish the projected one hundred before her death in 1549. The title Heptaméron was given to the collection by the Parisian editor Claude Gruget when he printed the second posthumous edition in 1559, alluding clearly to Boccaccio’s Decameron (coined from the Greek, meaning ‘ten days’) and its length (‘epta’ is Greek for seven, after the seven completed days of storytelling). But we can see from the Prologue how the project is from the beginning linked back to the extradiegetic world of the French court and its most illustrious members. This connection to the real world is emphasised by the rules that Parlamente establishes in the Prologue, referring back to the first project in the royal 65 See Edwin M. Duval, ‘“Et puis, quelles nouvelles?”: The Project of Marguerite’s Unfinished Decameron’, in Critical Tales: New Studies of the ‘Heptameron’ and Early Modern Culture, ed. John D. Lyons and Mary B. McKinley (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), pp. 241–62 (p. 255). 66 Le Decameron has a privilège dated 2 November 1544, which allows the dating of the writing of the Prologue: see Jourda, Marguerite d’Angoulême, vol. 2, p. 670.

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court.67 There will be some important differences between Boccaccio’s Italian original and the French recreation, and they revolve around the idea of truth. Firstly, the Dauphine and Madame Marguerite insisted that they tell ‘nulle nouvelle qui ne soit veritable histoire’ (p. 90; ‘[no] story that was not truthful’, p. 68). Then, the Dauphin excluded all scholars, educated in rhetorical art, from the project, ‘de paour que la beaulté de la rethoricque feit tort en quelque partye à la verité de l’histoire’ (‘[for fear that] rhetorical ornament would in part falsify the truth of the account’, p. 69). This suspicion of rhetoric is as old as rhetoric itself; here, the originators of the French project are trying to separate storytelling from persuasion. The art of rhetoric is the art of persuasion: originating in the law courts of ancient Greece and Rome, rhetoric is a system of discursive techniques and devices designed to win the audience over to the orator’s perspective – to win an argument.68 Renaissance humanists revived what they called classical rhetoric, editing and promoting the Latin rhetorical handbooks of Cicero and Quintilian. But they were also concerned with rhetoric’s relationship to truth – or, to be more precise, with rhetoric’s indifference to the truth: the fact that it provided a set of persuasive techniques that could be applied to any case, truthful or not. Classical rhetoricians were also anxious about the amoral potential of rhetoric: Quintilian, for example, insists that a good orator will also be a good man, and thus uninterested in supporting cases that are not true.69 The storytellers in the Heptameron decide to distance their project from rhetoric’s exercises in praise and blame, defence and accusation. The stories they tell will be unadorned, unaffected accounts, although this anti-rhetorical stance is itself of course profoundly rhetorical. In the passage on nonchalance or sprezzatura in Castiglione’s Courtier, for example, ancient orators are offered as an example of this practice, in an attempt to defuse the suspicions of their audience: ‘dissembling their knowledge, they made their speeches appear to have been composed very simply and according to the promptings of Nature and truth rather than effort and artifice’.70 And the storytellers of the Heptameron make no real attempt to avoid praise and blame. In the Heptameron’s final rule – one that Parlamente adds to those established in the French court – the stories must be attested: the storytellers must either have witnessed the events themselves or have heard the story from ‘quelque homme digne de foy’ (p. 91; ‘[a man] worthy of belief’, p. 69). From the start, and in explicit contrast to Boccaccio’s book, the French project is associated André Tournon, ‘The Rules of the Game’, in Critical Tales, pp. 188–99. Peter Mack, A History of Renaissance Rhetoric, 1380–1620 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 69 Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, trans. Donald A. Russell, 5 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 12.1 (vol. 5, pp. 196–7). 70 Castiglione, Courtier, p. 67. 67 68

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with unmediated truth-telling; but the dynamics of the storytelling group will, as we will see, interfere in this objective storytelling ideal. The storytellers repeat the vow of truthfulness made in the Prologue over twenty times throughout the collection, while offering themselves as witnesses, or referring explicitly to a trustworthy source. The stories themselves are rich in local and circumstantial detail: almost all are set in a precise geographical location and feature identifiable historical characters. This is the case even when they are drawn from the literary traditions of medieval fabliaux and other short story collections such as the anonymous fifteenth-century Cent Nouvelles nouvelles, as in nouvelles 6 (in which a woman tricks her one-eyed husband), 8 (in which a husband accidentally cuckolds himself), and 20 (in which a noblewoman is found in the arms of her groom). Other stories seem genuinely drawn from anecdotes of court life, such as nouvelle 17 (in which François I foils an assassination plot) and 66 (in which Marguerite’s daughter, Jeanne, and her new husband, Antoine de Bourbon, are scolded by an old chambermaid). Three of the stories are corroborated by historical documentation: nouvelles 1 (the pardon letter mentioned in the tale), 12 (other sixteenth-century accounts of the murder of Alessandro de’ Medici by his cousin Lorenzino, as well as Lorenzino’s own autobiographical account), and 25 (an account of François I’s affair with his lawyer’s wife appears in a contemporary journal).71 Some early modern commentators were sceptical about the truth claims made in the Heptameron. In his extensive bibliography of sixteenth-century French writers, François de la Croix du Maine argues that ‘la pluspart [sont] fabuleuses’ (most of them are made up), and was convinced that a queen could not have been the author of a book ‘plein de propos assez hardis, & de mots chatouilleux’ (full of risqué subjects and equivocal words).72 The seventeenthcentury novelist and historiographer Charles Sorel also refused to believe that the king’s sister could have written such scurrilous tales, which he described as ‘contes execrables de Prestres & de Cordeliers, toutes lesquelles choses ne furent jamais, & ont esté inventées par un Huguenot qui a composé le livre’ (execrable stories about Priests and Franciscans, none of which ever happened, and were invented by a Huguenot who composed the book).73 Neither La Croix du Maine nor Sorel could believe that a queen could have authored such a scandalous book, either for its bawdiness or its anti-clericalism. 71 On true stories, see Jourda, Marguerite d’Angoulême, vol. 2, pp. 766–88, and on the idea of truth more generally, Sylvie L. F. Richards, ‘Fictional Truth and the Prologue of the Heptaméron’, Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 48.1 (1994), 61–76. 72 Premier Volume de la Bibliotheque du sieur de la Croix du Maine (Paris: Abel L’Angelier, 1584), p. 309. Quoted in Jourda, p. 766. 73 [Charles Sorel], Remarques sur le XIIII Livres du Berger extravagant (1639), p. 501, quoted in Pierre Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique, vol. 3 (Amsterdam, Leiden, The Hague, Utrecht: P. Brunel et al, 1740), p. 471; and Jourda, p. 661.

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More commonly, however, the Heptameron has been read as a kind of coded memoir. Pierre Jourda meticulously traced the historical allusions and identified the characters; Patricia and Rouben Cholakian supplemented their biography of the queen by drawing on the stories in the Heptameron.74 Reading the Heptameron this way was pioneered by the late sixteenth-century chronicler Pierre de Brantôme, whose grandmother was Marguerite’s maid of honour; his mother, Anne de Vivonne, was one of her ladies and (he tells us) ‘sçavoit quelques secrets de ses Nouvelles’ (knew some secrets of her Nouvelles), implying slyly that the collection did indeed have secrets to hide.75 He also claims that his mother was the thinly disguised model for the storyteller Ennasuite, inaugurating a long tradition of attempts to uncover the historical identities of the narrators.76 Oisille is usually identified as Marguerite’s mother, Louise de Savoie (‘Oisille’ is a rough anagram of ‘Louise’); Parlamente as Marguerite herself; and Hircan as her second husband, Henri d’Albret (‘Hircan’ being an anagram of ‘Hanric’, a Gascon variant of ‘Henri’). Other identifications are more arguable, and even these three are not infallible guides to understanding the characters. In particular, attributing the author’s perspective to one storyteller, Parlamente, risks marginalising the voices of the other nine storytellers and the general narrator.77 In a further biographical reading, Brantôme drew on the Heptameron for material in writing his chronicles of illustrious and gallant ladies of the French court; he also promises to unveil some of the ‘secrets’ hidden in the stories. He was the first to claim that the lady in nouvelle 4 was Marguerite herself, and that her attacker was her brother’s childhood friend Guillaume de Bonnivet; Bonnivet features under his own name in nouvelle 14 as an unscrupulous rake.78 Patricia Cholakian picks up this clue in her study of sexual violence in the Heptameron, arguing that the recurrence of stories of rape and assault indicates an underlying traumatic experience.79 More recently, Elizabeth Zegura has also argued that the frequency of rape narratives in the Heptameron is perhaps a hint of Marguerite’s own experience, or at least a reflection of early modern culture in which women were vulnerable to a sexual violence

Jourda, Marguerite d’Angoulême; Cholakian and Cholakian, Marguerite de Navarre. Brantôme, ‘Second volume des Dames’, in Recueil des Dames, p. 392. 76 Brantôme, Recueil, p. 392: ‘elle en estoit l’une des devisantes’. For a discussion of the identifications, see Jourda, vol. 2, pp. 761–6, and Régine Reynolds-Cornell, Les Devisants de ‘L’Heptaméron’: Dix personnages en quête d’audience (Washington: University Press of America, 1977). 77 Deborah N. Losse, ‘Authorial and Narrative Voice in the Heptaméron’, Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme 11.3 (Summer 1987), 223–42. 78 Brantôme, Recueil, pp. 553–4. 79 Patricia Francis Cholakian, Rape and Writing in the ‘Heptaméron’ of Marguerite de Navarre (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991). 74 75

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that was minimised, ignored, or blamed on the victim.80 The menace of sexual assault weighs heavily on the collection. In the first day alone, a virtuous woman is raped and murdered by her servant (nouvelle 2); a noblewoman endures an unsuccessful attack in her own bedroom by her host (nouvelle 4); a ferrywoman tricks two Franciscan friars who want to rape her (nouvelle 5); a chambermaid is constantly propositioned by her master, who plans to sleep with her and allow his friend to do the same (nouvelle 8); and a young Spanish noblewoman is subject to a series of aggressions by her courtly suitor, once with the connivance of her own mother (nouvelle 10). Nouvelle 4, Marguerite’s possibly autobiographical account of a sexual attack, explores with economy the double binds and dead ends that sixteenthcentury women experienced in seeking justice for violence. In this nouvelle, a widowed aristocrat, still young and vivacious, is approached by a handsome nobleman as a courtly lover; she rejects his propositions, but he cannot take no for an answer for long, persuading himself that, if he chooses the right time, ‘[elle] prandroit peult-estre pitié de luy et d’elle ensemble’ (p. 119; ‘might she not [take pity on him and on herself] at the same time?’, p. 91). He does not plan to talk to her anymore, as he had little success with words; rather, he invites the woman and her brother to his house, installing her in a bedroom that has a communicating trapdoor to his own. Having dressed himself up in his best white shirt, and after admiring himself in the mirror, he surprises the lady in bed and tries to take her in his arms. She fights back, biting and scratching so that his face and shirt are covered in blood; beaten, he retreats. The lady is furious and determined to exact justice on her attacker, whose identity she is pretty sure she knows. But her old lady-in-waiting, who is sleeping in her room and helps her fight, counsels caution. Everyone has seen how gracious you are to this man, she tells her mistress. If you insist on his punishment, no one will believe you did not encourage him. And, worse, you will turn yourself into a story, which will put your honour at risk: ‘Et vostre honneur […] sera mis en dispute en tous les lieux là où cette histoire sera racomptée’ (p. 124; ‘Your honour […] would be put in doubt wherever this story was heard’, p. 94). This advice reveals the culture in which the lady must operate, and which controls her reputation; far from protecting and vindicating the victim, this culture will seek to blame and indeed shame women for the violence they suffer. It is a culture that seeks to silence the victims of violence rather than to repair or prevent the violence itself. The unfortunate narrator of nouvelle 62, who inadvertently reveals that the story she has been telling 80 Zegura, Shifting Gaze, p. 37. See Nancy Frelick, ‘L’Heptaméron de Marguerite de Navarre: Enjeux et écueils de la lecture biographique’, Le Verger – Bouquet 20 (2021) [online journal]: http://cornucopia16.com/blog/2021/01/26/nancy-frelick-lheptameron-demarguerite-de-navarre-enjeux-et-ecueils-de-la-lecture-biographique/

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is in fact about herself, is another example of the humiliations and dangers that threatened women who attempted to tell their own stories. This culture of shame, silence, and violence finds a spokesperson in Hircan, who, in the discussion following nouvelle 4, declares that the nobleman dishonoured himself, and should have killed the old woman and taken the young widow by force. Nomerfide is horrified at the condoning of greater violence revealed by the story itself and Hircan’s reaction to it. If this is an account of a personal traumatic experience, Marguerite has managed to circumvent the restrictions on women’s testimony advised by her old lady-in-waiting and evident in other tales in the collection. In telling the story, and exposing one man’s reaction to it, she also exposes the culture that exploits and silences the victims of violence. Women are not safe in the world of the Heptameron, where the general atmosphere is one of menace and terror, in which women are put in danger by the very people who should protect them – through the predations of their confessors and priests or the stupidity of their husbands and mothers. Whatever the details may be of Marguerite’s autobiography, her book reflects the reality of sixteenth-century women’s vulnerability to the endemic sexual violence of their social and literary culture. In this sense, the Heptameron is a book committed to revealing unpalatable truths about its own culture and its own communities. Marguerite’s Writing Life In the last few sections, we have looked at the literary communities that are created in Marguerite’s works. In the final section of this chapter, I would like to turn briefly to her experience of writing and the real-life communities she created through writing. Susan Broomhall emphasises the conditions necessary for writing in the sixteenth century that meant women authored less than 1% of print publications: education was crucial, as were time, a certain freedom from domestic and household duties, and a place to write.81 But equally crucial was what Broomhall calls a ‘rhetorical space in publication’, that is, a culture that would allow her voice to be heard. Even among the elite, Marguerite was an exceptional case: she was one of the very few women who published significant works in the sixteenth century, and one of even fewer to be reprinted in successive editions throughout the century.82 Although she wrote letters and devotional poetry throughout her adult life, she did not start printing her work until after she had left Paris for Nérac. 81 Susan Broomhall, Women and the Book Trade in Sixteenth-Century France (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), p. 85. 82 Susan Broomhall, ‘Teaching a Publishing History for the Heptameron’, in Approaches to Teaching Marguerite de Navarre’s ‘Heptameron’, ed. Colette H. Winn (New York: MLAA, 2007), 44–51.

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Marguerite seems to have incorporated literary culture into her public as well as her private life. An obituary by Charles de Sainte-Marthe praises her habit of discussing religion, philosophy, and history with her household; a welcome contrast, he says, to the ordinary occupation of courtiers: gossip.83 And yet there is evidence that Marguerite found space for both gossip and literary pursuits. Brantôme tells us that she composed the Heptameron’s stories while on the move around her domains in her litter, while her ladyof-honour (his grandmother) held her inkwell or took her dictation.84 The Heptameron’s stories often have the flavour of the anecdotal and the gossipy – stories told and retold in the tight circle of acquaintance that made up the royal courts. We might be able to glimpse in between the lines a picture of her literary endeavours as fundamentally sociable, surrounded by her court and in the midst of business. This was not always the case – her late poems Les Prisons and La Navire were probably composed in the convent where she had withdrawn to recover from her brother’s death. But even here – as in the monastery in Sarrance where the Heptameron stories are told – her daily writing life would have been punctuated by collective prayer and meals. Marguerite’s final decade was spent largely in Navarre. At this time, the capital, Pau, was no more than a village – a handful of streets surrounding a church. The chateau, however, was an imposing fortified building that had been transformed into a Renaissance palace; but when she joined her husband in 1542, Marguerite preferred the more modest and comfortable chateau that she had furnished at Nérac. She led a less extravagant and spectacular life there than she had at her brother’s court, but one that was also less anxious and wearing. Marguerite’s days in Navarre were tranquil, but the nights must have been long. We might imagine her in her chateaux at Nérac and Pau, by the fire, surrounded by her ladies and her household, reading a book or a manuscript from the library, or telling a story destined for the growing manuscript that would become the Heptameron. Her example left a mark on the literary culture of Navarre. Eight of her noblewomen accompanied her into print in the ‘Adieux des dames de chez la Royne de Navarre, allant en Gascongne, à madame la Princesse de Navarre’ (‘Farewells from the ladies of the Queen of Navarre, going into Gascony, to madame the princess of Navarre’), a series of laments addressed to young Jeanne and included in the Suyte des Marguerites. These short poems, each printed under a different name, bid a ceremonial farewell to Jeanne and ask 83 Oraison funèbre de la mort de l’incomparable Marguerite, royne de Navarre et duchesse d’Alençon composée en Latin par Charles de Sainte-Marthe et traduicte par luy en langue françoise (Paris, 1550), in Marguerite de Navarre, Heptaméron, ed. Antoine Le Roux de Lincy and Anatole de Montaiglon, 4 vols (Paris: August Eudes, 1880), vol. 1, pp. 23–130 (pp. 68–9). 84 Brantôme, ‘Premier Volume’, in Recueil, p. 183.

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her to remember them. They are printed as a kind of keepsake, expressing the sorrow they could not speak when Jeanne was present. The introductory section ends with the utility of writing for consolation and remembrance: ‘Mais maintenant feront nostre harangue, / En nous servant de la plume pour langue, / D’encre pour voix, & de papier pour bouche’ (But now we will make our speech, using a quill for a tongue, ink for voice, and paper for mouth).85 Jeanne herself, when she became queen of Navarre in 1555 and converted to Calvinism in 1560, wrote poetry and memoir, and transformed the personal letter into a form of political propaganda. She strongly promoted the linguistic identity of her state, commissioning biblical translations into the local languages, Béarn and Basque.86 Nérac remained a centre for women’s literary production: the Calvinist emblem poet Georgette de Montenay was raised there. And, as her country ignited into civil war, Marguerite became one of the best-selling authors – male or female – of the sixteenth century. In an increasingly polarised country, where a plurality of beliefs was considered a threat to national stability as well as to personal salvation, people were nevertheless still reading her profoundly open and dialogic works.

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Suyte des Marguerites, pp. 337–41 (p. 338). Broomhall, Women and the Book Trade, p. 152.

2

Religion All of Marguerite de Navarre’s work is inspired and deeply marked by her religious beliefs.1 From the chansons spirituelles to her theatre and her masterpiece, the Heptameron, she wrestles with the challenges of living a spiritual life in a fallen world. She lived at a time when it was not straightforward to be a Western European Christian. The sixteenth century was a turbulent and traumatic period of religious history. The Protestant Reformation split the Western Christian church into two, and as the sixteenth century progressed the ideological conflict turned, inevitably it seemed, into violence and civil war across Europe as the coexistence of different religious beliefs seemed increasingly fraught. In France, the promise of new learning and new discoveries embodied in the humanist movement at the beginning of the century was shattered in a series of intractable and destructive civil wars known as the Wars of Religion (1562–98), stoked not just by religious division and hostility but also by rivalry between powerful French noble families.2 Marguerite did not live to see France’s descent into civil chaos, but she did witness a hardening of sectarian positions and an intolerance of different beliefs on all sides that led to persecutions for heresy and statesanctioned massacre. This chapter will explore the religious conflicts that provide a backdrop and often the material for Marguerite’s work. In the first two sections, I look at the context in which Marguerite was writing: the first section is a brief introduction to the Reformation, the issues that divided Catholics and Protestants, and the position of the French Evangelicals; then I turn to the situation in France, the 1 On Marguerite’s religious beliefs, see Lucien Febvre, Amour sacré, amour profane: autour de l’Heptaméron (Paris: Gallimard, 1944), an old but still valuable study. More recently, Carol Thysell, The Pleasure of Discernment: Marguerite de Navarre as Theologian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), in which Marguerite’s theology is compared to Calvin’s. Finally, see the valuable studies in A Companion to Marguerite de Navarre, ed. Gary Ferguson and Mary B. McKinley (Leiden: Brill, 2013). 2 On the Reformation, see Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided (London: Penguin, 2004). On the French Wars of Religion, Denis Crouzet, Les Guerriers de Dieu: La Violence au temps des troubles de religion, vers 1525–vers 1610, 2 vols (Paris: Champ Vallon, 2005); R. J. Knecht, The French Wars of Religion, 1559–1598 (London: Longman, 1989).

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persecution of reformers, and the French Evangelicals’ response. The next sections take Christian themes that marked the Reformation debates and that recur in Marguerite’s work to explore in more detail: sin; false pride; faith and grace; and mysticism and death. I read Marguerite’s religious poetry – Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse, Les Prisons, and Les Chansons spirituelles – alongside the Heptameron, which continues her meditation on these matters in a secular setting. Catholics, Protestants, Evangelicals There have been many movements of reform in the history of Christianity, but the period we now call the Reformation was a particularly spectacular one. On 31 October 1517, a German Augustinian friar, Martin Luther, nailed a list of topics for discussion at the university to the church door in Wittenberg.3 This moment has come to be seen as the foundational story of the Reformation, the moment it all began; and although there was nothing particularly radical about Luther’s list – now known as the Ninety-five Theses – or indeed the fact that he nailed it to a church door, it nevertheless became an iconic image of Protestant rebellion. Luther’s list was extensive, and it covered both institutional (that is, on the governance of the church) and theological (doctrinal) questions; many were rooted in medieval criticisms of the church. The principal grievance of Luther’s list was the practice of indulgences. Indulgences were sold by the church to hasten a soul’s progress through purgatory, and they could be purchased for one’s self or for another. For Luther, as for many other critics before him, the practice was representative of the worldly corruption of Catholic authority, which had abandoned spiritual matters for material wealth and power. Luther’s ideas got unprecedented exposure through a relatively new invention: the printing press.4 His pamphlets were produced and sold in huge numbers throughout Germany. The Protestant movement that eventually grew out of Luther’s original protest aimed to strip the church of accrued corruption and restore its pristine, primitive purity. Protestants did not see themselves as inventing a new religion. They saw themselves not as destroyers, but as repairers, and only revolutionaries in the sense of seeking a return to an original state. In response, Catholics accused Protestants of political as well as religious rebellion and lamented the destruction of the old bonds of community and communion that the Catholic Church’s rituals represented. The Protestant movement itself was not unified. Lutheran Protestantism coexisted alongside Calvinism, another branch named after its charismatic leader, Jean Calvin, but there were also smaller, more local movements. 3 For Luther in historical and national context, see Lyndal Roper, Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet (London: Vintage, 2017). 4 Andrew Pettegree, Brand Luther (New York: Penguin, 2015).

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Jean Calvin was born in France but left the country during the period of persecution in 1534 and settled in Geneva. Here, he wrote the systematic and comprehensive Institutes of Christian Religion and initiated the revival known as the Second Reformation. He transformed Geneva into a centre of reformed piety, encouraging persecuted Protestants to make their home there; large numbers of Protestant refugees from France and from England during Mary I’s Catholic reign settled there. Calvin’s reformed Geneva exerted a huge influence in France. It was where French Protestant pastors were trained and vast numbers of tracts and pamphlets were printed. In response to the Protestant challenge, Catholicism initiated its own reform, known as the Counter-Reformation, but more accurately understood as a process that had begun long before Luther and which produced both internal and schismatic reformations. The principal institution of the Counter-Reformation was the Council of Trent, which met intermittently between 1545 and 1563 to pin down matters of governance and doctrine and drew up definitive dividing lines between Catholicism and Protestantism. After Trent, moderate or mixed positions that were possible earlier in the century became untenable. Such a position was held in the early sixteenth century in France by reforming Catholics known as Evangelicals, after their insistence on the primacy of the gospels (or l’évangile) in Christian spirituality.5 They were a loose group, formed around the humanist and biblical scholar Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples in Paris around 1520, the year before Luther was excommunicated. While they shared many of Luther’s concerns and criticisms of the church, they sought to reform and renew Catholicism from within the church without schism; some, like Lefèvre himself, remained Catholic while others, such as Guillaume Farel, would eventually leave Catholicism and France to help establish Calvin’s reformed church in Geneva. Lefèvre and his followers left Paris for Meaux in 1521, at the invitation of the bishop, Guillaume Briçonnet, who was working to reform the clergy in his diocese. Marguerite and Briçonnet corresponded regularly and lengthily between 1521 and 1525, and he remained an important spiritual influence on all her work.6 Marguerite was the most prominent protector of the Meaux group and their intermediary at her brother’s court for three decades, although it should be acknowledged that this was precisely the accusation made by a Sorbonne orator to the king in February 1534, who furiously had him imprisoned for his outspokenness.7 Association with reform could amount to calumny in certain historical and political contexts. 5 Reid, King’s Sister, and his ‘Marguerite de Navarre and Evangelical Reform’, in A Companion, pp. 29–58. 6 Guillaume Briçonnet and Marguerite d’Angoulême, Correspondance, 1521–1524, ed. Christine Martineau and Michel Veissière with Henry Heller, 2 vols (Geneva: Droz, 1975). 7 Jourda, Marguerite, vol. 1, p. 182. Jourda’s expression is ‘protectrice attitrée’, or appointed protector.

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Beyond the specific issue of indulgences, Luther rejected the more general belief that a person could somehow earn salvation through their own meritorious deeds – charity, prayer, abstinence. That gave too much power and control to people, when God alone had the power to save. The only way to salvation, therefore, was by faith in God’s grace which is given freely and in excess of any desert or merit. This was a belief that French Evangelicals shared. Evangelicals also believed with Protestants in the primacy of Scripture as the only certain guide to religious belief and practice. The Bible represents direct access to the word of God without the intermediary of a priest, who could (and it was his admission of this that led to Luther’s excommunication) be unclear, mistaken, or even deliberately misleading. Consequently, the Bible, and the languages in which it was available, became an area of controversy between Catholics and reformers. The original language of the Old Testament is Hebrew, and the New Testament was written in Greek. Old and New Testaments were translated by the Church Father St Jerome in the late fourth century into Latin. Jerome’s translation became known as the Vulgate Bible (from the Latin edition vulgata, or ‘common version’) and was adopted as the official Bible of the Catholic Church. Many humanist reformers such as Erasmus and Lefèvre argued that Jerome’s translation was faulty and that it was now necessary to go back to the original texts. But in order to put the word of God into the hands of ordinary people, the Bible had to be translated into their languages so that they could understand it without the mediation of a priest. For this reason, reformers championed the translation of the Bible into multiple European vernaculars, whereas for the Catholic authorities at certain times mere possession of a vernacular Bible could signal dangerous resistance to the Church. Many of Marguerite’s protected writers worked on biblical translations: Lefèvre produced a French version of the Bible, working with the original texts in Greek and Hebrew, and Marot translated the Psalms into French. Marguerite herself produced an early translation of Luther’s meditation on the prayer ‘Our Father’, which she transformed into a verse dialogue between the soul and God.8 The Heptameron is explicit on the primacy of Scripture. In the discussion after nouvelle 44 – a short anecdote in which a Franciscan earns his alms by denouncing the stupidity of women – Parlamente turns to bad preachers, whom she refuses to believe unless their words are corroborated by the word of God. The Bible, she says, is the ‘vraye touche pour sçavoir les paroles vraies ou mensongeres’ (p. 513; ‘the only true touchstone by which one can know whether one is hearing truth or falsehood’, p. 400). Parlamente’s insistence on Scripture is characteristically evangelical; as is the confidence with which she, a layperson, claims knowledge of the Bible in contrast to 8

Le Pater Noster de Marguerite de Navarre.

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what she hears preached in sermons. In her devotional poem Les Prisons, Marguerite uses this image again: ‘l’Evangile est la pierre de touche’ (the gospel is the touchstone).9 A touchstone is used to test the purity of precious metals, and Marguerite alludes to this property in the next line of the poem, where the touchstone makes true gold manifest: ‘Où du bon or se congnoist la valeur’ (where the value of real gold is known). In this sense, the word of God in Parlamente’s assertion juxtaposes truth with lies and shows how far the latter are wanting. But the biblical touchstone can also be a test of an individual’s mettle, a test of their faith. Jesus appears as such a stone in Peter’s first letter, precious to those who believe, but ‘a stone of stumbling, and a rock of offence, even to them which stumble at the word’ (1 Peter 2.8). In Parlamente’s claim, Scripture as touchstone shows the true worth of the preacher whose words do not conform to God’s. Jonathan Reid argues that Marguerite and her evangelical network mounted an organised campaign of lobbying and publication in order to further religious reform in France in the 1520s and 1530s.10 In addition to these national-scale efforts, Marguerite also worked at a local level to reform religious practice in the territories she controlled. Her letters bear witness to her intervention throughout her life in local disputes and her interest in reforming lax monastical rule; in this she was following the example of Marguerite de Lorraine, her first husband’s mother, who entered a convent at the end of her life.11 When Marguerite de Navarre appears as a character in the Heptameron, it is often to intervene and correct injustice or abuse, justifying (for example) the virtuous nun Marie Héroët in nouvelle 22 and comforting a pregnant nun in nouvelle 72. Her interest in reform was practical as well as theoretical: while reform for her was evidently about spiritual matters of eternal salvation, it was also about everyday life and interactions such as marriage, state control, and literacy. Attempts to adjudicate whether Marguerite was ‘really’ a Catholic or a Protestant (and, if so, whether a Lutheran or a Calvinist) are problematic because they are generally based on categories that became fixed only after her death. Sixteenth-century religious history also tends to ignite current confessional identity politics, resulting in Marguerite being claimed by one side or the other. While Eugène and Emile Haag acknowledge that she cannot strictly be classed as either in their history of Protestant France, they conclude that her quest for truth brought her closer to Protestantism.12 Sixteenth-century judgements also tend to come from a very particular confessional or political Les Prisons, p. 177, Book 3, line 1232. Reid, ‘Marguerite de Navarre’, p. 51, and King’s Sister. 11 Stephenson, Power and Patronage, p. 4 and ch. 5 (pp. 149–83). 12 E. Haag and E. Haag, La France protestante, 10 vols (Paris, 1846–59), vol. 7, p. 228. Quoted in Jean-Marie Le Gall, ‘Marguerite de Navarre: The Reasons for Remaining Catholic’, A Companion, pp. 59–87 (p. 59). 9

10

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perspective. Calvin’s disappointment was echoed by his successor in Geneva, Théodore de Bèze, who regretted Marguerite’s later return to what he called the superstition and idolatry of Catholicism.13 Her conservative opponent at court, Anne de Montmorency, on the other hand, tried continually to persuade François of her unorthodoxy. Pierre de Brantôme relates how the Grand Constable, at the height of his favour with the king, was unafraid to attack his sister, advising François that: ‘s’il vouloit bien exterminer les heretiques de son Royaume, qu’il falloit commancer à sa Court et à ses plus proches, luy nommant la Reyne sa sœur’ (if he wanted to exterminate the heretics from his kingdom, he should start at his court and those closest to him, naming the Queen his sister).14 François was dismissive: ‘Ne parlons point de cellelà, elle m’ayme trop. Elle ne croyra jamais que ce que je croyray, et ne prendra jamais de relligion qui prejudicie à mon Estat’ (Let’s not talk of her, she loves me too much. She will only ever believe what I believe, and will never adopt a religion prejudicial to my State). According to Brantôme, this attempted intervention signalled the end of Montmorency’s influence at court, and he retired from his duties in 1541. Many assumptions and perspectives are at work here: François’s unshakeable belief in his sister’s loyalty and Brantôme’s predilection for court gossip and hearsay (he eagerly tells us that he heard this anecdote from a trustworthy source, a ‘personne digne de foy’). Elizabeth Zegura is surely right to warn against too hasty an endorsement of François’s reported position.15 Marguerite was clearly not slavishly attuned to her brother’s beliefs, despite her own rhetoric of unity and shared purpose. François’s own statement here is more monitory than descriptive: it is a warning to Montmorency, and also, perhaps, a warning to his sister. François was right, however, to emphasise Marguerite’s dynastic loyalty. Her religious and political position was unquestionably that of a queen and governor of territories in her own right, as well as sister to a king who believed schismatic ‘new religions’ synonymous with sedition (they, in Brantôme’s words, ‘tendoient plus à la destruction des Royaumes, des Monarchies et dominations nouvelles, qu’à l’édification des ames’; tended towards the destruction of Kingdoms, Monarchies, and new dominations, rather than to the edification of souls).16 Her approach to religious and particularly ecclesiastical reform was top-down, led by enlightened rulers and their appointed officials, not a grassroots overhaul. Brantôme is quite interestingly non-committal on her attachment to Protestantism: ‘elle n’en fist jamais aucune profession ni semblant; et, si elle la croyoit, elle la tenoit dans son ame

13 14 15 16

Histoire ecclésiastique, cited in Le Gall, ‘Marguerite de Navarre’, p. 59. Brantôme, ‘Premier Volume’, Recueil, p. 178. Zegura, Shifting Gaze, pp. 49–50. Brantôme, Recueil, p. 177.

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fort secrette’ (she never made, or appeared to make, any profession of that faith; and if she believed it, she held it secret in her heart, p. 177). Unlike her daughter, Jeanne, she made no public conversion to Protestantism. She might be thought, in Thierry Wanegffellen’s terms, ‘ni Rome ni Genève’: belonging neither to Rome nor Geneva.17 But Jean-Marie Le Gall argues that this is to ignore Marguerite’s commitment to certain central elements of Catholicism: monastic life, the Eucharist, and devotion to the Virgin Mary.18 These loyalties make her a strange Protestant, even crypto-Protestant. But if she remained a Catholic, it was as a Catholic who believed in salvation through faith, universal access to Scripture in the vernacular, and reform of the church. Her vision was perhaps only possible in the first half of the sixteenth century, when religious renewal and reform could still be envisaged within the Catholic Church, and confessional positions had not yet hardened into oppositions.19 Increasingly, the coexistence of different religious beliefs was seen as a challenge to national stability and to personal salvation throughout sixteenth-century Europe. The eruption of religious wars across the continent demonstrates the limits of tolerance for different beliefs, even while local communities found ways to accommodate difference and to neutralise hostility.20 In France, the series of Wars of Religion was punctuated by temporary peace edicts which varied the extent to which the new religion would be tolerated, regulating and containing Protestant worship. In her commitment to forms of dialogue, particularly in the Heptameron, Marguerite demonstrates her interest in exploring the difficulty and the challenge of accommodating difference, especially when that difference is perceived as offensive or threatening. Persecution and Pretence The evangelical cause in France was very much subject to François I’s sympathies, and these were not constant over the thirty-two years of his reign. Historians’ evaluations of Marguerite’s influence have changed too, from a rather pessimistic account of increasing decline to a more recent sense that she remained a powerful figure throughout her life, with moments 17 Thierry Wanegffellen, Ni Rome ni Genève: Des fidèles entre deux chaires en France au XVIe siècle (Paris: Champion, 1997). 18 Le Gall, ‘Marguerite de Navarre’, p. 87. 19 Monastic reform had been underway for forty years before Luther: see Jean-Marie Le Gall, Les Moines au temps des Réformes: France (1480–1560) (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2001). 20 On the coexistence of religious beliefs in France, see The Adventure of Religious Pluralism in Early Modern France, ed. Keith Cameron, Mark Greengrass, and Penny Roberts (Oxford: Lang, 2000).

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of estrangement.21 When François came to the throne in 1515, Marguerite was at the centre of his court and his confidence and could have justifiably been optimistic about influencing domestic religious policy. Her support and protection of the Meaux group in the early 1520s was successful and she wrote to Briçonnet in 1521 that she was hopeful of winning François and their mother, Louise, to the cause of reform.22 But she was always beset by more conservative forces in the court such as Anne de Montmorency, the Grand Constable; and their position was hardening against reform as it became increasingly associated with political rebellion and religious schism. Outbreaks of radical protests against the pope, indulgences, or the Mass, and incidences of iconoclasm would only harden their positions further, convincing conservatives that Protestants were not simply seeking their own freedom of conscience but a more revolutionary political change. Towards 1523, the conservative attack on Marguerite as a protector and enabler of heresy increased; meanwhile, François’s attentions were directed towards his war with Charles V. After the battle of Pavia, when François was a prisoner in Spain and Marguerite was negotiating his release, conservatives at the Faculty of Theology and the court made decisive moves against the Evangelicals and forced many preachers into exile: Lefèvre, Gérard Roussel (Marguerite’s chaplain), and Michel d’Arande (who preached at the royal court on Marguerite’s recommendation) all fled to Strasbourg. But after François’s release and return to Paris the cause looked promising again. Here, as always, religious policy was inextricable from foreign policy. In the 1530s there were alliances to be made against the Catholic Charles V: the Protestant princes in Germany and (after his 1533 break with Rome) Henry VIII of England. Marguerite hoped that these political alliances, if made, would further the evangelical cause and reform of the church in France. But the cause was always fragile. In 1533 Roussel was examined for heresy by the Parlement de Paris, and in the same year the Sorbonne made an unprecedented move against Marguerite, calling in the 1533 printing of her devotional poem Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse for examination. François was furious, and the Sorbonne quickly backed down, claiming that its procedures for pre-publication approval had not been followed. But a threatening step had been taken. In October 1534 the evangelical cause suffered a severe blow. In what became known as the affaire des placards, posters denouncing the Catholic Mass appeared overnight in prominent places in Paris – some said even on the door of the king’s bedroom. The Mass – or more specifically, the Eucharist – was a flashpoint in the polemic between Catholics and Protestants. Catholics 21 For different views on Marguerite’s influence, see Jourda, Marguerite d’Angoulême, and Reid, King’s Sister. 22 Correspondance, vol. 1, pp. 71, 75–6; Reid, King’s Sister, vol. 1, pp. 186–93.

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insisted that a miraculous transformation actually turned the bread and wine of the Eucharist into the body and blood of Christ, because these were his words at the Last Supper as the bread was broken: ‘This is my body.’23 This miraculous transformation was known as transubstantiation, as the substance of the bread and wine were transformed, leaving its superficial accidental properties (such as taste and texture) unchanged. Protestants were reluctant to accept this kind of frequent miracle and insisted that Jesus’s words should be taken metaphorically. On this point, Marguerite was emphatically a Catholic.24 For François, the placards crossed a line and represented an act of political sedition. After the placards, he authorised increasingly severe persecution of reformers and Evangelicals, and Marguerite left Paris in a prudent retrenchment. Between October and New Year, twenty-four accused heretics were executed, including the Parisian printer of Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse, Antoine Augereau. After an initial period of hope, then, the French Evangelicals found themselves in precarious circumstances. Orthodox conservative opinion was firmly entrenched in the Faculty of Theology in Paris, the Sorbonne, and had powerful advocates at court. François’s sympathies, despite his attachment to his sister, seem to have depended on the political weather. In the face of opposition, persecution, and the threat of execution, the Evangelicals tended to adopt a policy of temporising and dissimulation. Sometimes this was advocated because they felt the time was not right for the changes they wished to see. This was the case in 1522, when Briçonnet advised Marguerite to draw back from her efforts to evangelise François and Louise, since they were such green wood that they would extinguish the fire rather than catch alight themselves (Briçonnet often used ‘enflamber’ to designate one who burned with evangelical faith).25 Biding one’s time, temporising: the evangelical cause had to be pursued diplomatically and sensitively; push too hard, and the advantage could be lost. Later, strategies of dissimulation were advocated by evangelical writers in Marguerite’s circle. Clément Marot advised Evangelicals to hide their beliefs in an unpublished satire probably written in 1542, just before his final exile, in which he addresses Marguerite as ‘l’âme pecheresse’, after her controversial 1531 poem, and urges her to simulate Catholic piety in order to remain safe: ‘Baisez la pantoufle du pappe / En disant votre patenostre’ (Kiss the pope’s Matthew 26.26, Mark 14.22, Luke 22.19. Luke adds: ‘this do in remembrance of me’. In a late poem, Marguerite is explicit on this score, referring to the host as ‘ton pain tresblanc / par qui mangeons et ta chair et ton sang’ (your pure white bread by which we eat your body and your blood). Miroir de Jhesus Christ crucifié, p. 32, lines 803–4. 25 ‘Il vous plaira couvrir le feu pour quelques temps: le bois que voulez faire brusler est sy verd qu’il estandroit le feu’ (Would it please you to smother the fire for a while: the wood you wish to burn is so green it will extinguish the flame). Correspondance, vol. 1, p. 230. 23

24

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slipper while saying your rosary).26 François Rabelais’s famous prologues hover between the suggestion that there is a hidden sense to find in his books and the denial that there is anything there but amusing diversion.27 It is difficult to talk about these strategies of dissimulation neutrally because they became an important part of Protestant critique of the Evangelicals, and thus caught up in the confessional polemic we are trying to observe. In 1539, Marie Dentière, who had left her Augustinian convent in the early 1520s to convert to Protestantism, published an open letter addressed to Marguerite from Geneva. Much of the letter is a defence of women’s theological and pastoral work, but Dentière also pleads with Marguerite – the godmother of one of her children – to continue to protect those persecuted by conservative authorities in France, suggesting that the queen has been misled by those who claim to support the gospel but are in fact motivated by self-interest.28 Once established in Geneva, Jean Calvin became disenchanted with what he now saw as the French Evangelicals’ timid and temporising approach to reform. He published a polemic in 1544 entitled L’Excuse de Jehan Calvin à MM. les Nicodémites (Jean Calvin’s Justification to messieurs the Nicodemites) in which he denounced this approach as hypocritical and impious. He called the Evangelicals who had, in his view, cravenly turned their backs on reform ‘Nicodemites’ after they defended their strategy by comparing themselves to the Pharisee Nicodemus who, although attracted to Jesus’s preaching, went to hear him only at night.29 Marguerite did not respond directly to these accusations, but she did address the issue of hypocrisy throughout her works. V.-L. Saulnier argues that her play Trop Prou Peu Moins (Too Much, A Lot, Little, Less) is a response to Calvin’s accusation in the Excuse.30 Trop Prou is an enigmatic play, written in the 1540s; it was called a farce when it was printed in La Suyte 26 Marot, ‘Epistre du coq à l’asne à Lyon’, Œuvres poétiques, vol. 2, p. 167, lines 91, 96–7. See Reid, King’s Sister, vol. 2, pp. 561–3. 27 Rabelais, ‘Prologue’, Gargantua, Œuvres complètes, ed. Mireille Huchon (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), pp. 5–8. See François Cornilliat, ‘Interpretation in Rabelais, Interpretation of Rabelais’, in The Cambridge Companion to Rabelais, ed. John O’Brien (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 43–56. 28 Epistre tres utile faicte et composée par une femme Chrestienne de Tornay, Envoyée à la Royne de Navarre seur du Roy de France [Geneva: Jean Girard, 1539]; Epistle to Marguerite de Navarre and Preface to a Sermon by John Calvin, ed. and trans. Mary B. McKinley (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004). 29 Jean Calvin, Excuse de Jehan Calvin à MM. les Nicodémites sur la complaincte qu’ilz font de sa trop grand’rigueur (1544) in Three French Treatises, ed. Francis M. Higman (London: Athlone, 1970), pp. 131–53 (p. 144). See Scott Francis, ‘Marguerite de Navarre, a Nicodemite? “Adiaphora” and Intention in Heptaméron 30, 65, and 72’, Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme 39.3 (2016), 5–31; Reid, King’s Sister, pp. 550–63. 30 Théâtre profane, p. 146.

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des Marguerites, but it also combines elements of the morality (the characters who clearly symbolise something, even if we’re not sure what) and the sottie (fool’s play). Trop and Prou are proud, disdainful characters, while Peu and Moins represent the childlike, open spirituality which Marguerite preferred and associated with the gospel. Trop and Prou are excessively attached to the world, so they can’t understand what Peu and Moins try to tell them; Peu and Moins appear foolish, but they are holy fools, closer to God in their rejection of human wisdom. The biblical allusion in their names is perhaps the clearest indication that their simple faith justifies them in the eyes of God: ‘many [prou] are called, but few [peu] are chosen’ (Matt. 22.14).31 At the end of the play, Peu and Moins leave Trop and Prou to their blindness and their pride; Saulnier argues that this is Marguerite’s riposte to Calvin’s accusation of surrender, since conversion of the blind and the stubborn is pointless. But, as Olivier Millet argues, it is hard to map a precise historical or religious interpretation onto this most enigmatic of texts; and Saulnier does offer this as only one of many potential keys to the play.32 It is in the Heptameron that the issue of hypocrisy is most exhaustively explored.33 The storytelling project itself endorses a relentless uncovering of secret hypocrisies: the true depravity of a prior in nouvelle 22, Jambicque’s hypocritical desire in nouvelle 43, or a disguised monk’s tonsure in nouvelle 56. The storytellers range themselves against dissimulation, as Geburon says before revealing Jambicque’s secret: ‘comme vous verrez par son histoire où la verité sera dicte tout du long’ (p. 501; ‘as you will see from [her] story, in which the whole truth will be told’, p. 391). Hypocrisy is unequivocally condemned in the Heptameron when it is an abuse of power, as in the case of Jambicque, and more urgently with the numerous lecherous friars who betray their vows and harm others. And yet Marguerite’s evangelical conception of the human being as flawed, impotent, and weak entails at the same time that hypocrisy is inevitable. Longarine suggests that hypocrisy can even act as a kind of supplement for the virtues human beings do not possess: ‘où elle [la vertu] default, se fault ayder de l’hypocrisie, comme nous faisons de pantoufles pour faire oublier nostre petitesse’ (p. 560; ‘when it [virtue] is lacking, one must use hypocrisy, just as people wear high shoes to cover up the fact that they are not very tall’, p. 436). This representation of hypocrisy as inevitable may be an oblique response to Calvin’s more high-handed dismissal of those who, in the face of persecution, choose to lower their heads rather than fight or leave. 31 In the Comédie de la Nativité, Marie quotes this verse: ‘Prou d’appellez y a, mais peu d’Esluz’. Les Comédies bibliques, p. 112, line 886. 32 Millet, ‘Staging the Spiritual’, p. 313. 33 Emily Butterworth, ‘Necessary Leaven: Hypocrisy and the Heptaméron’, Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme 43.3 (2020), 135–66.

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The persecution of Evangelicals and Protestants after the affaire des placards did not stop Marguerite writing. Most of her plays, including the cycle of four biblical plays representing Christ’s birth and childhood, were probably written in the second half of the 1530s. Marguerite was also soon back at her brother’s court. Her counter-attack against the conservatives seems to have been the accusation that they were ‘forgeurs d’hérétiques’ (heretic-creators), who saw heretics where there were none, and strove to punish innocent people.34 In the early 1540s, François was again considering an alliance with the Protestant princes against Charles V; and in this cause, Marguerite’s twelve-year-old daughter, Jeanne, was married to the duke of Cleves in what Jonathan Reid calls ‘an Abrahamic sacrifice’, as the marriage was directly against her husband’s wishes (he hoped Jeanne would marry Charles V’s son) and her daughter’s inclination.35 When this alliance fell through, Marguerite did not fall from favour. François had called her to court and she was on her way there when he died in March 1547. The succession of Henri II was not good news for the evangelical cause, however: he had always been in the conservative, orthodox faction at court, and immediately surrounded himself with other conservatives such as his father’s constable, Anne de Montmorency. The last two years of her life might have been filled with despair at the failure of the evangelical project. But this was also one of the most productive times of her life, as she continued to write: La Navire, her elegy to her brother, which turns him into an evangelical exemplar; Les Prisons, in which the benighted soul struggles towards its understanding of God’s love; the ecstatic Chansons spirituelles; and the life-affirming, openended, quarrelsome yet conciliatory Heptameron. The Sinful Soul The theology of fallen humanity permeates all Marguerite’s works. The image of the impotent human, incapable of any worth on their own, is counterbalanced by the irrepressible hope of God’s infinite capacity to save. We will see below how Marguerite conceptualises God’s grace; here, I will focus on her conception of the sinful soul. The narrative of the Fall is recounted in Genesis, almost immediately after the creation of humanity. Adam and Eve disobey God by eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, on the urging of the serpent. As 34 ‘Forgeurs d’hérétiques’ comes from a letter she wrote François in 1529 in favour of Louis de Berquin, once again arrested on heresy charges: see Nouvelles Lettres, p. 49. In another letter to the king in 1541 she reminds him of her opinion that the 1534 placards were actually posted by those who sought to impose punishment on others (‘les vilains placars estoient faits par ceux qui les cherchent aux aultres’, Nouvelles lettres, p. 197). 35 Reid, ‘Marguerite de Navarre’, p. 42.

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a consequence, God drives them out of Eden and condemns them to a life of hard labour and to death. ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return’ (Gen. 3.19). The fourth-century Church Father and theologian St Augustine coined the term ‘original sin’ for the concept of inherited, collective guilt that was shared by all humanity, and which could be redeemed only through God’s sacrifice of his son, Jesus. Through Jesus’s death on the cross, the sins of ‘vieil Adam’ (old Adam) were finally purged for true believers.36 Marguerite’s Miroir de l’âme pécheresse was the first of her works to be printed, by Simon du Bois in Alençon in 1531. It was a publishing success, reprinted eight times by different editors before it was included in her selected works, Les Marguerites, in 1547; the future Elizabeth I translated it into English as a gift for her stepmother Katherine Parr in 1544 when she was 11.37 Isabelle Garnier and Isabelle Pantin describe the publication of Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse in 1531 as ‘a militant act’.38 They assimilate the text to the first publication campaign of the ‘Navarrian network’, to use Jonathan Reid’s term, a didactic work that aimed to put evangelical ideas in circulation. It was the 1533 edition printed in Paris by Antoine Augereau that was momentarily condemned by the Sorbonne for not including the printer’s name, a legal requirement; after François’s intervention, Augereau went on to print two more editions that year, one which made Marguerite’s authorship explicit. At the very end of her writing career, in the last year of her life, Marguerite wrote another ‘mirror’ poem, Miroir de Jhesus Christ crucifié, an extended penitential contemplation of Christ on the cross, which was edited and printed in 1552, after her death. The titles of the Miroir poems place them in the medieval tradition of didactic and devotional ‘mirror’ texts in which Christians are invited to meditate on their own life and to examine their conscience. Mirrors were rarely simple reflectors of what was in front of them in medieval and early modern literary and religious culture: rather, they offered ideal models of behaviour, a reminder that humanity was made in the image of God, or, conversely, an image of human vanity.39 The book that Ysambert de Saint-Léger dedicated to 36 Poline refers to ‘le corps qui perit et tient du vieil Adam’ being replaced by that of Jesus Christ in nouvelle 19, Heptameron, p. 288; ‘the flesh of the old Adam that perisheth’, p. 227. 37 Susan Snyder, ‘Guilty Sisters: Marguerite de Navarre, Elizabeth of England, and the Miroir de l’âme pécheresse’, Renaissance Quarterly 50.2 (Summer 1997), 443–58. 38 Isabelle Garnier and Isabelle Pantin, ‘Opening and Closing Reflections: The Miroir de l’âme pécheresse and the Miroir de Jésus-Christ crucifié’, in A Companion, pp. 109–59 (p. 118). 39 Deborah Shuger, ‘The “I” of the Beholder: Renaissance Mirrors and the Reflexive

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Marguerite, his translation of the late thirteenth-century Miroir des dames, is an example of the secular strand of the tradition: a text that offers exemplary, ideal models for behaviour. Here, as in the many other texts that offer models of various states and professions (princes, clergy, magistrates …), the Miroir in the title is less a reflection of reality than an ideal construction of it. After her death, Marguerite herself was held up as an ideal of intellectual and pious perfection by her eulogists, ‘le mirouer des Princesses’, as Charles de SainteMarthe put it.40 In a manuscript book of hours belonging to Catherine de Medici, wife of Henri II, there is a portrait of Marguerite in a chemise smiling enigmatically into a mirror.41 No doubt a reference to her Miroir de l’âme pécheresse, the portrait deploys all the ambiguity of the image of the mirror. What is Marguerite contemplating in her mirror? Almost certainly not her own reflection, but perhaps the ideal of humanity made in the image of God or a reminder of human vanity. Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse bears the mark of Marguerite’s association with Lefèvre’s circle and, in particular, her correspondence with Guillaume Briçonnet. It is a handbook of evangelical belief: the sinfulness of the human soul, the utter dependence on God’s grace for salvation, the primacy of faith. A large part of the poem is a mystical meditation on the soul’s eventual union with God, with Jesus appearing as husband, father, brother, and son. Marguerite draws direct inspiration from the Bible, filling her margins with annotations and references; the important presence of Scripture in personal belief is another evangelical trait. Recent criticism has shown the Miroir de l’âme pécheresse to be a complex and intricately structured poem, after its dismissal by earlier critics as a disorganised piece of personal expression.42 Written in readable decasyllables, it invites the reader to meditate on their own sinful nature and to accept with joy and wonder the miracle of God’s grace. It opens and closes with an acknowledgement of human abjection. Echoing God’s judgement in Genesis (‘dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return’), the poet confesses the worthlessness of her being: ‘Que, quant à moy, je suis trop moins que riens: / Avant la vie boue, et apres fyens’ (‘As for me, I am [much] less than nothing: / before life, dirt, and after, dung’).43 A similar vocabulary of waste and abjection returns at the end of the poem. ‘Moy donques, ver de terre, moins que riens, / Mind’, in Renaissance Culture and the Everyday, ed. Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), pp. 21–41. 40 Oraison funèbre de la mort de l’incomparable Marguerite, in Marguerite de Navarre, Heptaméron, ed. Le Roux de Lincy and Anatole de Montaiglon, 4 vols (Paris: August Eudes, 1880), vol. 1, pp. 23–130 (p. 23). 41 https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b10035936n/f175.item 42 Garnier and Pantin, ‘Opening and Closing Reflections’, pp. 124–37. 43 Marguerite de Navarre, Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse, in Selected Writings, pp. 76–149 (pp. 78–9, lines 45–6).

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Chienne morte, pourriture de fienz’ (‘I then, worm, less than nothing, / dead dog, rotting dung’, pp. 144–5, lines 1373–4). The echo of Genesis, which takes the ‘dust’ of the Bible text and makes it more repellent, is also a reminder that human beings are created by God. Human sinfulness is traced in the poem back to Adam and the original sin of disobedience in the Garden of Eden. The human body is ‘Subjecte à mal, ennuy, douleur, et peine […] Qui soubz peché par Adam est vendu’ (‘slave to evil, pain, suffering and distress […] which, through Adam’s sin has been forfeited’, pp. 78–9, lines 49–51). Again, Genesis teaches that the consequences of sin were pain and suffering: the earth would no longer give its fruit freely; people would have to labour to survive; women would give birth in pain. The wages of original sin were emphasised by early Christian convert St Paul in his evangelising letters to the first Christian communities around the Mediterranean, collected in the New Testament, which were a particular reference point for Evangelicals (and indeed for Protestants and Augustine before them). Paul’s meditation on sin and death in his letter to the Romans is a clear reference point for Marguerite here: ‘but I am carnal, sold under sin’ (in Lefèvre’s translation, ‘mais je suis charnel vendu soubz peché’, Romans 7.14). The metaphor of the financial transaction evokes the worldly logic of the consequences of sin and it is one that Paul repeatedly employs: ‘For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord’ (Romans 6.23). The worldly logic of sin demands repayment; salvation, in contrast, can only be a gift, freely and undeservedly given. Marguerite’s poem insists on the body’s role in obstructing the soul’s knowledge of God – and, indeed, its knowledge of its own sin. The body is a physical thing that allows physical impediments to multiply: Si je cuyde regarder pour le mieulx, Une branche [de péché] me vient fermer les yeulx; En ma bouche tombe, quand vueil parler, Le fruict par trop amer à avaller. Si pour ouyr, mon esperit se reveille, Force fueilles entrent en mon aureille; Aussi mon naiz est tout bousché de fleurs. Voilà comment en peine, criz, et pleurs En terre gist sans clarté ni lumiere Ma paovre ame, esclave, et prisonniere … The moment I think I see better, a branch [of sin] comes and covers my eyes. And when I try to speak, a fruit too bitter to swallow fills my mouth. If I am prone to listen,

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countless leaves block my ears. My nose is obstructed by flowers. And so it is that in pain, shrieking, and weeping, my unfortunate soul inhabits this world of darkness and obscurity, a slave and a prisoner. (pp. 76–9, lines 17–26)

Every sense here is subject to obstruction and distraction. The images of abundance and growth might seem positive if it were not for the reaction of the soul, shrieking and weeping in its physical prison: the branches and flowers of sin are shackles that bind the soul to the earth. This conception of the relationship between the body and the soul is indebted to Plato, whose work on the spiritual transformative power of love, the Symposium, taught that the soul must learn to free itself from the prison of the body.44 This idea was adopted by Christian humanists, especially in the Christianised version developed by Marsile Ficino in his commentary on the Symposium. The prison is the central conceit of Marguerite’s long poem Les Prisons, which details the various prisons in which the soul is kept captive and separated from God, as we will explore below; we will also return to what is known as Neoplatonism and Marguerite’s use of it in her writing in Chapter 5. The logical consequence of this conception of the body as a prison is that bodily death will equate to the soul’s release and renewal. Marguerite explores this paradox in Le Miroir, a paradox which is heightened by the Christian belief that it is through the death of Jesus Christ that human beings have been restored to life. Jesus’s death on the cross entails, in Christian theology, redemption from Adam’s sin; it is a death that brings life. Par ceste mort, moy morte, reçoy vie; Et au vivant, par la mort, je suis ravye. En vous je vys; quant à moy, je suis morte. Mort ne m’est plus que d’une prison porte. Through this death, I dead find life. And while alive, through death, I am made to live. I live in you while I am dead. Death to me is no more than a prison door. (Miroir, pp. 120–1, lines 887–90)

The tightly patterned sounds of Marguerite’s verse here replicate the close association of the two terms in Christian theology: a death that brings life, a life in death. The individual’s physical death becomes not an end but a 44 See Philip Ford, ‘Neo-Platonic Themes of Ascent’, in A Companion, pp. 89–107; and Paula Sommers, Celestial Ladders: Readings in Marguerite de Navarre’s Poetry of Spiritual Ascent (Geneva: Droz, 1989).

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beginning, an open door from the prison of the body. It is a dense, allusive form of writing that she learned from Briçonnet’s correspondence: in 1522 he wrote her a long meditation on Jesus’s death which uses the same patterns: ‘Par vie mourant, morte est mort vivant et engendrant enfans de mort, qui sont en la mort de vie viviffiéz’ (Through life dying, dead is the death that lives and produces children of death, who are in the death of life vivified).45 Again, this is a motif to be found in St Paul, who instructs the Romans in the same paradoxical terms of life from death: ‘yield yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead’ (Romans 6.13). The prison of the body and its appetites is also present in the Heptameron, where the storytellers espouse the evangelical conception of sin as a kind of prison that encloses the soul; or in Parlamente’s words, ‘nous sommes tous encloz en peché’ (p. 390; ‘we all incline to sin’, p. 305; literally, ‘we are all enclosed in sin’, suggesting the soul’s being encased and confined). It is Parlamente, too, who offers the most developed exposition of Neoplatonic thought in the Heptameron, where again she gives an image of the soul weighed down and blinkered by the physical casing it finds itself in. The senses are the only means of gaining knowledge and information, but they are fallible: ‘des sens […] sont obscurs et charnelz par le peché du premier pere’ (p. 290; ‘the senses […] are dim and carnal because of the sin of our forefather Adam’, p. 229). Parlamente describes sin as obscure and obfuscating; just as the senses are invaded by the branches and shoots of sin in Le Miroir, here they are dimmed by that original calamity all human beings inherit from Adam. The opposition that Parlamente puts into play here is between flesh and spirit, which is not the same as between body and mind; for the mind, too, can be enslaved by sin, and is just as much beholden to flesh as the body. It was an opposition that Marguerite explored throughout her writing career: sixteenthcentury editions of the Miroir de l’âme pécheresse also included another shorter poem, Discord estant en l’homme par la contrarieté de l’esprit et de la chair et paix par vie spirituelle (Discord being in man through the opposition of spirit and flesh and peace through a spiritual life). The opposition between flesh and spirit is an important one for St Paul, and Parlamente is evoking the apostle here. In his letter to another early Christian community, he warns: ‘For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would’ (Galatians 5.17). The restriction of the flesh on human autonomy is one of the more devastating wages of sin. The situation that Paul describes – where the flesh inhibits the spirit and prevents the individual from following their true desire – is one that the Heptameron storytellers recognise. Hircan in particular gives voice to the 45

Correspondance, vol. 1, p. 223.

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ambivalence of the snares of embodied desire. In the debate after nouvelle 25 (in which François I uses a monastery as a cover for an adulterous liaison), Hircan admits (scandalously) that he too has confessed without repenting. Oisille is shocked and admonishes him that it is better not to confess than to offer this kind of defective confession. Hircan’s reply is, if anything, even more scandalous, but it encapsulates the dilemma that Paul describes: ‘le peché me desplaist bien, et suis marry d’offenser Dieu, mais le peché me plaist tousjours’ (p. 371; ‘I don’t approve of sin, and I’m always sorry if I offended God – but I still enjoy it!’ p. 290). (In other manuscript versions of the Heptameron, Hircan says ‘le plaisir me plaist tousjours’, which expresses nicely the tautological bind that human beings find themselves in.46) For St Paul, sin is precisely that which stops the individual sinner doing what is right, even if that is what they want to do. ‘For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me’ (Romans 7.19–20). The awkward repetitiveness of the King James Version here manages to express the torturous position of the sinner: aware of the sin, aware of the good, and yet in thrall to the lure, the ‘plaisir’ of the flesh. For both St Paul and the French Evangelicals, there is no way to combat this impasse by human means; believing that one has the power to resist or to overcome it is a fundamental mistake, and one the Evangelicals named cuyder. Cuyder and the Illusions of Pride Cuyder is the term Marguerite uses to designate false belief, particularly a false belief nourished by pride in human power and capacity.47 In less theological contexts, cuyder means simply to think or believe, although Randle Cotgrave’s extremely useful 1611 French–English dictionary gives a semantic spectrum that veers towards the fanciful and the unreliable: ‘Cuider. To thinke, weene, deeme, imagine, suppose, presume, have an opinion of, make a ghesse at’.48 Even in ordinary language, ‘cuider’ is more of an opinion than a judgement, and for the Evangelicals it encapsulates human error and presumption, a kind of erroneous understanding of the self. For Marguerite, the term has the even more specific sense of the belief that one is capable of one’s own salvation. This particular cuyder is entirely at odds with Marguerite’s evangelical insistence that only God’s grace can save. It is at the basis of her attacks on Franciscan teaching in the Heptameron, as we shall see. For this variant, see Marguerite de Navarre, Heptaméron, ed. Salminen, p. 254. Thysell, Pleasure of Discernment, pp. 48–52. 48 A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1950), art. ‘cuider’. 46 47

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Cuyder is a foundational error. In the Comédie de la nativité, it is embodied in Satan, who appears towards the end of the play attempting to persuade the shepherds that they are mistaken to think that the baby they have just seen is the son of God. Meditating on his fall from heaven, Satan admits that his desire to be like God (‘à toy voulois estre semblable’) was the root of his pride and his disgrace: ‘Et ta vertu voyant Cuyder en moy, / Me dechassa du Ciel’ (and your virtue, seeing Cuyder in me, chased me from Heaven).49 It is Satan’s cuyder that encourages him to think he could equal God and is the cause of his fall. Mirroring Satan’s fall is Adam’s fall in another biblical play, La Comédie de l’adoration des trois roys (Play of the Adoration of the Three Kings). In this play, the three kings are guided by three allegorical abstractions, Philosophie, Tribulation, and Inspiration, who lead them towards spiritual enlightenment. A fourth figure, Divine Intelligence, is their final intermediary who shows them the way to Bethlehem. In a long speech, Intelligence explains how Jesus’s birth is necessary to undo the sin of Adam, caused by his cuyder: read Genesis, Intelligence says, and ‘Tu verras comme Adam / Sot Cuyder esblouyt, / Dont peu se resjouyt; / Car il saillit d’Eden’ (you will see how Adam was blinded by foolish Cuyder, for which few can rejoice, for he left Eden).50 Gaspard – the king who is led by Inspiration, and has a sudden, immediate conversion – recognises that the incarnation of God on earth (which he describes as ‘l’habit du pecheur prendre’, taking on the clothes of the sinner, p. 193, line 1131) is an act of divine humility to redeem human pride: ‘En abbaissant ta grand [sic] sublimité, / Tu as l’orgueil par ton humilité / Tout mis à rien’ (in humbling your great sublimity you have, through your humility, reduced pride to nothing, p. 193, lines 1132–4). Divine humility is the only effective counterbalance to human pride. Cuyder is the central psychological prison of Marguerite’s long devotional poem Les Prisons. Les Prisons is a late work, written in her final years and completed after the death of François I in 1547. The narrator, Amy (Lover/ Friend) addresses his erstwhile beloved, Amye, from the endpoint of a journey to spiritual enlightenment, describing with a suggestion of satire the earthly prisons that once kept him confined. This journey towards enlightenment and, more specifically, towards a realisation of God’s love is reminiscent of Dante’s Divine Comedy, which Les Prisons alludes to; and of St Augustine’s Confessions, another narrative of realisation and enlightenment. The prisons Amy must escape from are described in the first two books of the poem: firstly, his love for Amye; then ambition, wealth, and the success of the courtier; 49 Marguerite de Navarre, Comédie de la nativité, in Comédies bibliques, pp. 75–148 (p. 126, lines 1172, 1174–5). 50 Comédie de l’adoration des trois roys à Jésus Christ, in Comédies bibliques, pp. 149–214 (p. 173, lines 637–40).

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finally, scholarship and learning. Each one of these represents, as Cynthia Skenazi shows, a different desire or concupiscence: desire for pleasure, desire for glory, and desire for knowledge.51 Every time Amy escapes from one prison he falls into another: having realised the mendacity of courtly love, he is seduced by the riches of the royal court and the ambitions of the courtier; when an old man points out the futility and emptiness of his worldly pursuits, he applies himself diligently to learning, but in the hope of recognition and glory – a curiosity as insatiable and damaging as his other desires. All of these prisons, Amy eventually realises, have been constructed by his own pride and blindness. As he says as his first prison crumbles, ‘je n’y voy que l’oeuvre de mes doigtz: […] C’est mon labeur, ma peyne et mon soucy’ (I see only the work of my own hands: my labour, my pains and my care), and realises ‘prisonnier de moymesmes j’estoys’ (I was the prisoner of myself).52 It is his reading of the Bible that finally, transformatively, opens his eyes. He hears the voice of Jesus professing to speak only to the humble, then the voice of God himself, in the words that are said to Moses in the Old Testament, and that express the ineffable divine nature: ‘Je suys qui suys, que oeil vivant ne peult veoir’ (p. 153, book 3, line 520; I am who I am, that no living eye can see). Amy’s conversion is immediate and marvellous as the voice ‘Me print, mua et changea si soudain, / Que je perdis mon cuyder faulx et vain’ (p. 153, book 3, lines 523–4; took, transformed and changed me so suddenly that I lost all my vain false belief). It is the loss of his cuyder that signals Amy’s conversion, his turning towards God as sole source of happiness and love. Cuyder has been the driving force of Amy’s journey through the temptations of the world. It is his belief in his own capacities that keeps him imprisoned, as he recognises in relation to his obsession with learning: Je cuydois donc, par ce cuyder puyssant, Moy inutile en valoir plus de cent Et meritter tous les biens que onques eurent Des vertueux les plus qui onques furent … (p. 111, book 2, lines 429–32) I falsely believed then, through this powerful delusion, that I, useless, was worth more than a hundred, and that I deserved all the rewards that ever had the most virtuous men who ever were.

In the belief that he deserves the rewards of his study, the virtue of the learned but also their honour and renown, Amy is blind to the fact that all study is useless if it is not directed to the glory of God rather than the glory of the self. 51 Cynthia Skenazi, ‘Les Prisons’s Poetics of Conversion’, in A Companion, pp. 211– 35 (pp. 215–16). 52 Les Prisons, p. 85 (book 1, lines 272–4) and p. 86 (book 1, line 321).

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The term meriter that Marguerite uses here gestures towards the evangelical (and Lutheran) rejection of human merit in earning salvation; although the poem is not explicitly about merit and salvation here but, rather, about earthly recognition and renown, the theological sense of ‘merit’ is hollowed out and undermined by its proximity to cuyder. The theme of cuyder appears in Marguerite’s secular works, too. A narrative poem, written for her niece on her marriage to the duke of Savoy in 1541 and printed in 1543, advertised its allegorical status in its title: La Fable du Faux Cuyder (The Fable of False Belief).53 It is the story of the seduction by satyrs of nymphs, subsequently turned into willows by their mistress Diana. Here, the term cuyder has a less technical sense than it does in Marguerite’s devotional works. It is described in the first lines as ‘un vain menteur, et Faux Cuyder, / Lequel produit un depravé desir / Dessoubs l’espoir d’un incongnu plaisir’ (‘[an empty liar, and] false pride. / In the disguise of hope, it gives birth / to a depraved desire for some unknown pleasure’).54 False cuyder here is not precisely the belief that it is within human power to attain, or merit, salvation; rather, it is a temptation or desire for earthly and sensual pleasures – represented by the satyrs, emblematic of lustful desires. Marguerite turns the fable into a story of women preyed upon and led astray by men; written for her niece on the occasion of her wedding, it is hard not to see this as a warning for women – even married women – against the mendacious predations of men. This depiction of gender relationships brings the Fable into the orbit of the Heptameron. Cuyder and the Franciscans in the Heptameron The Heptameron returns to a theological understanding of cuyder, although the noun itself does not appear in the text. We have seen how the storytellers share an understanding of humanity’s fallen nature. A recurring diagnosis of the root of human failing and sin is cuyder, understood as the false belief that humans have the capacity to save themselves. After nouvelle 34, a short, comic story about a misunderstanding, Parlamente turns a discussion about ancient philosophy towards theology: il est impossible que la victoire de nous-mesmes se face par nous-mesmes, sans ung merveilleux orgueil qui est le vice que chacun doibt le plus craindre, car il s’engendre de la mort et ruyne de toutes les aultres vertuz. (p. 439)

53 For an English translation, see Selected Writings, pp. 233–79, translated as The Fable of False Pride. 54 La Fable du faux cuyder, in Selected Writings, pp. 236–7 (lines 6–8).

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it’s impossible to overcome [ourselves] by our own means, without [wonderful pride] on our part. And [pride] is a vice we should fear above all others, because it is born of the death and destruction of all the virtues. (p. 344)

Here, Parlamente replaces cuyder with orgueil (pride), but she means the same false belief in human capacity that Marguerite condemns in her devotional poetry. She calls it ‘merveilleux’, marvellous in the sense of something extraordinary to be marvelled at. It signals the ruin of all other virtues, which cannot coexist with this sense of self-sufficiency. Oisille then refers the group back to her Bible reading that morning, Paul’s letter to the Romans in which misplaced pride in human knowledge and human effort, or ‘labeur’, to acquire that knowledge actually indicates ignorance and unreason. ‘Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools’ (Romans 1.21–2). The marks of this folly are a pride in learning that attributes it to the creature, and not to the creator (Romans 1.25), as Oisille insists: ‘s’attribuans ce que à Dieu seul appartient’ (p. 439; ‘attributing to themselves that which belongs to God alone’, p. 344). Earlier in the Heptameron – the day before, in fact, at the end of the third day of storytelling – Parlamente equated this misplaced human pride with estrangement from God, and therefore from salvation: ‘le premier pas que l’homme marche en la confiance de soy-mesme, s’esloigne d’autant de la confiance de Dieu’ (nouvelle 30, p. 409; ‘the first step man takes trusting in himself alone is a step away from trust in God’, p. 321). It is a blinding and obstructive kind of pride in the self which alienates the soul from God. It is this confidence in human ‘labeur’, effort or work, that marks out the recidivist villains of the Heptameron: the Franciscans. Indeed, continuing the discussion after nouvelle 30, Ennasuite explicitly blames the Franciscans for the incestuous mother in the story they have just heard, who believed that she could resist sin through her own efforts, ‘par sa resverie des Cordeliers’ (p. 409; ‘[through the] nonsense [of] the Franciscans’, p. 322). The Franciscans, known as ‘Cordeliers’ in sixteenth-century France after the distinctive cord tied round their habits, were members of the monastic order of St Francis, who were mendicants – that is, they relied on alms for their living – and itinerant preachers. The crimes of the Franciscans in the Heptameron are extensive and horrible. They are lecherous, lustful, greedy, and unscrupulous. Several stories do not shy away from accusing them of absolute depravity: one friar rapes a wife who subsequently commits suicide (nouvelle 23); another friar murders three servants in order to abduct another young wife, planning to take her to his monastery where other women were held captive (nouvelle 31); another takes a husband’s place on his wedding night and rapes the bride (nouvelle 48). They are hypocrites, preaching a moral law that they have no intention of keeping themselves, and yet they manage to convince many of their holiness.

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Some warning tales show friars who have been given too much licence by credulous guardians, husbands (in nouvelle 23), and mothers (in nouvelle 46). The Franciscans are not the only criminal clerics in the Heptameron, but they are the most frequent and the most visible. It may have been their visibility that singled the Franciscans out for particular critique in the sixteenth century. As itinerant preachers, they were present in the communities they served, and not cloistered in monasteries; as Oisille says (after a story about a debauched Benedictine prior), the good ones weren’t tempted to go out into the world and so, we might add, did not have stories told about them (nouvelle 22, p. 340; p. 265). Marguerite’s criticism of the monastic orders was not unusual for the time. It was part of a long tradition that includes Ruteboeuf’s fables (he has a version of nouvelle 31) and the denunciation of the friars as hypocrites in the Roman de la Rose.55 Marguerite was not in principle anti-monastic: she founded monasteries and convents, gave generous alms and contributions, and spent much time herself in contemplative retreat in convents. But she does identify the Franciscans as particularly culpable because of their promotion of the efficacy of good works; as Gary Ferguson argues, it is their bad preaching, more than their bad example, that makes them such a threat.56 Marguerite, like the Evangelicals, and like Luther, subordinated good works entirely to faith. Since humanity was fallen, it followed for the Evangelicals that nothing within human power was enough to merit forgiveness and salvation. Believing that anything within human reach is sufficient for salvation, whether it is prayer, alms, or works, is – in Parlamente’s words – taking a step away from trust in God. It is the Franciscans’ preaching of the efficacy of good works that condemns them, and it appears as the catalyst in one of the more tragic stories. Nouvelle 23 is a horrifying story of rape and despair which ends in three deaths. The Franciscan in this story is the spiritual advisor of a man who has a beautiful young wife and a newborn son. The husband has such reverence for St Francis that, as the storyteller Oisille puts it, ‘il luy sembloit que tous ceulz qui portoient son habit devoient estre semblables au bon sainct’ (p. 324; ‘he was under the impression that anyone who wore the Franciscan habit must be as holy as the good Saint himself’, p. 267). In his faith in external trappings, and in the sanctity of the friar’s habit, he is much mistaken. The Franciscan lusts after his wife and manages to take his place in her bed; when this subterfuge is revealed as rape, the young wife despairs and, while her husband is hunting the friar, strangles herself with her bed cord and in the process suffocates her young son. 55 Tim Rayborn, Against the Friars: Antifraternalism in Medieval France and England (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004). 56 Gary Ferguson, ‘Mal vivre, mal croire: l’anticléricalisme dans L’Heptaméron de Marguerite de Navarre’, Seizième Siècle 6.1 (2010), 151–63.

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Oisille’s commentary on the thought process that leads the wife to this act is clearly an attack on Franciscan preaching: elle, qui n’avoit jamais aprins des Cordeliers, sinon la confiance des bonnes oeuvres, la satisfaction des pechez par austerité de vie, jeusnes et disciplines, qui du tout ignoroit la grace donnée par nostre bon Dieu par le merite de son Filz, la remission des pechez par son sang, la reconsiliation du pere avecq nouz par sa mort, la vie donnée aux pecheurs par sa seulle bonté et misericorde … (p. 348) She had learnt from the Franciscans nothing but confidence in good works, satisfaction for sins through austerity of life, fasting and chastisement. She had remained ignorant of the grace given by our good God through the merit of His Son, ignorant of the remission of sins by His blood, ignorant of the reconciliation of the Father with us by His death and ignorant of the life given to sinners through His goodness and mercy. (p. 271)

Oisille deploys here some key terms in evangelical belief. Forgiveness and salvation are possible only through God’s grace; it is a gratuitous gift that can never be earned. Good works do not merit salvation; the only merite belongs to God’s son, Jesus, who died for the remission of all sin, orchestrating a reconciliation that would otherwise be impossible. The life given to sinners is the eternal life of salvation; and it comes from God’s goodness and mercy alone (seulle bonté et misericorde). The young wife’s suicide is a direct consequence of her despair at the enormity of her sin and her belief that she will never be able to ‘satisfy’ that sin through good works and charity. She is entirely ignorant of the futility of human works such as fasting, but also of the joyful message of God’s mercy; she has been taught this mistaken and dangerous doctrine by the Franciscans, who are thus doubly responsible for her death. The association of the Franciscans with the doctrine of the efficacy of good works is underlined by the husband who refers with misplaced irony to the ‘belles oeuvres’ (p. 347; ‘good works’, p. 270) the friar performed in his wife’s bed. The Franciscans thus represent for Marguerite the worldly dangers and the theological trap of false cuyder, and the Heptameron’s stories offer an opportunity to explore its tragic consequences. Faith and Grace The realisation that human effort has no impact on salvation could well result in despair like the wife’s in nouvelle 23. Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse opens with just such desperation: ‘Est il de mal nul si profond abisme / Qui suffisant fust pour punir la disme / De mes pechez?’ (‘Is there an abyss torturous and

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cruel enough / to punish one tenth of my sins?’).57 But we have seen in nouvelle 23 that this counsel of despair is not inevitable. Oisille talks of reconciliation and life: if human beings cannot deserve salvation, God’s grace can operate through the merit of his son to supplement the lack. Thus, human beings are utterly reliant on God’s grace, the only way to salvation, ‘la seule bonne grace / Du tout puissant’ (‘only […] the infinite grace / of the Almighty’), as the Miroir de l’âme pécheresse puts it (pp. 80–1, lines 69–70). It is a gift entirely out of proportion with the deserts of the recipient: ‘sa grace, que ne puys meriter’ (‘[his] grace, which I [cannot] merit’, pp. 78–9, line 33). Because it is so far removed from the human logic of merit and deserving, divine grace is beyond human comprehension; it is a divine mystery. Marguerite argues that Christians are not required to understand it, but only to accept it. This, however, proves difficult; the influence of false cuyder makes it hard – even unthinkable – for human beings to renounce autonomy, to give up on the idea that action is possible. Confidence and trust in God’s grace necessarily equate to a surrender of self. Gaspard, the divinely inspired king in the Comédie des rois, expresses this as a kind of annihilation: ‘Tu me fais voir de mes pechés la somme, / Mortz et couverts par Amour, qui m’assomme / Et met à rien’ (you show me the sum of my sins that are dead and hidden by Love, which strikes me down and reduces me to nothing).58 This is the realisation that comes so slowly to Amy in Les Prisons, that he cannot attain enlightenment through his own efforts; indeed, his own efforts are obstacles to his eventual revelation. In Book 3, as he looks back on his counter-productive efforts to acquire happiness, he realises that, even in studying, he has simply built himself another prison: ‘Je environnay de ces pilliers ma tour, / Où des papiers fiz ung mur alentour, / Et de cahyers et d’oeuvres amassées’ (I surrounded my tower with these pillars where papers made a wall all around, and of books and heaped works).59 Just as he has constructed an idol from his beloved in Book 1, he builds himself a wall of paper in Book 2 which stops him seeing the truth. He recognises, however, the difficulty, or even the impossibility of seeing the truth with a human eye: Mais sa Lumiere et vertu estoit telle Que l’oeil charnel la trouva importable, Pour estre trop luysante et agreable. (Prisons, p. 152, Book 3, lines 492–4) But this Light and virtue were such that it is unbearable for the eye of the flesh, for being too bright and too delightful.

57 58 59

Miroir, in Selected Writings, pp. 76–7, lines 5–7. Comédies bibliques, p. 161, lines 356–8. Gaspard is talking to Inspiration. Les Prisons, pp. 146–7, Book 3, lines 331–3.

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This is an idea that Marguerite found in St Paul, who writes to the first-century Corinthians that ‘now we see through a glass, darkly’ (1 Cor. 13.12), as if human, earthly vision can only catch glimpses of an enigma in a mirror (‘now I know in part’, 1 Cor. 13.12). It is an idea that runs through Marguerite’s devotional works: as Isabelle Garnier and Isabelle Pantin argue, the Miroir de l’âme pécheresse is full of references to, and metaphors of, occluded and partial vision.60 Grace is the only possible route to salvation; and, rather than works, Marguerite emphasises faith as the means to acquire grace. In the Heptameron, Parlamente argues that faith is the catalyst for the working of grace: the antithesis of cuyder, faith opens the soul to grace in a way that human understanding cannot fathom. ‘Foy seullement peult monstrer et faire recevoir le bien que l’homme charnel et animal ne peult entendre (nouvelle 19, p. 291; ‘For only faith can reveal and make the soul receive that Good which carnal and animal man cannot understand’, p. 229). Faith is the only possible link between a fallen humanity and salvation. Marguerite signs off her preface to the reader in Les Marguerites with this blessing: ‘Mais priez DIEU plein de bonté naïve, /Qu’en vostre cœur il plante la Foy vive’ (But pray to God full of natural goodness that he plants in your heart a living faith).61 This – as Garnier and Pantin point out – marks a difference between the evangelical understanding of faith and the Lutheran doctrine of sola fides (only faith).62 Where Luther insists that only faith can justify the sinner in the eyes of God, and that good works are of absolutely no account, the evangelical vive foi (living faith) can animate and be demonstrated by good works or charity. Marguerite describes it in Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse: ‘Foy donne espoir par seure verité / Qui engendre perfecte charité’ (‘Faith gives hope of certain truth, / which in turn engenders perfect love’).63 This was a position adopted by Lefèvre and other prominent Evangelicals, who referred to St Paul’s letter to the Galatians, which recommends ‘faith which worketh by love’ (Gal. 5.6). In Marguerite’s later poetry, as Gary Ferguson shows, good works are perceived less as a demonstration of faith than as the work of Christ through the believer.64 Garnier and Pantin, ‘Opening and Closing Reflections’. Les Marguerites, p. 14. This preface was also the prologue to some editions of the Miroir: see Garnier and Pantin, ‘Opening and Closing Reflections’, p. 157. 62 Garnier and Pantin, ‘Opening and Closing Reflections’, pp. 154–5. 63 Le Miroir, Selected Writings, pp. 146–7 (lines 1415–16). On the linguistic formulae that express the relationships between foi and charité in evangelical thought, see Gary Ferguson, Mirroring Belief: Marguerite de Navarre’s Devotional Poetry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992), pp. 149–77; and Isabelle Garnier-Mathez, L’Epithete et la connivence: Ecriture concertée chez les Evangéliques français (1523–1534) (Geneva: Droz, 2005), pp. 193–5. 64 Ferguson, Mirroring Belief, p. 169. 60 61

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The faith that Marguerite espouses is beyond – or perhaps before – understanding; it does not conform to reason or to logic, it is not thought so much as felt. In her theatre, this kind of naïve faith is often represented through children or a childlike figure. In L’Inquisiteur, a short play called a ‘farce’ in the manuscripts, the eponymous Inquisitor is converted from his repressive, cruel beliefs by a group of seven playful, singing children. The atmosphere of the play and the menacing figure of the inquisitor allude to the climate of persecution and hostility that the French Evangelicals suffered after the Affaire des placards, in which many of them fled abroad, dating the play to 1535–36. V.-L. Saulnier calls L’Inquisiteur ‘a small work of engagement and polemic, a pamphlet on current events’.65 Various models have been suggested for the Inquisitor, including Marot’s enemy, the syndic of the Sorbonne, Noël Béda. The Inquisitor is certainly one of the ‘forgeurs d’hérésies’ that Marguerite warned her brother about: that is, ‘un Inquisiteur, / De maulx inventeur’ (an Inquisitor, inventor of wrongs).66 He opens the play with a long monologue in which he laments his waning power over believers, who are starting to read the Bible and challenge his authority. He responds with ‘rigueur’ (line 46) and an eager willingness to send even the innocent to the stake to serve as an example (‘Car il vault myeulx qu’un homme innocent meure / Cruellement, pour estre exemple à tous, / Que cest erreur plus longuement demeure’, lines 33–5; for it is better if an innocent man dies cruelly as an example to all than if this error persists for long). The Inquisitor’s intolerance for what he sees as mistaken belief leads him to indiscriminate cruelty. His insistence that the removal of ‘erreur’ (a synonym for heresy) justifies any act of cruelty and injustice suggests a reason why a plurality of religious beliefs remained an unacceptable, even unthinkable, proposition in sixteenth-century France, and why religious difference engendered the devastating violence of the religious wars. The children might represent the circle of Evangelicals that Marguerite protected, their names possibly alluding in childish diminutives to individuals: Clérot could be Clément Marot, Jacquot possibly Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples, Thiennot to Etienne Dolet.67 Whether Marguerite had individuals in mind, or simply a more general confrontation between conservative and evangelical religion, the play ends on a note of hope and reconciliation brought about by the Inquisitor’s conversion to the naïve faith of the children. In L’Inquisiteur, Marguerite can still imagine an outcome that avoids violence or estrangement – although only because the Inquisitor is converted to the other’s belief. 65 Théâtre profane, p. 40: ‘une petite œuvre d’action et de polémique […] un pamphlet d’actualité’. 66 L’Inquisiteur, in Theâtre profane, pp. 48–81 (p. 76, lines 542–3). 67 Théâtre profane, pp. 38–9.

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The play stages a confrontation between the Inquisitor, his servant, and the children, who are playing barefoot in the snow. When the Inquisitor questions the children, they answer him in riddles and jokes that he cannot understand; he tells them they would be better off studying, and they reply with a joy in play: ‘Monsieur, si nous sommes contans, / Ne vous en vueillez ennuyer’ (p. 55, lines 165–6; Sir, if we’re happy, don’t let it bother you). There is a lengthy misunderstanding in which the Inquisitor thinks he is asking them where their father lives, and they respond with reference to their Father in heaven: ‘Nostre père est, entendez vous?’ (p. 60, line 241; our father is, do you understand?) The Inquisitor’s lack of understanding is underlined by his belief in his own merit: Clérot: Vous y avez donq méritté Ou gaigné, comme bon marchant? L’Inquisiteur: Ouy vrayement, je y ay gaigné Ung gaing qui est spirituel. (p. 61, lines 257–60) Clérot: Have you then deserved it [truth] or earned it, like a good merchant? Inquisitor: Yes, truly I have earned a spiritual reward.

The Inquisitor’s language is rooted in the human understanding of labour and reward, which Clérot mocks as grubby and misguided. The Inquisitor’s sense of his own righteousness and his own worth prevents him from understanding the children, even when they break into song. They sing psalm 3 in Clément Marot’s French translation, its presence in this play showing Marguerite’s approval and possible patronage of Marot’s translation project. It is a psalm of persecution and confidence in God: ‘Mon Dieu, que d’ennemys / Qui aux champs se sont mis / Et contre nous s’eslièvent! […] Car tu es mon trèsseur / Bouclier et deffenseur, / Et ma gloire esprouvée’ (pp. 62–3, lines 286–8 and 303–5; in the King James translation, ‘Lord, how are they increased that trouble me! many are they that rise up against me. […] But thou, O Lord, art a shield for me; my glory, and the lifter up of mine head’, Psalm 3.1–3). It is a psalm with which the French Evangelicals of the 1530s could identify, providing support and encouragement as persecution increased, but one which arguably encouraged a sense of separation and exceptionalism rather than reconciliation. Their song does convert the Inquisitor’s servant, who then inspires the Inquisitor to return to question the children. When he asks, ‘Des bonnes oeuvres, des mérittes, / Qu’est ce?’ (p. 71, lines 432–3; And good works, merit, what is that?), the nameless ‘Petit Enfant’ replies ‘Cza’ (Pffft!) The other children then begin to answer the Inquisitor’s questions more directly, and the Inquisitor acknowledges that he has read all their responses in his Bible. The

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Inquisitor’s conversion is finally signalled by his desire to renounce his own hard-won authority and learning: ‘Je veulx estre enfant, non plus saige. / Il est heureulx qui tel devient’ (p. 73, lines 478–9; I want to be a child, and no longer wise. He is blessed who becomes so). He professes the faith of the Evangelicals: ‘Clairement je veoy, / De l’oeil de la foy, / Mon salut par grâce’ (p. 75, lines 518–20; I see clearly with the eye of faith my salvation through grace). His servant marvels at his conversion from ‘persécuteur’ to ‘pasteur’ (p. 76, lines 538, 541). The children sing another biblical song – the Canticle of Simeon (Luke 2.29–32) in Bonaventure Des Périers’s translation; and the play ends with the characters leaving the stage to share the Eucharist, ‘Le pain de vye et de vérité’ (p. 80, line 663; the bread of life and truth). This is a short play of 671 lines with the dense and allusive character of a parable. It celebrates a childish, unlearned faith that comes from Matthew’s gospel where Jesus rebukes the priests, ‘Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven’ (Matt. 19.14). There is a certain anti-intellectualism here, common in the evangelical circle, that stems from St Paul’s rejection of the wisdom of the world in the first letter to the Corinthians: ‘But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty’ (1 Cor 1.27). Faith in L’Inquisiteur is innocent, childish, unthinking; foolish, even irritating, in the eyes of the learned Inquisitor. It is expressed most powerfully through song, which seems able to reach souls where words and arguments cannot. Song here is cohesive and transformative, the voice of those who are close to God. The final scene of L’Inquisiteur continues the sense of collective spiritual experience that is evoked by the song. The Eucharist – one of the most contentious points of doctrine between Catholics and Protestants in the sixteenth century – is here represented as a joyful ritual that heals and consoles. We might imagine the audience joining the characters of the play in this final, off-stage act. Mysticism and Death Song in L’Inquisiteur comes closer to expressing the ineffable experience of God’s love than words or reason can. The ineffable nature of God’s love is another idea that Marguerite and the Evangelicals found in St Paul. Paul was himself a persecutor of the new Christian sect before he experienced an epiphany, a vision of Christ, and converted fervently to the new religion. He writes about the visionary experience as something impossible, indeed forbidden, to speak of: ‘he was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter’ (2 Cor. 12.4). Amy alludes to Paul’s words in the final book of Les Prisons, when he is finally liberated by a single divine word: ‘Mot apportant aux mortz vie eternelle, / Innominable à

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la bouche charnelle’ (a word that brings eternal life to the dead, unnameable by the mouth of the flesh).68 Marguerite’s inclination for mysticism or ecstatic religious experience was noted by François Rabelais, who, as we have seen, implores her enraptured and ecstatic spirit to leave the contemplation of heaven and return to earth to read his third book. Robert Cottrell has argued that Marguerite’s religious poetry tends towards silence as the closest possible human expression of the divine.69 Again, this insistence on the ineffability of God characterises evangelical thought. Both Lefèvre and Briçonnet drew on the ‘negative theology’ of the late fifth-century Christian philosopher PseudoDionysius the Areopagite, for whom the divine was incommensurate with and therefore inexpressible by human language, which could only be a series of poetic experiments to approximate divine silence.70 The aspiration of unity with God is at the heart of her two great religious poems, Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse and Les Prisons, a union between the ‘Rien’ (Nothing) that is the human creature and the ‘Tout’ (All) that is God. Les Prisons imagines this union as freedom: ‘Et quand ce Riens à son Tout est uny / Et le Cuyder en luy mort et puny, / C’est liberté plaisante, pure et plaine’ (and when this Nothing is united with its All, and Pride is dead and punished within, that’s pleasant freedom, pure and plain).71 Le Miroir begins, as we have seen, with an abject admission of the soul’s sinful nature and the realisation that only God’s grace can redeem its corruption. Most of the poem is, however, a joyful, if astonished, celebration of the union of the soul with Jesus Christ, expressed in terms of family relationships: Christ is the soul’s husband, father, brother, and son; the soul is Jesus’s wife, daughter, sister, and mother: ‘Mais mon ame traictez (si dire l’ouze) / Comme mere, fille, soeur, et espouse’ (‘But, if I may say so, you treat my soul / like that of a mother, daughter, sister, and wife’).72 The mystical marriage of the soul and God can be found in the Old Testament book Song of Songs, which Marguerite alludes to and quotes in the Miroir. The renunciation of self appears as the cost for the unity with the divine: this is a union that also signifies death. We have seen already how Jesus’s death is transformed in Christian theology into life, first at the resurrection, and then in the redemption of Christian souls. Eternal life through Christ inevitably means death: of the flesh, of cuyder, of attachment to the world; but it also means the end of an individual life. It implies the annihilation of human Nothing into the divine All. Marguerite welcomes her Les Prisons, p. 152, Book 3, lines 469–70. Robert D. Cottrell, The Grammar of Silence: A Reading of Marguerite de Navarre’s Poetry (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1986). 70 Marguerite asked Briçonnet to write her a letter on Pseudo-Dionysius in 1524; Lefèvre printed an edition of the Divina nomina by Pseudo-Dionysius in 1498. 71 Les Prisons, p. 193, Book 3, lines 1757–9. 72 Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse, in Selected Writings, pp. 84–5, lines 171–2. 68 69

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own death for this reason in Le Miroir: ‘O doulce Mort, par son amour venez, / Et par amour à mon Dieu me menez. / O Mort, où est icy vostre poincture […] ?’ (O sweet Death, in the name of his love, / come to me and lead me to my God. / O Death, where is your sting […]? pp. 130–1, lines 1099–101). Marguerite does not cite the biblical quotation here in the margin, from St Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians: ‘O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?’ (1 Cor. 15.55; Paul goes on to say that ‘the sting of death is sin’, abolished with the death of Jesus). The chansons spirituelles, similarly, celebrate or perhaps gesture towards the mystical union in death: Jan Miernowski argues that ‘the ascent toward transcendence is therefore a kind of death drive’, and that ‘death is at the heart of the spirituality of the Chansons spirituelles’.73 The death of her brother, which dominates many of the chansons spirituelles, is double-edged: for the Marguerite of the flesh, it is a devastating trauma; for the Marguerite of the spirit, it is an indication of the mystical union with divine All. In chanson 41, for example, François’s death is an ‘importable regret’ (unbearable regret); the singer’s heart is ‘par regret anéanty’ (annihilated by regret); her reason produces only ‘tourment’ for ‘celluy que plus ne puis veoir’ (he whom I cannot see again); and yet ‘En mon péché, en ma douleur, / En mon dueil, en mon désespoir, / Je sens de mon Dieu la valeur’ (In my sin, in my pain, in my mourning, in my despair, I feel God’s worth).74 Only the annihilation of the self allows this glimpse of the divine. Marguerite wrote the chansons spirituelles later in her life, that is, after 1533, with a good proportion coming from the devastating but productive retreat in the convent at Tusson after her brother’s death. The songs cover a number of recurrent evangelical themes in Marguerite’s work: the fallen nature of humanity, salvation by God’s grace alone, the pre-eminence of faith, and the message of God’s love. The singer/poet is beset by grief and doubt, longing for a deathly union with God, aware that human language is incapable of expressing the ineffable mystery of divine love. A number of these spiritual songs were selected by the queen for inclusion in the Marguerites; they are thus part of her work that was in print circulation during her lifetime (these are numbered 1–32 in the modern edition) and were probably envisaged by their author to be sung or read as part of devotional practice. But, as well as being potentially embedded in religious practice, the chansons spirituelles were written at a time when song was a central part of court culture.75 Writing from his exile in Ferrara in 1536, nostalgic for Marguerite’s court and for her Miernowski, ‘Chansons spirituelles’, in A Companion, pp. 237–79 (p. 259). Marguerite de Navarre, Chansons spirituelles, ed. Georges Dottin (Geneva: Droz, 1971), pp. 114–16, lines 10, 18, 26, 32, 41–3. 75 Kate Van Orden, Materialities: Books, Readers, and the Chanson in SixteenthCentury Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Jeanice Brooks, Courtly Song in Late Sixteenth-Century France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 73 74

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protection, Clément Marot says he remembers in his dreams the times she asked him to sing her psalms: ‘Pseaulmes divins, car ce sont tes chansons’ (divine psalms, which are songs for you); suggesting that, in Marguerite’s court, psalms were as ordinary as chansons elsewhere.76 This intimate singing is bound up for Marot with the wider companionship of Marguerite’s court, as the next line evokes: ‘Ou qu’avec vous, mes amys singuliers, / Je me console en propos familiers’ (p. 122, lines 121–2; Or with you, my especial friends, I console myself with familiar talk). Despite being embedded in court sociability, the chansons insist on their inarticulacy. The last verse of chanson 41 is full of failed communication: ‘Je n’ay voix pour à toy crier, / Ny parole trouver ne puis / Qui soit digne de te prier’ (I have no voice to cry to you, nor can I find any words worthy of praying to you, p. 116, lines 50–2). Jan Miernowski has called the poetics of the Chansons ‘a poetics of screaming’, a series of inarticulate sighs, cries, screams, and shouts.77 In the very last line of chanson 41, the singer asks God to speak for her: ‘Parle, prie, et respond pour moy’ (speak, pray, and answer for me, line 56). Citing St Paul, Marguerite ends the Miroir de l’âme pécheresse similarly with her own silence: ‘Comme saint Paul n’a voulu parler oultre, / A l’exemple de sa tressage eschole / Je me tairay’ (‘as Saint Paul says no more, / following his example, / I am silent’, pp. 146–7, lines 1424–6). Except this is not quite what happens. After this vow of silence, there are ten more lines which reiterate the poet’s worthlessness but end in praise: ‘Ne puis faillir à rendre la louenge’ (‘I cannot fail to give thanks’, pp. 148–9, line 1428). There is a final self-inscription (‘sa Marguerite’; ‘his Marguerite’, pp. 148–9, line 1430), which is also an act of recreation and acknowledgement. Human approximation of divine silence in Le Miroir slides into praise. The shepherdess in the Comédie de Mont-de-Marsan is similarly caught in a perpetual act of praise. Marguerite spent the winter of 1548 in her chateau at Mont-de-Marsan and wrote the Comédie to be performed by her ladies on the last day of carnival, Shrove Tuesday. It resembles a morality play, with four emblematic characters representing four different spiritual positions. The Mondaine (the Worldly Woman) is a materialist and a sensualist, attached to pleasure; the Superstitieuse (the Superstitious Woman) appears as a pilgrim, embodying the ceremony and ritual of the Catholic Church; and the Sage (the Wise Woman) is an Evangelical, who comes onto the stage, Bible in hand, talking about reason as a gift from God, and converts the first two women to the gospel. To their credit, they both are willing converts: the Mondaine finds an outlet for her love, and the Superstitieuse has the requisite humility. 76 Marot, Les Epistres, ‘A la Royne de Navarre’, in Œuvres poétiques, vol. 2, pp. 118– 23 (p. 121, line 120). See Miernowski, ‘Chansons spirituelles, p. 243. 77 Miernowski, ‘Chansons spirituelles’, p. 273.

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The Sage is often assimilated with Marguerite’s own evangelical position, teaching justification by faith and, crucially, the importance of individual reading of the Bible in the vernacular. Just over halfway through the play, it has the appearance of an evangelical triumph. And then a fourth woman comes on stage, singing: this is the Bergère (the Shepherdess), or the Ravie de l’Amour de Dieu (the Woman Enraptured by the Love of God). The Bergère is devoted fully to love of God, but her communication is (at least initially) limited to song and the other three women cannot understand her. The Sage decides she must be mad. She is, like the children in L’Inquisiteur, and like Peu and Moins, another holy fool. She uses the language of the popular love song to express a love of God; she enters the stage singing ‘Helas! Je languys d’amours … / Helas! je meurs tous les jours’ (‘Alas! I languish from love … / Alas! I die every day’).78 The Sage in particular has no patience for the Bergère’s ecstatic outpouring of love, and interprets it as best she can, through the discourse of reason: ‘La femme, s’elle est raisonnable, / Doibt panser amour dommageable’ (‘A woman, if she is reasonable, / Must consider love harmful’, pp. 342–3, lines 637–8). Reason is not the logic governing the Bergère, and the Sage gives up: ‘En sa fasson ny chant je n’entendz rien’ (‘I understand nothing, neither in her manner nor in her song’, pp. 344–5, line 669). For her part, the Bergère is not particularly interested in preaching to the deaf and the unconvertable. She stakes her position outside of the understanding of the world, which she knows will call her mad: ‘Et le saige on nomme fol, / Et qui est Pierre, on nomme Pol. / Ainsy chacun / Parle son langaige commun’ (‘The wise man is called foolish, / Peter is called Paul. / Thus everyone speaks / An ordinary language’, pp. 366–7, lines 978–81). Despite evoking ‘langaige commun’, ordinary or perhaps shared (common) language, the Bergère’s model here is one of miscommunication rather than communication. The three other women leave her, as they can make no sense of her. Her last words sketch out her assimilation into the light of God: ‘Et ta lumiere, / Qui en moy sera toutte entiere, / Comme toy me fera legiere’ (‘And your light, / That will fill me completely, / Will make me, like you, weightless’ (pp. 368–9, lines 1016–18). At this point in the manuscript, there is a blank line; the Bergère has no words for the experience of mystical union. But, after a pause, she continues, ‘Tu l’as faict et je t’en mercie’ (‘You have done it and I thank you’, line 1019). When she leaves the stage, the distance between human reason or discourse and mystical experience has not been bridged, despite an instance of ecstasy having been enacted. And yet this is not a play that ends in despair: the Bergère is transformed, and the three other women have the Bible. If the 78 Comédie de Mont-de-Marsan, in Selected Writings, pp. 299–369 (p. 338–9, lines 574–5).

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Sage represents Marguerite in evangelical guise, and the Bergère her mystical inclinations, the Comédie de Mont-de-Marsan stages a confrontation between these two tendencies that, seemingly, were irreconcilable. But they represent the two sides of Marguerite’s religious sensibility: a fundamental belief in the gulf between the human and the divine, bridgeable only by faith; and an investment in the everyday, the lived experience of the Christian believer, whose presence in the world demands constant engagement and persuasion.

3

Politics Marguerite de Navarre was a stateswoman and a diplomat as well as a poet. As trusted advisor to François I, she influenced French religious and foreign policy; she also controlled considerable territories in her own right when, in 1517, François made her duchess of Berry, at the same time promoting the duchy to the status of duché-pairie or ducal peerage. She thus became one of very few women peers of the realm and a powerful broker and patron, corresponding with diplomats, popes, humanists, and heads of state.1 A picture of how her political activities informed and influenced her writing is emerging from the work of historians and literary critics. Barbara Stephenson has studied her correspondence for evidence of how she managed her extensive patronage networks; Elizabeth Zegura has argued that the Heptameron is a political text in the mould of the ‘mirror for princes’, a political manual whose stories demonstrate to her brother how to govern.2 Jonathan Reid sees a continuity between Marguerite’s political activities and her literary work, both of which demanded consummate control, management, and presentation.3 This chapter considers the political side of Marguerite’s writing, which – given the interconnection between politics and religion in the period – was often inseparable from the religious questions we considered in the previous chapter. I explore Marguerite’s involvement in international politics through letters related to her brother’s imprisonment in Spain. Then, I turn more generally to the gendered constraints and obligations that controlled sixteenth-century women’s political activity before examining the diplomatic virtues and practices evident in Marguerite’s correspondence and the accounts of foreign diplomats. 1 Only thirty women were ever made peers of France. In the early sixteenth century, there were usually only twelve peers at any one time, six religious and six secular. See Stephenson, Power and Patronage, p. 9. 2 Stephenson, Power and Patronage; Zegura, Shifting Gaze. For Marguerite’s political work inside and outside the court, see Jonathan A. Reid, ‘Imagination and Influence: The Creative Powers of Marguerite de Navarre at Work at Court and in the World’, in Women and Power at the French Court, 1483–1563, ed. Susan Broomhall (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018), pp. 263–86. 3 ‘Long before she penned most of her poetry, plays, or prose, she was composing narratives and dialogues for the political dramas at court. These contained admixtures of réal politique plots, chivalric trappings, and pious speeches.’ Reid, King’s Sister, vol. 1, p. 330.

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Finally, I consider how these practices are deployed in the Heptameron and its treatment of political issues such as governance, authority, and justice. Marguerite in Madrid The Battle of Pavia in 1525 was a disaster for France.4 This battle was part of the long-running Italian Wars which François had inherited from his predecessors, fought between France, Spain, and Italian states over Italian territories. From the start of his reign, François was an enthusiastic soldier: one of his first actions as sovereign was to leave the kingdom under the regency of his mother, in order to fight in Italy. The Battle of Marignano in September 1515 was an unusual victory for France and delivered the city of Milan temporarily to François. Ten years later, with François’s rival Charles V of Spain elected Holy Roman Emperor and therefore ruler of huge territories in Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, and Austria, the Italian Wars were far from over. The Battle of Pavia lasted for four hours on 24 February 1525, but it is estimated that over 10,000 soldiers and 1,000 men-at-arms were killed, including François’s childhood friend Guillaume de Bonnivet. François was taken prisoner, and Marguerite’s first husband, Charles d’Alençon, returned home to France in disgrace, widely believed to have abandoned his king on the battlefield. He died two months later. François was taken to Madrid and held captive in the Alcazar, a fortress on the current site of the royal palace. He soon understood that Charles V meant to impose harsh conditions on his release, including the renunciation of French territorial claims in Italy and in Burgundy. Shortly afterwards, he sent for Marguerite to negotiate the terms of his release and she arrived in Madrid in September to find him seriously ill. She secured more comfortable conditions for him and engaged in increasingly frustrating negotiations. Pierre de Brantôme praises her frank eloquence in his account of her diplomatic mission to Spain: ‘Et fist si bien par son beau dire, qu’elle s’en rendist plus agreable qu’odieuse ny facheuse; d’autant qu’aveq’ cela elle estoit belle jeune veufve de Monsieur d’Allençon, et en la fleur de son aage’ (She performed so well with her eloquence, that she made herself more agreeable than hateful and tedious; all the more since she was then the beautiful young widow of Monsieur d’Alençon, and in the flower of her youth).5 And yet, despite her attractions, her negotiations failed to broker an acceptable compromise between the French and the Spanish positions. Discouraged by her lack of 4 On the Battle of Pavia and Marguerite’s time in Madrid, see Jourda, Marguerite d’Angoulême, vol. 1, pp. 101–36; Cholakian and Cholakian, Marguerite de Navarre, pp. 104–32. 5 Brantôme, ‘Premier Volume des Dames’, in Recueil, p. 180. On Marguerite as diplomat, see Jourda, Marguerite, vol. 1, pp. 43–78.

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progress and what she perceived as the dishonesty and intransigence of the Spanish, she was involved in an unsuccessful plot to spring François from his prison; when the rescue attempt failed, she was forced to return to France in some despair at the broader failure of her mission. François was eventually released in 1526, on the condition that his two young sons were exchanged as hostages for his freedom. The son who became Henri II eventually returned from Spain taciturn and gloomy; arguably, his resentment towards his aunt may stem from her approval of the exchange. Letters that Marguerite wrote to her brother, her mother, and others while she was immersed in negotiations in Spain demonstrate her understanding of diplomacy and her status as official envoy: as Barbara Stephenson argues, Marguerite’s letters from Spain in the autumn of 1525 are those of a trusted counsellor on official business.6 In a letter from Toledo in October 1525 to Anne de Montmorency, who had been taken captive with François at Pavia but was released soon after and was also involved in the negotiations, Marguerite reads and interprets the behaviour of the Spanish for her reader, presenting herself at the same time as an assured and capable negotiator, able to keep her head. Mon cousin, quelque mine que l’on me fasse, si sont ils sy estonnés, que ne sçavent que dire! Je ne crains que la longueur; mais dites au Roy en luy présentant ma lettre, que je treuve leur estrangeté sy piteuse, qu’ilz me donnent bonne espérance. J’espère ce soir despescher devers luy pour l’advertir de la conclusion que nous avons prise, et sur cela attendre son bon plaisir; vous asseurant que si j’avois affaire a gens de bien et qui entendissent que c’est que d’honneur, je ne m’en soulcierois; mais c’est le contraire. Chascun me dict qu’il aime le Roy, mais l’expérience en est petite. Le principal est de sa santé, puisque Dieu la luy donne bonne, je vous prie, ne craignés d’ung petit temporiser, car pour retourner à Madil devers luy et pour revenir icy, cela n’est riens, car j’espère que en ces dissimulacions ilz se raviseront.7 My cousin, whatever face they show me, they are so astonished that they do not know what to say! I only fear delay; but tell the King when you give him my letter that I find their strange looks so pitiable that they give me hope. I hope to send this evening notice of the conclusion we have come to, and await his pleasure; I assure you that if I were dealing with men of worth who understood honour I would have no concerns; but it’s the contrary. Everyone tells me he loves the King, but there is little proof of this. The main

Stephenson, Power and Patronage, p. 117. Marguerite to M. le mareschal de Montmorency, Toledo, October 1525, in Lettres de Marguerite d’Angoulême, no. 35, pp. 191–2. 6 7

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thing is his health, and since God grants that it is good, I pray you, do not be afraid to delay a little, for to return to him in Madrid and to come back here is nothing, for I hope they will think better of their dissimulations.

This letter shows Marguerite performing diplomacy on a number of fronts: reading Spanish behaviour while simultaneously demonstrating that competence to Montmorency. She claims to be able to see beyond the ‘mines’ (appearances) of the Spanish negotiators, to be able to read their intentions and the true state of affairs behind the appearances that are designed to fool her. She betrays a certain incomprehension, referring to the ‘estrangeté’ of the Spanish and their ‘dissimulacions’, but nevertheless displays her refusal to be intimidated by their ‘foibles’ threats, and an assurance in her own interpretation of the situation, which she judges to be much worse for the opposing side than it is for the French. She is confident that the Spanish will drop their pretence and that they will come to an agreement that very day, implicitly counselling steadfastness in the face of Spanish duplicity; and she reiterates her willingness to travel to the king’s side without being missed in Toledo – the distance, she claims, is nothing. The tone of this letter is that of the king’s official negotiator, and it exudes confidence that the two sides will come to an arrangement very shortly. She was soon disillusioned, and in her letters to the still-captive king during her journey back to France in December she blamed Spanish deceit and dissimulation for the failure of the negotiations.8 This itself may amount to consummate diplomacy; it seems that contemporaries were unimpressed with the official narrative of her success, and blaming the Spanish might serve to excuse her inefficacy, as Jonathan Reid suggests.9 In any case, we have seen in the previous chapter how Marguerite’s interest in the mechanics of dissimulation and hypocrisy would be nurtured by more political and religious encounters, and would become a characteristic of her works, particularly the Heptameron. The Politics of Childbearing and Marriage As a peer of France and queen of Navarre, Marguerite was an exceptionally powerful sixteenth-century woman. But she was nevertheless a woman operating in a man’s world, recognising – and occasionally resenting – the 8 On the uses of dissimulation, see Michael Randall, ‘Marguerite de Navarre and Ambiguous Deceit’, Sixteenth Century Journal 47 (2016), 579–98. 9 Reid, King’s Sister, vol. 1, p. 340, quoting a contemporary diarist who dismisses Marguerite’s embassy: ‘et n’y fist rien’ (and achieved nothing). Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris sous le règne de François premier (1515–1536), ed. Ludovic Lalanne (Paris: Jules Renouard, 1854), pp. 258–9. For a more optimistic contemporary view of Marguerite’s embassy, see Jehan Du Pré, Le Palais des nobles Dames (Lyon, 1534), ed. Brenda DunnLardeau (Paris: Champion, 2007), p. 347.

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injustice of those constraints. Writing to Anne de Montmorency just after the Battle of Pavia, when both he and the king were prisoners of Charles V, she expresses her envy at his position by her brother’s side. Bien est vray que toute ma vie j’auray envie que je ne puis faire pour luy office pareil au vostre, car où la voulenté passe toute celle que pouriés avoir, la fortune me tient tort, qui, pour estre femme, me rend le moyen difficile.10 It is true that all my life I will be envious that I cannot do him the same service as you do, for while my desire exceeds any you may have, fortune does me wrong by making the means difficult because I am a woman.

While this declaration serves principally to emphasise her loyalty to François, it does suggest Marguerite’s recognition of the limitations on her sphere of action. The gendered expectations governing men and women’s behaviour are a principal theme in the Heptameron, as we will see in Chapter 4; they also permeate her presentation of herself and of the obligations of elite women. In addition to letters carrying information, requests, and recommendations, Marguerite exchanged verse letters and poems with her mother and brother following a practice they must have established during their years together in the royal palaces of the Loire.11 Leah Middlebrook has argued that the verse letters that survive show a careful fashioning of legitimacy and authority, in particular that of Louise, who was regent twice during François’s reign (in 1515 and again in 1525–26) and was one of his closest counsellors.12 In order for Louise to transcend potentially suspect feminine authority, Middlebrook argues, she is represented in these letters as a somewhat disembodied figure of prudence and wisdom, while more troublesome associations of feminine sexuality and embodiment are displaced onto Marguerite. For her part, Marguerite always described herself as the subordinate member of the trinité, ‘Ung petit point de ce parfaict triangle’ (‘a small part of that perfect triangle’).13 An exchange of verse letters between brother and sister in 1527, when Marguerite was pregnant with her first child, Jeanne, demonstrates her desire to be a useful part of the family trinité, her frustration at her perceived incapacity, and a subtle recognition of the cultural constraints on her gender.14 Marguerite to M. le Mareschal de Montmorency, Lettres, no. 25, pp. 176–7 (p. 176). For examples of rondeaux by the trinité, see Aimé Champollion-Figeac, Captivité du roi François Ier (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1847), pp. 109–10. 12 Leah Middlebrook, ‘“Tout mon office”: Body Politics and Family Dynamics in the Verse Epîtres of Marguerite de Navarre’, Renaissance Quarterly 54.4 (Winter 2001), 1108–41. 13 ‘Epîtres’, in Selected Writings, pp. 50–1 (this letter is to her mother Louise in the summer of 1530). 14 For an analysis of this exchange, see Middlebrook, ‘“Tout mon office”’, pp. 1129–36. 10 11

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Marguerite opens the exchange drawing attention to the stubborn materiality of her pregnant body, figured as an obstruction to her service to François: Le groz ventre trop pesant et massif Ne veult souffrir, au vray bon cueur naïf, Vous obeyr, complaire et satisfaire, Ce que surtout il desire de faire …15 This great womb, too heavy and solid, will not allow this good and innocent heart to obey, please, and satisfy you, which it wants to do above all.

Marguerite’s pregnancy is obstructive, rather than creative, a physical impediment to her ability to serve and to her writing. Sketching an opposition between womb (‘ventre’) and heart (‘cueur’), with the womb representing material heaviness and the heart intellectual freedom, she accompanied her letter with a ‘hard stone’ (‘ce dur chaillou’) from the ‘desert sans voye’ (trackless desert) of Navarre, where she finds herself exiled, far from the court and her brother (pp. 536–7). The stone is the emblem of her pregnancy, an obstacle in the fulfilment of her duty, rather than a symbol of fertility and new life. François’s reply deliberately occludes the knot of anxiety and ambivalence and instead reiterates her duty to her family. He recommends that she think of her child, and the bond between them that will revivify her.16 His focus is elsewhere: he is looking for an alternative political mythology (he calls it an ‘exemple à moy […] propice’, an appropriate example for me, p. 538) to replace the maternal authority of Louise, and he finds it in Aeneas, the prince of Troy who carried his father Anchises out of the burning city and eventually founded Rome, the hero of Virgil’s epic The Aeneid and a familiar figure in European foundational mythologies. This myth replaces Louise’s figure of successful maternal authority with the figure of the broken and superseded father, and Marguerite gently takes issue with this in her response, reminding her brother that Louise’s ‘seure constance’ (sure constancy) was her country’s only defence while he was in captivity.17 As in her religious poetry, the materiality of the flesh in Marguerite’s first epistle is an impediment to the desire of the soul, but there is also a political subtext here. Marguerite experiences the principal political duty of elite women – childbearing – as an obstacle to what she sees as her real duty and desire, to serve her brother, perhaps as she had done in Madrid in 1525. When this verse letter was written, in 1527, François’s two sons Henri and Charles 15 This letter is reproduced in Champollion-Figeac, Captivité du roi François Ier, pp. 536–7 (p. 536). 16 Champollion-Figeac, Captivité, pp. 537–9. 17 Champollion-Figeac, Captivité, pp. 540–4 (p. 542).

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were both still hostages of the emperor; Louise was working to secure their release, and Marguerite represents her situation in Navarre and pregnancy as a demotion and as uselessness: ‘Et qui pis est, ne vous faisant service / Fors prier Dieu, voylà tout mon office’ (p. 536; And what is worse, doing you no service except praying to God, that is my only office). In this exchange, Marguerite refuses to see her reproductive work as work; it keeps her away from the public face of service. Elsewhere, she recognises childbearing as a form of service. The feminine aristocratic burden of childbearing and the terror of sterility had surrounded Marguerite from birth. Her mother (when practically still a child herself) had allegedly visited a soothsayer because she was so afraid of childlessness; her brother’s accession to the throne would have been thwarted if the old king Louis XII had had children with his young wife, Mary Tudor; François’s first wife, Claude, was almost constantly pregnant and ignored by the royal court as a result; and Marguerite’s own first marriage to Charles d’Alençon had been childless, a time when her writing to Guillaume Briçonnet bristled with images of sterility and barrenness. In a letter to her brother from 1537, in which she thanks him for restoring her ducal authority in Alençon after his own royal commissioners had disrupted it, Marguerite imagines the work of reproduction explicitly in terms of service: ‘je me souhaite grosse de cent mille hommes d’armes qui, en mettant leurs vies pour vostre service, vous peussent montrer quel desir a d’en faire aultant Vostre très humble et très obéyssante subjecte et seur Marguerite’ (I wish I were pregnant with a hundred thousand soldiers who, in giving their lives in your service, could show you what desire to do as much is felt by your most humble and obedient subject and sister Marguerite).18 Believing herself pregnant at the time of writing, she here acknowledges the political significance of childbearing for the monarch and the state. Marriage was a related obligation for aristocratic women. Both Marguerite and her daughter, Jeanne, were married twice, always of course for dynastic purposes; for both women, their second marriage seems to have been the happier. Marguerite’s first husband, Charles d’Alençon, seems to have been ill-suited to his spirited, intellectual, and curious wife; her second, Henri d’Albret, although not her intellectual equal either, may have conformed more to her taste for dashing, active, fighting men. Jeanne’s first marriage, to the duke of Cleves in 1541, was imposed on her and (arguably) her parents by François I, as a political alliance with a German Protestant prince who had just allied with France against the Holy Roman Empire. The extent of Marguerite’s 18 Marguerite to the king, 1537, in Nouvelles Lettres, no. 81, p. 136. This was a tricky political tangle for Marguerite, who wanted to reassert her own authority without offending her brother. See Stephenson, Power and Patronage, pp. 95–102.

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complicity in the marriage is debated, but she could not ultimately oppose her brother.19 When Cleves had to switch his alliance back to Charles V in 1545, the marriage was annulled, and an extraordinary statement of protest written by Jeanne and signed by witnesses at the time of the wedding was produced as evidence of the invalid marriage. Moi, Jehanne de Navarre, continuant mes protestacions que j’ay ci-devant faictes, èsquelles je parsiste, dis et déclaire et proteste encoires par ceste presente que le mariage que l’on veult faire de moy au duc de Clesves est contre ma volunté; que je n’y ay jamais consenti et n’y consentiray, et que tout ce que je y pourray faire ou dire par cy-après, dont l’on pourroit dire que je y auroie consenti, ce sera par force, oultre mon grey et vouloir, et pour craincte du Roy, du roy mon père et de la royne ma mère, que m’en a menassé et faict foueter par la baillyve de Caen, ma gouvernante, laquelle par plusieurs fois m’en a pressée par commandement de la royne ma mère, me menassant que, si je ne faisois, au faict dudit mariage, tout ce que ledit Roy vouldroit et que si je ne m’y consentoie, je serois tant fessée et maltraictée que l’on me feroit mourir, et que je seroie cause de la perte et destruction de mes père et mère et de leur maison; dont je suis entrée en telle craincte et peur, mesmement de la destruction de mesdicts père et mère, que je ne sçay à quy avoir recours que à Dieu, quant je vois que mes père et mère m’ont délaissée, lesquelx sçayvent bien ce que je leur ay dict, et que jamais je n’aymeroie le duc de Clesves et n’en veulx point.20 I, Jeanne de Navarre, continuing my protestations that I have made before, in which I persist, say and declare and protest again in this current protestation that the marriage they want between me and the duke of Cleves is against my will; that I have never and will not consent, and anything that I could do or say henceforth, which could be said to be consent, will be by force, against my pleasure and my will, through fear of the King, of the king my father and the queen my mother, who threatened me and had me whipped by my governess, who several times has urged me at the command of the queen my mother, threatening me that if, in the case of the said marriage, I did not do everything the King wanted and if I did not consent, I would be so beaten and badly treated that I would be killed, and that I would be the cause of the loss and destruction of my father and mother and of their house; of which I am so afraid, especially of the destruction of my father

19 Patricia and Rouben Cholakian see Marguerite as opposed to the Cleves marriage from the start, even managing Jeanne’s protest to provide evidence for an eventual annulment that also justifies her own loyalty to François: Marguerite de Navarre, p. 218. 20 Nouvelles Lettres, pp. 291–2.

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and mother, that I do not know who to turn to except God, when I see that my father and mother have abandoned me, they who know well I have told them that I will never love the duke of Cleves and I do not want him.

Jeanne describes an extreme version of the coercion that propelled aristocratic women’s marriages; and perhaps, also, an unusual level of resistance on her part. Whatever the extent of Marguerite’s pressure on her daughter, Jeanne’s own internalised recognition of the ways her marriage was an indissoluble part of her family’s honour and even survival is equal to her fear of reprisals. Her mother explored this affective compound of guilt, responsibility, and selfdetermination in her writing.21 Given this immediate family and political drama, Marguerite’s play now known as La Comédie des quatre femmes, probably performed as part of the carnival celebrations in February 1542 to mark the reconciliation of François I and the cardinal of Tournon, with François’s daughter and mistress both taking roles, takes on added poignancy, expressing an ideal that was impossible in reality. In it, two young girls and two married women discuss their respective states: the first girl is determined not to fall in love; the second girl is seeking pleasure in love; the first wife is miserable because of a jealous husband; the second is miserable because of an unfaithful one. The first girl (possibly played by François’s daughter Marguerite) is adamant that she will not give up her freedom: Tout le plaisir, et le contentement, Que peult avoir un gentil coeur honneste, C’est liberté de corps, d’entendement, Qui rend heureux tout homme, oyseau, ou beste. Malheureux est, qui pour don, ou requeste, Se veult lyer à nulle servitude.22 All the pleasure and contentment that a gentle honourable heart can have is in the freedom of body and the mind, which makes any man, bird, or beast happy. Unhappy are they who, by gift or request, want to bind themselves in servitude.

This philosophy of freedom and self-determination was clearly impossible for Marguerite, her daughter, Jeanne, and for the girl playing the part, her niece Marguerite de France. The play does not explicitly point to this political 21 Carla Freccero, ‘Archives in the Fiction: Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron’, in Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe, ed. Victoria Kahn and Lorna Hutson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 73–94. 22 Théâtre profane, p. 96, lines 1–6.

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reality; but its staging as part of the Mardi Gras carnival suggests that it might have been understood as an expression of the ‘world upside down’: no one would have taken it as a manifesto for the aristocratic women present. Court Diplomacy Gendered roles were also evident in Marguerite’s diplomatic activities, especially in the political style attributed to her by Pierre de Brantôme. Brantôme praises her aptitude with foreign ambassadors, who were, he says, ‘grandement ravis’ (greatly delighted) with her. He particularly admires the service she gives her brother: sur ce elle en soullageoit le Roy son frere; car ilz l’aloyent trouver tousjours après avoir faict leur principalle Ambassade, et bien souvant, lorsqu’il avoit de grands affaires, les remettoit à elle. En attandant sa diffinition et totalle resolution, elle les sçavoit fort bien entretenir et contenter de beaux discours, comme elle y estoit fort opulante, et fort habille à tirer les vers du nez d’eux; dont le Roy disoit souvent qu’elle luy assistoit très-bien, et le deschargeoit de beaucoup.23 In this she relieved the king her brother; for they would seek her out after having performed their primary embassy, and very often, when he had important affairs, he would send them to her. Waiting for his definitive and complete answer, she knew well how to entertain and satisfy them with pretty speeches, which she had in abundance, and was skilful in drawing out their secrets; and the king said she was a great help to him and disburdened him of many things.

In Brantôme’s terms, Marguerite’s diplomatic practice is emphatically gendered feminine: entertaining, charming, subtle but wily. Her performance recalls Castiglione’s ideal sprezzatura: artfulness that passes itself off as effortless, making Marguerite’s investigations into diplomatic secrets more effective. Anne Lake Prescott has analysed English ambassadors’ reports of Marguerite and their emphasis on ‘what her culture would have read as “feminine” emotive and flirtatious charm’.24 Brantôme seems to share this view of female diplomacy, but his text is ambivalent about its status; on one level Marguerite’s contribution is supplementary and secondary, it happens Brantôme, ‘Premier Volume’, in Recueil, p. 179. Ann Lake Prescott, ‘“And Then She Fell on a Great Laughter”: Tudor Diplomats Read Marguerite de Navarre’, in Culture and Change: Attending to Early Modern Women, ed. Margaret Mikesell and Adele Seeff (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003), pp. 41–65 (p. 57). 23 24

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after the ‘principal’ business or in the time spent waiting for the king’s decision; on the other hand, François seems to view her as a substitute for himself, asking her to take responsibilities that would usually be his. Barbara Stephenson has argued from the evidence of her letters that Marguerite was not always in her brother’s shadow. She held substantial authority and power in her own right, as ducal peer and duchess of Alençon and Berry; when she married Henri de Navarre, she became a queen, her brother’s equal in some diplomatic contexts.25 Her extensive correspondence shows her confident authority in fiscal, religious, and administrative affairs. She was an important patron, not just of poets, but of clergy and nobility, finding positions for numerous clients in her own household or recommending them to the king and to others. Marguerite presented herself to her brother on at least one occasion as more outspoken and independent than Brantôme’s image of the feminine diplomat might lead us to believe. In a letter to François that probably dates from the early 1540s, she describes to him how she sees her role as counsellor and confidant: Et ce qui m’a fait et fera parler à vous franchement, c’est la seureté que j’ay que vous savez bien que je ne vous dis oncques ny ne diray que vérité, et que vous congnoissez la néifveté de mon cueur et de mon affecsion, et aussy, Monseigneur, que, quoy que je vous mande, vous le tiendrez plus secret que moy mesmes.26 And what makes me and will continue to make me speak to you frankly, is the certainty I have that you know I have never spoken and will never speak anything but the truth to you, and that you know the innocence of my heart and my affection and also, my Lord, that, whatever I tell you, you will keep it secret even more than I.

This is another bravura diplomatic performance. Marguerite presents her truthfulness as guileless and spontaneous, linking it to their shared history, speaking ‘coume de celle qui n’a jamais acoustumé ny ne sauroit vous celer ou dissimuler ses pensées’ (p. 184; as one who has never been accustomed, or would even know how to hide or dissimulate her thoughts). Marguerite’s stance as unaffected and fearless truth-teller is a role familiar from manuals for princes and courtiers, albeit one that is usually associated with masculine virtues. The long discussion by Ottaviano in Book 4 of Castiglione’s Courtier betrays an anxiety about the effect on young men of constant dancing, singing, and entertaining, and in compensation proposes 25 26

Stephenson, Power and Patronage, pp. 8–9. Nouvelles Lettres, p. 184; see Stephenson, Power and Patronage, p. 133.

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the perfect courtier as counsellor and diplomat. The accomplishments of the courtier, Ottaviano claims, serve to ‘win for himself the mind and favour of the prince he serves that he can and always will tell him the truth about all he needs to know, without fear or risk of displeasing him’.27 The figure of the truth-teller plays an important role in classical discussions of influence and diplomacy, too. Perhaps the most well-known discussion is the first-century Greek philosopher and historian Plutarch’s essay ‘How to Tell the Flatterer from a Friend’, in which the craven flatterer is contrasted with the friend or counsellor who will tell unwelcome truths.28 Marguerite adopts and adapts these classical and Renaissance models in her self-presentation to François. In addition to international diplomacy, Marguerite was deeply embroiled in the internal politics of the French court. During François’s reign, the court factions were generally defined by their conservatism or their openness to evangelical reform, although these religious divisions clearly had secular political implications. Anne de Montmorency, the Grand Constable, an influential conservative, favoured alliance with Charles V the Holy Roman Emperor, while Marguerite and the evangelical faction counselled suspicion of Charles’s territorial ambitions and preferred alliances with England or the German princes. Religious and political choices were inseparable, as the Evangelicals were fearful of Charles’s opposition to reform as well as his dreams of expansion. We have already seen in Chapter 1 how the exchange and gift of books could serve to consolidate alliances, request loyalty, and align interests. La Coche is offered to François’s mistress, the duchess of Etampes, in the final verses of the poem and in manuscript illuminations that show Marguerite handing over the book itself. As they decide who should judge their disagreement, the three women in La Coche choose first the king, then Marguerite, then Mme d’Estampes; Marguerite the poet counters the first two suggestions, fearing that her work will be unworthy of the king and that she will be unworthy of the task; but she applauds the choice of Mme d’Estampes, who appears as an intercessor between the women – and indeed the book – and the king. She will be the mediator between the text and the king, and decide whether to show it to him, and which parts to show him (‘Et la monstrez, celez ou excusez’; and show it, hide it, or excuse it).29 Marguerite is sure that she will judge the work as the king would. She will graciously excuse any fault that she finds in the poem; she will serve as ‘couverture’ (cover) for ‘ma povre escriture’ (p. 205, lines 1302–3; my poor writing). Castiglione, Courtier, p. 284. Plutarch, ‘How to Tell the Flatterer from a Friend’, trans. Frank Cole Babbitt, Moralia, 16 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927–76), vol. 1, pp. 265–395. 29 La Coche, p. 207, line 1335. 27 28

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The book (‘le livre’, ‘l’escriture’) appears frequently in the final verses as a material object, written, given, read, shown, hidden, and excused. The book is a material embodiment of the connection between the two women which enables other, more immaterial, exchanges and promises: Car ceste amour, en noz cueurs emmurée, Soit de monstrer ce livre ou le cacher Fera si bien qu’on ne pourra toucher A mon honneur qu’entre voz mains je mectz … (p. 208, lines 1357–60) For this love, immured in our hearts, whether the book is shown or hidden, will ensure that no one will touch my honour which I place in your hands.

This passage establishes connections and correspondences between material objects, immaterial qualities, gifts, and trust. The affection that the two women bear each other reassures Marguerite that she can trust Mme d’Estampes with her book and her honour, both of which she puts in her hands. Present throughout the last section of La Coche is the king, the third party who triangulates the relationship between the two women; if the book is the mediator between Marguerite and Mme d’Estampes, in La Coche, at least, Mme d’Estampes is the mediator between Marguerite and her brother. This oblique approach to diplomacy is what English ambassadors appreciated in Marguerite’s political practice; it is also evident in the indirect didacticism of the Heptameron. François I in the Heptameron The political engagement of the Heptameron has been the subject of growing critical interest. Margaret Ferguson has argued that the Heptameron is a ‘portrait of the author as courtier’, showcasing the persuasive tactics of Ottaviano’s educator of the prince.30 In her book Dido’s Daughters, Ferguson argues further that Marguerite intervenes in the vision of empire which was being constructed by her brother and her nephew.31 With its storytellers’ explicit negotiations about the truth of the story and what it represents for their social world, the Heptameron appears a pre-eminent example of the 30 Margaret Ferguson, ‘Recreating the Rules of the Game: Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron’, in Creative Imitation: New Essays on Renaissance Literature in Honor of Thomas M. Greene, ed. David Quint and others (Binghampton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992), pp. 153–87 (p. 178). 31 Margaret Ferguson Dido’s Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern France and England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), ch. 5, ‘Making the World Anew: Female Literacy as Reformation and Translation in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron’, pp. 225–63.

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‘diplomatic poetics’ that Timothy Hampton describes.32 Elizabeth Zegura presents the Heptameron as a political work, written from multiple and shifting perspectives with the aim of revealing and critiquing the injustices of contemporary France; although undeniably elite and well educated, as a woman in political contexts Marguerite nevertheless had an outsider’s perspective, the view from the ‘petit coing’ of the trinité.33 Carla Freccero has argued that the Heptameron critiques changing narratives of nationalism and governance.34 In the rest of this chapter, I explore the Heptameron in the tradition of the ‘mirror for princes’, as a manual of good governance for François and perhaps even for his son, Henri II. The three stories featuring François himself demonstrate Marguerite’s talent at oblique instruction. Nouvelle 42 is a story of feminine virtue and masculine education; it is told by Parlamente, who introduces it as an exemplary story. The male protagonist is not named, but as a prince of peerless perfections he is traditionally identified with François. This identification brings the story closer to home, into the intimate family dynamics of Marguerite, François, and Louise. The fifteen-year-old prince, interested only in hunting and gallantry, falls in love with a young townswoman, not insignificantly named Françoise, who has been raised in his household and who virtuously resists him until he relents and marries her to one of his gentlemen. Parlamente offers Françoise as a lesson to all women not to concede power to their admirers: ‘Que dirons-nous icy, mes dames? Avons-nous le cueur si bas, que nous facions noz serviteurs noz maistres […]?’ (p. 498; ‘Well, Ladies, what are we to make of that? Are our hearts so base that we allow our servants to become our masters?’ p. 389). She recognises here that declarations of love are in fact negotiations of power, an insight we will explore further in Chapter 4. Carla Freccero reads nouvelle 42 as the education and initiation of a prince by his namesake, Françoise, who is also the French nation itself personified (nation françoise). This reading is suggested by Oisille, who compares Françoise favourably to Lucretia, the legendary Roman noblewoman whose rape and suicide were presented as an emancipatory story by Roman historians. In their accounts, Lucretia’s assault provoked a rebellion against monarchical tyranny and consequently led to the establishment of the Roman republic. In this retelling and supplanting of the Lucretia story, François must give up his immediate desires for more permanent honour and power, which involves 32 Timothy Hampton, Fictions of Embassy: Literature and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), pp. 3, 7. 33 Zegura, Shifting Gaze, p. 32. 34 Carla Freccero, ‘Queer Nation’, in Queer/Early/Modern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), pp. 51–66; ‘Practicing Queer Philology with Marguerite de Navarre: Nationalism and the Castigation of Desire’, in Queering the Renaissance, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 107–23.

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moving beyond the reach of the maternal power that regulates and structures his immediate family.35 It is the prince’s mother who controls his spending and his pastimes, and of whom he is clearly terrified. Nouvelle 42, then, echoes a desire we have seen François express himself – the desire to free himself from maternal authority – that Marguerite resists, or at least complicates with the suggestion of familial obligation. Elizabeth Zegura also reads this story as a Bildungsroman that stages the education of a prince.36 From Françoise, the ‘enlightened outsider’, François learns some moral lessons: not to confuse rank with virtue, and to acknowledge honour as a possession of all social classes. Zegura discerns a more general political lesson, too. In the story, François blithely uses the church as a means to advance his love affair; this is where he first sees Françoise, proceeding to treat church services as opportunities for seduction, following her to different chapels as she tries to avoid him. Zegura argues that this is a subtle critique of François’s tendency to exploit confessional struggles to increase his own political power.37 Françoise, representative of the French nation, teaches François to value honour, compassion, and self-denial, principles that mould him in the image of the Christian ruler that Erasmus described in his 1516 Education of a Christian Prince. Zegura calls these qualities ‘non-Machiavellian’ (p. 194), and while he does not feature by name, there are possibly other traces of the Italian political theorist as negative exemplar elsewhere in the story. Niccolò Machiavelli wrote Il Principe (The Prince) around the same time as Erasmus’s Christian Prince, but it was not printed until 1532. A French translation was dedicated to Anne de Montmorency in 1546, but it is probable that François’s court knew it in the original Italian. Machiavelli’s Prince was conceived as a pragmatic guide for rulers and governors, a how-to manual that portrayed the world realistically and offered appropriate advice. It was immediately met with the criticism that this was a cynical approach that abandoned any aim of moral improvement. One of The Prince’s most famous assertions is that it is more effective for a ruler to be feared than to be loved. This is offered in the interests of good governance; for Machiavelli, the principal duty of the prince is to unify and to protect his subjects in a context where indiscriminate compassion could lead to disorder and disaster. Machiavelli states that, clearly, it is best to be both loved and feared; ‘but because it is difficult to combine them, it is far better to be feared than loved if you cannot be both’.38 In nouvelle 42, in contrast, Françoise paints a picture of a ruler who would scorn to make Freccero, ‘Practicing Queer Philology’, p. 118. Zegura, Shifting Gaze, p. 195. 37 Zegura, Shifting Gaze, p. 194. 38 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. George Bull (London: Penguin, 2003), ch. 17, p. 54. 35 36

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himself feared. At one point in his attempted seduction, the prince sends one of his gentlemen to offer Françoise money; when she rejects this, the gentleman takes the initiative of threatening her. She laughs. ‘Faictes paour de luy à celles qui ne le congnoissent poinct, car je sçay bien qu’il est si saige et si vertueux, que telz propos ne viennent de luy’ (p. 496; ‘You can try frightening women who don’t know him, but I know that he is too virtuous and too good to say such things himself’, p. 386). This could be a subtle French riposte to the Italian pragmatism represented by Machiavelli; it might also be an oblique condemnation of persecution more generally, and François’s intermittent policy of suppression. Machiavellian principles make a surprising appearance in another story that features an anonymised François. Longarine introduces nouvelle 25 as a story with political heft, along familiar anti-Machiavellian lines: ‘mensonge ou dissimulation […] est ung vice laid et infame, principallement aux princes et grans seigneurs’ (p. 364; ‘lying and deceit […] is the most ugly and most squalid of all vices, particularly for princes and high-born lords’, p. 284). In chapter 18 of The Prince, ‘How Princes Should Honour their Word’, Machiavelli recommends that, while it is not necessary for a prince to be compassionate, truthful, and religious, he should certainly appear to be so.39 Indeed, Machiavelli warns that actually possessing these good qualities might do the prince more harm than good. Longarine’s rejection of this advice repeats commonplace identifications of the nobility with noble virtues and honour. But she sets an interesting limit on even a prince’s good faith: love can excuse any ignoble behaviour. ‘[P]ar ceste necessité leur est non seullement permis mais mandé de user de mensonge, ypocrisye et fiction, qui sont les moyens de vaincre leurs ennemys, selon la doctrine de maistre Jehan de Mehun’ (p. 365; ‘by such necessity not only are they permitted, but are actually obliged, to employ fabrications, lies and hypocrisy, which, according to the teaching of Jean de Meung, are the weapons one needs in order to vanquish the enemy’, pp. 284–5). Longarine’s tongue seems to be firmly in her cheek here. These tactics are only recommended in the teaching of Jean de Meun, whose Roman de la Rose offered ambivalent examples of virtue.40 This reference to Jean de Meun takes us from a Machiavellian political setting to medieval courtly allegory, shifting the focus from the specific and the political with which Longarine began to the universal power of love. Nouvelle 25 recounts François’s affair with a lawyer’s wife, which seems to have been general knowledge in Paris, according to a contemporary diary.41 Machiavelli, The Prince, p. 57. Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la rose, ed. Armand Strubel (Paris: Librairie générale française, 1994). 41 Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris, pp. 13–14. 39 40

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The lawyer is the old, impotent husband familiar from medieval tradition; the wife is young (eighteen or nineteen, says Longarine) and beautiful. The prince makes use of a monastery as a shortcut to his trysts, and the monks notice him early in the morning, seemingly praying. When this comes to the attention of the prince’s sister she is immediately suspicious. She knows her brother is a good Christian, but not one for superstitious and ceremonial practices. When she asks him, she gets the whole story; Longarine concludes with a general moral about the power of love: ‘puis qu’Amour sçait tromper les trompeurs, nous autres simples et ignorantes le devons bien craindre’ (p. 371; ‘if Love can trick the tricksters, then the rest of us ordinary ignorant [women] ought indeed to fear it!’ p. 290). The debate after the story is relatively short and dominated by Hircan’s scandalous avowal of pleasurable sin that we considered in Chapter 2. But Geburon and Oisille both praise the actions of the prince on the grounds that he took considerable pains to ensure the secrecy of his affair and therefore to safeguard the honour of his lover, an example they wish others would follow. The seeming indulgence of the storytellers for the prince’s behaviour has antagonised some readers. Michel de Montaigne believed that Marguerite was offering her brother’s example as ‘tesmoignage de singuliere devotion’ (‘evidence of singular devotion’), and dismissed the story along with Marguerite’s credentials as a religious thinker: ‘ce n’est pas par cette prevue seulement qu’on pourroit verifier que les femmes ne sont guières propres à traiter les matieres de la Theologie’ (‘it is not by this proof only that one could demonstrate that women are hardly fit to treat theological matters’).42 But, arguably, Montaigne – usually an astute reader of authorial perspective – is missing Marguerite’s irony here. ‘Je vous laisse à juger’, he scoffs, ‘l’ame pleine de ce beau pensement, à quoy il employoit la faveur divine’ (‘I leave you to judge for what purpose he employed the divine favour’), an ironic appreciation of the prince’s repentance that is in fact anticipated in the discussion. ‘Pensez, dist Nomerfide, que les prieres qu’il faisoit au monastere où il passoit estoient bien fondées!’ (p. 371; ‘Don’t forget, exclaimed Nomerfide, that he had every good reason to be saying his prayers!’, p. 290). Despite echoing Nomerfide’s ironic commentary, Montaigne insists that Marguerite is unequivocally holding her brother up as a good example. He is mistaken about this: it is in fact the monks in the monastery who take the prince’s ‘singuliere devotion’ at face value. Neither the story nor Marguerite endorses the ‘superstitions ne ceremonies’ (p. 370; ‘superstitious ceremonies’, p. 289) that raise his sister’s suspicions. Indeed, Montaigne’s cynicism about the quality of the prince’s prayers is shared by Hircan when he admits to his own defective repentance. 42

Montaigne, ‘Des prières’, Essais I, 56, p. 324; ‘Of Prayers’, Complete Works, p. 285.

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Longarine’s brief presentation of this nouvelle in the political terms of the integrity and honour of the nobility is quickly reframed as just another story that shows love’s imperious power. And yet, read alongside nouvelle 42, it repeats the picture of a young prince who has to be educated in his duties and responsibilities. Nouvelle 25 is not so obviously a pedagogic story as nouvelle 42, in which Françoise instructs the young prince in virtue, but it does offer some oblique instruction in aristocratic honour. Nouvelle 17 is a final story that features François, this time not as an anonymous young prince but by name as the king of France. Oisille tells the story in response to the second tale of Bonnivet’s amorous conquests in Milan, which must have evoked previous French military conquests (and humiliations) in contemporary audiences. Like the Heptameron itself (set in Sarrance, in the Pyrenees), nouvelle 17 takes place in contested territory, the duchy of Burgundy, which had been French only since 1482 and had been the impossible demand of Charles V in the negotiations after Pavia in 1525. François takes into his service a Saxon count, Guillaume de Furstemberg, making him one of his gentilhommes de chambre, that is, part of the intimate group who attend the king personally. When he is warned twice that the count has been paid by an unnamed source to assassinate him, François stages a confrontation that both threatens and undermines the Saxon. Hunting in the forest, François allows the two of them to be separated from the rest of the court and draws his sword, declaring he is ready to defend himself against any attack. The count affects astonishment, but nevertheless takes his leave of the French court the very next day. François’s conversation with him, alone in the forest, is an implicit accusation of cowardice and dishonour. Oisille sums up her story by claiming that François was moreover proving himself: ‘pour se contanter luy-mesmes d’experimenter la bonté et la hardiesse de son cueur’ (p. 268; ‘so that he could satisfy himself personally by proving that his heart was true and his courage unswerving’, p. 212). As well as a test of the count, François’s act was a test of himself, away from the sycophancy and the hierarchy of the royal court. This is a story of François’s kingship, when he was no longer a young and inexperienced prince, but an established ruler with a lively eye on his own reputation and a taste for spectacular performances of his own power. In addition to courage, however, he also demonstrates a discriminating judgement: he bides his time, he weighs the evidence, and he tests it for himself.43 This judicious approach coupled with the bravura of the confrontation offers a composite image of Renaissance kingship, balanced between the warrior ethos of the chivalric past and the political manoeuvring of the present. It is the transitional moment that is described in Castiglione’s Courtier, in which 43

Zegura, Shifting Gaze, p. 195.

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the new man of the court is not so much a warrior as a diplomat. Historians have identified François’s reign more specifically as a period of transition for France, away from a network of feudal obligations in which the nobility held significant power and towards the absolutist centralised state of the seventeenth century.44 François’s presence in the stories, especially as a young prince in training, suggests that Marguerite conceived of her book as a political intervention. She does this through the figure of the king, but also in numerous meditations on justice and authority in both the public and the domestic spheres. Justice and Authority: Nouvelle 1 The first story in the Heptameron starts the collection off in sensational style with adultery, murder, sorcery, and retribution. But beyond the headlines is a tale of justice and authority. The story is set in the town of Alençon, in the lifetime of duke Charles, Marguerite’s first husband. A procurator named Saint-Aignan is married to a beautiful but immoral young woman who pursues two affairs simultaneously: the bishop of Sées for ‘profit’ and a young, virtuous and handsome man named Du Mesnil for ‘plaisir’ (p. 94), in the words of the storyteller, Simontaut. When the younger lover finds out about his rival, he breaks with the wife; she, afraid that he will destroy her reputation (although he has vowed not to breathe a word), tells her husband that she is being pursued, persuading him to have the young man killed. The husband and a hired assassin ambush Du Mesnil at night and murder him. The couple then flee to England after Du Mesnil’s father brings a court case against them, where they manage to induce Henry VIII to intervene with François I on their behalf. On their return to France, the husband seeks the services of a sorcerer who makes enchanted poppets of his wife, Du Mesnil’s father, and the duchess of Alençon: that is, of course, Marguerite. SaintAignan and the sorcerer are condemned to death, a sentence that is commuted on the intervention of Marguerite to life in the galleys, where they have time to consider their crimes. The wife suffers no judicial punishment but continues her wicked life and eventually dies ‘miserablement’ (p. 102). The story is full of high drama and outlandish detail, but it is also grounded in a recognisable society of domestic authority, local justice, and loyalties. The wife – according to Simontaut, who has his own reasons for telling the story of a wicked woman – has too much authority in the marriage, and too much power over her husband, who ‘se laissoit gouverner par elle’ (p. 96; ‘[was] in the habit of taking orders from his wife’, p. 72). The verb 44 J. H. M. Salmon, Society in Crisis: France in the Sixteenth Century (London: Methuen, 1975).

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‘gouverner’ suggests a world in which women command and govern and men obey; a world turned upside down in contrast to normal sixteenthcentury patriarchal authority. Being entirely ruled by his wife, Saint-Aignan forgets the loyalty and service he owes, and used to show, his master and mistress, the duke and duchess of Alençon. The wife’s wickedness corrupts both the good governance of her marriage and the bonds of fealty that should bind a nobleman to his lord. Saint-Aignan’s abdication of responsibility and dereliction of his household contrast markedly with the process of judicial authority that is illustrated in the story. Simontaut proves himself a close observer of judicial procedure. He tells how Saint-Aignan and his wife, in their cover-up of the murder, turn their attention to any witness who might be called to trial: Du Mesnil’s servants would not, they know, be ‘creuz en tesmoignage’ (p. 98; ‘regarded as credible witnesses’, p. 75) because of their association with the dead man. They attempt to discredit their own servants who witnessed the deed, tricking one young chambermaid into a brothel in Paris in order to destroy her reputation as a witness. An older maid, however, makes her escape and seeks refuge in a monastery, and is a reliable witness at the trial, which condemns the couple to death in their absence (they have by this point escaped to England). The first tale in the collection is particularly preoccupied with stories and their accreditation, problematising the role of witness that the Prologue made so central to the Heptameron’s own storytelling project.45 Saint-Aignan writes to the chancellor to defend himself and request a pardon but is thwarted by the duke and duchess of Alençon, who have been apprised of the truth by the dead man’s father. The letter requesting a royal pardon by the historical Saint-Aignan has been preserved in the archives.46 In her study of remission letters, Natalie Zemon Davis argues that writers requesting pardons used the same narrative techniques that were being developed in the French short stories of the early sixteenth century.47 SaintAignan’s remission letter frames the story in terms of family honour and disgrace. He does not deny the murder or the disposal of the body but portrays Dumesnil (as the young man is referred to) as an unscrupulous seducer who corrupts a chambermaid in his assault on his wife. In the Heptameron version, 45 André Tournon, ‘Conte véritable, véritable conte’, in Conteurs et romanciers de la Renaissance: Mélanges offerts à Gabriel-André Pérouse, ed. James Dauphiné and Béatrice Perigot (Paris, 1997), pp. 379–93; John D. Lyons, Exemplum: The Rhetoric of Example in Early Modern France and Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 81–93. 46 Reproduced in L’Heptaméron des nouvelles, ed. Le Roux de Lincy and Montaiglon, vol. 4, pp. 214–17. 47 Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), pp. 2–4; on nouvelle 1, see pp. 58–9.

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Marguerite offers a critique of Saint-Aignan’s appeal to a code of honour by presenting him as deliberately dishonouring others so their stories will not be believed. Rather than an immutable code, honour in nouvelle 1 appears as a convention that can be manipulated. Elizabeth Zegura argues that the story also makes a point about local authority and justice.48 The duke and duchess of Alençon appear as paternalistic figures, protecting Du Mesnil’s father and allowing his story to be told. Their authority in their territories is even emphasised by François, who, in his first response to Henry VIII, informs him that ‘le duc d’Allençon avoit seul ce previlleige en son roiaulme de donner grace en sa duché’ (p. 100; ‘the Duke of Alençon alone in the realm had the right to confer pardons within his own duchy’, p. 76). If we look at the historical context of ducal authority, we can see that this was a time of conflict and change. Alençon’s ducal rights passed to Marguerite on Charles’s death when she was given the sole title of the duchy; indeed, in 1526, when the remission letter in the archive was written, she would have been the authority François refers to in the story. Marguerite’s accession to the duchy was not uncontroversial. It was opposed by the rest of Charles’s family, since his sister would, under normal circumstances, have inherited the territory, and raised local fears that Marguerite would simply enact her brother’s wishes on the duchy, thus undermining its semi-autonomy.49 Although her situation as king’s sister was exceptional, Marguerite here experienced a conflict characteristic of early sixteenth-century relationships between crown and nobility. François’s attempts to codify the French legal system in order to increase his jurisdiction over the semi-autonomous duchies, and to centralise power in the hands of the king, ran counter to the still powerful nobility’s desire to retain their traditional authority over their territories. The historian Donna Bohanan describes a situation in sixteenth-century France in which many of the fiefdoms and provinces had come into the royal domains, which should have meant that they came under royal control; but, in practice, they still operated in traditional, semi-autonomous ways.50 Feudalism – the system in which land was granted for military service, and reciprocal ties of loyalty and support bound monarch and nobles together – was increasingly contested by centralising kings like François, but the nobility did not yet believe it was over. Marguerite experienced the sharp end of these changes as a ducal ruler and vassal. Elizabeth Zegura argues further that nouvelle 1 is a reminder of how François should operate in his dukes’ territories, recognising their authority and jurisdiction.51 In its detailed account of a complex and Zegura, Shifting Gaze, pp. 188–90. Stephenson, Power and Patronage, p. 85; and on the following conflict, pp. 95–102. 50 Donna Bohanan, Crown and Nobility in Early Modern France (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), p. 33; quoted in Stephenson, Power and Patronage, p. 98. 51 Zegura, Shifting Gaze, pp. 188–90. 48 49

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careful judicial system, nouvelle 1 portrays a monarch who acts with integrity and tact and is swayed towards compassion: a model, rather than a portrait, for François at the end of his reign. Marguerite appears as a figure of authority and clemency in nouvelle 1, reappearing in this role throughout the collection. Marie Héroët’s mother appeals to her in desperation at the lecherous prior’s besieging her daughter in nouvelle 22; ‘la Royne de Navarre’ (p. 338) immediately commands an examination, despite having believed in the prior’s integrity herself and having entrusted him with important benefices. In the final existing story, nouvelle 72, she reconciles the seduced and pregnant nun to her order and dissuades her from her futile pilgrimage to Rome. The nun, in tears, swears that she will not tell her story to any other than the duchess, ‘estant asseurée que, s’il y a ordre, elle le trouvera’ (p. 695; ‘I am sure that if there is anything anyone can do, she will do it’, p. 542). From first story to last, Marguerite appears in the Heptameron as one who can find and impose order and, indeed, compassion. She acts as an ideal overlord: the last resort of the oppressed, a conduit of justice, and a defender of the vulnerable. Tyranny and Resistance Alongside these figures of good governance are counter-examples, the antiheroes of the Heptameron’s precariously post-feudal world. Two of the most ruthless rulers in the collection are Italian. This choice does not seem accidental, given François’s desire to consolidate his Italian territories and the humiliation that he suffered there in 1525. Italy was also the homeland of Machiavelli, whose book The Prince, as we have seen, proposed some unsettling reformulations of the bonds between ruler and subjects. The Heptameron’s forays into Italian territory bring back significant symbolic spoils. The rulers in nouvelles 12 and 51 are harsh foils for the contractual kingship we saw operating in nouvelle 1. Nouvelle 12 is, like nouvelle 1, a story corroborated by the historical record. This is Marguerite’s version of the assassination of Alessandro de’ Medici by his cousin Lorenzino, a story famous in the sixteenth century (not least because the assassin himself wrote an Apologia) and beyond: Alfred de Musset’s 1834 play Lorenzaccio was a comment on the defective republican virtues of his own time. Dagoucin, the storyteller, sets it up as a story illustrating the blindness of love, but the discussion strays back into political territory. In Florence, a Medici duke falls in love with the sister of his best friend and righthand man; as the duke is married and the sister is virtuous, he asks his friend to act as go-between, relying heavily on a rhetoric of friendship, while still managing to underscore his friend’s subordinate position: ‘si moy, qui suys vostre maistre, vous portois telle affection, que pour le moins ne la sçauriez porter moindre’ (p. 204; ‘If I, as your master, bear you such affection, then,

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surely, to say the least, you can’t feel less for me?’ p. 158). The gentleman is put in an impossible position: aware of the obligation and duty he owes the duke for his own advancement, and yet protective of his sister’s honour, he is also familiar with the cruelty and ruthlessness of his master. So the gentleman decides to kill the duke, saving the honour of his family, an act which should additionally ‘delivrer sa patrye d’un tel tyran’ (p. 206; ‘rid his homeland of this tyrant’, p. 160). The assassination is difficult and messy. The gentleman and one of his men stab the duke as he lies waiting for the sister in his bed. The assassins then flee for Venice. This story provokes a lively debate of ‘diverses oppinions’ (p. 210; ‘diverse opinions’, p. 163), though the subject is not love, as Dagoucin directs in his summing up, but politics. [L]es ungs soutenoient que le gentil homme avoit faict son debvoir de saulver sa vie et l’honneur de sa seur, ensemble d’avoir delivré sa patrie d’un tel tirant; les autres disoient que non, mais que c’estoit trop grande ingratitude de mectre à mort celluy qui luy avoit faict tant de bien et d’honneur. (pp. 210–11) For some, the gentleman had clearly done his duty in saving his sister’s life and honour, and in ridding his homeland of a tyrant by the same stroke. Others, however, did not agree. They said that it was the height of ingratitude for the gentleman to murder the very man from whom he had received such honour and advancement. (p. 163)

These opposing opinions are split along gender lines. ‘Les dames disoient qu’il estoit bon frere et vertueulx citoyen; les hommes, au contraire, qu’il estoit traistre et meschant serviteur’ (p. 211; ‘The ladies said that he was a good brother and a virtuous citizen. The men, taking the contrary view, insisted that he was a traitor and a bad servant’, p. 163). With this discussion, a gendered version of the transition from feudalism emerges. The men argue for the old traditional bonds of fealty and service; the gentleman’s first obligation is to his lord, regardless of that lord’s character, and in the absence of the reciprocity that should mark the feudal tie. The women look simultaneously to a smaller and a larger scale. The sister – the family – is the gentleman’s first duty; but the same act is also an act of political liberation, freeing the state from the grip of a tyrant whose ruthless pursuit of his own pleasure might serve as an indication of his style of governance. As Elizabeth Zegura points out, the men’s feudal model, the ‘seignorial code’ broken by the gentleman’s violence, is shown in the story to be already anachronistic: the duke does not abide by it any more than does his assassin.52 52

Zegura, Shifting Gaze, p. 200.

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Critics have argued that Marguerite effectively depoliticises the story by focusing so insistently on the gentleman’s reaction to his sister’s threatened honour.53 It is true that her version omits the republican arguments that characterise Lorenzino’s own Apologia and versions in Italian chronicles. But the politics is not stripped out of the story altogether. The disagreement between the male and female storytellers suggests that the shifting values of feudalism and republicanism was a live issue and not, as Dagoucin claims, trying to put the lid back on the contentious box his story has opened, ‘une chose desja passée’ (p. 211; ‘something that is now long past’, p. 163). We will return to Dagoucin’s attempts to reframe the discussion in terms of courtly love and the way the women deal with that in Chapter 4; for now, we might note Marguerite’s surprising willingness to classify regicide as tyrannicide. She does not explore the ethical complexities of the issue here, although she does allow a certain scepticism to form around the gentleman’s motives; but questions of resistance to tyrannical power and its limits would feature prominently in Protestant writing of the religious wars.54 More obviously, nouvelle 12 allows Marguerite to show how ‘diverses oppinions’ can be contained in ways that do not erupt into violence or open irreconcilable rifts. It is a model of dialogue that accommodates different opinions and world views and allows them to coexist, as we will explore further in Chapter 6. Nouvelle 51 portrays a ruler more untrustworthy and capricious than Alessandro de’ Medici.55 This is the duke of Urbino, Francesco-Maria della Rovere, the nephew and heir of Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, whose court in Urbino was so memorably and influentially portrayed in Castiglione’s Courtier. Although Castiglione is careful to emphasise the continuity between the courts of the uncle and the nephew, the whole work, and particularly Book 4, is written in a faintly melancholy mode, under the shadow of death, suggesting nostalgia for a culture that no longer exists. In Marguerite’s nouvelle 51, there is no mention of the artistic or cultural side of Urbino court life. Instead, Oisille tells a story of domestic intrigue and tyranny, an illustration (she says) of the biblical instruction, ‘Ne vous confiez poinct aux princes, ne aux filz des hommes, auxquelz n’est nostre salut’ (Psalm 146.3, p. 550; ‘Trust 53 Gary Ferguson, ‘History or Her Story? (Homo)sociality/sexuality in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron 12’, in Narrative Worlds: Essays on the ‘Nouvelle’ in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century France, ed. Gary Ferguson and David LaGuardia (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 2005), pp. 97–122; Julie Singer, ‘For Palle and Patrie: Re-gendering Violence from Benedetto Varchi to Marguerite de Navarre’, in Gender Matters: Discourses of Violence in Early Modern Literature and the Arts, ed. Mara R. Wade (Leiden: Brill, 2014), pp. 101–18. 54 Robert M. Kingdon, ‘Calvinism and Resistance Theory, 1550–1580’, in The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450–1700, ed. J. H. Burns with Mark Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 193–218. 55 Zegura discusses nouvelle 51 in Shifting Gaze, pp. 203–11.

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not in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no salvation’, p. 428). This lesson will be repeated in the discussion after the story. The duke is portrayed as an implacable, cruel, avaricious man, a ruler and a father who imposes his authority without pity or mercy. When he hears his young son has fallen in love with a noble but poor woman, he is furious, and blames a young woman in his wife’s service who has been passing letters between them. Oisille says he ‘se delibera d’y donner ordre’ (p. 551; ‘resolved at once to put a stop to it’, p. 429), but he has in mind a different kind of ‘ordre’ than the compassionate resolution of the duchess of Alençon in nouvelle 72. The lady-in-waiting, who knows the duke’s ‘malice’ and lack of conscience, is terrified, and goes into hiding in a convent, from which she is reluctantly drawn by the duchess’s promise ‘sur sa vie et son honneur’ (p. 552; ‘on her life and honour’, p. 430) that she will not be harmed, the duke having persuaded his wife that his rage has passed. This is a trick: as soon as the girl is out of hiding, the duke, to his wife’s horror and despair, has her hanged, ‘sans forme de justice, obliant Dieu et l’honneur de sa maison’ (p. 553; ‘ignoring all legal forms, God and the honour of his house’, p. 430). In telling this story, Oisille makes much of the breach of honour between husband and wife. Against her better judgement, but trusting the duchess’s promise and believing that the duke would never disregard ‘telle seureté où l’honneur de sa femme estoit engaigé’ (p. 552; ‘a promise pledged on his wife’s life and honour’, p. 430), the girl leaves her hiding place and goes back to the court, where she learns how little the duke cares for his wife’s word of honour. The wife is devastated that her word should count for so little, but we might feel this is little consolation for her lady-in-waiting who is sacrificed to the duke’s desire for revenge. Oisille is explicit that he has transgressed the codes that should direct noble behaviour, ‘contre toute loy d’honnesteté’ (p. 553; ‘against all laws of honour and justice’, p. 431). The duke thus represents a foil to the Angoulême model of compassionate governance: avaricious, vicious, untrustworthy, he disregards the refined codes that made his uncle’s court so famous a model for courtly behaviour across Europe. Oisille sums up her story with a warning about wicked rulers. ‘Regardez, mes dames, quelz sont les effectz de la malice quant elle est joincte à la puissance!’ (p. 553; ‘Ladies, observe the effects of wickedness when combined with power’, p. 431). It is not clear from the story what resistance would be possible to the duke, apart from a scepticism to match his unscrupulousness: his wife, a little like the male storytellers, is betrayed by her confidence in outmoded codes of honour that have no place in the practices of opportunistic rulers like the duke. He flouts any sense of contractual responsibility; he has no qualms about performing an equanimity he does not feel or violating his wife’s promise. In the discussion, Simontaut drives home the lesson for France, associating the cruelty of the duke firmly with Italy: ‘ceulx qui ont

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passé par Italie en ont vu de si très incroyables que ceste-cy n’est au pris qu’un petit pecadille’ (p. 554; ‘People who’ve travelled through Italy have seen the most incredible things, things which make this a mere peccadillo by comparison’, p. 431). Geburon adds an example, drawn from the Italian Wars, of an Italian captain who ate a rival’s heart and ripped the foetus of his child from the womb of his dead wife; the implication perhaps being that the French were fighting an enemy who did not feel bound by the same rules of honour. Parlamente brings the discussion back to Oisille’s starting point by stating that the Italians are particularly guilty of cuyder, the pride in human achievement that distances humanity from God, a swipe at Italian hubris and ‘ceulx qui cuydent passer et surmonter les aultres en honneur, prudence et raison humaine’ (p. 555; ‘those who regard themselves as rising so high above their fellows in honour, wisdom and human reason’, p. 432). This reminder that rulers are equally subject to the logic and consequences of cuyder might suggest that Marguerite does not take the divine right of kings as a given, even while her brother was consolidating precisely this traditional authorisation of his position as the ‘roi très chrétien’ (most Christian king, an epithet associated with the kings of France since at least the twelfth century). The duke of Urbino in nouvelle 51 is a different kind of ruler: ‘ignoring God’, noble honour, and justice, obsessed and corrupted by secular power. There is a more explicit exposure of worldly ambition and the ultimate futility of human power in the biblical plays. Marguerite’s tetralogy of biblical plays represents another godless secular ruler in King Herod. The sequence was probably written and performed after 1535 and was printed in the 1547 Marguerites; the plays were performed first in front of a select elite audience and then circulated to a wider public.56 Herod makes his appearance in the Comédie de l’adoration des trois rois à Jésus Christ, no doubt written to be performed on the feast of the three kings, 6 January. This play covers the part of the Christmas story where three foreign kings, searching for a new-born Messiah, follow a star to Bethlehem, stopping in Jerusalem to consult with King Herod. Herod is furious at the threat to his authority and tries to trick the kings into telling him where they find the baby (whose birth, his learned counsel tells him, has indeed been foretold by the stars); but, warned by an angel, they go back another way. Herod is obsessed with his own greatness and power: ‘Dens le coeur me brusle le feu / Peu à peu / D’ambition, pour estre maistre’ (In my heart burns, little by little, the fire of ambition to be master); this ambition has become a hubristic belief that he might rival even God: ‘plus grand que luy voudrois estre’ (I would like to be greater than him).57 This confession betrays his Millet, ‘Staging the Spiritual’, pp. 288–9. Comédie de l’adoration des trois roys à Jésus Christ, in Comédies bibliques, pp. 149–214 (p. 180, lines 847–9, line 846). 56 57

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fundamental cuyder, the deluded belief in human power and potential. Herod has the customary attendants of the bad ruler: bad counsellors, the ‘docteurs’ who flatter him and concur with him, even when he plans to kill the new-born Messiah. One tells him, in Machiavellian terms, that he is ‘Un Roy craint et aymé de tous’ (p. 185, line 951; a king feared and loved by all). Another confesses that he exercises no judgement or discrimination in executing the orders of his power-hungry king: ‘Cercher ne veux qu’à luy complaire / Par tous moyens, bons ou mauvais’ (p. 187, lines 1007–8; I only seek to please him by any means, good or bad). The bad king seeks an absolute power that corrupts not just himself but spreads, contagious, through his court. His counsellors, although learned, dare not contradict him, and even share his unscrupulous pretentions. With no brakes on his ambition or on his cruelty, Herod becomes truly monstrous in the Comédie des Innocents, no doubt performed on the feast of the Holy Innocents on 28 December. This play stages Herod’s massacre of all the boys under two years old in Bethlehem in an excessive and indiscriminate desire to kill the king who he is assured has just been born and who he assumes is a threat to his own secular authority. His blinkered alignment with purely worldly ambition is emphasised in a speech towards the end of the play, just before he learns that his own son has been killed in the massacre, in which he consciously abandons his share of heaven for power on earth. ‘Je laisse à Dieu, de tous ses cieux / La police et gouvernement; / J’en quitte ma part; aymant mieux / Regner en terre puissamment’ (I leave to God the government and rule of the heavens; I abandon my share, preferring to reign powerfully on earth).58 His magnanimity to God, as if the government of heaven was in his gift, underlines his cuyder and pride, and becomes more scornful a few lines later: ‘En terre est mon contentement, / Garde bien Dieu son paradis’ (p. 236, lines 559–60; On earth is my contentment; let God keep his paradise). Like Satan before him, Herod condemns himself; he deliberately turns his back on eternal life to embrace the temporary pleasures of worldly power. Herod’s choices and mistakes are turned into an explicit example for princes in the first speech of the play, delivered by God from the top tier of the stage, which represented heaven. God denounces Herod as a ‘tyrant’ who ‘par grande cruauté’ (p. 216, line 28; with great cruelty) sought to kill God’s son ‘Pour conserver sa vaine royauté’ (line 30; to preserve his empty royalty). God then turns to address the world: ‘Roys de là bas, escoutez promptement’ (Kings down below, listen immediately, line 31). This could, of course, be read as intradiegetic, that is, addressed to the putative kings in the world on the lower tier of the stage below the heavens; we could seal in this way God’s warning inside the confines of the play. But Marguerite’s 58

Comédie des Innocents, in Comédie bibliques, pp. 215–59 (p. 236, lines 553–6).

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theatre would have been performed in front of her household and her friends, which included kings, her brother and her husband; God’s pronouncement crosses the boundary of the stage and addresses the kings in the audience. He warns them against false pride and hubris and reminds them that worldly power is only ever a temporary gift: ‘vous aussi, qui soubs moy puissamment / Jugez la terre en votre obeïssance: / Or apprenez mon saint enseignement, / Et me servez craignant reveremment’ (lines 32–5; you who, under me, have the power to judge the world in your obedience: learn my holy teaching and serve me in reverent fear). Marguerite is not afraid to remind her royal family of the limits of their power, and perhaps this kind of admonishment was expected in the contemplations of Christmas; I do not want to overstate her audacity here. But the humility appropriate to human beings in Marguerite’s theology necessarily extends to kings, and she reminds her family of this explicitly in Innocents and more subtly in the Heptameron. Marguerite’s daughter, Jeanne, recalled in a letter after her mother’s death that François I had warned her mother not to ‘mettre en cervelle dogmes nouveaux’ (get new doctrines into her head); that was the reason, Jeanne claims, why her mother stopped writing devotional poems and began to compose the ‘romans jovials’ (amusing stories) of the Heptameron.59 François’s intervention suggests how closely associated religious and political issues were. Jeanne was wrong about her mother’s giving up devotional poetry, as some of her most explicitly evangelical work – the Chansons spirituelles and Les Prisons – were written in the last years of her life. Moreover, her assessment of the Heptameron, relentlessly engaged as it is with matters of doctrine, reform, and political governance, suggests the rather startling conclusion that Jeanne never read it (or is misrepresenting its content for reasons of her own). In the next chapter, the Heptameron will be our focus as we explore another fundamentally political question, one that was sketched out in the discussion following nouvelle 12 as it veered from love to politics and back again: the nature of men and women and of the relationships that connect them.

59 Quoted and translated in Nancy Lyman Roelker, Queen of Navarre: Jeanne d’Albret, 1528–1572 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), p. 127.

4

Women and Men In structure and themes, the Heptameron seems deliberately designed to interrogate the social roles, expectations, and relationships of women and men. In comparison with Boccaccio’s Decameron, where seven women and three men tell the stories, Marguerite’s collection insists on gender equality, at least in numbers, suggesting that gender difference will be a primary concern. In the first section of this chapter, I will consider this polemical setting-up of gender in the Prologue. The storytellers’ allegiances do not always divide along gender lines, but they often do; and both women and men point out at various times the socially constructed nature of male and female honour, and the different demands these conceptions make on behaviour. The next two sections consider the models of masculinity and femininity assessed in the text. The Heptameron’s exploration of male and female nature and honour place it in the context of the long-running literary debate about the status of women known as the querelle des femmes, and a further section will consider Marguerite’s engagement with this debate, in particular the question of marriage that was a central part of it. The next section explores the literary model of courtly love and the Heptameron’s critique of it; and a final section returns to the question of the similarities and differences between the sexes. Marguerite’s own approach recognises the complexities of the relationships between women and men: multi-voiced, open-ended, and ultimately unresolved, the Heptameron encourages its readers to exercise their own judgement on the relationships it puts before us. Equality in the Prologue The Heptameron has elicited a large body of scholarship on how gendered communities are defined and delineated in the stories and the relationships between the storytellers.1 The Prologue both establishes and erases gender 1 For the first wave in gendered interpretations of the Heptameron, see a number of contributions to Critical Tales, especially Hope Glidden, ‘Gender, Essence, and the Feminine (Heptameron 43)’ (pp. 25–40) and Cathleen M. Bauschatz, ‘“Voylà, mes dames …”: Inscribed Women Listeners and Readers in the Heptameron’ (pp. 104–22); Heroic Virtue, Comic Infidelity: Reassessing Marguerite de Navarre’s ‘Heptameron’, ed. Dora

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differences in the storytelling group. When they finally gather at the monastery in Sarrance after their ordeals and realise that they will have to wait at least ten days before they can leave, the group looks to Oisille, the oldest, and who, in Parlamente’s words, should act as a substitute mother for them all, for guidance on how to pass the time. It is the women who rally first to Parlamente’s request for entertainment, worried that they will sicken or become melancholic without it. When Oisille suggests biblical study, Hircan speaks out ‘pour la part des hommes’ (p. 88; ‘on behalf of the men here’, p. 67), requesting a supplementary physical activity that will keep their bodies as active as their souls; his allusion to private entertainment makes his wife, Parlamente, who divines the meaning behind his words, blush. The discussion is, then, already beginning to split along gender lines when Hircan perhaps unexpectedly cedes the field to Parlamente: ‘je m’en tiens à son oppinion comme celluy qui n’en a nule autre que la sienne’ (p. 89; ‘I accept her opinion as if it were my own’, p. 68). Given licence by her husband, it is Parlamente who suggests the storytelling enterprise; and while her suggestion is authorised in advance by patriarchal authority (Oisille has, after all, asked Hircan first of all to express his opinion), the activity of storytelling allows ample scope for questioning, dissensus, and surprising alliances. Indeed, many of the discussions that follow the stories end abruptly, with the acknowledgement that consensus cannot be found, but that this does not invalidate the enterprise. When the group sits down on the first day of storytelling, it is again Hircan who gives licence to a kind of anti-hierarchical misrule: when Simontaut asks who should set the subject for the first day, Hircan allows him this privilege, ‘car au jeu nous sommes tous esgaulx’ (p. 92; ‘Where games are concerned everybody is equal’, p. 70). On the surface this remark is permissive and has ramifications for the gendered equality of storytelling as well as the abandoning of social hierarchies. But it is Hircan who addresses in a somewhat superior way a younger, and therefore possibly subordinate, man, whose presumption in speaking up first is emphasised by Hircan’s gracious concession. This is typical of the Heptameron’s statements and pronouncements: a statement of what appears to be uncompromising and (from a modern perspective) admirable equality is undermined, in this case because it is offered by one of the more misogynist and inflexible storytellers. It is an indication that, in the stories that follow, the question of gender difference will be polemicised. E. Polachek (Amherst: Hestia, 1993), especially Jeffrey C. Persels, ‘“Qui sommes tous cassez du harnoys” or, the Heptaméron and Uses of the Male Body’, pp. 90–102; Gary Ferguson, ‘Gendered Oppositions in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron: The Rhetoric of Seduction and Resistance in Narrative and Society’, in Renaissance Women Writers: French Texts/American Contexts, ed. Anne R. Larsen and Colette H. Winn (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), pp. 143–59; and Zegura, Shifting Gaze.



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Simontaut immediately takes advantage of his privilege in a pointed allusion to his own frustrated desires that makes Parlamente blush again, and by setting up the first day’s storytelling in terms of gender conflict and revenge: ‘Mes dames, j’ay esté si mal recompensé de mes longs services, que, pour me venger d’amour et de celle qui m’est si cruelle, je mectray peine de faire ung recueil de tous les mauvais tours que les femmes ont faict aux pauvres hommes’ (pp. 93–4; ‘Ladies, I have been so ill rewarded for my long and devoted service, that, in order to avenge myself on Love and on the woman who is so cruel to me, I shall do my utmost to collect together all the accounts of foul deeds perpetrated by women on us poor men’, p. 70). Unlike Boccaccio’s Decameron, whose first day is presided over by ‘queen’ Pampinea, who rejects competitive games on the grounds that they ‘bring anxiety’ to the loser, preferring to tell stories ‘that may afford some amusement both to the narrator and to the company’, Marguerite’s Heptameron begins in a spirit of vexatious recrimination.2 Simontaut goes on to tell the story (discussed in Chapter 3) of a truly unscrupulous and wicked woman, a serial adulterer, liar, manipulator, and instigator of murder. He concludes the story with a reference to Eve’s inaugural temptation of Adam, and a not-so-veiled accusation of Parlamente. But his command over the topic of the day does not last longer than his own story. He confidently summons Oisille to tell the second story, ‘et suis seur que si elle vouloit dire des femmes ce qu’elle en sçait, elle favoriseroit mon opinion’ (p. 103; ‘I’m sure that if she tells us what she knows about women, she’ll corroborate my own view’, p. 78). Oisille, however, tells her story as a deliberate refutation of Simontaut’s misogyny, to ‘desmentir sa mauvaise oppinion’ (‘belie the low opinion he has of us’). Oisille points out one particular error that Simontaut’s opinion has induced in him: that is, the belief that the story of one unfortunate or wicked woman has implications for all women. This belief has a certain traction in the Heptameron, as it underlies the power of exemplarity, as we will see in Chapter 6; but it has damaging implications for the individual. Indeed, Oisille searches her memory for a story of female virtue that is sufficiently dazzling that it will put Simontaut’s anti-heroine in the shade. The first two stories, then, suggest an argumentative structure in which women’s virtue will be attacked and defended; but the discussions complicate this straightforward binary opposition to uncover the assumptions that lie behind it. Models of Masculinity Marguerite’s travellers arrive at Sarrance after a traumatic journey through the Pyrenees. Hircan and Parlamente and Longarine and her husband are travelling back from the spa at Cauterets accompanied by Parlamente and 2

Boccaccio, The Decameron, p. 23.

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Longarine’s admirers or serviteurs, Saffredent and Dagoucin, when they are attacked by bandits at the inn where they are staying. In the fighting, the bandit-innkeeper and his wife are killed, but so is Longarine’s husband, and Hircan’s clothes are cut to ribbons, his sword broken, so that he begs Saffredent and Dagoucin not to abandon them. The next day, these three men are called to arms again when a man dressed only in his shirt runs wildly into the church where they have just heard Mass, shouting for help against two men with swords who have tried to rob him; Hircan, Saffredent, and Dagoucin rush out and kill his pursuers and then realise that the victim is another companion from the spa, Geburon. While the ties binding this group together are ostensibly romantic – ties of marriage and of courtly gallantry – the group is also bound by a masculine warrior ethic of mutual aid and support. The stories they tell each other while waiting for the bridge to be built, while focusing on heterosexual relationships, are also interested in exploring relationships between men where we can glimpse the homosocial environment of war and (to a lesser extent) certain spaces of the court. The Prologue appears in many ways like a rite of passage that the men must undergo in order to gain access to the privileges of the monastery and its storytelling project; but the definition of masculinity as aggressive heroism is also (as Jeffrey Persels has argued) limited and flawed.3 The communities of men portrayed in the collection often seem brittle and precarious. Hircan is the principal proponent of an image of aggressive masculinity, arguing that men should take women by force if they are left no alternative (nouvelles 4 and 59), and openly contemptuous of the courtly rhetoric with which Dagoucin sublimates desire (nouvelle 14); but even he recognises that the traditional ethos of the warrior class constitutes an obstacle in the plot of courtly desire. At the end of nouvelle 20 – told with gleeful cynicism by Saffredent, in which a gentleman falls suddenly out of love with a lady he has been pursuing when he finds her lying with her groom – Hircan is not surprised at her choice. He asks the shocked women to recognise ‘la difference qu’il y a d’un gentil homme, qui toute sa vie a porté le harnoys et suivy la guerre, au pris d’un varlet bien nourry sans bouger d’un lieu’ (p. 295; ‘[the] great difference there is between a gentleman who spends his whole life in armour on active service and a well-fed servant who never budges from home’, p. 232). His use of the synecdoche of the warrior’s armour echoes a more explicit statement made by Geburon, the older, thoughtful male storyteller whose days of seduction are behind him: ‘les Cordeliers […] sont hommes aussy beaulx, aussy fortz et plus reposez que nous autres, qui sommes tous cassez du harnoys’ (p. 132; ‘friars […] are often just as 3

Persels, ‘“Qui sommes tous cassez du harnoys”’.



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good-looking as we are, just as well-built and less worn out, because they’ve not been knocked about in battle’, p. 100; literally ‘broken by our armour’). While the harnoys, the warrior’s armour, is the symbol of a particular ethos of masculinity and strength, it is also the cause of the warrior’s impotence. Hircan’s nostalgic pride is undercut by Geburon’s (and indeed his own) rueful acknowledgement of this. Persels argues that the Heptameron testifies to the slow change in masculine roles, from the gentilhomme ‘cassez du harnoys’ to the honnête homme, the adept urbane man of the court, whose first duty is to please the king rather than to fight for him. It is a social change that is discussed in Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, as we have seen not without anxiety for the passing of the warrior-courtier. Emblematic of this change in the Heptameron is Amadour in nouvelle 10, whose story is at once chivalric romance and domestic novella, as Timothy Hampton has argued.4 He is required to fight all over Europe, is taken hostage by the king of Tunis, and eventually dies on the battlefield, like a chivalric hero. At the same time, he is adept in the courtier’s art of pleasing and even manages to coopt Floride’s mother to his cause; his struggle with Floride plays out in the domestic interiors of various Spanish castles. The aggressive masculinity of Hircan’s embattled arguments is not the only model available to or represented by the storytellers. Its principal counterweight is Dagoucin’s idealised courtly hero, who would rather die than betray either his love or his lady, and who features in Dagoucin’s nouvelles 9 and 24, but also in tales told by other storytellers, such as nouvelles 19 (told by Ennasuite), 50 (Longarine), and 64 (Parlamente). Two of these men (in nouvelles 9 and 50) do indeed die for their love; the other three end up cloistered in a monastery or otherwise withdrawn from society, broken hearted, dead to the world though potentially able to sublimate their desire. It is in response to nouvelle 19 that Dagoucin gives the clearest expression to this ideology of perfect love and self-sacrifice. ‘[I]l y en a qui ayment si fort et sy parfaictement, qu’ilz aymeroient autant mourir que de sentir ung desir contre l’honneur et la conscience de leur maistresse, et si ne veullent qu’elle ne autres s’en apparçoyvent’ (p. 292; ‘There are men […] who love so deeply and so perfectly that they would rather die than feel any desire that was contrary to the honour and conscience of their ladies, and yet would not wish their ladies or anyone else to be aware of their feelings’, p. 230). Preparing for his own nouvelle 9, he expands on this ethic of secrecy and silence, in which the lover’s knowledge of his own love is sufficient reward.

4 Timothy Hampton, Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Century: Inventing Renaissance France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), pp. 116–25.

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Mais j’ay si grant paour que la demonstration face tort à la perfection de mon amour, que je crainctz que celle de qui je debvrois desirer l’amityé semblable, l’entende; et mesmes je n’ose penser ma pensée, de paour que mes oeilz en revelent quelque chose; car, tant plus je tiens ce feu celé et couvert, et plus en moy croist le plaisir de sçavoir que j’ayme parfaictement. (p. 148) But my love is a perfect love, and I fear lest showing it openly should betray it. So greatly do I fear this, that I shrink to make it known to the lady whose love and friendship I cannot but desire to be equal to my own. I scarcely dare think my own thoughts, lest something should be revealed in my eyes, for the longer I conceal the fire of my love, the stronger grows the pleasure in knowing that it is indeed a perfect love. (p. 113)

Content with his own knowledge of his perfect love, Dagoucin refuses to communicate it to the world and even to his beloved, for fear (he repeats the verb three times) that its communication will somehow contaminate its purity. Indeed, he refuses to admit it even to himself (‘je n’ose penser ma pensée’) in case his thought betrays his secret. Needless to say, this posture of the martyr to love is mercilessly contested by other male storytellers, including Hircan, who cannot believe in a love with no hope (nouvelle 8), and goes as far as to advocate rape in the case of protracted resistance (nouvelle 18). But it is Saffredent, more cynical than Hircan but no less aggressive, who ridicules Dagoucin’s position most comprehensively, dismissing it as a pose and a pretence: ‘J’en ay ouy tant parler de ces transiz d’amours, mais encores jamays je n’en veis mourir ung’ (p. 148; ‘I’ve heard a lot of talk about these languishing lovers, but I’ve never seen a single one actually die’, p. 114). Dagoucin tells nouvelle 9 to refute this cynicism; but Saffredent has raised the possibility of masculinity as a role, even – to adopt the formula made famous by Joan Riviere almost one hundred years ago in relation to femininity – as masquerade.5 In the wake of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s ground-breaking work on male homosocial desire as a driving force underlying social relationships and their representation in literature and culture, scholars have turned their attention to the representation of masculinity in the Heptameron and the fascination of patriarchal power.6 With reference to Renaissance France, David LaGuardia has explored how masculinity was an interlinking network of intertextual practices, shored up and reinforced by cultural phenomena as 5 Joan Riviere, ‘Womanliness as Masquerade’, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 10 (1929), 303–13. 6 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).



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diverse as legal texts, confessors’ practice, criminal records, and exemplary stories in collections such as one of Marguerite’s sources, Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles.7 While the primary focus of the Heptameron’s stories is the relationships of power and coercion between men and women, it nevertheless (and perhaps consequently) has much to say about relationships between men. A prominent discourse of homosocial reciprocity and desire in the sixteenth century was the idea of perfect friendship, inherited from the classical tradition and refracted through medieval romance. Perfect friendship was an idea with a strong charge in the sixteenth century, perhaps as an attempt to escape from the more instrumental and manipulative relationships with which many elite men had to contend; and it was a purely homosocial relationship, with women generally excluded from its practices and privileges. In his essay ‘De l’amitié’ (‘Of Friendship’), Montaigne describes an equal and mutual relationship in which the friend is not so much a separate being as a second self (a description he takes from Cicero); as we saw in Chapter 1, women’s souls are judged not strong enough for such a rigorous and intense relationship. Inexplicable in terms of family, influence, advancement, or advantage, perfect friendship is encapsulated in Montaigne’s famously balanced and reflective formula, ‘parce que c’estoit luy; parce que c’estoit moy’ (‘Because it was he, because it was I’).8 In the Heptameron, the political manipulation of the rhetoric of perfect friendship is put to the test in Dagoucin’s recounting of the recent political scandal, the murder of Alessandro de’ Medici, duke of Florence, by his cousin Lorenzino in nouvelle 12.9 Dagoucin deploys the discourse of perfect friendship in setting up the relationship between Alessandro and Lorenzino: the duke loves his cousin as himself (‘comme luy mesmes’), and keeps no secrets from him, ‘en sorte que l’on le pouvoit nommer le second luy-mesmes’ (p. 204; ‘[so that] he was in fact almost the Duke’s second self’, p. 158). However, even before the murder, Dagoucin represents the friendship as instrumental and venal; his deployment of the rhetoric of perfect friendship aims to further emphasise the corruption of politics – and perhaps particularly Italian politics. If Montaigne insists on the absolute equality necessary for perfect friendship – any imbalance of social power or status cripples the 7 David P. LaGuardia, Intertextual Masculinity in French Renaissance Literature: Rabelais, Brantôme, and the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). 8 Montaigne, ‘De l’amitié’, Essais, I, 28, p. 188; ‘Of Friendship’, Complete Works, p. 169. 9 See E. Joe Johnson, Once There Were Two True Friends: Or, Idealized Male Friendship in French Narrative from the Middle Ages through the Enlightenment (Birmingham, AL: Summa, 2003); Todd W. Reeser, ‘Fracturing the Male Androgyne in the Heptaméron’, Romance Quarterly 51.1 (Winter 2004), 15–28; Marc D. Schachter, ‘The Friendship of the Wicked in Novella 12 of Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron’, in Discourses and Representations of Friendship in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700, ed. Daniel T. Lochman, Maritere López, and Lorna Hutson (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 165–79.

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equality of the friendship – then the duke’s ultimate authority would seem to exclude the possibility of anything other than service. When the duke deploys the rhetoric of perfect friendship, of mutual and reciprocal love (‘l’amour que vous me portez est reciprocque à la mienne’, p. 204), to compel his cousin to procure his sister for him, Lorenzino nevertheless picks up on the competing rhetoric of obligation (‘moy, qui suis vostre maistre’; ‘I, as your master’). The duke’s angry response to Lorenzino’s equivocation over the honour of his family shows how far he believes his own protestations of perfect friendship. When Lorenzino kills his cousin, it is an almost farcical act of butchery: the duke, unarmed and waiting in bed for his assignation, is able, despite his weak and even feminised position, to defend himself with teeth and nails so that it takes two men to kill him in a frenzied attack with a dagger, rather than the more noble sword with which Lorenzino intends to commit the murder. The eroticised nature of the relationship between the duke and his cousin is less pronounced in the Heptameron than in other contemporary accounts, but it surfaces here in the violation of the defenceless duke in his bed. The rhetoric of perfect friendship in nouvelle 12, far from shoring up an ideal masculinity in which solidarity, mutual affection, and mutual support are allowed to flourish, in fact covers up a politicised relationship in which both parties are exclusively self-interested. The debate that follows the story is, we are told, particularly protracted and divided, displaying the ‘diverses oppinions’ (p. 210; ‘diverse opinions’, p. 163) of the storytellers. Far from being a unifying idea, male friendship creates divisions; the men replace the idea of perfect friendship with a feudal relationship of service and obligation, while the women insist on loyalties that are more important than the obligation between men. As we saw in Chapter 3, the feudal code that Lorenzino transgresses in murdering his master has already been replaced by a Machiavellian rule of fear and the threat of violence in the duke’s Florence; it is already an anachronism. Even more explicitly, two perfect friends who are forced apart are again Dagoucin’s subject in nouvelle 47. These two gentlemen hold everything in common to such an extent that they seem one person, and Dagoucin uses the term ‘perfect friendship’ to describe this arrangement: ‘Ilz vesquirent long temps, continuans ceste parfaicte amitié, sans que jamays il y eust entre eulx une volunté ou parolle où l’on peut veoir difference de personnes’ (p. 524; ‘For a long time they lived together in this state of perfect friendship, and never once was there in word or wish any sign of difference between them’, p. 410). Their perfect union is only interrupted by the marriage of one of the gentlemen, although this in effect simply manifests the economic inequality between the two men that had previously been masked: it is the husband who allows his friend to continue to live in his house, graciously insisting that things go on precisely as they had before. While the marriage draws attention



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to the flaws and inequalities in what had been perceived as a perfect friendship, it also consolidates the existence of a male object of desire, who is now shared between friend and wife: the friends continue to share the same bed, with the husband sleeping between his friend and his wife. When the husband becomes jealous of the friend, as E. Joe Johnson has pointed out, his crime against the friendship is not his jealousy – both friends agree this is an uncontrollable passion, although the narrator Dagoucin will insist this is what drives the men apart, and that it is indeed the moral of the story – but his distrust.10 He now communicates with his friend through his wife; in other words, it is not the change in their affective relationship that is the problem but, rather, the mediation of that relationship through a third party. The wife continues to mediate between the two men when, after the irreparable demise of the friendship, the friend does eventually cuckold the husband: rather than an object and subject of desire in her own right, she remains a means of communication between the two men, allowing the friend to express his spite and his revenge. The woman appears, then, as a message sent between men; the female body is the site where male rivalry and desire for power are performed. Oisille intuits this in the debate, suggesting that the wife ‘eust mieulx faict de ne parler jamais à luy, pour monstrer à son mary le tort qu’il avoit de la soupsonner’ (p. 528; ‘would have done better not to speak to the friend, so that she could demonstrate to her husband how unjust he was to suspect her’, p. 413). But this tale also enacts an awareness of shifting social models, and it is not clear that Dagoucin believes that perfect friendship is a workable social structure, or even that it exists at all. The two friends might resemble great heroic pairings from antiquity and medieval romance; yet they do not meet and pursue their friendship on the battlefield, but in the domestic space of the home – the territory of the novella, then, rather than the territory of the romance.11 Marguerite is again using slightly anachronistic social and literary paradigms to explore the shifts in ideal models of masculinity that the elite were witnessing and indeed experiencing, and the consequences for both men and women. Models of Femininity The models of femininity available to the elite women of the Heptameron are no less constraining and no less contested than the models of masculinity. The stories do contain recognisable female types from classical, medieval, and moral literature: the depraved adulterer in nouvelle 1; the virtuous matron 10 Johnson, There Were Once, p. 88. See also E. Joe Johnson, ‘How Male Relationships Shape a Woman’s Text’, in Approaches to Teaching, pp. 118–21. 11 Johnson, There Were Once, p. 89.

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willing to die for the protection of her honour in nouvelle 2; the quick-witted boatwoman in nouvelle 5; but all these types are discussed by the storytellers, given individual motivations and (sometimes) attenuating circumstances. Women appear as privileged listeners and (by extension) readers in the Heptameron. As Cathleen M. Bauschatz has pointed out, the formula ‘Voylà, mes dames…’, used by male and female storytellers to wrap up their tales, implies their audience is primarily women; women are the first recipients of the stories and their moral lessons, encouraged to reflect on the ethical implications of the behaviour portrayed in the stories. This marks a further difference between Marguerite’s Heptameron and Boccaccio’s Decameron. The Decameron’s subtitle, ‘Prencipe Galeotto’, aligns it with the archetypal go-between of medieval romance, the same word that Dante famously uses for the book that incites Francesca da Rimini to adultery in the Inferno.12 Marguerite’s Heptameron, in contrast, invites women to exercise suspicion towards the discourses of desire and seduction that the stories recount. Geburon, whose advanced age has taken him out of the game of seduction and conquest, even spells this out explicitly, to the horror of the other male storytellers: ‘nostre gloire, nostre felicité et nostre contentement, c’est de vous veoir prises et de vous oster ce qui vous est plus cher que la vie’ (pp. 262–3; ‘our one pride and joy, our one true delight, is to see you caught, and to take from you that which you prize more than life itself!’ p. 208). There is, however, no lack of theories about what women are really like in the Heptameron. In the discussion that follows nouvelle 40, in which a brother kills his sister’s clandestine husband for outraging his family’s honour and challenging his own power over his sister, Simontaut appeals to divinely ordained nature in order to justify the kind of gender violence Geburon and Parlamente have just been talking about: les hommes ne doibvent poinct estre reprins de pourchasser les femmes, car Dieu a mis au cueur de l’homme l’amour et la hardiesse pour demander, et en celluy de la femme la craincte et chasteté pour refuser. (p. 477) men should not be condemned for pursuing women, since it was God who put love in men’s breasts in the first place and gave them the boldness to do the asking, while He made women timid and chaste, so that they would do the refusing. (p. 373)

Simontaut seeks to justify and to naturalise men’s violence towards women through the claim that men’s aggression (‘pourchasser’) and women’s reticence (‘refuser’) are ordained by God. This general point does not gain 12

Decameron, pp. 3 and 1.



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much traction with the other storytellers, however, who return to discussing the specifics of the case in hand. Simontaut was not, of course, alone in believing in this natural difference between the sexes. The background to the Heptameron’s debates on male and female nature is a long tradition of Aristotelian biology in which the female was conceived as an imperfect male, characterised by passivity and a desire for the male for completion.13 In humoral medicine, the imperfection of the female was caused by the dominance of cold and moist humours, which deprived her of the heat needed for complete development. In procreation, the male provided the form, the active principle in the embryo; the female provided the matter, the material stuff of the embryo. Ethical consequences were drawn from these biological traits. If women were naturally deprived and imperfect, then intellectually and morally they were weaker, less suited to public life, more passive, less decisive, and with a reduced capacity to resist temptation and vice. Lists of contraries sprang seamlessly from the fundamental Aristotelian differences between the active male and the passive female; on the male side, eloquence, reason, command, and virtue; on the female side, silence, passion, obedience, and vice. These stark binaries and the belief in the natural imperfection of the female were not unchallenged in the sixteenth century. Indeed, by the end of the century, many doctors had abandoned the idea of the imperfect female; but the Aristotelian idea that sex difference was fundamentally based on opposing positive and privative terms retained a strong cultural influence.14 Most notorious, perhaps, is François Rabelais’s misogynist doctor Rondibilis, whose dim view of female nature in Le Tiers Livre causes such panic in Panurge: Quand je diz femme, je diz un sexe tant fragil, tant variable, tant muable, tant inconstant, et imperfaict, que nature me semble (parlant en tout honneur et reverence) s’estre esguarée de ce bon sens, par lequel elle avoit créé et formé toutes choses, quand elle a basty la femme. When I say woman I mean a sex so weak, so fickle, so variable, so changeable, so imperfect, that Nature – speaking with all due reverence and respect – seems to me, when she made woman, to have strayed from that good sense with which she had created and fashioned all things.15 13 Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Idea of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), chapter 3 on medicine (pp. 28–46), and chapter 4 on ethics (pp. 47–67); Lyndan Warner, The Ideas of Man and Woman in Renaissance France: Print, Rhetoric, and Law (London: Routledge, 2011). 14 Maclean, Renaissance Idea of Woman, p. 44. 15 Rabelais, Le Tiers Livre, in Œuvres complètes, p. 453; Gargantua and Pantagruel, p. 533.

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This vision of sex difference had wide implications and consequences. It meant that women had to accommodate themselves to the ideal of the domestic, silent, passive female, even when acting (as Marguerite did) in the public realm. Saffredent echoes the pessimism of Rondibilis on women’s fundamental depravity in the Heptameron. In a singularly misjudged piece of misogyny in the discussion after nouvelle 15, he addresses an odd rejoinder to Oisille, the older maternal figure of the group: ‘Toutesfois […] si estes-vous toutes femmes, et quelques beaulx et honnestes accoustremens que vous portiez, qui vous checheroit bien avant soubz la robbe vous trouveroit femmes’ (p. 256; ‘All the same […] you are all women. You can cover yourselves up becomingly with all the finery you like, but the fact remains that anyone who looks carefully underneath all those skirts will find that you are all women!’ p. 202). Saffredent’s implication – that all women are the same – and his covert accusation of their hypocrisy, that they disguise their base desires with handsome ornaments, cancels the more nuanced points the other storytellers were making, as generalisations of this sort tend to do. Nomerfide then draws an abrupt end to the discussion, warning that they are engaged on dangerous ground, but Geburon – who tells the next story – may be responding to Saffredent’s position with his tale of aggressive and imperious male desire. Rondibilis’s portrayal of female nature is characterised by unruliness and unpredictability. In the Heptameron, female unruliness is not universally condemned; it contains a catalogue of outspoken and headstrong women whose stories are told with some admiration. There is Rolandine, in Parlamente’s nouvelle 21, who defies her father and her queen in order to marry and offers a spirited and eloquent defence of her behaviour to the furious queen when the alliance finally comes to light. Rolandine is offered to the company of storytellers as a virtuous and admirable figure; Longarine tells nouvelle 15 about another outspoken woman with more equivocation but equal admiration. This woman marries (against her parents’ wishes) a gentleman who is older and poorer than her, who is immediately unfaithful; after years of pining, she resolves to take a lover herself, transgressing the usual roles of courtly love to make the first approach. When her husband inevitably finds out, she – although terrified, seemingly for her life – makes an unanswerable defence of her conduct to her husband, a rhetorical tour de force of recrimination and self-justification. The husband is utterly astonished by her ‘propos pleins de verité’ (‘words so obviously full of truth’, as Longarine puts it), ‘dictz d’un si beau visaige, avecq une grace tant asseurée et audatieuse’ (‘spoken from the lips of this beautiful woman, and spoken with such confident grace and bold assurance’); he does not know how to answer her, ‘sinon que l’honneur d’un homme et d’une femme n’estoient pas semblables’ (pp. 250–1; ‘except that men’s honour and women’s honour were not the same thing’, p. 197).



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Longarine concludes her story with a warning to men that ‘les femmes de grand cueur sont plustost vaincues de l’ire de la vengeance, que de la douleur de l’amour’ (p. 255; ‘women of high spirit are more often dominated by anger and the desire for revenge than by the [pain] of love’ (pp. 201–2). These qualities of courage, anger, and vengeance are more traditionally masculine than feminine, as Simontaut points out: ‘[elle] a oblyé, pour ung temps, qu’elle estoit femme; car ung homme n’en eust sceu faire plus belle vengeance’ (p. 256; ‘[she] forgot she was a woman for a while, for even a man could not have taken his revenge so well’ (p. 202). Both Rolandine and the wife in nouvelle 15 demonstrate that female virtues in the Heptameron are not restricted to silence, chastity, and piety; and although these qualities are contested, there is plenty of sympathy for the women and their situations. While stories are also told in response to men or to make a point to men, it is often the resistance of the women listening to easy stereotypes that is foregrounded in the debates that follow. The women are, generally, more reluctant to draw conclusions about women’s nature in general from the stories of individuals that are told; they resist generalities and insist on the particularity of each case. Nouvelle 15 is an especially delicate proposition, since Longarine’s heroine is an outspoken woman who takes revenge in kind on her husband for his infidelity. Ennasuite defends her actions; Simontaut thinks that she acted more like a man than a woman in extracting revenge; and Oisille says, ‘Pour une qui n’est pas saige […], il ne fault pas que les autres soient estimées telles’ (p. 256; ‘Because one woman is not virtuous […] one should not think that all others are like her’, p. 202).16 The female storytellers recognise the polemical and perlocutionary force of men talking about women: that is, the impact of what is said on real women’s lives. Examples and arguments are never just rhetorical exercises; they have reallife consequences. Parlamente draws the second day’s debates to an end with an insight of this kind. ‘[T]ant plus avant nous entrons en ce propos, et plus ces bons seigneurs icy drapperont sur la tissure de Simontault et tout à noz despens’ (p. 296; ‘The more we pursue this subject […] the more these fine gentlemen here will embroider on what Simontaut has already said, at the expense of us ladies’, p. 233). Parlamente realises that this is a debate the women cannot win; the more they talk, the more they will become entangled in the prejudices of their male companions and ultimately reinforce them. Parlamente is the advocate of women’s virtue, patience, and resilience, often arguing that women are naturally more virtuous than men; she is also a strong defender of marriage as a sacred duty and obligation. ‘C’est raison’, she says, in defence of marriage and of certain male privileges, 16 For other moments of reluctance to generalise, see p. 192 (Longarine and Parlamente), and p. 248 (Oisille).

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‘que l’homme nous gouverne comme nostre chef’ (‘It’s reasonable that the man should govern us as our head’); but she does go on to insist on a wife’s right to dignity and good treatment: ‘mais non pas qu’il nous habandonne ou traicte mal’ (p. 462; ‘but not that he should abandon us or treat us badly’, p. 361). In response to Saffredent’s goading that he has told an unpalatable truth about women’s unruly desires, Parlamente tells nouvelle 21 about the exemplary Rolandine, whose patient fidelity to her clandestine husband, despite opposition from her family and his betrayal, is finally rewarded with marriage, wealth, and a secure place in the social order. In the debate following the story, she allows herself to generalise from this exemplary figure, claiming that women’s love is ‘bien fondée sur Dieu et sur honneur’ (‘rooted in God and founded on honour’), whereas (and here lies a danger) most men’s love is ultimately ‘fondée sur le plaisir’ (p. 324; ‘based on pleasure’, p. 254). On the one side, God and honour; on the other, pleasure. As we will see below, Parlamente’s insistence on the essential difference between men and women is not shared by the other storytellers. There are other assessments of women’s roles. Oisille, although the figure of spiritual authority, is often less judgemental than Parlamente in forgiving weakness and recommending indulgence for excesses occasioned by a keen sense of honour. Longarine frequently rejects the idealised version of women’s behaviour recommended by Parlamente, preferring a more robust, emotive, and proud course of action, especially when dealing with men. In the discussion after nouvelle 37, about a townswoman who patiently pulls her husband back from his affair with a housemaid, a campaign that ends with her setting fire to the straw around the adulterous couple as they sleep (but carefully putting it out again before anyone is hurt), Longarine is uncompromising (Oisille calls her ‘cruelle’): ‘de telz marys que ceulx-là, les cendres en seroient bonnes à faire la buée’ (p. 461; ‘Husbands like that ought to be burnt and their ashes used for the washing!’ p. 361). The polyphonic nature of the Heptameron’s discussions creates a space for discussion and even dissent; despite Saffredent’s claim to essentialise all women, no one monolithic ‘idea of woman’ emerges from the collection. The Querelle des femmes and the Question of Marriage The literary context in which the Heptameron’s debates take place is that of the querelle des femmes, the long-running debate on the ‘question of women’ that interrogated women’s nature and intrinsic moral and intellectual value.17 This 17 On the Heptameron and the querelle des femmes, see Nancy Frelick, ‘Mirroring Discourses of Difference: Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron and the Querelle des femmes’, French Forum 42 (2017), 375–92; Thysell, Pleasure of Discernment, pp. 86–92.



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was a literary and moral debate started by Christine de Pisan in the fifteenth century when she objected to the representation of women in Jean de Meun’s thirteenth-century Roman de la Rose. The models for women available there, she argued, were exclusively wicked, with nothing good to redeem them. But they were remarkably influential. Her Livre de la cité des dames (Book of the City of Women, 1405) was, in part, an attempt to counter the rhetorical weight of this derogatory representation of women with an abundance of examples of feminine virtue. The querelle evoked renewed interest in sixteenth-century France, when works praising women like Jehan Du Pré’s Palais des nobles Dames (Palace of Noble Ladies, 1534), Henry Cornelius Agrippa’s De la noblesse et preexcellence du sexe foeminin (Of the Nobility and Pre-excellence of the Feminine Sex, 1535), and François de Billon’s Fort inexpugnable de l’honneur du sexe feminin (Impregnable Fort of the Honour of the Feminine Sex, 1555) continued Christine’s rhetorical work by celebrating women’s learning, piety, and chastity throughout history, proclaiming the superiority of women over men, and Gratien Dupont’s Controverses des sexes masculin et femenin (Controversies of the Masculine and Feminine Sexes, 1534) denounced the evils of women, but was (as the title suggests) controversial enough for Dupont to try to print it anonymously.18 François Rabelais’s 1546 Tiers Livre rehearsed in exuberant style many of the traditional clichés of querelle des femmes misogyny; it is dedicated to Marguerite, though what she would have made of his spirited yet potentially ironic antifeminism is open to debate. Marguerite herself was closely involved with one particular offshoot of the querelle, an exchange of poems on the court lady and the nature of love inspired by Castiglione’s Courtier (especially Book 3 on the ideal court lady), written by men in her circle who shared her evangelical beliefs. It is known as the querelle des amies after the cluster of titles featuring amie, the feminine friend/lover of the medieval courtly tradition, who is transposed in these works into the court society of the sixteenth century. Bertrand de la Borderie’s Amie de court (The Courtly Friend, 1542) is written in the voice of Castiglione’s ideal courtly lady, who is nevertheless adept at exploiting the codes of courtly love for her own purposes. Antoine Héroët, even closer to Marguerite as a member of her household (and whose sister Marie is the slandered nun in nouvelle 22), responded to the disturbing pragmatism of La Borderie’s amie with La Parfaicte Amye (The Perfect Friend, 1542), whose eponymous heroine is the spokeswoman for an idealised Neoplatonic model of love in which both lovers move beyond physical beauty towards a spiritual understanding that transcends earthly attraction. For some sixteenth-century readers, these court 18 On the querelle des femmes in sixteenth-century France, see Warner, Ideas of Man and Woman, ch. 4 (pp. 93–119).

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ladies were the embodiment of traditional misogynist cliché, hypocritical, grasping, and untrustworthy. Charles Fontaine contributed to the cycle of poems with La Contr’amye de court (Against the Courtly Friend, 1543), a direct riposte to La Borderie’s courtly amie through the figure of a virtuous bourgeoise who deliberately rejects courtly manners in favour of love in marriage. Paul Angier’s Briefve defense [...] de l’Honneste Amant pour l’Amye de Court contre la Contr’Amye (Brief Defence of the Honourable Lover for the Courtly Friend against the Counter-Friend, 1544) responded, as the title suggests, to Fontaine’s critique.19 Marguerite’s most direct contribution to the querelle is her play, Les Quatre femmes, a staged debate about love performed in 1542, the year Héroët’s Parfaicte amye was printed. More obliquely, the Heptameron takes up many of the concerns of these texts, including an interest in the coercive and normative force of discourses of courtly or perfect love. The Heptameron often approaches the ‘debate’ style of the querelle des femmes, with storytellers speaking ‘for’ and ‘against’ a particular representation of women. They are called on to ‘defend’ women’s honour with their stories, to ‘repair’ a fault that a previous storyteller has made, or to speak for women in the story they plan to tell. But the structure of the Heptameron abandons the black-and-white rhetorical posturing of defence and attack, allowing storytellers to nuance each other’s representations of women’s nature and behaviour, and crucially to excavate the underlying motivations underpinning these representations. When Parlamente claims an exclusive privilege of virtue for women, Hircan voices his scepticism (nouvelle 21); and when Saffredent denounces all women as meretricious and vain, he has already been challenged (nouvelle 15). But it is not just the explicit arguments of the discussions that move against a monolithic view of female vice or virtue. The pattern of storytelling itself, in which stories are told to score points, respond to other stories, or correct perceived erroneous impressions, invites the debates that follow to mediate between these extremes and to exercise discrimination and discernment.20 This is a complex view of female nature that anticipates the later writings of Marie de Gournay, especially her Egalité des hommes et des femmes (Equality of Men and Women, 1622), in which she rejects one sex’s superiority over the other. Marguerite’s storytellers are interested in the ways relationships between men and women inevitably exist within a patriarchal society in which men are invested with more power and authority than women; this means that the discourses of love, duty, and obligation that run throughout the Heptameron are built over these undercurrents of power 19 These works were printed together by Galiot du Pré in Paris in 1544, and then again (with additional works) by Jean de Tournes in Lyon in 1547 as Opuscules d’amour, par Heroet, La Borderie, et autres divins poëtes; see the modern facsimile, Opuscules d’amour, ed. M. A. Screech (New York: Johnson, 1970). 20 Thysell, Pleasure of Discernment, pp. 79–96.



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and privilege. It is these ideological subtexts that the storytellers are keen to excavate, particularly in the case of the institution that is supposed to bring men and women together, and that was an essential feature of much querelle des femmes literature: marriage. The question of marriage – what it should be, how it should happen, and what it was for – was a live question in the early sixteenth century, for jurists, moralists, and theologians, as well as for married men and women. The Dutch humanist Erasmus published his In Praise of Marriage in 1518 and the more compendious Institution of Christian Marriage in 1526, both of which favour marriage over celibacy, as a bond of true friendship and companionship; although it was an institution in need of reform, particularly with regard to parental consent (Erasmus thought this was crucial) and the length of betrothal (Erasmus thought this should be as long as possible, to give the parties concerned enough time to consider their commitment). Rabelais’s sometime patron André Tiraqueau’s Latin treatise on marriage law, De legibus connubialibus (1513), began as a commentary on customary law intended to justify women’s inferior legal position, but grew into a vast collection of commonplaces on the inferiority of women taken from theology, medicine, ethics, and classical literature as well as the law. Rabelais’s Tiers Livre itself draws extensively on Tiraqueau’s treatise, and is predicated on the question of marriage: should Panurge marry, and if he does, will his wife be unfaithful and violent? The book is made up of dialogues with various experts – a lawyer, a theologian, a doctor, a sibyl, a dying man, a madman, a sceptical philosopher – who discuss the nature of women and predict Panurge’s connubial future. The book ends with Panurge’s deliberation to take his question to a divine oracle, and a speech from Gargantua, Pantagruel’s father, on the evils of clandestine marriage, in which young people marry without parental consent but with the blessing of a priest. Gargantua qualifies it as rape and abduction, abetted by criminal clergy. Speaking as a father, Gargantua describes parents devastated by the removal of their daughters by criminal, impoverished strangers – ‘un incongneu, estrangier, barbare, mastin tout pourry, chancreux, cadavreux, paouvre, malheureux’ (‘some uncouth, unknown stranger, some putrid, syphilitic, cadaverous, sinister, penniless dog’).21 For Gargantua, marriage without consent represents a theft of parental property, of the daughters that they have raised for dynastic ends. Betrothal is a carefully choreographed arrangement between long-established friends, in order to ‘parvenir à ceste felicité de mariage, que d’eulx ilz veissent naistre lignaige raportant et haereditant non moins aux meurs de leurs peres et meres, que à leurs biens meubles et haeritaiges’ (p. 498; ‘attain to that joy of the married who see descendants born from them who are like them, not only 21

Œuvres complètes, p. 498; Gargantua and Pantagruel, p. 596.

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inheriting the virtues of their fathers and mothers but also their goods and their property’, p. 596). Expressed in terms of inheritance, alliances, and investment, marriage for Gargantua is a question of family responsibility and duty. This is a view of marriage that treats it first and foremost as an economic and dynastic institution – an aristocratic view somewhat at odds with the church’s position on marriage as a holy sacrament. Later in the century, Montaigne expressed the aristocratic view clearly and concisely: ‘On ne se marie pas pour soy, quoi qu’on die; on se marie autant ou plus pour sa posterité, pour sa famille’ (‘We do not marry for ourselves, whatever we say; we marry just as much or more for our posterity, for our family’).22 In Marguerite’s time, clandestine marriage was allowed by canon law as an expression of a holy union that needed only the promise of both parties in the presence of God for legitimacy. But, in addition to the critiques of Evangelicals such as Erasmus and Rabelais, it was debated by the Council of Trent in the 1540s and was finally condemned by it in 1563. Henri III would outlaw the practice in France in 1579.23 Marguerite was equally interested in marriage as a state institution and in the rights of children and parents in choosing spouses, and she explores these questions in the Heptameron. But she is more nuanced on clandestine marriage than Gargantua, emphasising parental duty to marry children well. Her storytellers often promote an idea of marriage as perfect friendship that is close to Erasmus’s. Oisille (who admittedly is not in the immediate throes of marriage herself, unlike the younger storytellers) claims that ‘je tiens mariage le plus beau et le plus seur estat qui soit au monde’ (p. 462; ‘marriage is, I believe, the finest and surest state in this world’, p. 361); this is after the story of the woman of infinite patience who wins back her unfaithful husband, whom Longarine immediately dismisses. Oisille does qualify her statement, however: ‘si l’on n’en abuse’ (‘provided one does not abuse it’), a condition that is more flouted than respected in the stories in the collection. As we saw in Chapter 3, both Marguerite and her daughter, Jeanne, made politically expedient marriages. Marguerite revisits these social, political, and dynastic questions in the Heptameron. Dagoucin (perhaps surprisingly; his brand of idealistic and self-sacrificing love does not necessarily fit comfortably with dynastic marriage) is the spokesperson for the institutional stability of marriage, stating in response to Saffredent’s wondering why a poor gentleman was not acceptable as a husband: ‘pour entretenir la chose publicque en paix, 22 Montaigne, ‘Sur des vers de Virgile’, Essais, III, 5, p. 850; ‘On Some Verses of Virgil’, Complete Works, p. 783. 23 Cathleen M. Bauschatz, ‘Rabelais and Marguerite de Navarre on Sixteenth-Century Views of Clandestine Marriage’, The Sixteenth-Century Journal 34 (2003), 395–408; Gary Ferguson and Mary B. McKinley, ‘The Heptaméron: Word, Spirit, World’, in A Companion, pp. 343–50.



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l’on ne regarde que les degrez des maison, les aages des personnes et les ordonnances des loix, sans peser l’amour et les vertuz des hommes, affin de ne confondre poinct la monarchye’ (p. 477; ‘in order to maintain peace in the state, consideration is given only to the rank of families, the seniority of individuals and the provisions of the law, and not to men’s love and virtue, in order that the monarchy should not be undermined’, p. 374). This is marriage as business transaction, but also as the foundation of social stability: not only the state but the monarchy itself would be threatened with a change in the marriage regime. Women and men cannot be allowed to marry for love; and despite the ideal state of matrimony being one of mutual affection and friendship, the stories do not necessarily resist this conclusion. Critics have focused on one pair of stories in order to examine Marguerite’s position on marriage, and on clandestine marriage in particular.24 These are nouvelles 21 and 40, both told by Parlamente, about two women in the same family. Both contain clandestine marriages which, although they are vigorously defended by their heroines, nevertheless end in failure. Nouvelle 21 is the story of Rolandine, who, neglected by her father and by her mistress the queen, eventually takes the law into her own hands and marries in secret an illegitimate gentleman of a family equal in status to her own. When the secret gets out, she is severely punished by the queen and by her father and locked in a tower on the family estate until her husband, who has fled to Germany and proves unfaithful, dies in a convenient riding accident. Rolandine then, having proved her worth, is able to marry again, have children, and inherit her father’s estate. Nouvelle 40, however, does not have such a happy ending. This is the story of Rolandine’s aunt, under the control of her brother (Rolandine’s father), who secretly marries a gentleman from her brother’s household, an apparent favourite; but when the brother finds out, he is furious, has the husband killed as his wife looks on, and imprisons her in the tower that will later incarcerate Rolandine. The clandestine marriage takes a similar form in both stories. The two women – the aunt and the niece – both see themselves as forced into secrecy by the avarice of their brother or father (both stories emphasise his miserliness). The sister’s marriage takes place with a priest as witness; Rolandine’s takes place in an empty church where the couple exchange rings and kiss, ‘devant Dieu, qu’ilz prindrent en tesmoing de leur promesse’ (p. 307; ‘in the sight of God, taking Him as witness of their vows’, p. 240). Marguerite is clearly familiar with the canon law’s position on a valid marriage. Both women 24 See Bauschatz, ‘Rabelais and Marguerite de Navarre’; and Carla Freccero, ‘Rewriting the Rhetoric of Desire in the Heptaméron’, in Contending Kingdoms: Historical, Psychological, and Feminist Approaches to the Literature of Sixteenth-Century England and France, ed. Marie-Rose Logan and Peter Rudnytsky (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), pp. 298–312.

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defend their marriages in similar and spirited terms. Rolandine justifies her decision to her husband with reference to both divine and secular law: Je sçay qu’en vous espousant, je n’offenseroye poinct Dieu, mais je faictz ce qu’il commande. Et quant à Monseigneur mon père, il a si peu pourchassé mon bien et tant refusé, que la loy veult que je me marie, sans qu’il me puisse desheriter. (p. 307) I know that in marrying you, I would be doing no offence to God but would be carrying out His commands. As for my father, so little has he sought to further my well-being and so much has he denied me, the law permits me to marry without his being able to disinherit me. (p. 240)

Neglected by her father and by her mistress the queen, Rolandine takes action herself, as she explains reasonably to the enraged queen after her marriage becomes common knowledge. ‘Je n’ay poinct offensé Dieu, ni ma conscience, car j’ai actendu jusques à l’aage de trente ans, pour […] en espouser ung à ma voulunté’ (p. 316; ‘I have neither offended God nor my conscience, for I have waited till the age of thirty to […] take a husband according to my own inclinations’, p. 247). These are terms echoed by her aunt in nouvelle 40 in more traumatic circumstances, to her brother who has just had her husband killed: ‘suis en tel aage, que je me puis marier à ma volunté’ (p. 472; ‘I am old enough to marry as I please’, p. 369). Both women are right about their legal status (women over twenty-five could marry without parental consent and retain their inheritance), but it does not stop the fury of their guardian from destroying their freedom and (in the aunt’s case) happiness.25 Both stories are about dynastic power and who should control the family’s wealth, prestige, and reputation. It is nouvelle 40 that sparks the most sustained discussion of marriage in the Heptameron. This is when Dagoucin declares that marriage is an institution of state stability and order, with no regard for the inclination of the parties involved; but he goes on to point out that because of this, people find themselves in such ill-sorted marriages, ‘en lieu de prendre ung estat pour mener à salut, ilz entrent aux faulxbourgs d’enfer’ (p. 478; ‘far from entering into a state of salvation, they frequently find themselves on the outskirts of Hell’, p. 374). Such marriages, for the idealistic Dagoucin, contracted as dynastic arrangements and devoid of love, create an intimation of hell on earth. Geburon – older and more sardonic – is having none of this. He points to the number of marriages that were contracted as love matches and that have ended nevertheless in repentance: ‘car ceste grande amityé indiscrete tourne souvent à jalousie et en fureur’ (p. 478; ‘Great but indiscreet love of this kind frequently 25

On marriage law, see Bauschatz, ‘Rabelais and Marguerite de Navarre’.



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turns into violent jealousy’, p. 374). (The marriage in nouvelle 15 is like this: the wife’s love for her own choice of husband turns to hatred and contempt, dépit, when he proves unfaithful.) Arranged marriages or love marriages? One risks ending in animosity; the other in jealousy and frenzy. Parlamente remains the advocate of marriage as a potentially perfect alliance between woman, man, family, and God. For her, marriage can bring men and women together in a union that mimics the ideal union between believer and God; this is the ‘parfaicte amytié’ she refers to throughout the days in Sarrance. These are marriages contracted between those who ‘par une amour vertueuse et du consentement des parens, desirent de vivre en l’estat de mariage, comme Dieu et Nature l’ordonnent’ (p. 478; ‘wish only to live in the state of matrimony as God and Nature ordain, loving one another virtuously and accepting their parents’ wishes’, p. 374). Parental consent still features prominently in Parlamente’s model, underpinned by divine and natural law. This is a convenient ideology for the governing classes, who remain untroubled and unperturbed by any unruly pairings. It is also quite impersonal; striving for this kind of ideal of perfection seems far away from the stories told in the Heptameron. But the discussion takes a more intimate turn when the storytellers turn their reflections on themselves. The four married men (Hircan, Geburon, Simontaut, and Saffredent; it is only Dagoucin who has not yet subjected his ideal of love to the reality of marriage) all swear that their marriages had been undertaken with Parlamente’s rules in mind; and they all spend the evening in delightful reminiscence of the circumstances of how they won their own wives. They become the subjects of their own stories, talking over and interrupting each other, and forget the time; so that these personal stories would rival the ones told in the meadow. When they do finally remember to go to bed, the reminiscence has a tangible effect on the present, as the narrator slyly suggests: ‘je pense que ceulx qui estoient mariez ne dormirent pas si long temps que les aultres, racomptans leurs amitiez passées et demonstrans la presente’ (p. 479; ‘I think the married couples amongst them did not do quite so much sleeping as the rest – what with talking about their love in the past and demonstrating it in the present’, p. 375).26 The love demonstrated by the married couples counter-balances the angst evident in the stories. Hircan’s original suggestion for passing the time, and the displacement of sexual pleasure by narrative pleasure, here comes full circle. 26 The narrative does not make this explicit, but if the keys suggested by Pierre Jourda are correct, then Saffredent and Nomerfide are based on a married couple, Jean de Montpezat and his wife, Françoise de Firmarcon: Marguerite d’Angoulême, vol. 2, pp. 764–5.

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Courtly Love and War The Heptameron storytellers are themselves involved in the courtly relationships their stories explore. Parlamente has been followed to the Pyrenees by two serviteurs, or admirers, and Longarine by one; their conversations are punctuated by coded messages, blushes, cover-ups, and misinterpreted advances. But the Heptameron works hard to complicate and problematise the model of courtly love inherited from medieval romances, in which an exemplary knight seeks to win the favours of an exceptionally beautiful, usually married, lady, through long service and dedication to her alone.27 The picture that emerges from the stories told in the Heptameron, and from the debates that follow, is less of love, and more of war. The Heptameron recounts a good number of stories about the kind of courtly lover Dagoucin describes and aspires to, attentive to his beloved’s honour, and willing to die rather than betray his love even by speaking of it. Despite other storytellers’ cynicism, death does feature prominently in these stories of frustrated courtly love. Nouvelle 9 ends with the death of the gentleman after his rejection by his beloved; nouvelle 50 also ends in death, as the gentleman expires in the embrace of his lady; nouvelle 70, a retelling of the medieval romance the Chastelaine de Vergy, ends in the deaths of both lovers when their secret relationship is revealed, and the murder of the woman responsible for that revelation. Dying for love might remain a literary trope, but it has tragic consequences in the world of the nouvelles.28 There are other stories told in which the discourse of courtly love is tested at its limits. We have seen how the lady in nouvelle 15 becomes ‘more like a man’ in her desire for vengeance on her unfaithful husband; she acts like the male courtly lover by choosing her own beloved and taking the initiative. Another woman to switch gender roles, this time to unanimous condemnation, features in Geburon’s nouvelle 43. This woman is unusual in that she is given a name, Jambicque, although it is not her real name; despite his explicit intention to reveal her secret to public scrutiny, Geburon changes it to spare her family’s honour.29 Jambicque is condemned because she is a hypocrite; 27 Gary Ferguson, ‘Pedestrian Chivalry: Novella 50 and the Unsaddling of Courtly Tradition in the Heptaméron’, in Heroic Virtue, pp. 118–31. 28 Simon Gaunt, Love and Death in Medieval French and Occitan Courtly Literature: Martyrs to Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 29 In the manuscript that Renja Salminen uses for her edition, and in Gruget’s 1559 edition, Jambicque is called Camelle. Carla Freccero argues that this less obviously significant name is a reference to a potential classical exemplar, Virgil’s chaste warrior Camilla: ‘Practicing Queer Philology’, p. 119. On nouvelle 43’s challenge to the practice of gendering, see Glidden, ‘Gender, Essence and the Feminine’. On the importance of names in this nouvelle, see Laura Doyle Gates, ‘Telling Stories, Naming Names: Heptaméron 43’, Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme 20.4 (Autumn 1996), 27–38.



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a ferocious and ostentatious performer of her own virtue, she is a vociferous opponent of love who nevertheless decides to take a lover – but on her own terms. More desirous, Geburon tells us, of protecting her own reputation for virtue than of putting herself in the power of a man who could betray her, Jambicque approaches the gentleman she has chosen, veiled and on a dark winter’s afternoon, offering herself but refusing to let him know her identity. The gentleman recognises that he has been offered a gratuitous gift, ‘le bien que sans mon merite vous m’avez donné’ (p. 504; ‘a favour I have not merited’, p. 393), in a subversion of the normal rules or procedure of courtly love, in which the gentleman’s merit and the lady’s beauty underpin their agreement with their mutual worth.30 Jambicque cares nothing for reciprocity, and less for masculine pride; she is interested in her own pleasure, and refuses to give the gentleman any role beyond the physical. She also refuses to give him the satisfaction of knowing her identity and the consequent power of being able to reveal it. When he does discover her identity – he marks her dress with chalk and is astonished at the truth – she does not hesitate to slander him and secure his exile from the court. The secrecy in which Jambicque attempts to keep her liaison echoes, in an exaggerated and even polemical way, the secrecy necessary in courtly romances; and Geburon, as storyteller, emphasises his role in revealing those secrets: ‘aujourd’huy est leu aux oeilz d’un chascun ce qu’elle vouloit cacher à ceulx de son amy’ (p. 508; ‘the story I’ve told today has revealed to everyone what she tried to keep from the eyes of her lover’, p. 396). Storytelling does the work of gossip in sharing others’ secrets, although Jambicque’s real name is never actually revealed; having recognised the power that names hold, she successfully outmanoeuvres her lover and even escapes from Geburon’s narrative. If medieval courtly lovers always had to protect themselves against the slanderers who might tell their story and use it to increase their credit at court, Jambicque manipulates this economy of storytelling to her own advantage, facing down her lover and securing his banishment.31 The women storytellers are all horrified by Jambicque’s example, and Parlamente accuses her (like the heroine of nouvelle 15) of forgetting her assigned gender role: ‘celles qui sont vaincues en plaisir ne se doibvent plus nommer femmes, mais hommes, desquelz la fureur et la concupiscence augmente leur honneur’ (p. 508; ‘Women who are dominated by pleasure have no right to call themselves women. They might as well call themselves men, since it is men who regard violence and lust as something honourable’, 30 See Dora E. Polachek, ‘Reshaping the Medieval Past: Courtly Love and beyond in the Heptameron’, in Approaches to Teaching, pp. 57–63. 31 A. C. Spearing, The Medieval Poet as Voyeur: Looking and Listening in Medieval Love-Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

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pp. 396–7). Parlamente is right in sensing that Jambicque challenges the gendered stereotypes of courtly narrative, and in pointing out the two surprisingly compatible principles of (masculine) pleasure and honour, but she doesn’t quite grasp the relationship between them. Jambicque does value her pleasure, but she values her honour more, and this leads to her unwillingness to conform to the gendering of courtly romance. The fate of the unfortunate chatelaine de Vergy in Oisille’s nouvelle 70 (exposed by her mistress and dead of chagrin) shows the potential consequences for those less versed than Jambicque in the manipulation of the courtly plot. It is not just travestied women who challenge the courtly narrative. Male lovers, too, in stories of coercive seductions, reveal courtly love’s underside of violence. Simontaut tells nouvelle 14 about François I’s childhood friend the seigneur de Bonnivet, who many scholars believe is also the anti-hero of the plausibly autobiographical nouvelle 4. The story is set in Milan, where Bonnivet is part of the occupying French forces; Simontaut embarks on it ‘pour m’en venger’ (‘to get my own back’) – not this time for a refusal from his beloved, Parlamente, but rather because she has called him amusing – and with the explicit intention of showing ‘qu’il y a des femmes qui font bien semblant d’estre chastes […]; mais la fin les monstre telles qu’elles sont’ (p. 230; ‘there are women who only pretend to be chaste […] but in the end they show what they are really like’, p. 180). This is another story of revelation, then, in which the male storyteller prides himself on exposing the true nature of his subjects. But the reception this story meets with is more mixed than that of Geburon’s tale of Jambicque. In nouvelle 14, Bonnivet manages, through trickery, to insinuate himself into the bed of a Milanese lady who has rejected him. In the discussion, Geburon warns the women (we have already heard him offer other warnings elsewhere) that, like Bonnivet, their admirers are not interested in love, whatever they might say; on the contrary, ‘c’est seullement pour l’amour d’eulx et de leur plaisir’ (p. 238; ‘for their own [sakes], and for the pleasure they get out of it’, p. 186). Longarine (whose admirer, Dagoucin, claims a little later that he would rather die than betray his love) thinks this rings true: Par ma foy, ce dist Longarine, je vous en croy; car, pour vous en dire la verité, tous les serviteurs que j’ay jamais eu, m’ont tousjours commencé leurs propos par moy, monstrans desirer ma vye, mon bien, mon honneur; mais la fin en a esté par eulx, desirans leur plaisir et leur gloire. (p. 238) ‘Quite!’ said Longarine. ‘I’m sure that what you say is true. The fact is that every man who’s ever wanted to be my devoted servant has always started by declaring that my life, my welfare and my honour were all he truly desired. But in the end it’s always their own interests that count, only their own pleasure and their own glory that they really desire.’ (p. 186)



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Longarine, in a process that is often repeated in the Heptameron, compares Geburon’s comment with her own experience and confirms its ‘truth’. Uncovering the truth is also the focus of her exposé of courtly promises. The would-be lover begins with the lady, focusing exclusively on her, vowing he wants only what is honourable and good; but feminine life and honour are eventually replaced by masculine pleasure and glory. In the face of Bonnivet’s bad faith, and the essential unreliability of courtly discourse, all the women storytellers (except Nomerfide – who is typically naïve) counsel detachment, disbelief, and repudiation. Parlamente’s advice is vivid: ‘quant il vient à en jurer bien fort, il me semble qu’il est plus honneste aux dames de le laisser en ce beau chemyn, que d’aller jusques à la vallée’ (p. 239; ‘when he starts to swear his oath […] I think it’s more becoming for a lady to leave him to continue that particular route alone, rather than accompany him down to the valley’, p. 187). In keeping with Parlamente’s Christian evocation of the right path, the pleasurable way down into the valley must be the way of temptation and sin, a sinister image of what might be lying in wait in the darkness below. In a moment of frankness earlier in the second day of storytelling, Saffredent has already laid bare the strategy that Longarine recognises: vous usez encores des termes, dont nous avons acoustumé tromper les plus fines et d’estre escoutez des plus saiges. Car qui est celle qui nous fermera ses oreilles quant nous conmancerons à l’honneur et la vertu? […] Mais nous couvrons nostre diable du plus bel ange que nous povons trouver. […] Et peut-estre tirons les cueurs des dames si avant que, pensans aller droict à la vertu, quand elles congnoissent le vice, elles n’ont le moyen ne le loisir de retirer leurs pieds. (Nouvelle 12, pp. 212–13) You’re still employing the terms we generally use to get round the cleverest of women, and to get a hearing with the most modest. After all, what woman can turn a deaf ear when we start talking about honour and virtue? […] So we devise the most angelic appearance we can, to cover up the devil inside […], and perhaps even manage to draw the ladies on so far, that, thinking they’re set on the road to virtue, it’s too late for them to beat a retreat when they find themselves in the midst of vice! (p. 165)

This is a kind of insider’s guide to the masculine rhetoric of honour and virtue: nothing more than lures, traps for the unwary, designed precisely to seduce women from the way of virtue and down into the darkness of the valley floor. The Heptameron is not the only one of Marguerite’s works to critique and satirise the conventions of courtly love. Obsessional love is the first of the three prisons Amy occupies, and is freed from, in Les Prisons. Amy recognises – or perhaps simply describes – the courtly lover as a role principally constructed

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from speeches. He remembers the words of his beloved as so many heavy chains that kept him imprisoned: Que de chesnons de comptes et de songes, D’inventions, d’histoires, de mensonges, De louanges, de courroux et de plainctes, D’appointements et de promesses feinctes, De jurementz, de tant d’autres propoz!32 So many chains of tales and dreams, inventions, stories, lies, praise, anger, complaints, reconciliations and false promises, oaths, and so much more talk!

Courtly love is here a series of lines and postures, and a web of words that entangled Amy in his prison. Once he has learned this, he becomes as cynical as Saffredent in his manipulation of courtly conventions. In Book 2, he moves from his tower to the city and the royal court, which he describes as a ‘teatre’ (p. 106, line 285), requiring a constant performance and carefully controlled appearance. Amy is delighted at the presence and availability of women at court, whom he vows to exploit: ‘Mais je useray de toutes à loysir, / Sans nul travail, pour y prendre plaisir’ (p. 108, lines 337–8; but I will use them all at my leisure, without effort, to take my pleasure). Like Saffredent, Amy plans to ‘feindre’ (line 344; pretend) and to ‘couvrir ma pensée vilaine’ (line 347; cover my base intentions) with a slick performance of a sighing, languishing lover, suffering, swooning, and turning his eyes to heaven. There is no acknowledgement of the women’s subject position here, although Amy does credit his erstwhile beloved Amye with as much cynicism as he displays later in the prison of worldly ambition. Back in the secular world of the Heptameron, the storytellers are more interested than Amy in exploring the social conditions that contribute to the antagonism between feminine honour and masculine glory described by Longarine and Saffredent. For Hircan in particular the social strictures that dictate a woman’s prioritising of her honour above all mark the only real difference between the sexes: outside social conditioning, human nature and desire are basically the same. If storytellers like Parlamente and Longarine agree in principle on a fundamentally flawed, and shared, human nature, they are not willing to concede this point on female honour as an obstacle to universal desire.

32

Les Prisons, p. 92, Book 1, lines 479–83.



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Same/Different Hircan’s contribution to the discussion after nouvelle 26 is his clearest expression of this principle of a basic similarity between the sexes. The virtuous lady that Saffredent has described in his narration is, according to Hircan, motivated solely by pride, and not by virtue; apart from that, there is no difference between her and her male admirer. Here he is talking about women’s honour and their essential nature: Nature n’a rien oblyé en elles non plus que en nous; et, pour la contraincte que elles se font de n’oser prendre le plaisir qu’elles desirent, ont changé ce vice en ung plus grand qu’elles tiennent plus honneste. (p. 389) Nature has no more forgotten anything where women are concerned than she has where we men are concerned. They impose on themselves the constraint of not daring to help themselves to pleasures they desire, and in the place of this vice they put another [greater] vice, one which they regard as more honourable … (p. 305)

Fundamentally the same, men and women share the same desires; except that women, seduced by pride, refuse to acknowledge theirs, which makes them cruel, hypocritical, and unnatural. This view of human nature, Hircan reminds us, stems from our fallen state, pulling Parlamente into his argumentative ambit: ‘elle et moy sommes enfans d’Adam et d’Eve; parquoy, en bien nous mirant, n’aurons besoing de couvrir nostre nudité de feulles, mais plustost confesser nostre fragillité’ (p. 389; ‘she and I are both children of Adam and Eve. So if we look at ourselves properly, we shall have no need to cover our nakedness with fig-leaves, but rather to confess our frailty’, p. 305). Hircan takes advantage of the negative valence of the verb ‘couvrir’ here (one that Marguerite exploited in the passages from Les Prisons quoted above) to suggest that women’s insistence on their honour is a hypocritical denial of their frail and fallen nature. As we shall see in the next chapter, this anthropology of a fallen humanity beset with desire has some purchase in the Heptameron more generally; but, as a pointed remark in a contested discussion, it bears some further scrutiny. In the introduction to her edition of the Heptameron, Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani lends a cautious ear to Hircan’s recognition of female desire (p. 43): less restrictive than Parlamente’s insistence on female virtue, itself based in ancient stereotypes of female nature as submissive and timid, he allows women equal rights to desire as men. But it is noteworthy that this opinion is expressed uniquely by the men, with the women reluctant to acknowledge this equality. They are not convinced that equality in the expression and enactment of desire would benefit women.

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Elsewhere, Hircan reiterates his belief in the fundamental sameness of the sexes. Parlamente has just told nouvelle 21, about the constancy and virtue of Rolandine; she offers her heroine to the women listening as an asset to women’s collective glory, much like the lists of celebrated women compiled by Boccaccio and Christine de Pisan and other contributors to the querelle des femmes (although Marguerite herself never wrote her own list, as far as we know). Parlamente sums up her story, which has emphasised the difference in loyalty and steadfastness between Rolandine and her clandestine husband, with the lesson: ‘souvent sont differenz les fardeaulx de l’homme et de la femme’ (p. 324; ‘the burdens borne by men and by women are very different’, p. 253). This is where she claims that a woman’s love is founded on God and her honour, while the love of most men is based on pleasure. Her conclusion – that women may abandon their admirers without reproach if they turn out to be wicked and malicious – is what prompts Hircan’s sardonic response. She is arguing, he says, ‘comme si leurs cueurs estoient differens; mais combien que les visaiges et habitz le soyent, si croy-je que les voluntez sont toutes pareilles’ (p. 325; ‘As if the hearts of men and women were any different! Although their clothes and faces may be, their dispositions are the same’, p. 254). Montaigne, in a famous conclusion to his essay on sexual practice, ‘Sur des vers de Virgile’ (‘On Some Verses of Virgil’), says the same thing forty years later: ‘je dis que les masles et femelles sont jettez en mesme moule: sauf l’institution et l’usage, la difference n’y est pas grande’ (‘I say that males and females are cast in the same mold; except for education and custom, the difference is not great’).33 Using a vocabulary of difference and similarity, Hircan rejects Parlamente’s idea that men’s and women’s hearts are any different in kind. But this is not exactly what Parlamente has said: she has not made any claim about human hearts or natures, but only about men and women’s respective burdens. Parlamente does not fundamentally disagree with her husband about the socially constructed nature of gender difference; she talks about amour and honneur in the same breath, acknowledging that both are subject to social convention. The women do not challenge Hircan on the social expectations that underlie ideas of gender difference. Where they differ is on the significance of these social constraints. Hircan argues that the constraints should be ignored; the women say they have real-life consequences. Parlamente offers the clearest expression of this recognition, speaking in terms of honour as fundamentally gender specific: ‘vostre plaisir gist à deshonorer les femmes, et vostre honneur à tuer les hommes en guerre’ (p. 390; ‘all your pleasure is derived from dishonouring women, and your honour depends on killing 33 Montaigne, ‘Sur des vers de Virgile’, Essais, III, 5, p. 897; ‘On Some Verses of Virgil’, p. 831.



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other men in war’, p. 305). These two activities, Parlamente concludes, are explicitly against the law of God. In contrast, a woman’s pride in her virtue seems a minor sin. The more cynical male storytellers – Hircan, Saffredent, and Simontaut – consistently uphold this ideal of gender equality as a means to criticise the women in the stories they tell, and implicitly, their wives and beloveds. As an example, we can return to the debate after nouvelle 14, discussed above as a flawed exercise in courtly love in which Bonnivet executes a campaign to dishonour a woman who has rejected him. When the women conclude that men’s talk of love is so dangerous for their honour that they should flee the slightest hint of it, Simontaut proposes naïvely a world structured differently, where desire could be spoken without recrimination. ‘Qui ayme ou qui n’ayme poinct le monstre sans dissimullation!’ (p. 143; ‘Whether you’re in love or whether you’re not in love, show it without dissimulation!’ p. 187). Although his proposal is put forward as an ideal of free expression, the coercive nature of his position is implied in his use of the loaded and pejorative dissimulation – as if there could be no other reason to hide one’s feelings than devious pretence. Saffredent recognises that social expectations do not yet permit Simontaut’s utopia of free speech: ‘Pleust à Dieu […] que ceste loy apportast autant d’honneur qu’elle feroit de plaisir!’ (‘Would to God […] that that law brought as much honour as it would pleasure!’) And on the face of it, this position seems reasonable enough: if everyone were free to act on their desires without fear of social reprimand, surely the world would be a better – or at least a more pleasurable – place? Other stories in the Heptameron show that the consequences for women and men of speaking desire could not be more different: for example, nouvelle 10 shows Amadour profiting from his reputation as a lover, whereas for his beloved Floride the admission of love leads directly to disaster and disillusionment. On the evidence of the stories, it seems clear that Simontaut’s ideal world, where desire could speak without sanction, would profit men more than it would profit women. Moreover, desire itself is not as transparent or self-evident as Simontaut seems to think, as we will see in the next chapter.

5

Desire Desire is a frequent preoccupation in the Heptameron, which presents a generally pessimistic picture of its ravages and disruptions. Desire goes wrong more often than not in the stories told in Sarrance: its expression provokes violence and cruelty, it disrupts the peace, it flips into narcissism. Hircan represents desire as humanity’s fundamental flaw, synonymous with original sin, and thereby a natural, if aberrant, facet of human psychology. We have seen already how the move to present anything as ‘natural’ is contested in the Heptameron discussions, where other storytellers work to expose the ideological underpinnings of these kinds of claims. While desire is firmly defined as natural by Hircan and Simontaut, the stories themselves offer a different perspective, of desire refracted and contaminated by other concerns such as revenge, contempt, or pride, so that often the emphasis is not so much on desire as on power, and who has it. This chapter will focus on the intersection of desire and power, and the related one of desire and gender. Maintaining the dialogue with Renaissance biology that we began in the last chapter, we will see how medical and philosophical discourses on gender difference are also present in the perception of desire. The centrality of desire to the Heptameron’s storytelling project, and its representation there as a flaw, has inspired psychoanalytic readings of the text, drawing on Sigmund Freud and, more frequently, Jacques Lacan to expose the workings of desire and its role as disrupter in social and psychical order. I consider stories that particularly lend themselves to this kind of reading here, before going on to discuss the solutions the storytellers propose for the trouble caused by desire. These solutions suggest replacing a worldly object of desire with a divine object that is the radical other of human imperfection and lack. While the Heptameron never quite settles whether this sublimation is possible, Marguerite’s Chansons spirituelles celebrate a mystical union between soul and God which is, if not easy or unproblematic, nevertheless presented as an aspiration and even a potential lived experience. Desire and Gender: Medicine and Theology The Aristotelian model of sex difference entailed implications for the relative control men and women could exercise over their desire. If women were

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imperfect, deficient males, they consequently lacked the strength of will and reason to master their passions and desires. Rabelais’s doctor Rondibilis can again stand in for this view, which in Le Tiers Livre and in sixteenth-century culture more generally generated no little anxiety: le naturel des femmes nous est figuré par la Lune, et en aultres choses, et en ceste: qu’elles se mussent, elles se constraignent, et dissimulent en la veue et praesence de leurs mariz. Iceulx absens elles prenent leur adventaige, se donnent du bon temps, vaguent, trotent, deposent leur hypocrisie, et se declairent […]. Ainsi sont toutes femmes femmes. the nature of wives is figured for us by the Moon in the following way amongst others: they efface themselves, restrain themselves and hide themselves away in the sight and presence of their husbands: when they are absent they seize their opportunity, have a good time, roam and trot about, lay aside their hypocrisy and manifest themselves […]. So, too, all women are … women.1

Changeable like the moon, women also seem to be governed by it: closer to nature than to reason, they respond to stimulus and opportunity with cunning but also helplessly, as if compelled to do so, and without the resources men can deploy for sublimating sexual desire. Rondibilis’s vision of women as dissimulating hypocrites, inevitably taking advantage of their husbands’ absence, is close to Saffredent’s cynical misogyny and particularly the brutal axiom we heard him deliver after nouvelle 15: ‘Toutesfois […] si estes-vous toutes femmes’ (p. 256; ‘All the same […] you are all women’, p. 202). Rondibilis’s potentially prurient insistence that women cannot help but reveal themselves (‘se declairent’) is also consistent with Saffredent’s position (‘anyone who looks carefully underneath all those skirts will find that you are all women’) and more generally with the storytellers’ project of illumination and revelation. Rondibilis locates the cause of women’s disobedient desire in their bodies: Nature leurs a dedans le corps posé en lieu secret et intestin un animal, un membre, lequel n’est es homes […] par la poincture et fretillement douloureux des quelles [humeurs] […] tout le corps est en elles esbranlé […]. De maniere, que si Nature ne leurs eust arrousé le front d’un peu de honte, vous les voiriez comme forcenées courir l’aiguillette … (p. 454) Nature has placed within their bodies, in a hidden intestinal place, an animal (an organ not found in men) […] from the sharp pangs and painful throbbing of which [humours] […] their whole body is convulsed […] to such an 1

Rabelais, Œuvres complètes, p. 453; Gargantua and Pantagruel, p. 533.

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extent that if Nature had not dewed their foreheads with a little modesty you would see them hunting the fly-cord as though they were mad … (p. 534)

Rondibilis’s ‘animal’ is the womb, which, following Plato, Renaissance medicine conceived as a quasi-autonomous organ whose insatiable and imperious demands fundamentally affected the balance of women’s humours and drove their sexual desire. Women’s natural propensity to run amok is only held back, in Rondibilis’s paradigm, by a sprinkling of shame that Nature seems to have bestowed upon them as a kind of compensatory brake, an effort to mitigate the damage of their fundamental insatiability. Rondibilis, in fact, misrepresents Plato’s original conception of an autonomous ‘animal’ in maintaining that it is ‘not found in men’. In the Timaeus, Plato also describes the male genitals as ‘disobedient and selfwilled, like a creature that is deaf to reason’; similarly, not exceptionally, the womb is ‘an indwelling creature desirous of child-bearing’.2 This equality in desire is closer to Hircan’s conception of men and women, as we saw it in the discussion after nouvelle 26: ‘Nature n’a rien oblyé en elles non plus que en nous’ (p. 389; ‘Nature has no more forgotten anything where women are concerned than she has where we men are concerned’, p. 305). For Hircan, women’s modesty and restraint – the necessary afterthought of Nature, in Rondibilis’s account – is not laudable or reasonable but, on the contrary, bestial and even diabolical. C’est une gloire et cruaulté, par qui elles esperent acquerir nom d’immortalité, et ainsy se gloriffians de resister au vice de Nature (si Nature est vicieuse), se font non seulement semblables aux bestes inhumaines et cruelles, mais aux diables, desquelz elles prenent l’orgueil et la malice. (p. 389) [It is] cruel hardness of heart and vainglorious concern for reputation, by means of which they hope to acquire immortal renown. Thus, glorying in their resistance to the law of Nature, as if Nature were vicious, not only do they make themselves no better than cruel and inhuman beasts, but they turn into veritable demons, and take on the arrogance and malice of demons! (p. 305)

Motivated solely by pride, in Hircan’s account, women’s resistance to their natural desires is a bid for glory, a cruel refusal that lowers them to the level of animals and a prideful ambition that equates them with devils. When Nomerfide scolds him about his disregard for his honourable wife, Hircan makes a statement of evangelical asperity. ‘[E]lle et moy sommes enfans 2 Plato, Timaeus, Critias, Cleitophon, Menexenus, Epistles, trans. R. G. Bury (London: Heinemann, 1929), pp. 16–253 (91B–C, pp. 249–51).

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d’Adam et d’Eve; parquoy, en bien nous mirant, n’aurons besoing de couvrir nostre nudité de feulles, mais plustost confesser nostre fragilité’ (p. 389; ‘She and I are both children of Adam and Eve. So if we look at ourselves properly, we shall have no need to cover our nakedness with fig-leaves, but rather to confess our frailty’, p. 305). Hircan establishes desire as humanity’s fundamental flaw, the original sin that has haunted each generation since the Fall, and for which the only remedy is a humble confession of infirmity. The Genesis story that Hircan refers to describes desire as a transgression of the divine order established in Eden. Eden is an earthly paradise, where Adam and Eve exist in harmony with the world around them. But there is one tree God forbids them to touch: the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. When the serpent tempts the woman to eat an apple from this tree it is with the promise of knowledge and a concomitant power: ‘your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil’ (Genesis 2.3). The serpent acts on the woman’s desire for knowledge as if it already exists, as if temptation just responds to a desire that is already incipient. For sixteenth-century commentators the story of the Fall was a story of feminine desire, weakness, and seduction. Back in Rabelais’s Tiers Livre, the usually moderate theologian Hippothadée describes to a horrified Panurge a biblical interpretative tradition in which Eve eats the apple only because it is forbidden. The serpent draws her attention to this fact, as if to say, ‘il t’est defendu, tu en doibs doncques manger: ou tu ne serois pas femme’ (ch. 34, p. 458; ‘It is forbidden thee: thou needs must eat it; thou wouldst not be a woman else’, p. 538). Genesis describes how Eve was tempted first and then persuaded Adam to eat the apple too: ‘she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat’ (Gen. 3.6). The Fall narrative was explored and explained by the fourth-century Church Father St Augustine, whose conception of original sin was profoundly influential in the development of Christianity. In The City of God, Augustine is clear that Adam is in no way absolved of responsibility. He is motivated by pride in blaming Eve (just as Eve is, in blaming the serpent): ‘their pride still seeks to lay the blame for its wrong act on another, […] as if there were something that should take precedence of God’.3 But Adam’s responsibility often drops conveniently out of the argument. At the end of the first nouvelle, Simontaut evokes this long interpretative tradition of women’s fatal seduction of men, ‘depuis que Eve feit pecher Adam’ (p. 102; ‘ever since Eve made Adam sin’, p. 78). The Genesis story associates desire with shame. Desire marks the end of the period of innocence in Eden, in which Adam and Eve were aware but unashamed of their nakedness (‘And they were both naked, the man and his 3 Augustine, City of God against the Pagans, trans. Philip Levine, 7 vols (London: Heinemann, 1966), 14.14 (vol. 4, p. 345).

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wife, and were not ashamed’, Gen. 2.25). Eating the forbidden apple from the tree of knowledge makes them aware of their nakedness and ashamed of it. Augustine argues in The City of God that, until the moment of the Fall, Adam and Eve were unashamed because they were covered by God’s grace; the Fall was thus a moment of denudement in a spiritual sense, as that grace was withdrawn, leaving humanity exposed not just to self-scrutiny but also to sin (City of God, 14.17). With the loss of divine grace, human beings also lost control over their bodies and their desires. This is not just a subjective perception for Augustine, but a genuine autonomy of the genitals that recalls Plato’s ‘animal’, so that the will no longer has control over them as it had in Eden. Human beings, after the Fall, are aroused by lust, over which they have no control, and which was not present (or necessary) in Eden. This is the cause of shame: ‘those members which it [lust] moves or does not move by its own right, so to speak, and not in full subjection to our will, should be called pudenda or shameful parts as they were not before man sinned’ (City of God, 14.17, pp. 355–7). For Augustine, the consequent impotence of the will over the flesh is at once proof of the transgression and its punishment: ‘Therefore, embarrassed by their flesh’s disobedience, a punishment that bore witness to their own disobedience, “they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons” [Gen. 3.7]’. The fig-leaf ‘aprons’ are the coverings Adam and Eve use to hide the nakedness they have just become aware of through their act of disobedience, which is also the cause of their loss of control over their bodies. The fig-leaves are both a covering for their newly disobedient bodies and an indication of the original disobedience, the eating of the apple and the transgression of God’s law. These ‘feulles’ are reconfigured by Hircan in the discussion after nouvelle 26 as another instance of hypocritical coverings. His call to cast them off equates, then, to the radical gesture of casting off shame and speaking (confessing) the truth of the body and its desires. As we have seen in the previous chapter, this transparency is more possible – and more advantageous – for men than it is for women. Desire and Narrative In the Heptameron the desire for knowledge – the original sin – is not gendered but, rather, shared among the storytellers. A desire for knowledge for its own sake is presented as the third and last worldly prison of the soul in Marguerite’s poem Les Prisons, synonymous with a hubristic confidence in human achievement: ‘En ce sçavoir où tant fort je me fyay, / Une prison bien forte j’edifiay’ (in this knowledge in which I had so much faith I built a strong prison).4 But in the Heptameron the desire to know is the motor that 4

Les Prisons, pp. 135–6, Book 3, lines 23–4.

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drives the narrative. Narrative is described explicitly by Hircan at one point as a desire to know (an ‘envye […] pour cognoistre’, nouvelle 49, p. 542). Hope Glidden has pointed out the pertinence of this model to many of the stories in the Heptameron, particularly the story of Jambicque that we read in the previous chapter.5 Mary McKinley traces the connection between desire and narrative in an essay on confession and secrets, proposing an alternative narrative principle at work in the Heptameron, despite the explicit efforts of storytellers to uncover secrets and resolve riddles and quarrels.6 In the Heptameron, storytelling is offered by Parlamente in the Prologue as a substitute for sexual desire, as Hircan acknowledges. In place of private pleasure (‘ung passetemps particulier’, p. 89), there is collective pleasure (‘celluy où chascun prendra plaisir’), and a residual libidinal attachment to storytelling: at the beginning of the second day, the storytellers are eager to return to a place of pleasure: ‘en grand desir de retourner au lieu où le jour precedent avoyent eu tant de plaisir’ (p. 199; ‘eager to return to the spot where they had had so much pleasure the day before’, p. 155). But for women (as McKinley also argues), narrative desire is fraught. Hircan’s call for a universal confession of human frailty and desire echoes Simontaut’s ideal of an innocently naïve world in which anyone can declare their love openly, and both seem poised to catch women in the double bind between honour and hypocrisy. Nouvelle 62 is an admonitory tale that dramatises the compulsion to tell stories and problematises the narrative theme of revelation with an instance of inadvertent self-exposure.7 Longarine tells it in response to a discussion about secrecy and dissimulation, introducing it with reference to the narrative pleasure so evident in Sarrance: ‘y en a maintes qui, prenans plaisir à parler de telz propos, se font gloire de publier leurs vices’ (p. 621; ‘There are a lot of women who derive some kind of pleasure from talking about such things, and feel some kind of pride in making their vices public’, p. 484). A young woman, wanting to amuse and entertain a visiting noblewoman, promises to tell ‘ung beau compte’ (‘a fine story’) that she assures is a true one: ‘le compte est très veritable, je le prens sur ma conscience’ (p. 622; ‘this is a true story. I vouch for it on my conscience’, p. 485). In her story, a young woman is raped in her bed by her neighbour and left naked and exposed when the sheet catches on the spur of her aggressor, who in his haste has not removed his boots or shut the door to her chamber. As if carried away by the momentum Glidden, ‘Gender, Essence, and the Feminine’, pp. 28–9. Mary B. McKinley, ‘Telling Secrets: Sacramental Confession and Narrative Authority in the Heptameron’, in Critical Tales, pp. 146–71 (p. 157). 7 There is an identical story in Philippe de Vigneulles’s Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, ed. Charles H. Livingston (Geneva: Droz, 1972), nouvelle 64, pp. 266–8. This story is framed as a warning against ‘trop parler’ (talking too much), p. 266. 5 6

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of her narrative – Longarine says she ‘ne peut garder de dire’ (p. 623; ‘could not stop herself saying’, p. 486) – and although she has resolutely told the story in the third person, the narrator reveals herself as the victim in her final words: ‘Jamais femme ne fust si estonnée que moy, quant je me trouvay toute nue’ (p. 623; ‘No woman had ever been as embarrassed as I was, when I found myself completely naked!’ p. 486). This involuntary revelation humiliates the narrator, who had hoped to increase her social credit with this story. Instead she irreparably loses her honour, ‘vollé desjà si loing, qu’elle ne le povoit plus rappeller’ (p. 624; ‘flown [so far] there was no calling it back’, p. 486). This is a difficult story to read now, in our historical moment, not least for the interpretations that the women storytellers offer in discussion. Longarine has already set up the telling of such a tale – that is, when it concerns oneself – as a ‘signe que le peché ne leur desplaist pas’ (p. 621; ‘sign that the sin they committed was not altogether unpleasant’, p. 484), and she repeats this judgement in her summing up. ‘Je vous asseure, mes dames, que, si elle eut grand desplaisir à faire ung tel acte, elle en eust voullu avoir perdu la memoire’ (p. 624; ‘I can assure you, Ladies, that if this kind of act had been distasteful to her, she would have wanted to erase it completely from her memory’, p. 486). She even goes so far as to suggest the narrator is bereft of God’s grace – the grace that would cover the sins of the truly repentant (and that compensates for the withdrawal of grace in Eden). This is an uncompromising judgement. Geburon tries to defend the narrator, who, he argues, has surely sinned no more than Lucretia, who was raped and subsequently committed suicide. But Parlamente is adamantly with Longarine on this point. Geburon evokes Lucretia only to lose control of the example. Parlamente argues: ‘quant on a prins grand desplaisir à l’oeuvre, l’on en prent aussi à la memoire, pour laquelle effacer Lucresse se tua; et ceste sotte a voullu faire rire les aultres’ (p. 624; ‘when one experiences disgust at some action, one also experiences disgust at the memory of it. That is why Lucretia killed herself, whereas [this] silly woman […] wanted people to find it amusing’, p. 487). Neither Longarine nor Parlamente have any pity for the unfortunate narrator. Parlamente even argues that women should resist to the death – as indeed the mule driver’s wife does, to great praise, in the second nouvelle. The narrator of nouvelle 62 is dismissed as a foolish woman, more eager to tell a story than to protect her honour, and accused of taking pleasure in her own violation as well as telling her own story – an argument that is usually made by men and vigorously contested by the women. None of the storytellers makes the same mistake of telling disguised tales of themselves. Hircan explicitly rejects this option on the first day, using the same vocabulary of foolishness: ‘si ne suis-je si sot de racompter histoire de moy’ (pp. 136–7; ‘I wouldn’t be so foolish as to tell you a story about myself’, p. 104). He is not, however, concerned for his own

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honour, but rather for his wife’s peace of mind, as he adds: ‘dont la verité vous puisse porter ennuy’ (p. 137, ‘when the facts might be hurtful to you’, p. 104). Critical responses to nouvelle 62 have emphasised the connection it makes between desire, language, and narrative. In their essay ‘Naked Narrator’, François Cornilliat and Ulrich Langer argue: ‘The unruliness of female desire is linguistic, and related in some way to the novella enterprise.’8 This would align narrative desire with the desire of the body and suggest that both are beyond the subject’s knowledge and control. Dominique Brancher is more explicit in her interpretation of what the slip means: ‘she uncovers its true meaning, the unavowed pleasure she took in the experience […], caught by her own words, which turn against her by forcing her to become aware of a meaning she had not wanted to recognize’.9 The connection between narrative and physical desire is one that even the women storytellers make, with as much violence and rigidity as the men. But perhaps to frame this story in terms of physical desire is misleading. What the narrator is attempting to conceal, and what her unfortunate slip of the tongue reveals, does not pertain to her desire but, rather, to her involvement in the story and her subsequent concealment, as John D. Lyons points out.10 It is the storytellers who extrapolate her desire from her narrative. Renaissance theorisation of the lapsus, the slip of the tongue, hovers interestingly between human intention and linguistic autonomy, as Dominique Brancher argues.11 Erasmus maintained in his Adages that slips of the tongue represented a privileged access to truth: ‘For what a man lets fall unawares is commonly thought to be true, because only then is it free from any suspicion of falsehood.’12 Commenting on another proverb, Quicquid in buccam venerit (‘Whatever came into his mouth’), Erasmus links this unguarded speech with conviviality and friendship: ‘This is what we do in the company of our loyal friends, with whom we can joke and chat with confidence.’13 For writers like Rabelais and Marguerite, the slip of the tongue is a comic trope, designed to raise a laugh in the forgiving company of friends. But the laughter of the noblewoman in nouvelle 62 doesn’t seem to fall into this category. Unlike the laughter at Mme de Roncex’s expense in nouvelle 11 – which the protagonist 8 François Cornilliat and Ulrich Langer, ‘Naked Narrator: Heptameron 62’, in Critical Tales, pp. 123–47 (p. 141). 9 Dominique Brancher, ‘“When the Tongue Slips it Tells the Truth”: Tricks and Truths of the Renaissance Lapsus’, Renaissance Studies 30.1 (2016), 39–56 (p. 46). 10 Lyons, Exemplum, p. 105. 11 Brancher, ‘“When the Tongue Slips”’, pp. 41–4. 12 Adage I, vii, 17 (‘In vino veritas’, ‘Wine speaks the truth’), Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 32, trans. R. A. B. Mynors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), pp. 76–7. Quoted in Brancher, ‘“When the Tongue Slips”’, p. 41. 13 Adage I, v, 72, Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 31, trans. Margaret Mann Phillips (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), p. 447.

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ends in joining – this doesn’t serve to dissipate tension or to confirm the protagonist as part of a group; on the contrary, the narrator in nouvelle 62 is left on the outside, dishonoured and humiliated. Slips of the tongue leave the speaking subject vulnerable to the interpretation and redirection of others, a process linguists have termed ‘hetero-correction’, when the meaning of a statement is determined by the audience as well as the speaker; and this is precisely what happens in nouvelle 62.14 ‘Ad ce que je voy,’ concludes the lady to whom the original story is told, ‘vous en povez bien racompter l’histoire’ (p. 623; ‘I can see that you can indeed vouch for the truth of the story!’ p. 486). The narrator’s words, like her honour, have flown out of her control, into the possession of her audience, and subsequently the audience of storytellers in Sarrance. This is one way that words’ meaning escapes the control of the speaker; but Erasmus points out another, more fundamental possibility. In the Lingua, a vast treatise on the sins and the virtues of the tongue, Erasmus demonstrates how the uncontrolled language of the unbridled tongue can exceed the intention of the speaker, raising the spectre of an autonomous word that displaces the speaking subject. ‘Their words are not produced but spill out, and so it often happens that just as they do not think first what they are going to say, they cannot even remember afterwards what they did say.’15 This is perhaps closer to the narrative experience of the narrator of nouvelle 62, whose own set-up of the story carefully avoids all mention of the protagonist’s desire and who appears devastated by the final outcome. Liz Guild argues that in her uncharitable interpretation of the lapsus Parlamente refuses to ‘acknowledge that the relation between women’s subjectivity, desire, and language is infinitely more opaque to themselves than women allow or are allowed’.16 The opacity of desire, although it runs counter to the rhetoric of revelation that the storytellers deploy, is nevertheless an insistent presence in many of the nouvelles. The Opacity of Desire: Nouvelle 32 The inscrutability of desire, even to the desiring subject, is one of the recurring themes of psychoanalytic readings of the Heptameron. In the next few sections, we will explore this approach to the nouvelles through the work See Brancher, ‘“When the Tongue Slips”’, p. 55. Erasmus, Lingua, trans. Elaine Fantham, Collected Works of Erasmus vol. 29, ed. Elaine Fantham, Erika Rummel and Jozef Ijsewijn (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1989), pp. 249–412 (pp. 269–70). See Emily Butterworth, The Unbridled Tongue: Babble and Gossip in Renaissance France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), ch. 1 (pp. 13–35). 16 Liz Guild, ‘“Au commencement était l’amour …”’, in Women’s Writing in the French Renaissance, ed. Philip Ford and Gillian Jondorf (Cambridge: Cambridge French Colloquia, 1999), pp. 75–90 (p. 90). 14 15

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of critics who draw on Freudian and Lacanian theories of the unconscious and its relationship to desire. In Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, desire is opaque and mute because it originates at a point in the subject’s development before language is established. Indeed, for Freud, language appears as a compensation for giving up the primary object of desire which is forbidden by the processes of socialisation and therefore irrecoverable by the speaking subject.17 Desire is born in the unconscious and related to the drives and the pleasures of the infantile id. Subject to the distortions and mediations that come about through the repression of pre-social and pre-linguistic demands and wishes, desire often expresses itself in disguised and hidden ways. For Lacan, desire is more amorphous and even more difficult to define. It is related to the work of meaning and communication, or, in Lacan’s rather densely enigmatic terms, ‘desire’s position is profoundly marked by, moored to, and riveted to a certain linguistic function – that is, to a certain relationship between the subject and the signifier’.18 As Malcolm Bowie explains: ‘desire […] is what keeps the chain of signifiers moving. It is the dynamo, everywhere in motion and nowhere at rest, that propels all acts of speech, all refusals to speak and all conscious and unconscious mental representations.’19 This means that desire cannot have a fixed object but, rather, runs through a series of substitutions, as we will explore below. Desire for Lacan both predates and exceeds the subject, who in no way controls their desire. It is probably obvious by now that desire is not synonymous with need: it cannot be satisfied like an appetite or relieved like an itch or achieved like a goal. On the contrary, it is always in motion, never fulfilled, never resolved. It entails that the subject can never achieve satisfaction but is always aware of a fundamental lack at the heart of their being. Nouvelle 32 is a dark tale of infidelity, punishment, and a mobile, ultimately opaque desire. At the centre of the story is a woman’s desire, which inspires in others a desire to know, understand, and control her desire. Bernage, an ambassador for Charles VIII, is sent into Germany on royal business, spends the night at a gentleman’s house and witnesses an intriguing and tragic spectacle. At dinner, a beautiful woman, dressed in black and with her head shorn, sits silently at the table, eats a little, and is brought her drink in a human skull, its eye sockets sealed with silver. Bernage is avid to know the story behind this strange sight, and the gentleman explains that the woman is his wife, whom he is punishing for an adulterous affair: having killed her 17 ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, trans. James Strachey and others (London: Hogarth Press, 1957). 18 Jacques Lacan, Desire and its Interpretation: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VI, trans. Bruce Fink (Cambridge: Polity, 2019), p. 5. 19 Malcolm Bowie, Lacan (London: Fontana, 1991), p. 122.

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lover, he hung the skeleton in her closet and now forces her to drink from the skull, a constant reminder of her transgression and unhappiness, ‘une peyne que je pense qu’elle a plus desagreable que la mort’ p. 424 (‘a punishment which I think she finds more painful than death’, p. 332). The husband seems transfixed by his wife’s adultery, which he stages every day so that she will not forget (‘affin qu’elle n’en oblye la memoire’); and yet this also ensures that he, too, will never forget. When Bernage speaks to the wife, she confesses humbly that she has wronged her husband and deserves her punishment. But Bernage is troubled by the gentleman’s intransigence and points out on leaving that his wife’s repentance deserves compassion and forgiveness. The gentleman sees the sense in Bernage’s advice. Thus the wife is reintegrated into the family, and they go on to produce children and secure the continuation of the gentleman’s family name. Françoise Charpentier has argued that this story represents a successful assimilation of a transgression into the social order. She argues that Bernage – with his diplomatic training – is able to break what she describes as the negative enchantment of the husband’s obsession with his wife’s adultery, and turn the couple back towards life, relationships, and communication. For Charpentier, Bernage is a kind of psychotherapist, who nudges the couple back into speech and simultaneously into the social order.20 Charpentier argues more generally that, in the Heptameron’s stories, silence kills, whereas speech is a welcome release that is therapeutic and tends to mend broken bonds. This is a plausible reading of the story – and who could begrudge the wife her reprieve from a punishment worse than death – but it does overlook its more disturbing aspects. As Liz Guild points out, nouvelle 32 is a version of the more dramatic and unrepentant ‘eaten heart’ narratives of the Middle Ages, in which an unfaithful woman is tricked into eating her dead lover’s heart, often then declaring it the best meal she has ever eaten, and refusing to eat ever again.21 Boccaccio includes a Provençal version of this story in the Decameron.22 Although this stance means death for the intransigent heroine, she nevertheless stays true to her desire, whereas the wife in nouvelle 32 seems to lose her autonomy as well as her voice in the pageant of her Françoise Charpentier, ‘La Guérison par la parole: A propos de la XXXIIe nouvelle de l’Heptaméron’, in Marguerite de Navarre 1492–1992, ed. Nicole Cazauran and James Dauphiné (Mont-de-Marsan: Editions InterUniversitaires, 1995), pp. 645–55. See also Nancy Frelick, ‘Speech, Silence, and Storytelling: Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron and Narrative Therapy’, Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme 36.1 (Winter 2013), 69–92. 21 Liz Guild, ‘Vous ne pouvez le savoir – car vous vous détournez’, Paragraph 29.1 (2006), 53–66 (p. 60). On the ‘eaten heart’ narrative, see Gaunt, Love and Death, pp. 90–103. 22 Decameron, 4.9 (pp. 349–52), the story of Guillaume de Roussillon, his wife, and Guillaume de Cabestanh, in which the wife leaps from a window as soon as she learns she has eaten her lover’s heart. 20

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repentance. She is assimilated back into the social order, but at the price of disavowing and disowning her desire, which is tamed in the narration that Bernage makes to the king as a kind of souvenir of his trip, a narrative which is repeated in Sarrance. For Guild, the skull at the centre of the story represents the Lacanian Real – the order that resists all representation and symbolisation, in which desire can annihilate the subject and break and destroy the rules of the Symbolic order that serve as distractions and diversions from that fatal desire.23 The sightless skull suggests a desire that cannot be acknowledged. This is an anxiety that is echoed by Dagoucin in the discussion that follows the story: goaded by Simontaut that he has not accepted the fact that women neither love nor regret, Dagoucin admits to a willed ignorance of women’s desire. ‘Je suis encores à le sçavoir […] car je n’ay jamais osé tenter leur amour, de paour d’en trouver moins que j’en desire’ (p. 428; ‘I have still to learn […] for I have never dared try out their love, for fear of finding it less than I desired’, p. 335). The skull’s sightless eyes and Dagoucin’s instinctive refusal represent the blind spot in this narrative, the place where desire might be confronted but cannot be. Like the anamorphic skull in Holbein’s 1533 painting The Ambassadors, it disrupts the visual or narrative plane, signalling anxiety and disturbance on the edges of representation, as Joshua Blaylock has also argued.24 Dagoucin intuits the threat that inhabits any attempt to look directly at the skull as he continues: ‘si je le sçavois [l’amour des dames], comme je l’espere, j’aurois si extresme contentement, que je ne le sçaurois porter sans mourir’ (p. 428; ‘if I knew for certain that it was even as I hoped, my joy would be too intense to bear, and I should die!’ p. 335). Satisfaction of desire entails the annihilation of the subject, whose existence depends on the deferral of that satisfaction; but Dagoucin suggests something more than that here. His unspoken – perhaps unspeakable – suggestion is also present in the ‘eaten heart’ narratives: that desire might ultimately be the desire for death. In nouvelle 32, this opaque desire is transmuted into narrative, in much the same way as it is in the Prologue, but this time the narrative sequence is explicit: Bernage tells Charles VIII, Oisille tells the group, Marguerite tells us. The sequence of narratives keeps the anxiety and the fascination at the heart of 23 On the three Lacanian orders of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real, see Bowie, Lacan, ch. 4 (pp. 88–121). 24 Joshua M. Blaylock, ‘A Skeleton in the Closet: Secrecy and Anamorphosis in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron’, The Sixteenth Century Journal 45.4 (Winter 2014), 951–72. For Jacques Lacan’s reading of courtly love itself as an instance of anamorphosis, see Jacques Lacan, ‘Courtly Love as Anamorphosis’, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: Seminar 7, trans. Dennis Porter (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008). Holbein’s Ambassadors is in the National Gallery in London: www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/hans-holbeinthe-younger-the-ambassadors.

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the story alive. The shifts in viewpoint never quite master the strangeness and dread of the original spectacle, the coupling of death and desire in which the third party – the spectator – is always excluded even if, like the husband, he is the orchestrator of the spectacle. Blaylock argues that secrets are at the heart of this nouvelle, and the narrative desire that drives so many separate retellings of the tale are attempts to master and reveal that secret.25 Throughout these attempts, the wife remains silent, inscrutable. In constructing her desire as the object of our desire, the tale objectifies her but also pushes her out of our reach. In summing up her story, Oisille turns her into a different kind of object: a moral example. Oisille recommends submission to God’s grace as the only escape from a similar danger – she means the danger of infidelity and murder, from the ravages of desire. Fetishism and Substitution: Nouvelle 57 Nouvelle 57 is another account of ‘improper’ desire, that is, desire turned away from the normative object and thus ‘perverse’ in its etymological sense. Very different in tone to nouvelle 32, it is a story about a ridiculous English gentleman, told by Parlamente in rare comic mood. It is another tale that an ambassador brings back from beyond the borders of France: this time the traveller is Guillaume de Montmorency, in England in the service of Louis XI. Montmorency notices a lady’s jewelled glove attached ostentatiously to the gentleman’s cloak, and asks for the story, which is willingly told. Again, as in nouvelle 32, the Heptameron’s storytellers take their place in a chain of stories passed on from person to person. The Englishman tells Montmorency that the glove belongs to a lady he loved for seven years without daring to approach her; when he did declare his love, clutching her hand to his heart, she was so astonished that she fled, leaving behind her glove, which he now exhibits as a token of his courtliness and heroic dedication to his love. The glove is, as Paula Sommers and Nancy Frelick have pointed out, a textbook example of the Freudian fetish in which a substitute object replaces the original object of desire.26 The gentleman is explicit about this substitution: ‘le gant demeura en la place de sa cruelle main’ (p. 589; ‘her glove remained [in the place of her cruel hand]’, p. 458); the glove replaces the hand and is enshrined as a ‘profane reliquary’, in Paula Sommers’ terms.27 As Peter Blaylock, ‘A Skeleton in the Closet’, p. 967. Paula Sommers, ‘The Hand, the Glove, the Finger and the Heart: Comic Infidelity and Substitution in the Heptaméron’, in Heroic Virtue, pp. 132–41; Nancy M. Frelick, ‘Fetishism and Storytelling in Nouvelle 57 of Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron’, in Distant Voices Still Heard: Contemporary Readings of French Renaissance Literature, ed. Malcolm Quainton and John O’Brien (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), pp. 138–54. 27 Sommers, ‘The Hand, the Glove’, p. 134. 25 26

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Stallybrass and Ann Rosalind Jones demonstrate, the fetish’s association with religious worship is not an accident, or at least not unconscious in this period. The word fetish comes the pidgin fetisso, and ultimately from Portuguese feitiço, meaning ‘magical practice, witchcraft’; it was developed as a term of abuse, first deployed by Catholics against the magical objects of colonised peoples in contrast to their own genuine relics, and then by Protestants against those same Catholic relics as part of Reformation polemic.28 If Freud quickly discounts the materiality of the fetish, preferring to conceptualise it as a symbol of a more general lack in subjectivity, Renaissance practices of objectifying powerful people – the monarch or the aristocrat – in land, material objects, or belongings instead materialise the connections between person (or subject) and object. As Stallybrass and Jones argue elsewhere, ‘detachable parts – rings, jewels, gloves, for instance – continued to trouble the conceptual opposition of person and thing, even as the concept of the fetish was forged to formalize such an opposition’.29 The glove is a particularly potent stand-in for the person, representing the bond of fealty between vassal and monarch, the love compact between courtly lovers, a sign of favour as well as a sign of defiance or ill omen. The fetish is for Lacan, as Nancy Frelick points out, the fundamental example of the dynamics of desire: it manifests the illusory nature of both the object of desire, only ever a substitute for the original lost object, and the subject’s attempts to reconstruct a sense of self through their relationship with the fetish.30 The Englishman describes the glove as ‘l’emplastre la plus propre que je puis donner à mon cueur’ (p. 589; ‘a sticking plaster, the most fitting I could find, to my wounded heart’, p. 458), a bandage for the wound inflicted on the subject by desire for an ultimately impossible object. In Lacanian terms, this is the damage done by the entry of the subject into the order of the Symbolic, the order of language and therefore of compensations and substitutions.31 But the glove itself is, as well as a substitution (and so part of the Symbolic order), a failure on the part of the gentleman to accept the Symbolic, and so belongs to the Imaginary order in which he tries desperately to patch up his disjointed and fragmented identity.32 28 Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, ‘Fetishisms and Renaissances’, in Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture, ed. Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 20–35 (p. 20). 29 Peter Stallybrass and Ann Rosalind Jones, ‘Fetishizing the Glove in Renaissance Europe’, Critical Inquiry 28.1 (Autumn 2001), 114–32 (p. 116). 30 Frelick, ‘Fetishism’, p. 138. 31 ‘[T]he disastrous separation of desire from its objects has already occurred. Such is the price that human beings unwittingly pay for their admission to language and to culture.’ Bowie, Lacan, p. 10. 32 ‘The Imaginary is the scene of a desperate delusional attempt to be and to remain “what one is” by gathering to oneself ever more instances of sameness, resemblance and self-replication’: Bowie, Lacan, p. 92. Nancy Frelick argues: ‘the fetish is a visual sign, a

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Nancy Frelick argues in her reading of this nouvelle that the Englishman prefers the glove to the lady’s hand, itself a metonymic substitution for the lady, because it places him firmly at the centre of the story. He displaces her as the focus of his story, the object of Montmorency’s gaze and the hero of the courtly romance he constructs, clearly expecting it to increase his credit and thus consolidate his identity as courtly lover: ‘il estimoit le compte estre bien fort à sa louange’ (p. 588; ‘thinking that the story which lay behind it could only redound to his praise’, p. 457). His implicit demand for recognition as an exemplary lover from Montmorency (‘je vous tiens tant homme de bien et congnoissant quelle passion c’est que amour, que, si j’ay bien faict, vous m’en louerez’; p. 588; ‘I know you to be an honourable man who knows the power of the passion of love. I know you will applaud me if I have acted rightly’, p. 457) resonates with Lacan’s statement that all desire is essentially desire for recognition. ‘[M]an’s desire finds its meaning in the other’s desire, not so much because the other holds the keys to the desired object, as because his first object(ive) is to be recognized by the other.’33 The gentleman’s appeal to Montmorency for recognition falls on deaf ears, however; or worse, produces contagious ridicule. It is the gentleman’s posturing, as well as the story itself, that draws the ambassador’s mockery, which is then echoed by the storyteller Parlamente: ‘s’il eust mieulx que le gand, peut estre qu’il fust mort de joye’ (p. 589; ‘if he had got any further than the glove, he might […] have expired in ecstasy’, p. 458). As Dagoucin also fears, the satisfaction of desire might lead not to ecstasy but to annihilation. As Parlamente suggests, it is perhaps safer to attach your desire to an object, rather than another human being. The English gentleman’s preference for the glove over the lady is only a more obvious – and therefore more ridiculous – instance of the substitutions of deferred desire. The Heptameron is, in fact, full of substitute objects of desire: chambermaids for wives, wives for chambermaids; a sword for a sister in nouvelle 12; a series of replaceable serviteurs in nouvelle 15. Perhaps the purest example of the substitutable object of desire occurs in nouvelle 49, in which a foreign countess entertains a series of young noblemen in her bed chamber, one after the other; they discover that they have been a collective rather than a favoured individual when they cannot help boasting to each other of their good fortune. As one of the number curses, ‘je suis le tiers qui pensois estre le premier et le seul’ (p. 538; ‘I’m the third person to think I was the first metaphor, a symptom of constitutive lack that functions both on the level of the Imaginary, in the realm of images and on the metonymic plane, or in what Lacan names the Symbolic.’ ‘Fetishism’, p. 151. 33 Jacques Lacan, ‘The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis’, in Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), p. 222. Malcolm Bowie comments: ‘In sentences like this kind the Subject–Other encounter takes place not in language but in the glare and counter-glare of desire’ (Lacan, p. 80).

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one and the only one’, p. 420). The countess turns from conquered object to inscrutable and unassailable Other. She even outfaces her lovers when they attempt to shame her publicly. Back in nouvelle 57, even Montmorency, the virile Frenchman who mocks the affectations of the Englishman, is described by Parlamente in terms of the metonymic substitution of desire: ‘qui eut mielx aymé la main que le gand d’une dame’ (p. 589; ‘who would have rather had the hand than the glove’, p. 458). Indeed, nouvelle 57 itself is framed by discussions of substitution, of narrative caught in the dynamics of desire.34 In the discussion following the story, Saffredent describes penitence as a kind of substitution – an unpleasant act for a pleasurable one – relating an anecdote of a young girl who atones for kissing a living man by kissing a corpse. Before the story, Parlamente and Simontaut debate Alain Chartier’s fifteenth-century poem La Belle dame sans mercy, whose eponymous heroine Simontaut predictably argues is a bad, uncharitable model for young women. Parlamente responds with the critique of courtly love that we have seen before in the Heptameron, in which mercy is a word or a token that signifies the total loss of honour for the women involved. In place of mercy, she quotes the belle dame, who offers words as compensation: ‘il siet bien que l’on le die, pour en tirer quelque confort’ (p. 586; ‘it is well to say it’s so, for such comfort as you may gain’, p. 455). Simontaut, in this instance, retreats, and accepts the substitution with a better grace than usual: ‘il y en a de si raisonnables, qu’ilz ne demandent rien que la parolle’ (‘some men are so reasonable that they ask nothing more than the word’, p. 456). This is the statement that inspires Parlamente to think of the story of another substitution, the story of the glove; at which point Hircan (who told nouvelle 56) enacts another substitution fundamental to the structure of the Heptameron by giving her his place – or, in the French, giving her his voice (‘je vous donne ma voix’, p. 586). Storytelling itself is predicated on an act of substitution, grounded in the fiction that ‘nous sommes tous esgaulx’ (p. 92). Founded in the Prologue as a substitute for desire, it replicates desire’s progress through substitutions. Storytelling is also, in the frame narrative of the Heptameron, a distraction and a deviation from illness, melancholy, and death. Admittedly in less explicit and punitive ways, the storytellers are like Scheherazade in The One Thousand and One Nights, attempting with their tales to keep ennui rather than execution at bay. The two may be closer than first appears. More than simple boredom, ennui is, as Liz Guild has argued, ‘pain, torment, affliction, intolerable unhappiness, associated with homesickness and with dying’.35 Frelick, ‘Fetishism’. Liz Guild, ‘“Au commencement était l’amour …”’, p. 79 (drawing on the dictionaries of Huguet and Cotgrave). 34 35

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Saffredent’s wish, expressed at the beginning of Day 5, that the bridge should not be completed for another month, continuing their separation from the rest of the world and giving them all more time for the pleasures of storytelling, is also an expression of the unfulfillable desire for one more story. Desire, Mediation, and Power Both desire and narrative are presented as endless chains of substitution, the ultimate object always out of reach. Lacanian theory conceptualises desire not just as substitution but as mediated: desire exists always in relation to some other desire or indeed some other’s desire. The ‘other’ here is another mobile concept, as Malcolm Bowie explains: ‘it designates now one member of the dialectical couple “Subject–Other” and now the limitless field and overriding condition in which both members find themselves – “alterity”, “otherness”’.36 In other words, there is no desire outside of the desire of the Other. This can mean a number of things. The desire of the Other can be desire for the Other’s recognition, as expressed by the English gentleman in nouvelle 57. It can also be desire for the Other itself, the unapproachable and absolute figure of alterity, which in Marguerite’s spiritual writings appears as the divine. It can also be desire for what the Other is presumed to desire, an adoption of the object that the Other seems to lack.37 Thus filtered through the figure of the Other, desire is never immediate or individual. Objects of desire are given to subjects, they are not freely chosen; the Other is the animating force that keeps desire continually in motion.38 The English gentleman in nouvelle 57 finds the object of his desire in courtly narratives. The lady herself disappears from his story to be replaced by her glove, and, more importantly perhaps, by the gentleman himself as the object of his audience’s attention. His desire is directed not so much towards the lady but towards his role in the narrative: the role of the perfect courtly lover. For Lacan, it is the gentleman’s appeal to the Other that constitutes him as a subject – full of holes, mediated, and dependent: ‘What I seek in speech is a response from the other. What constitutes me as subject is my question.’39 Neither his desire for the lady nor for the role of courtly lover is his own invention: both are mediated through his cultural and imaginary world. Bowie, Lacan, p. 83. ‘[D]esire full stop is always the desire of the Other. Which basically means that we are always asking the Other what he desires.’ Jacques Lacan, My Teaching, trans. David Macey (London: Verso, 2008), p. 38. 38 ‘“The Other” propels, where nature, instinct and nervous excitation do not. It is that which always insinuates itself between the individual and the objects of “his” desire; which traverses those objects and makes them unstable; and which makes desire insatiable by continuously moving its target’ (Bowie, Lacan, p. 83). 39 Lacan, Ecrits, p. 247. 36 37

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In nouvelle 14, Simontaut narrates a story that he believes shows women’s hypocrisy. When Bonnivet is rebuffed by a Milanese lady he is pursuing, he does not believe her claim that she is faithful to her husband, because she is beautiful and he is ugly. Instead, he imagines there must be a rival, a gentleman she must be in love with, who is the real reason for her refusal. From lover he turns detective, and discovers the identity of the young man, who has served the lady faithfully for three years without receiving any favour except the assurance that she loves him. Bonnivet insinuates himself into the young man’s friendship and springs into action. Within a matter of days the gentleman, acting on Bonnivet’s advice, has secured a secret rendezvous with his lady. Bonnivet obtains all the details of the meeting and has nothing left to do but substitute himself for the Italian lover by arriving earlier than agreed. The room into which he penetrates is a study in symbolic innocence: hung with white linen, the lady alone in bed.40 When the lady discovers who her lover is, she is temporarily plunged into despair; she knows that ‘elle avoit perdu son honneur pour ung homme qu’elle n’aymoit poinct et qui, pour se venger d’elle, pourroit divulguer ceste affaire par tout le monde’ (p. 236; [she had] ‘lost her honour to a man whom she did not even love, a man who, moreover, for the sake of revenge would be quite capable of divulging the episode to the whole world’, p. 184). Like Jambicque, she knows the power her lover holds over her with the knowledge of her name. But Bonnivet persuades her that he loves her more than her former admirer, and that he will be loyal; although, Simontaut remarks sardonically, his attachment lasts ‘selon la coustume, comme la beaulté des fleurs des champs’ (p. 238; ‘as usual […] even as the flowers of the field in their beauty’, p. 186). Bonnivet is in Milan defending the French territorial possessions in Italy, and his seduction campaign is conducted with military precision. He is challenged by the lady’s refusal and determined to prove what Simontaut calls her hypocrisy; he cultivates the friendship of the Italian gentleman specifically to take his place in the opportunity that he creates. While the scenario follows a courtly script, it is not animated by erotic desire, but by a desire for power. Simontaut is explicit that Bonnivet is not motivated by love or even lust, but by a desire for revenge (‘vengeance’), the antithesis of the reciprocity and gratitude that characterise the ideal courtly relationship: ‘de luy oster son honneur et sa chasteté, sans luy en sçavoir gré ni grace’ (p. 235; ‘to take her honour and chastity, without obligation or gratitude’, p. 184). This is not a love affair: this is revenge, an effort to cancel the humiliation Bonnivet experiences at the lady’s refusal. Or it might be more accurate to say that Bonnivet’s motivation reveals the true transactional nature of the courtly relationship. As the belle dame 40

See Cholakian, Rape and Writing, pp. 118–22.

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sans mercy knows, there is a price to pay for certain significant terms and concessions. In the discussion after the story, Ennasuite responds to Simontaut’s characterisation of the Italian lady as a hypocrite by insisting on the exclusive nature of courtly favours. ‘Est-il dict que si une dame en aymoit ung, l’autre la doyve avoir par finesse?’ (p. 238; ‘If a woman is in love with one man, does that make it alright for some other man to take her by trickery?’ p. 186). Ennasuite is right, of course; as Patricia Cholakian points out, when Oisille and Ennasuite tell structurally identical stories of substitution where the protagonist is not a courtly gentleman but a friar, the male storytellers, having lost their point of identification, do not defend the rapist or blame the victim.41 Nouvelle 23 is one of these, where the Franciscan takes the husband’s place in bed unbeknownst to the wife, and is unanimously condemned for his crime rather than praised for his ingenuity. Geburon replies to Ennasuite by shifting the terms of the debate radically from love to power through the language of mercantile capitalism. ‘[T]elles marchandises ne se peuvent mectre en vente, qu’elles ne soient emportées par les plus offrans et derniers encherisseurs’ (p. 238; ‘you can’t put goods like that up for sale without their being carried off by the highest bidder’, p. 186), he claims, redefining courtly love as a market embroiled in the traffic in women, although here the woman has put herself up for sale. While Ennasuite focuses on consent as exclusive, Geburon imagines a transaction where it is interchangeable. This is not about love, but power and glory, where men take such pains to pursue and win women not for their love for them, but for their love for themselves and for their own pleasure (‘pour l’amour d’eulx et de leur plaisir’). As we saw in Chapter 4, Longarine recognises what Geburon is describing, saying that, while her serviteurs start their approach with talk of her and her honour, it is ‘only their own pleasure and their own glory that they really desire’ (p. 186; ‘desirans leur plaisir et leur gloire’, p. 238). Longarine and Geburon are describing a state in which desire is never really for the beloved object; the object is simply a convenient means of self-construction and self-promotion. Bonnivet refuses to be baffled by the Italian lady’s refusal and proves himself once again a valiant conqueror. Very shortly afterwards, Geburon narrates nouvelle 16 about a Frenchman in Milan who Brantôme believed was also Bonnivet; there is no subterfuge on his part this time, but a series of tests of his courage and a metaphorical field of hunting in which the lady is figured as the hunted animal – a wolf and a deer.42 Similarly, the English gentleman Cholakian, Rape and Writing, p. 162. Geburon concludes his story with an explicit warning: ‘pour ce, mes dames, si vous estes saiges, vous garderez de nous, comme le cerf, s’il avoit entendement, feroit de son chasseur’ (p. 262; ‘so, Ladies, if you are wise, you will beware of us men, even as the deer would beware the hunter if it had understanding’, p. 208). See Brantôme, ‘Second Volume’, in Recueil, pp. 670–1. 41 42

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in nouvelle 57 enjoys admiring himself in the mirror of courtly melancholy. Arguably, the male storytellers equally enjoy the reflection of themselves that these stories give back; the women are a little more circumspect, but even they cannot resist the power of a story of virtuous martyrdom (like nouvelle 2) or virtue rewarded (like nouvelle 42). In nouvelle 14, Bonnivet’s desire runs in step with the patriarchal social structures that he is able to exploit. Masculine desire seems directed towards reinforcing social patterns in which men play the primary roles and reap the rewards. Feminine desire, however, is much more of a disruptive force. The Mortification of Desire: Nouvelle 30 In stories like nouvelle 32, feminine desire is a threat to the social order and must be tamed or (to use Carla Freccero’s term) ‘castigated’ in the service of a social order that is patriarchal and monarchical.43 Here we turn to a story in which a woman’s desire erupts with sensational consequences, before considering the alternative that Oisille proposes. It is a cautionary tale about the suppression of desire where the storytellers (as usual) disagree on the extent to which this is possible. Nouvelle 30 is the story of accidental incest, in which a widow, who has vowed not to marry again, decides to punish her son’s pursuit of a chambermaid by taking her place in bed, intending to reprimand him. She leaves the reprimand until too late, however; the storyteller, Hircan, comments, ‘elle convertit sa collere en ung plaisir trop abominable, obliant le nom de mere’ (p. 404; ‘her anger turned to […] a pleasure so abominable that she forgot she was a mother’, p. 318). The widow’s constrained desire suddenly overwhelms her, ‘tout ainsy que l’eaue par force retenue court avecq plus d’impetuosité quant on la laisse aller, que celle qui court ordinairement’ (p. 404; ‘as the dammed-up torrent flows more impetuously than the freely flowing stream’, p. 318). This is a hydraulic model of desire in which, if not expressed or acted upon, it ravages the individual to a fatal extent, stubbornly refusing to be sublimated. The widow becomes pregnant by her son and sends their daughter to live with a distant relative; she also sends her son away to learn to fight, commanding him not to return until he is married to a woman he loves. When he does return, thirteen or so years later, he is married to his daughter, who is also his sister. The mother, devastated, confesses the situation to the papal legate in Avignon, who forbids her to say anything to her children, who are innocent of any wrongdoing, and prescribes perpetual penance. In the discussion, the storytellers follow Hircan in condemning the widow’s presumptuous belief in her own powers to resist temptation. 43

Freccero, ‘Practicing Queer Philology’.

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Ennasuite blames the Franciscans’ emphasis on the individual’s power to resist sin, as we saw in Chapter 2. It is not enough, Hircan points out, to avoid the opportunity to sin, as sin will create its own opportunities (‘elle pensoit que l’occasion faisoit le peché, et ne sçavoit pas que le peché forge l’occasion’, p. 402). Longarine continues this condemnation of presumptuous self-reliance by describing the practices of a religious order in Milan, who would test their resistance by frequenting, touching, and even lying with beautiful women, disciplining their flesh if they felt any intimation of desire. The problem, Longarine explains, was similar to the predicament of the widow in nouvelle 30: what began as chastisement can turn into pleasure, or ‘inconveniens’ as she puts it (p. 410). While self-imposed ‘disciplines’ do not work for the Milanese monks or for the widow in nouvelle 30, later on, after another tale of incest, Oisille suggests a possible solution to the problem of desire. This is mortification, a state in which the flesh dies to the desires and the temptations of the world so that the soul (or spirit) can live in God.44 Nouvelle 33 is the unedifying tale of a hypocritical priest who impregnates his sister and attempts to pass off the pregnancy as a miracle, a second virgin birth. In response to Hircan’s scepticism, Oisille argues that ‘l’esperit de Dieu, qui est plus fort que la mort, peult mortiffier nostre cueur, sans mutation ny ruyne de corps’ (p. 434; ‘the spirit of God is stronger than death and can mortify the heart without changing or destroying the body’, p. 340). Challenged again by Saffredent that this is a rare gift from God, she insists: ‘Il est commung […] à ceulx qui ont la foy’ (‘It is shared […] by those who have faith.’) For the evangelical Oisille, it is possible with faith to die to the world and the desires of the world without actually leaving it, to live in the world as if dead to the world. Oisille turns again to the language of mortification after nouvelle 63. Again in response to Hircan, who has just dismissed chaste fidelity to a courtly amie as miraculous, only possible for those who are already transformed into angels, Oisille insists that this detachment from desire is possible for all, even ‘des plus grossiers esperitz que l’on voye ça-bas entre les hommes’ (p. 629; ‘those bodies that belong even to the basest spirits we see here on earth among men’, p. 490). Oisille lists those who have successfully ignored the demands of the flesh, including scholars and those who love beautiful and virtuous women with whom conversation is enough: ‘[ils] ont l’esperit si contant, que la chair est appaisée de tous ses desirs’ (p. 629; ‘their minds are so [contented] that the flesh finds peace and is rid of all desires’, p. 490). 44 Nicole Cazauran, ‘Des devisants peu ou prou “mortifiés”? Note en marge du Prologue de l’Heptaméron’, Bibliothèque d’humanisme et Renaissance 59.1 (1997), 7–12; Neil Kenny, ‘Problems of Power in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron: Ruse, Mortification, and the Everyday’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 47.3 (2011), 251–61.

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Parlamente tells the next story, nouvelle 64, which is ostensibly about mortification and the sublimation of sexual desire. But it does not have the positive charge of other stories of withdrawal and transcendence in the Heptameron. This is the story of an unhappy love affair in which the man’s patience is tested to such an extent that he withdraws to a monastery in order to, ‘à force de jeusnes et disciplines, affoiblir tant son corps, que la memoire de la mort luy soit pour souveraine consolation’ (p. 634; ‘[through] a life of fasting and chastisement […] [so weaken his] body that the thought of death [would be] his supreme consolation’, p. 494). In Parlamente’s words, the gentleman’s mortification feels more like a torment than peace: ‘la mortification de sa passion extresme luy avoit cousté si cher, qu’elle luy avoit osté la volunté de vivre et la craincte de morir’ (p. 634; ‘the mortification of his extreme passion had cost him so dear that the will to live had left him, and that he no longer feared to die’, p. 494). Of all the stories in the Heptameron that end with one or both of the protagonists withdrawing from society, this is the one least at peace with itself, as the lady waits out her life in a melancholy state as devastating as her suitor’s austere life in the monastery, and to which he has resorted in despair. Parlamente calls the gentleman’s decision to take religious vows revenge, ‘vengeance’ (p. 636), on a lady whose tests were too hard to bear; she does not say if either eventually found peace. At the other end of the scale is nouvelle 19, the story of Poline and her suitor who both take religious vows when Poline’s family refuse to let them marry. Poline expresses this as a mutual renunciation of the world and a union in Christ: ‘le desir qu’elle avoit eu de rendre la fin de leur amityé semblable en habit, estat et forme de vivre’ (p. 287; ‘her desire that at the last their love should bring them together, that they should be alike in habit, condition and manner of life’, p. 226). They are given a happier end by the narrator, Ennasuite, who claims there can be no doubt that ‘leur pechez leur estoient pardonnez, veu qu’ilz avoient beaucoup aymé’ (p. 289; ‘their sins were forgiven, for they had loved much’, p. 228). And yet even this story of mutual and shared mortification of desire, told with approbation by Ennasuite, is open to Hircan’s dismissive scepticism: ‘Si melencolie et desespoir sont louables’ (p. 289; ‘If melancholy and despair deserve praise’, p. 228). The potential of mortification is a controversial topic among the storytellers. Where Oisille sees love – young love converted into love for God – and the prospect of eternal life, Hircan sees nothing but melancholic despair, a relationship with loss that is a renunciation of both God and life. The idea underpinning these stories is the belief in a clear continuity between physical love and spiritual love. The lovers withdraw to their convents in order to transform their passion for each other into love of God. This idea that physical desire can be sublimated – indeed, that physical love can sometimes

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be the first step towards spiritual love – is one that Marguerite takes from the Renaissance discourse of Neoplatonism, which we will turn to now. Neoplatonism and the Sublimation of Desire Neoplatonism is the Christianised Renaissance version of Plato’s famous paradigm of love in the Symposium, in which the appreciation of human beauty can be the lover’s first step on a path towards recognition of transcendent, universal beauty.45 Marsilio Ficino’s commentary on Plato’s Symposium in De Amore (Of Love, c. 1467) had a profound influence on Renaissance Europe, replacing the troubling homosexuality of the Platonic model with a heterosexual couple striving ultimately for knowledge of God.46 Neoplatonic ideas were a strong strand in the religious thinking of Marguerite’s evangelical circle and a recurrent feature in Briçonnet’s letters. Castiglione’s ideal court lady is ultimately a figure of Neoplatonic sublimation and transcendence – she exists to be the mediator of male desire, from the earthly to the divine.47 Marguerite makes Parlamente the spokesperson for the aspirations of Neoplatonism in the discussion after nouvelle 19, but, unlike Castiglione, she does not gender the subject positions in the soul’s progress towards truth and divinity. In contrast to nouvelles 9 and 64, where the man despairs of his love and unilaterally abandons the world, Ennasuite’s nouvelle 19 features the withdrawal of both lovers to a monastery to sublimate their love for each other into love of God. After Hircan’s dismissal of the lovers as ‘folz et folles declarez’ (p. 289; ‘self-declared fools’, p. 228), Geburon remarks that ‘Dieu a plusieurs moyens pour nous tirer à luy’ (‘God has many ways of drawing us to Him’), and Parlamente goes even further in a clear exposition of a Neoplatonic vision. ‘Encores ay je une opinion […] que jamais homme n’aymera parfaictement Dieu, qu’il n’ait parfaictement aymé quelque creature en ce monde’ (‘I hold the view that no man will ever perfectly love God, unless he has perfectly loved some creature in this world’). Love for a fellow creature is here the first step in a more perfect love for God. Parlamente’s understanding of the soul’s progress from earthly love to spiritual love is based on the idea of the soul’s originary desire to return to the source of goodness from which it came, and from which it is estranged through ‘le peché du Philip Ford, ‘Neo-Platonic Themes of Ascent’, in A Companion, pp. 89–107. Todd Reeser, Setting Plato Straight: Translating Ancient Sexuality in the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 47 Pietro Bembo expounds the ideas of Neoplatonism in Book 4 of The Courtier; for example, that ‘divesting ourselves of the human passions in which we were clothed when we fell, let us ascend by the ladder whose lowest rung bears the image of sensual beauty to the sublime mansion where dwells the celestial, adorable and true beauty’ (p. 341). 45 46

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premier pere’ (p. 290; ‘the sins of our forefather Adam’, p. 229). The trials of human love appear as experiments through which the soul draws closer to its true desire. The soul thus passes from love of visible things to absolute beauty and virtue. This can only happen, Parlamente is careful to emphasise, through the gift of faith: ‘car foy seullement peult monstrer et faire recevoir le bien que l’homme charnel et animal ne peult entendre’ (p. 291; ‘For only faith can reveal and make the soul receive that Good which carnal and animal man cannot understand’, p. 229). The soul’s progress towards the divine, then, although facilitated by human beauty and virtue, is ultimately possible only through faith – Parlamente’s Neoplatonism has a distinctive evangelical ring. Her dismissal of the ‘homme charnel’ is an echo of the letters of St Paul, for whom (as we have seen) the flesh is synonymous with sin and the things of this world, and in opposition to the spirit. Other storytellers harmonise with Parlamente’s view of ‘perfect love’. Longarine agrees, arguing that the human heart that has not loved is like a sterile field, incapable of truly loving God. Simontaut (perhaps surprisingly) quotes the New Testament in his agreement: ‘he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?’ (1 John 4.20). But the debate does not proceed uncontested. Ennasuite cuts through Simontaut’s pieties with a malicious quotation of the Latin Vulgate Bible, qui est hic et laudabimus, ‘Who is he? And we will call him blessed …’ (Ecclesiasticus 31.9). Show me this perfect man who is drawn from visible beauty to the beauty of God, Ennasuite challenges her more idealistic (or cynical) companions. Certainly, the stories told in the Heptameron do not tend to suggest this is the usual human trajectory. And indeed, when Saffredent quotes the same passage in the discussion after nouvelle 36 – only slightly more cynically than Simontaut – Oisille is quick to reprimand him for deploying Scripture for his own ends (p. 455; p. 357). Saffredent (and perhaps even Simontaut) is able to see the rhetorical opportunity in Neoplatonic themes of ascent from corporeal beauty to spiritual beauty. Oisille puts the company on its guard against the cynical deployment of Scripture for entirely worldly ends, and she could have said the same about the Neoplatonic ideal. The successful sublimation of desire in nouvelle 19 is offset by a more cynical manipulation of the rhetoric of Neoplatonism in nouvelle 26. Told by Saffredent, ostensibly to illustrate the difference between a virtuous and a wanton woman, the critique of Neoplatonic rhetoric as rhetoric emerges despite his intentions. The young seigneur d’Avannes is welcomed into a childless older gentleman’s household as his adopted son; his wife, young and beautiful, is also virtuous, and, despite d’Avannes’s clear desire for her (and his own manifest attractions), she manages to contain his seductive talk within the limits of a relationship condoned by the husband. When d’Avannes realises that his attempts to seduce his adoptive mother are in vain, he turns his attentions to another beautiful

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but less virtuous woman, and, disguised as a groom, stays with her for many months until his health is affected. He finally returns to his adopted family in an enfeebled state. The wife pities him and offers her spiritual guidance; he takes this gratefully, but not without an attempt to turn the language of Neoplatonic love against her resistance. ‘Or, Madame […] entendez que Dieu, incongneu de l’homme, sinon par la foy, […] s’est voulu servyr des moyens visibles, pour nous faire aymer par foy les choses invisibles’ (p. 381; ‘Madame […], know that God, whom no man may know but by faith alone […] by means of things visible did it please Him to make us love through faith the things that are invisible’, pp. 298–9). The lady tries to shut down this avenue of seduction with a relatively curt ‘Monseigneur, je n’entreprendz pas de respondre à vostre theologie’ (‘Monseigneur, I shall not attempt to reply to your theology’, p. 299) – although it is not Saffredent’s intention to reveal the coercive undercurrent of the language of Neoplatonism, so this is not all she says, and Saffredent makes it clear that she is extremely content with his change of heart. While d’Avannes offers this piece of Neoplatonic orthodoxy in a cynical mode, with a more immediate goal than divine beauty in mind, his lady does nevertheless effect a conversion of sorts on him, though only through her own death. He is so touched by this, and by her constant and virtuous resistance, that he wears mourning for ten years and ignores all other women. Saffredent is not so impressed: he dismisses the woman as a hypocrite whose attempts to repress her desire led directly to her death, as he makes her say on her deathbed to d’Avannes: ‘sçachez que le non que si souvent je vous ay dict m’a faict tant de mal au prononcer, qu’il est cause de ma mort’ (p. 386; ‘I confess that it has hurt so much to pronounce that word [no] that it is now the cause of my death’, p. 302). Saffredent here repeats the hydraulic model of desire we saw Hircan describe in nouvelle 30, this time operating with fatal effect. Saffredent does not allow his protagonist to sublimate her desire; and while the Heptameron does offer other examples of more successful sublimation, the rhetorical deployment of Neoplatonic discourse provokes too much suspicion to remain an uncontested aspiration. Whether that would have been the case had Marguerite finished the Heptameron is an interesting question. There are indications that the storytellers are becoming more devout and more attuned to the spiritual teaching of Oisille as their stay in Sarrance continues. In the prologue to Day 7, after Oisille has read from the Acts of the Apostles – that is, the stories of evangelism immediately after Jesus’s death – their discussions of the apostles’ ministry delight and preoccupy them so much that they almost forget their storytelling enterprise. Nomerfide has to remind them, but Marguerite is explicit that their ‘plaisir’ now resides in contemplating the lives of the apostles (p. 611). Desire and pleasure continue to shift object: from the sexual pleasure suggested by Hircan in the Prologue, through Parlamente’s alternative, storytelling, to

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Oisille’s spiritual contentment – as she puts it in the Prologue, in reading Scripture lies ‘la vraie et parfaicte joie de l’esprit’ (p. 87; ‘true and perfect spiritual joy’, p. 66). But it seems unlikely that the storytellers would have left Sarrance transfigured into different people. As Ferguson and McKinley argue, ‘Such idealism would be at odds with the Heptaméron’s spiritual anthropology.’48 More likely is that the Heptameron’s debates and discussions – and indeed conflicts – are intended to continue, outside the frame narrative and into the lives of its readers. Desire for God: Chansons spirituelles We need to look elsewhere for a more unequivocal assertion of desire’s sublimation. If in the Heptameron the potential transcendence of human desire offered by Christian Neoplatonism is repeatedly brought back to earth by the suspicion or the cynicism of the storytellers, in other works the desire for God submerges all other concerns. In the Chansons spirituelles Marguerite draws on a Christian mystical tradition to express the soul’s longing for union with God in the terms of profane courtly love. Some of the chansons make use of pre-existing popular song tunes to emphasise this shared vocabulary and imagery; in his edition of the Chansons spirituelles, Georges Dottin identifies those that have survived.49 These songs, consisting of new words for old tunes, belong to the medieval tradition of contrafacta in which secular songs were rewritten with religious intent or sacred songs were given profane words. The tunes that Marguerite used come principally from a popular songbook of courtly lovers, amis and amies, that she repurposed to describe the relationship between the soul and God, that most radically other of all objects of desire. The very material that Marguerite uses in her spiritual songs thus mimics the sublimation of physical desire: the courtly love object of the popular song is replaced by the divine other in the chanson spirituelle. In the Chansons, the divine ‘Tout’ is relentlessly opposed to the human ‘Rien’; and yet both are drawn together by the longing voice of the soul, speaking variously as the unworthy, sinful, prodigal child (‘L’indigne enfant, pécheur, prodigue’), or a whole choir of the lost in chanson 30 that includes a poisoned and parched deer, a storm-wracked ship, and a prisoner anticipating freedom.50 Chanson 11 is a song about deception and misapprehension as the soul begins to realise how pride has obscured the truth, leading to a misunderstanding about its own being and predicament. It deploys the language of cuyder, false belief and pride, explored in Chapter 2: 48 49 50

‘The Heptaméron’, in A Companion, p. 365. Chansons spirituelles, pp. 171–9. Chanson 10, pp. 31–3 (p. 31, line 15); chanson 30, pp. 76–7.

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Par Faux Cuyder j’ay bien été déceu, Lequel m’a fait ignorer mon vray Estre, Voire mon Rien sy très-fort mescongnoistre, Que tard me suis de son mal apperceu.51 By False Belief have I been deceived, which made me ignorant of my true Being, or rather my Nothingness so utterly misrecognise, that only very late did I realise my predicament.

The popular song that Marguerite took as her model for chanson 11 has survived and is also about misapprehension. The model is a lover’s lament at being mistaken about his lady, where the place of Faux Cuyder is taken by the beloved’s misleadingly encouraging appearance. Putting the two songs side by side, we can see how much of her model Marguerite reproduces in her version: notably, the rhyme scheme and the key (rhyming) term ‘deceu’, ‘deceived’. This would necessarily set up an echo in the minds of those who knew the popular song, producing a kind of aural palimpsest that reinforces Marguerite’s principal message that attachment to things of this world (including romantic love) is a delusion and a mistake. This is the first verse of the popular song: Par beau semblant j’ay bien esté desceu De la belle de qui je me fioye; Aultre chose pour l’heure m’atendoye Fors seullement ce qui m’est advenu.52 By fair seeming have I been deceived, of the beauty in whom I had faith; I expected something very different from what happened to me.

In Marguerite’s version, Faux Cuyder replaces the deceptive appearance of the lady in the original courtly scenario; Faux Cuyder is the substitute, mistaken object of desire which, when pursued, leads the soul to blindness rather than insight. But there are also fundamental differences between the two versions which give them contrasting tones. While the lover in the secular version complains to Fortune about his disappointment and his wasted time, Marguerite’s singer in contrast addresses God in praise and thanks, ‘Vous estes donc la Vie d’un chacun’ (You are then the Life of everyone, p. 35, line 21). The popular song ends on a suggestive note. There is no reconciliation or hope in ‘Par beau semblant’, just a weary recognition of the folly of youth.

Chanson 11, pp. 34–5 (p. 34, lines 1–4). Chansons du XV e siècle, ed. Gaston Paris (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1875), no. 114 (p. 112); identified in Chansons spirituelles, p. 174. 51 52

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Que feray je, de tout bien despourveu Et desvoyé de chemin et d’adresse? Laisser te fault le plaisir qu’en jeunesse Tu as trop prins: il t’est bien cher vendu. (lines 13–16) What will I do, bereft of all good, astray from the path and from the direct way? You must abandon the pleasure which in your youth you enjoyed too much: it cost you dear.

The reference to the path and the cost of pleasure in the original version are Christian images that may well have appealed to Marguerite and suggested a spiritual reworking. In her own chanson spirituelle, she also refers to renunciation and pleasure, but it is without the weary tone of the lover worn out by disappointment and dissipation. If the lover in ‘Par beau semblant’ recognises too late the error of his ways, Marguerite’s song is about realising – almost too late, but not quite – that one has strayed from the right path in believing Faux Cuyder, that is, believing that the human amounts to something; renouncing this belief, paradoxically, leads to plenitude. En nous faisant congnoistre nostre Rien Et vostre Tout par grâce et par puissance, Nous renonçant avons la jouyssance De vous, Seigneur, et seul bon et seul bien … (Chansons, p. 35, lines 25–8) In making us know our Nothingness and your All by grace and might, renouncing ourselves we have possession of you, Lord, the one good and only good.

Whereas in ‘Par beau semblant’ renunciation is a renunciation of desire, in Marguerite’s song it is the paradoxical way to fulfilled desire, the way to capture (or recapture) the ‘seul bon et seul bien’. The beloved in ‘Par beau semblant’ is simply another illusory object of desire, another prison of the soul, that must be abandoned along with a sense of self and self-worth, in order to participate in the divine All. Chanson 17 is also about renunciation, the singer having already turned their back on the world and its ersatz ‘plaisir’. It starts with a contemplation of the Passion (the final period of Jesus’s life and death on the cross) and expresses the soul’s longing for union with God, conceptualised as a marriage: ‘Seigneur, quand viendra le jour / Tant désiré, / Que je seray par amour / A vous tiré, / Et que l’union sera / Telle entre nous / Que l’espouse on nommera / Comme l’espoux?’ (Lord, when will the most desired day come when I will be by love drawn to you, and that the union between us will be such that we

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will be called wife and husband?)53 We have seen this figuring of death as amorous consummation in Chapter 2, but here the marriage of the (feminine) soul and the (masculine) Christ is gendered in a remarkably fluid way. As Jeff Kendrick has argued, the voice in this particular song is grammatically marked as masculine – the gendered adjectives all take the masculine form (‘tiré’, ‘baisé’, ‘appaisé’) – and so the longed-for union of the soul with God requires a mystical transformation of the male speaker into the espouse.54 This feminisation extends to the subject position of the speaker, who must renounce the active role of the courtly lover and take on the passive feminine role: ‘Si de vostre bouche puys / Estre baisé, / Je seray de tous ennuys / Bien appaisé’ (If I can be kissed by your mouth, I will be relieved of all my anguish, lines 21–4). Union with God requires not just the renunciation of Faux Cuyder but a more comprehensive submission. As Oisille, Parlamente, and other storytellers counsel in the Heptameron, only the recognition of absolute impotence offers the hope of salvation. The secular model of chanson 17 also survives in Gaston Paris’s collection of popular songs from the fifteenth century. ‘Trop penser me font amours’ (‘Love inspires in me too much thought’) is a song describing a secret sexual encounter in which a girl arranges with her lover to meet at her bedroom window at midnight while her father is sleeping.55 If the masculine voice in Marguerite’s spiritual song is feminised, the feminine speaker in the popular song takes on masculine agency as she speaks to her lover: ‘Baisons nous, acollons nous, mon amy gent, / Comme font vrays amoureux secretement’ (Let us kiss and embrace, my noble friend, like true lovers do secretly, p. 34, lines 17–18). The secret collaboration of the first-person plural verbs in the secular version is replaced, in Marguerite’s song, with a request, or rather a supplication in the imperative: ‘Baisez moy, acolez moy’ (Kiss me, embrace me, line 25). Jeff Kendrick argues more generally that this flexibility in gender subject positions is characteristic of Marguerite’s chansons spirituelles, which exploit the image of amorous union in the mystical tradition in order to upset gendered hierarchies.56 Marguerite alternates different gendered subject positions throughout the collection of chansons to join a mystical tradition in which desire is fulfilled through transcendence of binary (that is, earthly) oppositions, including gender. Desire is expressed throughout the Chansons spirituelles explicitly as a desire for death as the only means of union with the divine beloved. In the middle of the images of privation and liberation in chanson 30, death Chanson 17, pp. 50–1 (p. 50, lines 5–12). Jeff Kendrick, ‘Gender Flexibility and Androgyny in Marguerite de Navarre’s Chansons spirituelles’, L’Esprit créateur 57.3 (2017), 105–17 (p. 111). 55 Chansons du XV e siècle, no. 30, pp. 33–4. 56 Kendrick, ‘Gender Flexibility’, p. 106. 53 54

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appears not so much as a means of deliverance but as the desired end: ‘Ainsi par amour vehémente / Mon âme désire la mort / Pour jouyr du seur réconfort’ (Thus through vehement love my soul desires death to enjoy its certain comfort, p. 76, lines 19–21). Just as the wounded deer runs towards water (verse 2), or the storm-tossed ship runs towards the ‘désiré port’ (desired port, line 17), or the prisoner who seeks release (verse 4), the soul strains towards consummation (and indeed absorption) with the divine. The first lines of chanson 30 set the goal: Mon âme n’ha plus autre esgard, Autre désir ny autre envie, Fors de jouyr du doux regard De la Vérité, Voye et Vie, Car de son amour est ravie … (lines 1–5) My soul has no other heed, other desire or other longing, than to enjoy the gentle gaze of the Truth, the Way, and the Life, for it is ravished by that love.

The word that I have translated as ‘enjoy’ here and above – ‘jouyr’ – and its cognate noun, ‘jouissance’ (‘enjoyment’), have a range of meanings that are difficult to capture in English. ‘Jouissance’ is a profound delight that can have a physical or an intellectual object, an intense pleasure of the senses (it is the French for orgasm) or of the mind. It is close to ecstasy, an experience that dissolves the edges of the feeling and thinking subject. But it also has a quasilegal sense with relation to rights or property: enjoyment in this case means possession, or (as Cotgrave puts it) ‘possessing, occupying, holding […] full use, absolute possession’.57 The ‘enjoyment’ of the soul in the quotation above is thus more than an ecstatic encounter with truth and life; it is also a restitution of an alienated possession. In terms of the Fall narrative of Genesis, it represents the restitution of those rights lost with original sin. The ultimate object of desire in the Chansons spirituelles equates to the abolition of the subject, ravished and annihilated by its absorption into the divine All. Desire for death as amorous consummation is part of the Christian mystical tradition and features in Marguerite’s early devotional poetry such as Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse; but in the Chansons spirituelles, written principally in the last years of her life, the impact of the motif is heightened by the death of her brother, which prompted a period of despairing introspection and prolific literary creation. When they were first printed in Marguerite’s selected works, Les Marguerites, in 1547, the first three pieces under the heading Chansons spirituelles were poetic laments on François’s last illness and death. In the 57

Cotgrave, Dictionarie, art. ‘jouissance’.

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second poem of mourning, the consolation of death takes on the allure of a mystical union. Written to be sung to the tune of Marot’s well-known erotic song, ‘Jouyssance vous donneray’ (‘Joy I will give to you’), it transposes this image of physical pleasure and union into the spiritual realm.58 In this song, Marguerite is harrowed by despair, mute with grief: ‘tant malheureuse je suis / Que mon malheur dire ne puys’ (I am so miserable that I cannot speak about my misery).59 She revisits the image of the trinité, now traumatically reduced to one: ‘Mais, hélas, mon corps est banny / Du sien, auquel it feut uny / Depuis le temps de nostre enfance’ (But alas, my body is banished from his, to which it was united since the time of our childhood, p. 9, lines 37–9). The ‘dure absence’ (hard absence, line 21) of her brother leaves a gaping hole and a silence that can be filled only by her crying. In the final verse, however, the physical union of Marot’s original song is reimagined as a reunion of brother and sister in an ecstatic afterlife. Marguerite addresses death itself: ‘Puisque mon Frère est en tes laz, / Prens moy, afin qu’un seul soulas / Donne à tous [deux] esjouyssance’ (Since my Brother is in your snare, take me, so that one solace alone gives us both ecstatic joy, p. 10, lines 70–72). This is a union of brother and sister after and in death, the joy and the wholeness they experience coming from a divine source. This was the solution to the problem of desire for the Marguerite of the Chansons spirituelles: a radical change of object, from the mortal to the divine. It represents a kind of homecoming, a restitution of the original lost object, union with the divine, forfeited at the Fall. If the storytellers in the Heptameron do not believe themselves sufficiently mortified to pursue this goal, the Chansons – some of them written at the same time as the Heptameron – celebrate the promise of mystical union that transforms the pain of loss and mourning into a ‘porte’ (door) to eternal life.60

58 ‘Jouyssance vous donneray (Chanson 4)’, Marot, Œuvres poétiques, vol. 1, p. 181. Set to music by Claudin de Sermisy in 1528, the song was printed in the 1532 Adolescence clementine. 59 ‘Autres pensées faites un mois après la mort du roy’, Chansons spirituelles, pp. 8–10 (p. 8, lines 1–2). 60 ‘Rondeau, faict au mesme temps’ [i.e. a month after François’s death], Chansons spirituelles, p. 139, line 11.

6

Form and Technique This final chapter is about the forms and techniques in Marguerite’s work. Over her long writing career, Marguerite experimented with many different forms: allegorical poetry, verse letters, theatre, song, and narrative fiction. Rather than consider these individually, I focus here on her best-known text, the Heptameron, referencing other works to explore how she drew on various literary traditions and techniques. First, I look at the dialogue form, which she employs from the early poem Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne to the later Navire, and as a structuring technique in Heptameron. Next, I consider the use of narrative voice to see how it produces an interrogative, collaborative, open-ended effect. The Heptameron refers to the stories it tells with a variety of different terms, and I consider two of the most prominent, nouvelle and histoire, to explore what it shares with these contemporary narrative genres. Both nouvelle and histoire make claims of exemplarity, and in a final section, I consider how the stories in the Heptameron both demonstrate and problematise the power of the exemplary model. Dialogue and Conversation The dialogue form is important throughout Marguerite’s works. Some texts are written in dialogue form, like the Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne (which was one of the first texts in French to use the title dialogue) and La Navire – both dialogues with the dead in which voices alternate, answer questions, and advise. But other works also make extensive use of dialogic techniques. Marguerite’s plays exploit the intrinsic dialogism of the theatre, sometimes to stage spiritual enlightenment (as in L’Inquisiteur), sometimes to highlight spiritual deafness (as in Trou Prou Peu Moins). The chansons spirituelles echo dialogue’s pedagogical technique of gradual realisation; they often imply an interlocutor who listens and learns. The Heptameron is structured on dialogic principles, with the discussions after the stories taking on as much importance – and taking up nearly as much space – as the stories themselves. In these discussions, points of view are defended, challenged, and revised, in an open-ended movement towards meaning and interpretation. This model of dialogue, in which different, mutually incompatible, and

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sometimes antagonistic opinions are accommodated and allowed to coexist, albeit sometimes uneasily, seems particularly significant when put into the context of the contemporary failed attempts at dialogue between Catholicism and Protestantism. The dialogue is a literary form with a long history and was a favourite pedagogical tool of the humanists.1 Inspired by a rich classical tradition of works by Plato, Cicero, and Lucian, the Renaissance dialogue presented a conversation between two or more speakers, using the techniques and characteristics of conversation to tease out problems, perform conversions, and stage confrontations. The most famous and influential classical model was Plato’s philosophical dialogues in which Socrates asks his interlocutors a series of questions in order to expose the contradictions or logical fallacies of their position, thus inching towards the truth in a subtle but devastating manner. For Marguerite’s Heptameron, Castiglione’s Courtier was an influential contemporary model, an extended dialogue in which the interlocutors respond to each other’s questions to sketch collectively a model of the perfect courtier that is in constant negotiation and open to modification. Closer still, Boccaccio’s Decameron is also structured as a dialogue between storytellers. Equally influential on her writing was her formative correspondence with the bishop of Meaux, Guillaume Briçonnet, in the early 1520s.2 While it is true that the correspondence most often takes the form of a question from Marguerite followed by a (sometimes very long) answer from Briçonnet, it is nevertheless profoundly dialogic, with both correspondents taking cues from each other. In the first year of the correspondence particularly, when Marguerite was principally seeking spiritual solace, Briçonnet’s lessons were often inspired by an image that Marguerite used in her letter to him. Robert Cottrell describes how Briçonnet gives Marguerite an exegetical commentary on her own letters, picking up her images, reshaping them, analysing them from all sides.3 In a letter of June 1523, Briçonnet comments on the ‘fecundity’ of Marguerite’s letters on his thinking.4 Barbara Stephenson argues that their relationship shifts over the course of the correspondence, which starts with 1 Eva Kushner, Le Dialogue à la Renaissance: Histoire et poétique (Geneva: Droz, 2004); Printed Voices: The Renaissance Culture of Dialogue, ed. Dorothea Heitsch and Jean-François Vallée (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004). For the Italian tradition, see Virginia Cox, The Renaissance Dialogue: Literary Dialogue in its Social and Political Contexts, Castiglione to Galileo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 2 See Reinier Leushuis, ‘Spiritual Dialogues and Politics in the Correspondance between Marguerite de Navarre and Guillaume Briçonnet (1521–1524)’, in Between Scylla and Charybdis: Learned Letter Writers Navigating the Reefs of Religious and Political Controversy in Early Modern Europe, ed. Jeanine de Landtsheer, Henk Nellen, and Henk J. M. Nellen (Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 17–34. 3 Cottrell, Grammar of Silence, p. 12. 4 Briçonnet and Marguerite d’Angoulême, Correspondance, vol. 2, pp. 36–7.



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Marguerite insisting on her subordinate status as pupil (she signs herself ‘la toute vostre fille’, ‘entirely your daughter’) and ends with her accepting a role as patron (signing herself ‘vostre inutille mere’, ‘your useless mother’).5 Equally important for Marguerite is the religious reflection they engage in together, that subsequently shaped her own literary works. In a letter of January 1523, after some time without corresponding, Marguerite turns back to Briçonnet with a request for more spiritual nourishment, exercising once again, she says, ‘mon mestier de mendicité’ (my occupation of beggary).6 She asks him for guidance and teaching so that she can shed her ‘vielle peau’ (old skin) and emerge polished and smooth, a true ‘Marguerite’ (p. 11). These are themes and images she has explored with Briçonnet before, including the body of sin inherited from Adam, and the pun on her name, which also means ‘pearl’. Briçonnet picks up on these suggestions and responds with a long letter elaborating Marguerite’s biblical references.7 Beggary is a holy occupation, he argues, after the first beatitude, ‘blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven’ (Matt. 5.3). Developing this Christian theme of humility, Briçonnet issues a series of paradoxical maxims, finishing with a flourish: ‘Richesses empauvrissent; mendicité enrichist’ (riches impoverish, beggary enriches; p. 12). He turns to St Paul’s letter to the Colossians (3.9–10) to show how Christians must cast off the ‘old man’ (Adam and sin) and accept the new man (Jesus and salvation). He then offers a combined image that equates the old man with the flesh and with illusory riches: ‘il fault despouiller [la chair] comme estant par trop plaine et riche en ses desirs, plaisirs, vouloir et propres concupiscences (importables richesses) et se vestir de l’esperit de mendicité, congnoissant de Dieu tout et de nous rien’ (p. 12; we must cast off the flesh as being too full and too rich in its desires, pleasures, intention and its own lusts (intolerable riches) and clothe ourselves with the spirit of beggary, knowing that all comes from God and nothing from us). Finally, Briçonnet returns to the image of the pearl as an illustration of literal and spiritual interpretations of the Bible, advising Marguerite that a literal reading is merely the candle with which Christians should search for the pearl, the ‘intelligence spirituelle’ (p. 13). Marguerite’s apology for her begging has thus unspooled a long letter of Bible reading, exegesis, and spiritual advice, developing out of her original images. Briçonnet also inspired some of the themes and images for Marguerite’s early work, the Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne. In a letter of 1524 consoling her on the death of her eight-year-old niece Charlotte, whom 5 Stephenson, Power and Patronage, pp. 155–6. See, for example, Correspondance, vol. 1, p. 30; and vol. 2, p. 51. 6 Correspondance, vol. 2, pp. 10–11 (p. 10). 7 Correspondance, vol. 2, pp. 11–15.

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Marguerite had nursed through her last fatal illness (she died on 8 September 1524), Briçonnet talks of the mystical marriage between Jesus and the soul, taken from the Song of Songs; he describes this world as a prison and death as liberation.8 In her poem, Marguerite turns again to these ideas, using the dialogue form as consolation and instruction. The grieving Marguerite asks the eight-year-old child for consolation and guidance, and Charlotte describes her happiness and urges her aunt to have faith – another fundamental belief in Briçonnet’s evangelical circle. The vision begins in the depths of Marguerite’s mourning, as she pleads with her niece to speak to her: ‘Respondés moy’; ‘Las! mon enfant parlés à vostre tante’ (Give me a reply; Alas, my child, talk to your aunt).9 To her aunt’s entreaties, Charlotte refers to her current happiness as ‘une joye indicible’ (p. 124, line 1256; an indescribable joy). In some ways, the poem describes a missed connection. In the place of the desired dialogue, there is the unspeakable bliss of the soul who has left the world – perhaps reminiscent of the impossibility St Paul experiences in talking about Heaven.10 Though to describe this as a failed dialogue is not completely accurate – aunt and niece do converse for more than 1,200 lines before Charlotte’s soul departs again – it nevertheless leaves the writer in ‘lamentation’ and ‘tribulation’, ‘pis que morte’ (p. 125, lines 1291–3; worse than dead). Other works continue this dialogue with the dead. Classical rhetoric has a name for the technique of making the dead, the absent, or the inanimate speak: prosopopoeia (from the Greek prosopon, face, and poiéin, to make: this is a figure that creates a face or a mask to speak through).11 For the great Roman student of classical rhetoric Quintilian, prosopopoeia is a particularly effective strategy as it appeals directly to the emotions of the listeners: by impersonating the voice of another, the orator can represent their plight or their grievance directly and forcefully.12 Marguerite employs it as consolation but also as goad. How can the living ever know the truth of the afterlife? This is a pattern that is repeated in Marguerite’s later poem of mourning, La Navire, written in the traumatic aftermath of her brother’s death. Here again Marguerite expresses her loss and her grief to a departed soul who chastises Correspondance, vol. 2, pp. 262–70. Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne, ed. Salminen, p. 10 (preliminary rondeau, printed in Simon du Bois’s 1533 edition). 10 ‘he was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter’. 2 Corinthians 12.4. 11 Gavin Alexander, ‘Prosopopoeia: The Speaking Figure’, in Renaissance Figures of Speech, ed. Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander, and Katrin Ettenhuber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 97–112. 12 ‘When an advocate speaks for a client, the bare facts produce the effect; but when we pretend that the victims themselves are speaking, the emotional effect is drawn also from the persons.’ Quintilian, Orator’s Education, 6.1.25, vol. 3, p. 31. 8 9



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her for mourning a death that is in fact a blessing, showing how attached she still is to this world. François’s voice opens the poem, calling Marguerite the (lost) ship of the title: ‘Navire loing du vray port assablee’ (Ship aground far from the true port).13 Marguerite responds to her brother’s voice with astonishment, joy, and lamentation. The poem records the dialogue between them, as Marguerite mourns her brother’s death and he strives to persuade her that she is wrong to do so, indeed that her mourning is preventing her from joining him. – Helas, j’entendz ta voix qui me conforte! O Monseigneur, que ceste heure me tarde D’aller a toy: pleust a Dieu estre morte! – Ma seur, d’autre oeil il faut que tu regarde; Destourne toy de ceste vaine chair, Et de l’aymer ainsi qu’as faict te garde. (p. 240, lines 67–72) – Alas, I hear your voice that comforts me! O Monseigneur, how that time is a long way off, when I will go to you: I wish to God I were dead! – My sister, you must look on this another way; turn away from this empty flesh and from your love which you have made your jailor.

The voices weave in and out of each other, with François struggling to instruct a sister who is not ready to understand. He tells her that he has come to help her overcome her ‘sot ennui dont tu fache[s] les anges’ (foolish grief which offends the angels, p. 255, line 401) as it betrays her misunderstanding of his blessed state by focusing on her own misery. He takes on the role of teacher in this dialogue – ‘Pour estre mieulx par ma parolle apprise’ (so that you are better taught by my words, line 402) – but she is not quite ready to hear him. He tells her that her love for him is misguided; it is another false object, an obstacle in the path to salvation. But Marguerite insists on mourning her loss and in summoning others to join her. She accepts that this is a dialogue of the deaf, that she is an inattentive pupil: ‘Ainsi je feiz, car en lieu d’acquerir / Par son parler aucun amandement, / Amour me feist ma douleur secourir’ (And so I do, for instead of acquiring through his talk amendment, love made me nourish my pain, p. 252, lines 337–9). The interweaving of voices in both La Navire and Le Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne is echoed in the formal patterning of the verse. Unusually for Marguerite (and indeed for French sixteenth-century poetry), these two poems are written in the terza rima form made famous by Dante’s Divine Comedy.14 La Navire, p. 237, line 1. Marguerite was familiar with Dante from her parents’ library: Jourda, Marguerite d’Angoulême, vol. 1, pp. 21 and 373–4. 13 14

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This is a slightly limping rhyme scheme of three-line verses in which the second line of one verse provides the rhyme for the first and third lines of the subsequent verse (aba/bcb/cdc, etc). Robert Cottrell characterises this rhyme scheme as particularly appropriate to Marguerite’s purpose, as it describes a progressive forward motion from one rhyme to another with a moment of sliding back: two steps forward, one step back.15 This is a motion that mimics the Christian’s lopsided journey towards enlightenment, and particularly Marguerite’s realisation that her grief is an obstacle in her spiritual ascent. The dialogues that recommend this journey are also necessarily lopsided, as the two interlocutors are speaking over the barrier of death, which is also a barrier to spiritual enlightenment. Charlotte and François can only indicate the right way to the left-behind Marguerite, they cannot ensure she takes it. Marguerite listens but she cannot fully understand. Marguerite explores this non-aligned type of dialogue in her plays. Theatre characteristically stages dialogue and encounter, and Marguerite’s plays in particular tend to eschew action for dialogue and discussion. Trop Prou Peu Moins is a difficult play to interpret, but one way of reading it is as a parable of miscommunication, transposed to a religious-political context in which embattled Evangelicals struggled to make themselves understood against the forces of conservatism and dogmatism. While Peu and Moins are foolish in the eyes of the vainglorious Trop and Prou, and indeed of the world, Trop and Prou are foolish in the eyes of God: this reversal was a favourite theme for French Evangelicals who found it in St Paul, who warns the Corinthians, ‘the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God’ (1 Cor. 3.19). Trop and Prou engage Peu and Moins in conversation only to mock them: ‘Devisons à ce mal vestu: / Il nous dira quelque soltise’ (Let’s talk with this badly dressed fellow: he’ll tell us something stupid), says Prou, to Trop’s approval.16 They immediately jeer at Peu and Moin’s horns that are poking through their hats; horns are a symbol of cuckoldry, as Prou points out, but Peu and Moins don’t seem to care. Trop and Prou have carefully hidden their long ears (symbols of foolishness but also espionage) for fear of ridicule. (Both of these appendages connect the characters to the disguises and masks of carnival, when the play would have been performed.) While Trop and Prou interrogate them on the reason for their joy, Peu and Moins respond with laughter, jokes, and puns (some of which are very obscure today). As Moins warns Prou towards the beginning of their conversation, ‘Vous ne le sçauriez deviner, / Et nous ne le vous povons dire’ (p. 171, lines 397–8; you will never guess, and we won’t be able to tell you). Trop and Prou cannot understand the content or even the form of these responses and refuse any suggestions that 15 16

Cottrell, Grammar of Silence, p. 54. Trop Prou Peu Moins, in Théâtre profane, pp. 150–201 (p. 168, lines 356–7).



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the other two make. As Peu points out, they do not know how to laugh with the heart (‘du coeur rire ne sçauriez’, line 428). Laughter here may signify many things, but in an evangelical reading it is a sign of Peu and Moins’s absolute trust in God and disregard for things of this world. This is a scene of miscommunication and misunderstanding that leaves Trop and Prou alone with their sadness and their fear. Peu and Moins make several attempts to communicate, but the obstacle lies as much in their inarticulacy as in Trop and Prou’s inability to hear (despite their large ears, which, as Moins points out, might be deaf so they cannot hear, lines 667– 8). For example, Peu and Moins both try to explain their laughter through a story (or perhaps a parable) but are unable to get beyond the first few words: ‘Il estoit au commencement …’ (p. 173, line 433; Once upon a time in the beginning), ‘Il estoit … Ha, je n’en puis plus!’ (line 436; Once upon … Ha, I can’t go on!), ‘Il estoit un …’ (line 439; ‘There was a …’) This fails to bridge the distance between the two pairs. Trop and Prou cannot let go of their attachment to the world and leave the stage with fear in their hearts; Peu and Moins go out ‘ensemble’, together. Unlike in L’Inquisiteur, where the Inquisitor is successfully converted through song, here no communication and no conversion take place. As a model of communication between different religions, it is bleak. The Heptameron stages a more complex and in many ways more successful dialogue.17 While the storytellers don’t always agree, and (like Trop, Prou, Peu, and Moins) speak from varying positions of mortification, they are nevertheless able to listen. The role of teacher is taken from more traditional dialogue forms and given to Oisille, who both reads the gospel to the group in the mornings and uses it to guide their discussions in the afternoons. But she is not the sole conduit of truth and enlightenment, nor does she always judge her audience correctly (for example, when she proposes only Bible study as their pastime in the Prologue), nor is she by any means infallible in her interpretations of the stories. In the years when religious dialogue and tolerance of difference became more intractable, less flexible, among French Protestants and Catholics, Marguerite explored ways of living and conversing together with different, even offensive, opinions in the Heptameron. Marguerite was a champion of dialogue as a route to religious concord. She was behind plans in the 1530s to invite the German Lutheran Philip Melanchthon and other Protestant reformers to France for a religious 17 The two classic studies of the Heptameron as dialogue are Marie-Madeleine de Garenderie, Le Dialogue des romanciers: Une Nouvelle Lecture de ‘L’Heptaméron’ de Marguerite de Navarre (Paris: Minard, 1977) and Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani, La Conversation conteuse: Les Nouvelles de Marguerite de Navarre (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1992). See also Philippe de Lajarte, ‘L’Heptaméron’ de Marguerite de Navarre: ‘En bien nous mirant’ (Paris: Champion, 2019).

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colloquy – a public debate in which Evangelicals and Protestants would have been able to defend and discuss their faith and ideas.18 This colloquy never happened, and as the years passed both sides’ inability to tolerate opposing beliefs made coexistence an increasingly distant dream. In 1562, Catherine de Medici, then regent, invited Théodore de Bèze and other prominent reformers to a debate in France in the hope of achieving some compromise between the two religious positions. The Colloquy of Poissy was not a success: on the contentious subject of the Eucharist, Bèze delivered a speech that the Catholic cardinals considered blasphemous, and Catholic proposals fell on deaf Protestant ears. From this perspective of intolerance and intransigence, the Heptameron reads as an attempt to reanimate the idea of dialogue in the literary sphere, staging the difficulties of hostile opinion and the efforts to accommodate it. It is not all about finding a happy compromise in the Heptameron: sometimes the storytellers must register another’s uncomfortable opinion and find a way to accommodate it. Storytelling itself plays a vital role here: at the end of the discussion after nouvelle 12, when Saffredent has been more frank than usual in his cynical view of seduction (this is where he says men use words like honour and virtue as traps for unwary women), he eventually agrees to be quiet and let the next story be told: ‘n’en parlons plus, afin que ma collere ne face desplaisir, ny à moy, ny à autre. Regardons à qui Dagoucin donnera sa voix’ (p. 213; ‘let’s say no more about it, lest I get angry, and upset myself and others too. Let’s see who Dagoucin will choose to tell the next story’, p. 165). Saffredent is permitted, in the constant movement of stories, to keep his offensive opinion, despite others’ opposition to it. Parlamente, who tells the next story, implicitly counters him with a tale about a woman for whom honour and virtue are not token words, contextualising and challenging Saffredent’s position and therefore rendering it less powerful. While the Heptameron sometimes progresses like a dialogue, with stories told to prove a point and then picked apart to test it, it is also less formally a conversation, in which literary markers of orality abound and communication between the storytellers takes forms other than words. The most obvious literary model for this narrative of oral storytelling is Boccaccio’s Decameron, but there are many other examples of texts that purport to be the transcription of (sometimes illicitly) overheard conversations.19 The late fifteenth-century Burgundian Evangiles des quenouilles (Distaff Gospels) claims to be the record, by a male scribe, of a group of peasant women’s conversations. Other collections of sixteenth-century French short stories are also framed around Reid, King’s Sister, pp. 436–46. See Kathleen Loysen, Conversation and Storytelling in Fifteenth- and SixteenthCentury French ‘Nouvelles’ (New York: Peter Lang, 2004). 18 19



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a scribe who records the stories he hears, such as Noël du Fail’s 1547 Propos rustiques (Rustic Conversations), like the Evangiles a visitor’s transcription of illiterate peasants’ stories, or Bonaventure des Périers’s Nouvelles Récréations et joyeux devis (New Recreations and Joyous Conversations, 1558). Unlike these examples, the Heptameron does not foreground a principal or general narrator (as we will see below) but gives the floor to the storytellers. The markers of spoken language are frequent, almost too numerous to mention: ‘je vous diray une histoire’ (p. 127; ‘I shall tell a story’, p. 97); ‘Je vous prie, mes dames, pensez’ (p. 131; ‘Now consider this story carefully, Ladies’, p. 100); ‘Escoutez doncques’ (p. 133; ‘So, if you will listen …’ p. 101). The final words of the text as we have it refer to this context of oral storytelling, as Nomerfide introduces the seventy-third story: ‘Or, escoutez le bien’ (p. 697; ‘So please all listen carefully’, p. 543). This is not to suggest that the Heptameron is a real transcription of oral storytelling, any more than Du Fail’s Propos rustiques are transcripts of country tales, although we shouldn’t rule out the possibility that Marguerite did collect stories from her circle for her book. These indications are carefully constructed literary markers of an oral context. The Heptameron is an exploration of how conversation works, as well as of its didactic potential. The atmosphere of intimate conversation is conjured through other non-verbal indications such as coughing, glancing, and blushing. The storytellers form a group of intersecting and competing loyalties and rivalries: marriage, friendship, courtly devotion. The male storytellers repeatedly propose stories to communicate their devotion to a female storyteller (Simontaut’s nouvelle 1, Dagoucin’s nouvelle 24, and Saffredent’s nouvelle 61). But all the storytellers are aware of the impact their stories have on their immediate audience. Hircan refuses to tell a story about himself in case it hurts his wife, and instead tells nouvelle 7 about a wily merchant and a young girl. Longarine makes Hircan and Saffredent very angry when she suggests her nouvelle 8 (about a man who accidentally cuckolds himself) should give them pause for thought. The very first story is dropped into an atmosphere of expectation and embarrassment as Simontaut directs a barbed comment at his beloved, Parlamente: ‘A ceste parolle, Parlamente l’entendit très bien, qui se print à tousser; parquoy Hircan ne s’apperceut de la couleur qui luy venoit aux joucs’ (p. 92; ‘Parlamente knew very well what he meant by this remark, and started to cough. Hircan did not notice the colour rising in her cheeks’, p. 70). What the translator, Paul Chilton, misses out here is Parlamente’s potential intentionality. Hircan doesn’t notice her blush because (‘parquoy’) she is coughing; but that ‘parquoy’ could also suggest that Parlamente starts coughing so that Hircan does not notice her blushing. This is an example of what cognitive science and the literary critics who draw on it call theory

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of mind, or mind-reading.20 Theory of mind is the ability to attribute mental states to other people and to act accordingly. In this instance, Parlamente is able to imagine what her husband might think if he sees her blushing at Simontaut’s remark, and she gives him another reason for her colouring. Simontaut has said, ‘Pleust à Dieu que je n’eusse bien en ce monde que de povoir commander à toute ceste compaignye!’ (p. 92; ‘Would to God that the one thing in all the world I had were the power to order everyone in our party to comply with my wishes!’ p. 70). He is also hoping and imagining that his words will be interpreted in different ways by different members of the group; as Parlamente’s serviteur he is signalling his desire to shift the relationship so that he, and not she, is able to give orders. But there is another participant in the activity of mind-reading in this scene, and that is the reader. While Parlamente’s coughing is potentially camouflage for her evident emotion at Simontaut’s remark, the Heptameron text only implies this intention, leaving it up to the reader to supply the possible reasons for her behaviour. We are drawn into the conversation in this way, sharing the complex (but often preconscious) interpretations of words and gestures of the storytellers. Saffredent is a master at the hidden implication, and he often makes use of another storyteller to convey a message to his beloved, Longarine. When he responds to Ennasuite that, although he is getting old, his ardour is as strong as ever, ‘ung de la compaignye’ (p. 117; ‘one of the ladies’, p. 89) starts to laugh, because Ennasuite is mistaken in believing that this remark is addressed to her. Saffredent, we are told, is pleased to see his covert message delivered to the correct place: ‘quant Saffredent apperceut que celle qui ryoit l’entendoit, il s’en tint trop content’ (p. 117; ‘When Saffredent saw that she was laughing and that she had understood him, he was highly pleased’, p. 89). As readers, we grasp the complexity of these beliefs and inferences unconsciously, but if we were to try to recreate the chain of suppositions, we might paraphrase (rather clumsily) that here ‘Saffredent is pleased that Longarine knows that Ennasuite is wrong to think that Saffredent is talking about her’.21 Poor Ennasuite again acts as Saffredent’s decoy at the beginning of Day 7, when he directs his soulful gaze at her rather than at Longarine and makes her blush. Saffredent is able to discern that ‘il n’en fut moins entendu du lieu où il desiroit estre oy’ (p. 612; ‘[h]is remark went home none the less to the person for whom it had been intended’, p. 477). Saffredent counts on Ennasuite understanding his 20 Cognitive criticism is a rapidly developing field in literary studies. On theory of mind as a literary tool, see Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006); and on cognitive theories of literature, Terence Cave, Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 21 On these levels of ‘intentional suppositions’, see Cave, Thinking with Literature, pp. 112–14.



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remarks in a certain way and manifesting that understanding so that he can communicate covertly with Longarine. Here it is not clear whether Ennasuite takes Saffredent to be addressing her, or whether she blushes simply to be looked at in such a significant way. In either case, her body’s involuntary gestures (blushing) are integral to the conversation and to how it is understood by participants and by readers. Narrative Voice We have seen in the previous section how Marguerite establishes a conversation in the Heptameron between ten differentiated voices. In this section, we will examine the question of narrative voice in a more technical sense. In Marguerite’s Heptameron, like Boccaccio’s Decameron and other similar collections of stories, we can distinguish between two levels of narration. The intradiegetic narrators are voices that inhabit the world of the fiction: in the Heptameron, the storytellers in the meadow, taking it in turns to narrate a story. They inhabit what critics call the ‘frame narrative’, that is, the framing story that explains why they are telling this sequence of stories and how they got to the place where they do so. The primary narrator in the Heptameron is extradiegetic, that is, external to the fiction, and comments infrequently on the action from the outside. In other collections of stories, the primary narrator might be included within the frame narrative, like the scribe who listens to the conversations and writes them down; in both cases, the primary narrator may also mould, shape, and present the finished, written collection to an audience of readers. Marguerite’s use of different voices and her staging of storytelling as a conversation is very similar to that of her model, Boccaccio’s Decameron, which also weaves stories into an ongoing conversation between the storytellers. The discussions in the Heptameron are longer than those in the Decameron, and arguably hold the key to the way in which the stories should be interpreted, through dialogue and discussion. In these discussions, the individual voices of the storytellers can be heard clearly: Saffredent is caustic and cynical, Hircan aggressive and entitled, Nomerfide slightly foolish and unthinking, Longarine reflective and thoughtful. The voices of the intradiegetic storytellers are clearly recognisable and their different points of view are explored with no attempt at ultimate agreement. The effect created is a polyphony: a text in which different voices can be heard, sometimes harmonising, sometimes in discord. This is an effect that Marguerite also deploys in her theatre, where different voices can be even more dramatically staged. We saw above the failed communication between characters symbolising fanaticism and those symbolising charity in Trop Prou. In La Comédie des quatre femmes, something closer to real voices is achieved (and, indeed, something closer to the Heptameron) as four women articulate their beliefs, hopes, and experiences.

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What is less distinct in the Heptameron is the voice of the primary extradiegetic narrator. This impersonal narrator describes the events in the Prologue through which the ten storytellers gather together in the monastery, characterises each storyteller with a relatively light touch, and reports the agreement of their storytelling project. After the Prologue, the primary narrator disappears almost entirely from view. This is in contrast to Boccaccio’s Decameron, whose primary narrator (who is called the Autore, the Author) speaks in the voice of a literary man of the world and offers his book to women unhappy in love as a kind of consolation for their misery.22 Boccaccio’s Autore intervenes in the fictional world of the text through commentary, and he shapes the text’s destiny in the external world through the dedication to ladies in love. Neither of these things are as clear or explicit in Marguerite’s Heptameron. The idea to present the completed one hundred tales to the royal originators of the storytelling project could feasibly be Marguerite’s intention for her book, an attempt to regain favour after the accession of Henri II.23 But it is articulated by an internal storyteller (Parlamente) within the confines of the frame narrative. The storytelling project itself is introduced as a collective one, both in its original version at the royal court and in its reiteration in the monastery in Sarrance. We might nevertheless be inclined to identify the primary narrator with Marguerite, especially if we are reading a printed edition or a manuscript that gives her name alongside the title. The Prologue is, after all, written in the first person: ‘Ma fin n’est de vous declarer la situation ne la vertu desdits baings, mais seullement de racompter ce qui sert à la matière que je veulx escripre’ (p. 77; ‘it is not my purpose here to expatiate on the powers of these waters and their fine situation. I wish merely to relate those details which will serve the subject I have in hand’, p. 60). Although the primary narrator does not draw attention to herself in the rest of the Prologue, and subsequently effaces herself almost entirely from the narrative, here she claims, like Boccaccio, a degree of control and mastery over what is narrated and its purpose. The storytellers deploy a range of narrative techniques in the telling of their tales. They are highly conscious of their immediate audience and frequently address the listeners directly, who they know are judging and interpreting their story. They seem to have access to every detail of their stories, and quote letters, songs, and long speeches. They take the position of omniscient narrators, able to slip into the thoughts and intentions of their protagonists. These psychological 22 Elizabeth C. Wright, ‘Marguerite Reads Giovanni: Gender and Narration in the Heptaméron and the Decameron’, Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme 15.1 (Winter 1991), 21–36 (p. 23). 23 On Marguerite’s precarious position (financially and politically) after the death of François I, see Jourda, Marguerite d’Angoulême, vol. 1, pp. 319–26; Cholakian and Cholakian, Marguerite de Navarre, pp. 282–5.



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states are conveyed sometimes through direct discourse (in which the words or the thoughts of the character are transcribed as a quotation), sometimes through indirect discourse (the storyteller explains what a character was thinking or saying), and sometimes through an imaginative leap into the mind of the character (anticipating what literary critics call style indirect libre). For example, nouvelle 18 is told by Hircan when Oisille requests a story in praise of male virtue. It is the story of a young scholar who falls in love with a beautiful woman, who sets him a series of tasks of self-control and discipline before she will grant his desire. Hircan’s narrative style is highly interventionist. He tells us from the start that the woman is no less in love with the student than he with her, and, although ‘honte’ (‘Modesty’; literally, shame) prevents her from immediately acquiescing, Hircan explicitly anticipates a happy ending for his protagonist (‘Mais elle, qui estoit vaincue d’amour, n’avoit poinct besoing de force’, p. 271; ‘But already the lady was conquered. There was no need of force’, p. 214). The student, of course, doesn’t know this; he is a timid and inexperienced young man, Hircan tells us. This explicit revelation of the lady’s state of mind, unknown at this point to her suitor, sets up a complicity between the storyteller and his audience: he lets us into a narrative secret and assumes that we will recognise the scenario he is describing. The fact that the suitor does not know the happy outcome in advance sets up a situation of dramatic irony in which the audience and reader know more than the character; we thus feel the intensity of his reactions to the tests from a place of emotional and narrative safety. At the very beginning of the story, Hircan addresses his audience directly, inviting prejudgement on his tale: Vous, qui sçavez le prompt chemin que faict ce feu quant il se prent à ung des boutz du cueur et de la fantaisie, vous jugerez bien que entre deux si parfaictz subjectz n’arresta gueres Amour, qu’il ne les eust à son commandement … (p. 270) Those of you who know how quickly the fire of love spreads when it starts to smoulder in the heart and in the imagination will understand that once Love enters two such perfect subjects, he never stops until he has rendered them obedient to his commands … (p. 214)

The immediate group of listeners and secondarily readers are thus constituted as a group of like-minded individuals: we know the story. Given that Hircan’s stories are often calculated to show the similarity between male and female desire, and to condemn women for their dissimulation of this shared condition, this group seems gendered masculine, who know the story because we (they?) know what women are like.

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In the first half of the story, Hircan conveys his characters’ thoughts and speech indirectly. The lady’s first test is a night in bed together when they will only talk and kiss, nothing more, however much she encourages him. The student passes this test although it is a ‘purgatoire’ (p. 271; ‘purgatory’, p. 215) for him. At this point, Hircan intervenes with a loaded comment. ‘La dame, comme je croys, plus esmerveillée que contente de ce bien …’ (p. 272; ‘the lady was, I think, more astonished than pleased by his upright behaviour’, p. 215). He has passed the test, but the lady (Hircan ironically notes) is rather displeased at his virtue. The next test is more cruel, as it involves a third party. The lady instructs the student to pay court to a girl in her household, who promptly falls in love with him; Hircan comments, again ironically, that she ‘creut sa mensonge plus que une autre verité’ (p. 272; ‘believed his lies rather than the truth’; the French also implies that she believed his lies as if they were the truth, thus casting more doubt on the sincerity of love’s vows). Here, the narrative accelerates with a sequence in direct discourse, as the lady sets up an assignation, substituting the girl for herself, which culminates in the contemptuous outburst of the misled student: ‘Vostre follye et la malice de celle qui vous a mise là, ne me sçauroit faire aultre que je suis; mais mectez peyne d’estre femme de bien; car, par mon occasion, ne perdrez poinct ce bon nom’ (pp. 273–4; ‘I shall not be made other than I am either by your wild desires or by the wicked one who put you here! Seek to be an honest woman, for by no act of mine shall your good name be lost!’ p. 216). This instance of direct discourse plunges us into the scene as witnesses to the young man’s anger. We are invited to admire his virtue and righteous passion and to feel that he fully deserves the reward his lady finally bestows. Hircan’s narratorial comments, the distance and proximity at which he holds his characters, and the voice of the young man towards the end of the story help him make his point about masculine steadfast virtue. Hircan’s direct address to his listeners – ‘Vous, qui sçavez …’ – is rather unusual in the Heptameron because it implies at least a mixed, and perhaps an exclusively male, group. The audience for these tales is almost always gendered feminine. Both male and female storytellers sum up their tales in the same way: ‘mes dames, regardez …’ (Simontaut, nouvelle 1); ‘Voylà, mes dames …’ (Oisille, nouvelle 2); ‘mes dames, pensez …’ (Geburon, nouvelle 5); ‘voyez-vous, mes dames’ (Nomerfide, nouvelle 6). This seems, as Cathleen Bauschatz has argued, directed primarily at the women storytellers inside the narrative frame; the reader, who appears briefly in the Prologue addressed as ‘vous’, disappears along with the primary narrator.24 But it has implications for the readership. This address to a female audience is a convention evident in Boccaccio’s dedication to women readers and his inclusion of women 24

Bauschatz, ‘“Voylà, mes dames …”’.



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storytellers and listeners. In the Heptameron, the storyteller often invites the women listeners to meditate on the exemplary and moral message of the story, but this is not a one-way didactic process. As we have seen, the discussions are places where men and women can reflect on the stories they have just heard and the moralities they may contain. This gives the women storytellers freedom to reinterpret the stories that are told to control their behaviour; and, as storytellers themselves, they are given the right to reply (as when, for example, Oisille tells nouvelle 2 in order to refute Simontaut’s account of women in nouvelle 1). Sometimes, the male storytellers are invited in their turn to reflect on the implications of a story for their own behaviour, as when Longarine warns Hircan and Saffredent that their infidelity to their wives might have consequences after her nouvelle 8. Their reaction – anger and outrage – may suggest that as men they are not accustomed to scrutinising their own actions in the light of moralising stories. However, the overall structure of the Heptameron works rather to encourage both men and women to engage in an active interpretation of the stories they hear. Nouvelles The Heptameron is, among many other things, a reflection on how narratives signify and what telling stories means. The stories told are comptes (accounts/ stories) in that they hold their tellers to account by revealing their motivations and intentions. Other terms used to designate the tales are nouvelle (novella/ story) and histoire (history/story). In the next two sections, I will consider these two terms and excavate some of their generic expectations and implications. When the Heptameron was printed for the second time in 1558, edited by Claude Gruget, it was given the name it still has today, L’Heptaméron des nouvelles (The Heptameron of Stories).25 Nouvelles indicated a generic category: the short story or novella. In France, Marguerite’s immediate precursors in the genre were the anonymous fifteenth-century Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles (One Hundred New Novellas) and Philippe de Vigneulles’s 1515 Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, both of which advertise their debt to Boccaccio, whose Decameron is a collection of novellas (or novelle in Italian); had she finished it, Marguerite might also have called her collection Cent Nouvelles. The genre remained popular during the civil wars, when the wars themselves took the place of plague or floods as the surrounding threat, and storytelling tended to be presented nostalgically as an activity belonging to the time of 25 Nouvelles also feature in the titles of some of the manuscripts; others mention comptes and histoires. Adrien de Thou entitled his 1553 manuscript the Décaméron and left blank pages at the end for the missing twenty-eight stories. For a description of the manuscripts, see Heptaméron, ed. Salminen, pp. xi–xxviii.

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peace in collections by, for example, Jacques Yver, Bénigne Poissenot, and Guillaume Bouchet. Novellas were short narrative fictions with a relatively recent, everyday, local setting rather than the sweeping scenery and temporality of the epic or the romance.26 They depicted recognisable people in the contemporary world wrestling with or resolving or circumventing common problems and dilemmas. They did not tend to portray quests, monsters, or magic. In nouvelle 10, where Amadour alternates between winning his fortune on the battlefields of Europe and managing his love intrigues in the domesticated setting of the court, he is caught between the plot of the romance and the nouvelle. However, as Edwin M. Duval has pointed out, this was not the only – or indeed the primary – sense of the French nouvelle in the early sixteenth century.27 As well as a literary term borrowed from the Italian novella, a nouvelle was a piece of news or the report of something new. Nouvelles were what you might ask for when you saw a friend after a long time or met a traveller from far away. ‘Quelles nouvelles?’ was, according to François Rabelais, the greeting that was customarily on all French people’s lips.28 Even in the early seventeenth century, when Randle Cotgrave was compiling his French–English dictionary, he passed over the literary sense of the word to focus on its more mundane meanings: ‘A novell, newes; tidings; an (unexpected) message; a strange report; a discourse, or tale unheard of before’.29 There was also a connotation of strangeness and unexpectedness (as in Cotgrave’s definition above): in medieval usage, a ‘novele’ was a new, unexpected, or surprising account. In the sixteenth century, nouvelles were news: quite simply accounts of recent events. As Duval argues, this means that Marguerite’s nouvelles are not versions of the Italian novelle that happen to be true; rather, the discussion in the Heptameron Prologue implies that the Italian novelle are degenerate nouvelles that have abandoned truthfulness for literary fiction.30 The term nouvelle is used in both the literary sense of story and the everyday sense of news throughout the Heptameron. Parlamente introduces the storytelling project in the Prologue as a French version of ‘les Nouvelles de Bocace’ (p. 89; ‘the hundred tales by Boccaccio’, p. 68) and Oisille asks Saffredent to tell the ‘tierce Nouvelle’ (p. 108; ‘the [third] story’, p. 82). When at the end of nouvelle 10 Amadour dies, ‘[l]es nouvelles en coururent par 26 On the nouvelle as a genre, see Gabriel-André Pérouse, Nouvelles françaises du XVIe siècle: Images de la vie du temps (Geneva: Droz, 1977). 27 Edwin M. Duval, ‘“Et puis, quelles nouvelles?”’. 28 Rabelais, Pantagrueline Prognostication, in Œuvres complètes, pp. 923–35 (p. 923); ‘What’s the news?’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, p. 174. 29 Cotgrave, Dictionarie, art. ‘nouvelle’. 30 Duval, ‘“Et puis”’, p. 244.



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toute l’Espaigne, tant que Floride […] en oyt le bruict’ (p. 195; ‘[t]he news of his death spread throughout Spain, and eventually reached Florida’, p. 152). Nouvelles here is not the story of his death, but news of it; what Floride hears is the related but more uncertain term bruit, rumour (literally ‘noise’). Indeed, nouvelle 10 is full of these kind of nouvelles and bruits, as Amadour follows the war around Europe and news of his exploits filters back to Floride in Spain. In addition to this everyday oral tradition, nouvelles was also the name given to the news-sheets that began to flood France (and indeed Europe) after the invention of printing to satisfy a demand for accounts of recent events. French people in the early sixteenth century could have picked up from itinerant pedlars in the streets printed sheets and pamphlets with titles like Les Nouvelles de Monsieur d’Orléans du 15 juin (News of M. d’Orléans of 15 June), Plusieurs Nouvelles envoyees de Napples a Monseigneur de Borbon (Several Pieces of News Sent from Naples to Monseigneur de Bourbon), Nouvelles bonnes lesquelles sont produictes et venues d’orient (Good News from the Orient), Nouvelles de Rome touchant l’Empereur (News from Rome concerning the Emperor).31 The news itself was a developing genre in the early sixteenth century; some of the more discursive news genres such as the sensationalist pamphlets known as canards were concerned with the same issues that Marguerite discusses in the Prologue to the Heptameron, namely, truthfulness, authority, and attribution. There is one final sense of nouvelle that informs the Heptameron and the stories that are told. This is the ‘bonne nouvelle’ or good news of the gospel (évangile in French, from the Greek euangelion, meaning good news). The ‘gospel of Jesus Christ, the son of God’ (Mark 1.1) is the coming of the Messiah who brings salvation and marks the beginning of the kingdom of God. Oisille uses the term ‘nouvelle’ explicitly in this sense in the Prologue when she suggests as their daily activity reading the Bible, ‘la Saincte Escripture’, ‘ceste saincte parolle et bonne nouvelle’ (p. 87; ‘holy Scripture’, ‘the holy word and the good news’, p. 66). The term ‘nouvelle’ may have evoked particularly the news of Jesus’s birth, in French ‘Noël’, and the songs also known as ‘noëls’ that were traditionally sung at Christmas, the feast that celebrates the birth of the Messiah.32 The structure of the storytellers’ days in the monastery in Sarrance encourages a comparison between the mundane 31 Les Nouvelles de Monsieur d’Orléans du 15 juin [Paris: Pierre Le Dru, after 1495]; Plusieurs Nouvelles envoyees de Napples a Monseigneur de Borbon (Lyon: [J. du Pré], 1495); Nouvelles bonnes lesquelles sont produictes et venues d’orient ([Rouen]: Jean Richard, [1517]); Nouvelles de Rome touchant l’Empereur (Antwerp: M. de Hoochstraten, 1536). 32 Gabriel-André Pérouse, ‘Des Nouvelles “vrayes comme evangile”: Réflexions sur la présentation du récit bref au XVIe siècle’, in La Nouvelle, ed. Bernard Alluin and François Suard (Lille: Presses universitaires de Lille, 1990), pp. 89–99.

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‘news’ of the fallen world, which is discussed in the afternoons, and the holy ‘good news’ of Scripture, which is read and discussed in the mornings. Edwin Duval argues that the project of the Heptameron and its focus on love is an attempt to negotiate between these two kinds of ‘news’, to answer the fundamental question, ‘How can we live in the world of news, yet still live according to the Word of the Good News?’33 This negotiation between nouvelle as news story and nouvelle as gospel requires work. It is work that the storytellers undertake in the discussions, teasing out the actions and motivations of the characters as well as the underlying ideologies and assumptions. The discussions provide a space of discrimination where distinctions can be made between the good and the bad and the shades in between.34 Telling, hearing, and discussing nouvelles is a training of the faculty of judgement that supports the negotiation between ‘the world of news’ and ‘the Word of the Good News’. As the storytellers debate motives, discuss meaning, and contest the exemplary power of particular stories, they talk about the impact of stories on their own lives and relationships; but they also explicitly discuss salvation and scandal, and the relationship between human love and divine love. We have seen how the Neoplatonic paradigm provides one model on which to move from the human to the divine. On a different level, the crimes of the Franciscans prompt reflection on the responsibility and scandalous hypocrisy of preachers and teachers. Less obviously, perhaps, the storytellers also take the opportunity of more ordinary or farcical tales to remind each other of human insignificance, the crucial evangelical teaching that promotes absolute faith in God alone. Nouvelle 34 is a comic tale about two Franciscans who misunderstand an innkeeper’s conversation and think that he is going to kill them, which makes the listeners laugh. The discussion takes off when Oisille wonders why we laugh at foolishness, through Geburon’s reflections on classical virtue to Parlamente’s insistence on human pride, which prompts Oisille’s gloss on Romans, Hircan’s suggestion that men are less proud and hypocritical than women, and Longarine’s proposal that divine grace reveals rather than conceals human faults in order better to amend them. The discussion is wide ranging and serious, as Simontaut claims in comic mode: ‘en partant d’une très grande follye, nous sommes tombez en la philosophie et theologie’ (p. 440; ‘We started with folly and we end up with philosophy and theology’, pp. 344–5). Similarly, nouvelle 65 is a short comic story about an old woman who mistakes a sleeping soldier for a statue in a dark church and tries to fix a votive candle to his forehead. While Hircan and Saffredent 33 34

Duval, ‘“Et puis”’, p. 254. Thysell, Pleasure of Discernment, ch. 5; Butterworth, Unbridled Tongue, ch. 4.



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want to take the opportunity to mock women’s stupidity, Oisille turns to the problem of intention and the possibility of reconciling Catholic ceremony with evangelical belief.35 But it is not just the explicitly theological discussions that train judgement and develop discrimination. Debate itself is a practice that hones both, as the storytellers identify points of discussion, parse assumptions, and speculate on motivations. This includes a meta-discursive element in which the reason for telling tales is itself put under scrutiny. This begins in the Prologue with the conception of the stories as a gift, part of the courtly economy, that will be brought back from the mountains and put into circulation (and presumably increase the credit of the storytellers). The protagonist of nouvelle 62 attempts to exploit this cultural economy of storytelling, but unfortunately falls foul of the unspoken rules governing what stories should be about. The debate that follows nouvelle 12 explores the politics of telling tales and exploiting their emotional impact. As we saw in Chapter 4, this is the sensational news story of Alessandro de’ Medici’s murder by his cousin Lorenzino; the Heptameron storytellers debate the story along gendered lines, with the women defending the assassin as a ‘bon frere et vertueux citoyen’ and the men condemning him as a ‘traistre et meschant serviteur’ (p. 211; ‘a good brother and a virtuous citizen’; ‘a traitor and a bad servant’, p. 163). These positions echo those that were held by Lorenzino’s defenders and accusers after the assassination. The storytellers thus model the various reactions sparked by the news. The primary narrator – making an unusual appearance in the transcription of the debates – puts this down to the women’s emotional engagement with the topic. ‘Mais les dames, selon leur coustume, parloient autant par passion que par raison’ (p. 211; ‘But the ladies, as is their wont, spoke as much from passion as from reason’, p. 163). This initially appears to be an instance of an old misogynist trope about women’s argument as irrational and emotional; but there is also a suggestion that the women’s response is actually appropriate to the story and the situation it describes. If the men seek, without much reflection, to uphold a traditional perspective on feudal loyalty and submission, it is the women’s passion that excavates those unexamined assumptions and holds them up to the spotlight. They refuse to be side-tracked when Dagoucin attempts to change the terms of debate back to the courtly relationship, which is itself, of course, political, in that it supports a certain social construction and gendered hierarchy. What the women’s emotional response reminds us is that nouvelles (in the sense of news as well as tales) are interpreted as much by passion as they are by reason. The Heptameron maps these reactions, too, in all their untidy rawness.

35

Francis, ‘Marguerite de Navarre, a Nicodemite?’.

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Histoires The Heptameron storytellers also refer to their tales as histoires. In fact, when the collection was first printed in 1558, edited by Pierre Boaistuau, it was given the title Les Histoires des amans fortunez (Histories of Fortunate Lovers), which, apart from being a singularly inaccurate description of the Heptameron, aligns it with a different tradition: histoires and histoire (history). Boaistuau was a prolific writer, editor, and translator whose edition represented a significant reworking of the manuscripts and is very different from the Heptameron we read today, consisting only of the tales and the Prologue, omitting the discussions. Boaistuau and his commissioners believed, then, that the interest of Marguerite’s collection lay in the stories and not in the debates, and this would have been how most sixteenth-century people would have read it, if Claude Gruget’s edition had not come out the following year (we will explore the publishing history of the Heptameron in more detail in the Conclusion). Histoires became associated with a different narrative genre from nouvelles. The histoire tragique, a sensational, often violent, short narrative featuring cruelty and revenge, became extremely popular in France in the second half of the sixteenth century, after the same Pierre Boaistuau published the first edition of Histoires tragiques in 1559 (the year after his edition of the Heptameron). Boaistuau was also the inaugurator in 1560 of another genre of histoire, the histoire prodigieuse, which specialised in fantastic and prodigious stories of monsters and miracles also largely drawn from news pamphlets.36 But histoire means more than ‘story’: it is also, of course, history.37 Like the news, and like the novella, historiography was a developing genre in the sixteenth century. The confessional polemic and conflict of the religious wars prompted historians’ concerns with truth, authority, and partiality. The Heptameron’s concern with the provenance and attribution of its stories is one it shares with the historians who were at this time developing a theory of history.38 Writers like Jean Bodin and other ‘New Historians’ promoted a model of history writing that was founded on the historian’s emotional distance from the material.39 This posture took on added significance and difficulty when the history to be written was that of the ongoing polarised and partisan religious wars. This difficulty extended to the reliability of historical sources, as Pierre Matthieu points out in his early seventeenth-century Histoire de France:

36 Pierre Boaistuau, Histoires prodigieuses (édition de 1561), ed. Stephen Bamforth and Jean Céard (Geneva: Droz, 2010). 37 ‘A Historie, Storie, Chronicle, Relation’: Cotgrave, Dictionarie, art. ‘histoire’. 38 Anthony Grafton, What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 39 Andrea Frisch, Forgetting Differences: Tragedy, Historiography, and the French Wars of Religion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), p. 68.



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Il ne peut estre, que ceux qui entreprennent d’escrire ce qu’ils ont veu ou par leurs yeux ou par ceux d’autruy, n’y rencontrent de grandes difficultés, parce que des choses qu’ils n’ont pas veu, le rapport n’est jamais si net, qu’il ne ressente la passion de ceux qui les publient …40 It cannot be, that those who undertake to write about what they have seen with their own eyes or through the eyes of another, will not meet with great difficulties, for the report of the things that they haven’t seen is never so clear that it doesn’t betray the passion of those who broadcast it.

Matthieu wrote this history for Henri IV as royal historiographer after having renounced his own passionate position as a supporter of the anti-royalist Catholic League.41 The passage quoted above is from the first page of his ‘Advertissement’ (Notice) to the reader, and he overcomes his difficulties relatively quickly. He does so through his faith in the aristocratic code of truthfulness that he attributes to the ‘premiers Seigneurs de ce royaume’ (principal Lords of this kingdom) and other noblemen whom he consulted for his data. This recourse to aristocratic good faith is similar to the Heptameron storytellers’ reliance for the truth of their stories on their own experience or the testimony of ‘quelque homme digne de foy’ (p. 91; ‘[some man] worthy of belief’, p. 69). The class implications of this belief are made explicit by Longarine in her introduction to nouvelle 25, the story about François I and the lawyer’s wife which rather disproves her axiom that princes and great lords are honour-bound to tell the truth.42 Attribution and the passionate engagement of the writer were also concerns of the histoires tragiques. Pierre Boaistuau’s Histoires tragiques of 1559 were translations of six stories published by the Italian Dominican monk Matteo Bandello under the title Novelle. The histoires tragiques were a publishing sensation in France in the second half of the sixteenth century, the taste for portentous and violent narratives responding perhaps to the dark climate of civil war. François de Belleforest added more translations to Boaistuau’s collection in 1570 and other writers followed their lead: Alexandre Sylvain’s Epitomes de cent histoires tragicques (Summaries of One Hundred Tragic Histories, 1581), Vérité Habanc’s Nouvelles Histoires tant tragiques que comiques (New 40 Pierre Matthieu, Histoire de France et des choses memorables, aduenues aux provinces estrangeres durant sept annees de Paix, du regne de Henry IIII Roy de France & de Navarre. Divisee en sept livres (Paris: Jamet Metayer and Mathieu Guillemot, 1605), p. ar. 41 On Matthieu, see Frisch, Forgetting Differences, pp. 79–94. 42 Longarine says that lying is particularly ugly in ‘princes et grands seigneurs, en la bouche et contenance desquelz la verité est mieulx seante que en nul autre’ (p. 364; ‘princes and high-born lords, for it is fitting that they of all people should have truth on their lips and in their eyes’, p. 284).

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Histories both Tragic and Comic, 1585), and Bénigne Poissenot’s Nouvelles Histoires tragiques (1586). Later on, François de Rousset turned to the truecrime pamphlets known as canards for his collection, Les Histoires tragiques de nostre temps (Tragic Histories of our Time, 1615). There was some movement between the Heptameron and the histoires tragiques. Matteo Bandello is thought to have heard or read an early version of the Heptameron in manuscript when he came to French Navarre as bishop of Agen in 1550. At least nine of his novellas resemble stories in the Heptameron, including a version of nouvelle 23; what is in the Heptameron a warning about the vicious predations of the friars becomes in Bandello’s longer version (II.24) a more general claim about the destructive power of love. François de Belleforest included an extended version of nouvelle 67 in his fifth volume of Histoires tragiques, in which he moved away from translating Bandello and towards narratives (as the subtitle of his book has it) of choses advenuës de nostre temps (things that happened in our time).43 With Belleforest, the histoire tragique becomes a chronicle of French troubles and anxieties during the Wars of Religion, and his insistence on the contemporary nature of his chronicle is an echo of Marguerite’s definition of the nouvelle. Hervé Campangne argues that the relationship between the two is so clear that Belleforest must have had two books on his writing table: Bandello’s Novelle and Marguerite’s Heptameron.44 The six histoires tragiques that Pierre Boaistuau chose to translate from Bandello are all, like all but four of the sixty-seven stories in his edition of the Heptameron, stories about the destructive and alienating power of love, including the story of Romeo and Juliet (histoire 3).45 Although he acknowledges in his preface to the reader that the term ‘tragique’ may not apply exactly to his stories, they are, like classical tragedy, calculated to provoke emotional reactions of fear and compassion in the reader.46 Hervé Campangne describes the histoire tragique as fundamentally theatrical, dwelling on the spectacle of human suffering in order to provoke a strong emotional response and adopting the vocabulary of the stage.47 Furthermore, in the Histoires tragiques Boaistuau takes a didactic tone, making the moral of each story explicit in 43 François de Belleforest, Le Cinquiesme Tome des Histoires Tragiques, contenant un discours memorable de plusieurs Histoires, le succez & evenement desquelles est pour la plus part recueilly des choses advenuës de nostre temps (Paris: Jean Hulpeau, 1572), histoire 3. 44 Hervé Thomas Campangne, ‘Marguerite de Navarre and the Invention of the Histoire Tragique’, in Approaches to Teaching, pp. 91–6 (p. 93). 45 Pierre Boaistuau, Histoires tragiques, ed. Richard A. Carr (Paris: Société des Textes Français Modernes, 2008), pp. 61–119. 46 Boaistuau, Histoires tragiques, p. 7; on the emotional response of pity and fear, see Carr’s ‘Introduction’, p. lxviii. 47 Campangne, ‘Marguerite de Navarre’, p. 95.



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an initial short summary. He offers histoire 1 to ‘celles qui se donnent en proye à l’amour lascif’ (women who abandon themselves to lust and love) as a ‘portraict et exemplaire de chasteté gravé en l’interieur de leurs cueurs’ (portrait and example of chastity engraved inside their hearts, p. 9). The instructive power of his stories is reinforced by his insistence that they are all true; they claim to be, like the tales in the Heptameron, ‘histoires veritables’. In his summary of the story of Romeo and Juliet (histoire 3), he admits that some readers – those of ‘rude entendement’ (crude understanding) – will not believe the story, full of strange coincidences and unparalleled feeling. But, he says, ‘je n’insereray aucune histoire fabuleuse en tout cest oeuvre de laquelle je ne face foy par annales et chroniques, ou par commune approbation de ceux qui l’ont veu, ou par autoritez de quelque fameux historiographe’ (I will not include any incredible story in this work that I cannot vouch for in annals and chronicles, or by common agreement of those who saw it, or the authority of a famous historian, p. 61). This concern with the truth of the story and of the credibility of the witnesses is one he shares with Marguerite and, indeed, with writers of other sorts of sixteenth-century histoire. Some of these characteristics of the histoire tragique can be found in the Heptameron and are emphasised in Boaistuau’s edition. His approach to editing the Heptameron strips the discussions from the stories, as if to suggest that the tales should speak for themselves without the work of judgement that, I have argued above, is central to Marguerite’s conception of her work. But this does not mean that Boaistuau thought he was stripping the tales of all interpretation. On the contrary, he claims in his preface to the reader that his intention is to correct potential bad interpretations: ‘il ne se trouve oeuvre si bien digeré, poly, & limé, duquel on ne face mauvaise interpretation, & qui ne soit calomnié par la malice de quelques delicats’ (there is no work that is so well disposed, polished, and smoothed that is not badly interpreted, or calumniated by the malice of some sensitive soul).48 His work of polishing and reordering is intended to guide the reader’s interpretation of the text and to pre-empt any deviant readings. It might also be an indication of his awareness that the book is entering a divided and impassioned public sphere. To this end, he provides summaries for all the tales at the beginning of the book. He chooses as his first story the Heptameron’s nouvelle 70, the retelling of the medieval Chastelaine de Vergy in which the unfortunate heroine dies of grief when she believes, through the machinations of the duchess, that her lover has betrayed her. Boaistuau’s summary indicates clearly the moral interpretation readers are encouraged to make: it is a story of the duchess’s ‘incontinence’ (lust) and ‘deshonneste vouloir’ (dishonourable desires), and 48 Histoires des amans fortunez. Dediées à tresillustre Princesse Madame Marguerite de Bourbon, Duchesse de Nivernois (Paris: Gilles Gilles, 1558), p. [*iiii]r.

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the ‘fidelité’ (loyalty) of the gentleman; it is, he tells us, a ‘Histoire tragique et fort notable’ (tragic and very notable story).49 Boaistuau here claims that nouvelle 70 is in essence an histoire tragique, and the vocabulary of tragedy is present in the story itself.50 Oisille calls this story a ‘tragedie’ and describes the effect it has when the duke explains to his court why he has stabbed his wife in the throat: ‘l’honneste et piteuse histoire […] ne fut sans faire pleurer les assistans’ (p. 681; ‘the piteous and noble story […] did not fail to call forth the tears of those who listened to it’, p. 531). This is the emotional reaction of audiences of classical tragedy, and it is passed along the narrative chain to the listeners in the meadow in Sarrance, as Oisille comments: ‘je congnois bien à voz oeilz n’avoir esté entendue sans compassion’ (p. 681; ‘I can tell by the looks in your eyes that it hasn’t left you unmoved’, p. 532). The second story in the Histoires des amans fortunez is another in the mould of the histoire tragique, the tale of the unfaithful German wife forced to drink from the skull of her murdered lover (nouvelle 32 in the Heptameron). It is a good theatrical choice: the narrative unfolds like a drama that we see through the eyes of the French ambassador Bernage; the lady emerges from behind a tapestry to eat and drink from her macabre vessel and then disappears again. Bernage is ‘esbahy de veoir chose si estrange’ (p. 423; ‘taken aback at such a strange spectacle’, p. 331; Chilton emphasises the theatrical nature of the scene in his translation). The final denouement does not consist in another death but nevertheless invokes the cathartic emotion of ‘pitié’ (p. 426; ‘pity’, p. 334) in the German lord who finally forgives his wife. In his reorganising, Boaistuau emphasises the macabre and cruel revenge narratives, associating the collection with the themes that will be central to the histoire tragique. Exemplarity We saw above how Boaistuau describes the heroine of his first histoire tragique as a ‘portrait et exemplaire de chasteté’ (p. 9). This points to another common feature of the histoires tragiques and the Heptameron: the claim to exemplarity, that is, that the stories they recount are useful exemplars of virtue (or indeed of vice) that can be used to model and guide the lives of readers. Looking for exemplary models to guide and fashion the present was a common humanist reading practice; the Renaissance example is more than just an instance or sample of behaviour or action, it is a paradigm that is 49 Histoires des amans fortunez, p. [*v]r. The same story was retold by Bandello in his Novelle (4.4) and François de Belleforest in his Histoires tragiques. See Reinier Leushuis, ‘La Châtelaine de Vergy comme histoire tragique matrimoniale de Marguerite de Navarre (1558) à Bandello (1573) et Le Sixiesme tome des histoires tragiques (1582)’, Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme 32.2 (2009), 5–31. 50 Campangne, ‘Marguerite de Navarre’, p. 95.



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held up as a model to follow (critics often refer to it by the Latin exemplum). The example has an important place in persuasive discourse and was codified in classical handbooks on rhetoric. Humanists found exempla in all sorts of texts from moral philosophy to history, but the genre that most influenced the nouvelle or short story tradition was the sermon, in which preachers would use exemplars and models in order to teach moral behaviour.51 We have seen how this moralising function is still very important in the Heptameron (as it is in the histoire tragique and, indeed, the news pamphlets). There is a slight tension between the exemplary function of stories and the claim that they are true. It is not exactly a contradiction – stories of saints’ lives and great leaders were thought both true and exemplary. The tension is between examining the particularities of one individual life and holding that life up as a universal model. How are readers supposed to choose an exemplary model in the proliferating stories of the Heptameron and (perhaps more importantly) the ‘diverse oppinions’ that they generate? In keeping with the emphasis on gender inequality that pertains in the Heptameron, the storytellers often turn their attention to how these exempla work to fashion or construct gendered behaviour and ultimately restrict women’s activity. The Heptameron storytellers frequently refer to their tales as exemples.52 They mean this in the two senses I mentioned above: that of moral paradigm and that of simple illustration. The scholar in nouvelle 18 is described by Hircan as ‘la doctrine et l’exemple des aultres’ (p. 270; ‘a shining example, fit to instruct his fellow-students’, p. 214). ‘Doctrine’ here means something similar to ‘exemple’: as well as being ‘fit to instruct his fellow-students’, that is, to be their teacher, he is also fit to be the object of their study. The moral paradigm can, of course, be a counter-example. When Longarine responds to Hircan’s nouvelle 7 (where a merchant covers up his liaison with a young girl) that ‘si n’est-ce pas une [sic] exemple que les filles doyvent ensuivre’ (p. 139; ‘I don’t think it’s an example that young girls should follow’, p. 106), she is clearly implying that Hircan has offered his story as a model for others. Indeed, she goes on: ‘Je croy bien qu’il y en a à qui vous vouldriez le faire trouver bon’ (‘I suspect there are some you’d like to persuade to do so’). Hircan has, Longarine suggests, told this story as a means of persuasion, holding it up as an acceptable pattern or template, and therefore as a means of seduction or perhaps coercion. 51 António de Ridder-Vignone, ‘Incoherent Texts? Storytelling, Preaching, and the Cent nouvelles nouvelles in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron 21’, Renaissance Quarterly 68 (2015), 465–95. 52 On exemplarity in the Heptameron, see Pollie Bromilow, Models of Women in Sixteenth-Century French Literature: Female Exemplarity in the ‘Histoires tragiques’ (1559) and the ‘Heptaméron’ (1559) (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 2007); Timothy Hampton, Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990); Lyons, Exemplum.

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In other instances, the example is just as clearly an illustration of an argument: still a means of persuasion, then, but persuasion to a point of view about the world (‘this is how things are, I can give you an example’) rather than persuasion to behave in a certain way. Saffredent says, introducing his nouvelle 39 (about a chambermaid who impersonates a ghost as cover for a love affair), ‘J’espere doncques […] vous monstrer, par exemple, que Dieu ne favorise pas aux amoureux’ (p. 466; ‘I hope to show you, by means of an example, that God does not favour lovers’, p. 364). Saffredent proposes an argument (God does not favour lovers) and seeks to prove it to his audience’s satisfaction with his ‘exemple’ (in which two lovers are caught out in their fraud). Later on, when Dagoucin claims that men are more easily deceived by women than the reverse, Parlamente is severe.53 ‘[V]ostre propos est de si petite auctorité qu’il a besoing d’estre fortifié d’exemple’ (p. 592; ‘What you say carries so little weight that it requires reinforcing by means of an example’, p. 460). Here again the ‘exemple’ is demanded as evidence for an argument. But, as Parlamente goes on to say, the ‘exemple’ does not necessarily have the power to persuade: ‘si ne dis pas que, pour ung mot, nous soyons subgectes de vous croyre’ (‘That doesn’t mean we’re obliged to believe you on the strength of just one story’). The example, then, far from being an unequivocal model for the storytellers, is, rather, more matter for debate. One particular discussion illustrates this quite clearly. Dagoucin’s nouvelle 37 is about a virtuous wife who wins back her husband from his infidelity through steadfast patience. When she realises he is leaving their bed for a liaison with the maid, she spends a year waiting up for him to offer him a basin of water to signify that he should cleanse himself of wickedness before returning to the marital bed. When this fails to get through to him, she goes to find him sleeping with the maid, and sets fire to some straw as another symbol, this time of the end of the world and the final reckoning. She wakes her husband in time to save him, and he does mend his ways. Oisille recommends the wife’s actions as exemplary: ‘Voylà […] un exemple qui doibt servir à toutes les femmes maryées’ (p. 460; ‘that was an example of which all married women should take note’, p. 360). But one of the married women in the group, Parlamente, refuses to take this as a lesson. ‘Il prandra cest exemple qui vouldra, […] mais, quant à moy, il ne me seroit possible d’avoir si longue patience’ (‘Anyone who cares to may follow that example, […] but as far as I’m concerned, it would be impossible to be so patient’). The examples the storytellers offer are not accepted uncritically. They are received as rhetoric, that is, as part of the work of persuasion, and they appeal (or not) depending largely on perspective. 53 The manuscript Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani uses for her edition gives Dagoucin’s speech to Simontaut, but Dagoucin is given in other manuscripts, and it is Dagoucin who tells the next story as his ‘exemple’.



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The Heptameron explores this question of perspective further through the prism of gender. While the male storytellers are keen to make generalisations from single stories, the women tend to resist this universalising power of the example. This paradigm is set up very early in the collection, as Oisille ransacks her memory for a story of a woman so virtuous that it will cancel the first story, told by Simontaut, of one woman’s wickedness, a story to ‘desmentir sa mauvaise opinion’ (p. 103; ‘belie the low opinion he has of us’, p. 78). Simontaut claims that his story proves a point about women in general, but Oisille doesn’t accept this. Where there is an example of an impious woman, there is another example of a virtuous one. Oisille in particular has an eye open for the slippage from particular to universal. After nouvelle 24 (in which the queen of Castile sets too hard a test for her serviteur and drives him into a melancholy hermitage), she notices the direction the discussion is going and corrects it: ‘Madame Oisille, voyant que soubz couleur de blasmer et reprendre […] la Royne de Castille […], les hommes se debordoient si fort à medire des femmes’ (pp. 363–4; ‘Oisille could see that on the pretext of criticizing her behaviour the men would go so far in speaking ill of women in general’, p. 284). Oisille recognises the coercive power of the example when it is used to restrict and to control women in general. The rhetorical models offered as negative exempla for women to reject have a real impact in the world outside the text. As Parlamente warns in the discussion that follows nouvelle 15, ‘tant plus avant nous entrons en ce propos, et plus ces bons seigneurs icy drapperont sur la tissure de Simontault et tout à noz despens’ (p. 296; ‘The more we pursue this subject […] the more these fine gentlemen here will embroider on what Simontaut has already said, at the expense of us ladies’, p. 233). At this point, Parlamente suggests another story; as a solution to the restrictive power of traditional misogynist culture, the Heptameron offers a diversity of stories and of interpretations. But this should not obscure the fact that traditional culture was experienced by sixteenth-century women as constraining, unjust, and coercive. The culture of exemplarity is also challenged when a different moral can be drawn from very similar stories, as John Lyons has argued.54 As we saw in Chapter 4, Parlamente’s story of Rolandine (nouvelle 21) involves hostile authority, a clandestine marriage, and the death of the heroine’s husband; Rolandine is held up as an ‘exemple’ of ‘foy et perseverance’ (p. 323; ‘example’ of ‘[faith] and [constancy]’, p. 253). Parlamente’s next story, about Rolandine’s aunt (nouvelle 40), also involves hostile authority, a clandestine marriage, and the death of the heroine’s husband; however, this protagonist is not to be imitated: ‘Je prie à Dieu, mesdames, que cest exemple vous soit si profitable, que nul de vous ayt envye de soy marier, pour son plaisir’ (p. 474; ‘Ladies, I pray to God that you 54

Lyons, Exemplum, p. 100.

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will take note of this example, and that none of you will wish to marry merely for your own pleasure’, p. 370). What is recommended in one woman’s life is reproved in another’s; what matters are the particularities of each case. Rolandine, moreover, does not learn from the example of her aunt, or at least she does not learn what not to do. Rather, she imitates her aunt’s condemned behaviour, but for her, it turns out well. Ultimately, then, the examples given in the stories do not prove any universal facts about men or women, and they can help to guide conduct only by providing material for reflection and the exercise of judgement that can then be applied to particular cases. So, what are the examples in the Heptameron examples of? Oisille gives one possible answer, in response to Hircan’s request to tell (yet) another story of female turpitude (nouvelle 49). She gives him permission to speak freely, because, she says, their stories do not redound to the credit or debit of the protagonists but have a deeper meaning: les maulx que nous disons des hommes et des femmes ne sont poinct pour la honte particulliere de ceulx dont est faict le compte, mais pour oster l’estime de la confiance des creatures, en monstrant les miseres où ilz sont subgetz, afin que nostre espoir s’arreste et s’appuye à Celluy seul qui est parfaict et sans lequel tout homme n’est que imperfection. (p. 533) when we recount the evil doings of men and women in our stories, we are not doing it in order to bring shame upon individuals, but in order to remove the esteem and trust placed in the mere creatures of God, by means of displaying the sorrows to which those creatures are subject, to the end that our hope may come to rest upon Him who alone is perfect and without whom all men are but imperfection. (p. 416)

In the end, Oisille comes round to universalising, but it is not the misogynist universalising sometimes practised by the male storytellers. What their stories condemn are not individual shortcomings, but the general fallen nature of humanity. The value of the example is to reveal this general depravity that human hubris tends to conceal. As in her devotional poetry, in the Heptameron Marguerite recommends recognition of human insignificance as the only condition of an authentic life. We have seen in this chapter how Marguerite makes use of a variety of literary traditions and conventions in her writing and modulates them for different genres. Some, like the dialogue, would remain popular and influential for a long time. Others, like the histoire tragique, would witness intense popularity for a short period. Others still, like the nouvelle, were set to evolve in the century that followed. We will explore the legacy and reception of Marguerite’s work in the Conclusion.

Conclusion: Print and Public In conclusion, I consider the ways in which Marguerite’s work first appeared in print and its fortunes in literary culture. The move into print changes and broadens a work’s audience, and in the prefaces to readers we will see authors, editors, and translators attempting to control or at least influence their readers’ reactions to their books. Marguerite made a significant impact in the overwhelmingly male world of print, producing works that continued to be best-sellers throughout the sixteenth century. How she presents herself and her work to her potential readers teaches us as much about the options and strategies open to women in the early modern period as do the manoeuvrings and discussions of her storytellers in the Heptameron.1 Marguerite was exceptionally well educated for a sixteenth-century woman, even for a woman of her class, and her publishing success was equally exceptional: reprintings of the Heptameron are comparable in number to Rabelais’s best-selling works and appeared throughout the sixteenth century. But she was still bound by the limits of her culture. The Aristotelian categories that we saw in operation in Rabelais and sixteenth-century culture more generally worked against women’s public acknowledgement of authorship and publishing. Women’s public speech was linked to sexual licence and a transgression of the proper female domestic space, which meant different strategies were necessary for women authors in print than for their male counterparts. First, I examine how Marguerite was perceived and presented in eulogies after her death. Then, I look at Marguerite’s own strategies for appearing in print in her selected works, Les Marguerites de la Marguerite des princesses, and examine how the Heptameron was presented to the reading public in its first two printed editions. Finally, I explore how the Heptameron, her most successful work, was rewritten and translated in the sixteenth century and beyond. Every moment of publication (either manuscript or print) is a making 1 On women’s strategies of authorship and publication, see Broomhall, Women and the Book Trade; Anne R. Larsen, ‘“Un Honneste Passetems”: Strategies of Legitimation in French Renaissance Women’s Prefaces’, L’Esprit créateur 30.4 (1990), 11–22; Colette H. Winn, ‘La Femme écrivain au XVIe siècle’, Poétique 84 (1990), 435–52.

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public in two senses: the work is put into public circulation and at the same time a public is shaped and even created for the work. Memorials After her death, Marguerite was presented as an ideal, a model or ‘mirror’ for princesses, patrons, writers, and women generally. She had been deployed as a figure of justification during her lifetime too. In 1539, Hélisenne de Crenne, the splendid pseudonym of the author of a tale of unhappy love, Les Angoisses douleureuses, printed a collection of familiar and invective letters (formal and conventional letters in the classical mould) in which Marguerite appeared in the company of classical goddesses and queens of antiquity as incontestable proof of women’s learning. In the elaborate Latinate prose of the Epistres, Marguerite is a paragon: ‘en sa reginale excellente & sublime personne, reside la divinité Platonicque, la prudence de Caton, l’eloquence de Cicero, & la Socratique raison’ (in her queenly excellence and sublime person reside Platonic divinity, the prudence of Cato, the eloquence of Cicero, and Socratic reason).2 For Crenne, Marguerite offers an ideal model of literary achievement and a justification for women writers who follow her. In Jehan Du Pré’s Palais des nobles Dames (1534), which he dedicated to Marguerite, we are guided through the handsome palace of Noblesse Feminine (Feminine Nobility), populated with notable women from mythology and history. Marguerite appears twice, once in the company of others dedicated to knowledge (‘sciences’) in the great hall, and then in the garden alongside her mother and other great political peacemakers.3 Du Pré – who (he tells us) was taken prisoner at Pavia and subsequently accompanied Marguerite on her mission to Spain in 1525 – sees her in the perspective of political diplomacy and the negotiation of ‘concorde’ (p. 347). After her death, commemorative eulogies sought to immortalise Marguerite and to create imagined communities of women and writers around her. The poet and theologian Charles de Sainte-Marthe, in Marguerite’s service for the last years of her life, delivered an oration, printed in 1550, which set the tone for subsequent eulogies. Sainte-Marthe holds Marguerite up as a model through the image of the mirror that she herself had used, subtitling his eulogy Icy est le mirouer des Princesses (here is the mirror of princesses).4 The eulogy is dedicated to Marguerite’s daughter, Jeanne, and her niece Marguerite, suggesting a mirror that offers a pattern for her female relatives. 2 Les epistres Familieres & invectives de ma dame Helisenne, composées par icelle dame, De Crenne (Paris: Denys Janot, [1539]), p. [Kvii]v. 3 Du Pré, Le Palais des nobles Dames, pp. 177, 347. 4 Sainte-Marthe, Oraison funèbre, p. 23.



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But throughout the eulogy Saint-Marthe addresses the people of Alençon in order to show what an exemplary ruler Marguerite has been, suggesting a less gender-specific ‘mirror’ for princes. In both instances, Marguerite becomes an example to follow, creating a bond that spans the barrier of death and makes her an ongoing presence in the lives of her family and people. An important sense of community is thus built around her in the aftermath of her death. Another female community was invoked in a second memorial volume to Marguerite that represents, as Brenda Hosington argues, a unique collective work on women’s learning and virtue.5 In 1550, a collection of 104 Latin distichs (couplets) by the English sisters Anne, Margaret, and Jane Seymour, daughters of Edward duke of Somerset (Queen Jane Seymour’s older brother), was published by Nicolas Denisot, who was their tutor (and reputedly a spy for François I) in the 1540s.6 The volume included further poems in Latin and Greek in praise of the Seymour sisters and of Marguerite, drawing them together into a group of exemplary women and (more unusually) poets. This is a poetic community that is anticipated by the sisters themselves when Anne, towards the beginning of the collection, calls for a poetic monument to Marguerite: ‘Divine poets, make ready not sepulchres but verses, / In which Marguerite’s bones, laid out, might softly repose.’7 The sisters’ verses reflect on Marguerite’s fame and posterity, but more importantly perhaps they are Christian meditations on the peace of her soul, in terms that Marguerite would have recognised. The Seymour sisters use images from the Song of Songs and Marguerite’s own devotional poetry – especially Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse – to portray her soul in amorous bliss as the bride of Christ. Anne ventriloquises the dead Marguerite: ‘What should I fear if my heavenly guardian is Christ? / What should I fear? Death to me is living, life is dying.’8 Anne later writes of a mystic union in death: ‘Who can count the joys of the Bride and immortal Bridegroom, / Whom the eternal light brings together in their marriage bed?’9 Marguerite continues to speak consolingly to the living through the verses of the sisters in the kind of dialogue with the dead that she herself imagined. 5 Brenda Hosington, ‘England’s First Female-Authored Encomium: The Seymour Sisters’ Hecatodistichon to Marguerite de Navarre: Text, Translation, Notes, and Commentary’, Studies in Philology 93.2 (1996), 117–63 (p. 131). 6 Annae, Margaritae, Janae, Sororum virginum, heroidum Anglarum, In morten Divae Margaritae Valesiae, Navarrorum Reginae, Hecatodistichon (Paris, 1550). See Hosington, ‘England’s First’, pp. 125–6 on Denisot. 7 Hosington, ‘England’s First’, p. 131. Anne’s Latin is: ‘Diuini vates, versus, non busta, parate / Queis sita Margaridos molliter ossa cubent’ (p. 130). 8 Hosington, ‘England’s First’, p. 139. ‘Quid trepido, si fida mei est custodia Christus? / Quid trepido? mihi mors viuere, vita mori’ (p. 138). 9 Hosington, ‘England’s First’, p. 147. Latin: ‘Gaudia quis nemeret Sponsae, Sonsique perennis, / Quos iungit thalamis lux sine fine suis?’ (p. 146).

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The next year, Denisot printed a further volume that appears to be a response to Anne’s instruction to poets to build verses in Marguerite’s memory. In Le Tombeau de Marguerite de Valois (The Tomb of Marguerite de Valois), the Seymour sisters’ verses were translated into Greek, Italian, and French by the young poets of the Pléiade, including Joachim du Bellay, Antoine du Baïf, and Jacques Peletier du Mans; Du Bellay, Jean Dorat, and Pierre de Ronsard were among the poets who contributed original pieces in praise of the sisters and of Marguerite.10 The list of poets marshalled by Denisot is impressive, Denisot having been stung perhaps by Charles de Sainte-Marthe’s suggestion in the 1550 volume that, in writing in praise of Marguerite, the Seymour sisters had done what French poets should have done. The 1551 volume is a clever piece of self-promotion on Denisot’s part, as he acts both as conduit for the English sisters’ verses and as midwife to the Pléiade’s overdue tribute to Marguerite; it is also a reminder, at a time of relative entente between France and England, of his connections to a powerful English family. In death as in life, Marguerite is an important patron of poets, a figure around whom other writers can gather. This is not the first or the last time women’s writing will be mediated through a man’s intervention; the same thing happens with the first Heptameron printings, as we will see below. However, as Brenda Hosington points out, even the French volume, with its roster of famous male poets, nevertheless retains an unusually strong female presence with women patrons, dedicatees, poets, and subject.11 The Heptameron in Print The Heptameron was never printed during Marguerite’s lifetime, and it is not certain what her plans were for it, even if she had completed the project. She did, however, print a selection of her other works in Les Marguerites de la Marguerite des princesses and its Suyte, both printed by Jean de Tournes in Lyon in 1547. Prefaces to the reader in Renaissance printed books are a good place to look for preoccupations and anxieties about the reception of the book. In Les Marguerites, it is not Marguerite who is represented as the impetus behind the printing. This role is taken by Simon Silvius, also known as Jean de la Haye, who is granted the book’s privilege (the book’s authorisation and copyright) and who writes a dedicatory poem to Marguerite’s daughter, Jeanne, in which her mother is held up as ‘le Miroir ou Princesses & Dames / Doyvent mirer & les corps & les ames’ (the Mirror where Princesses and Ladies should see reflected their own bodies 10 Le Tombeau de Marguerite de Valois Royne de Navarre (Paris: Michel Ferzandat and Robert Granion, 1551). 11 Hosington, ‘England’s First’, p. 163.



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and souls).12 Rouben and Patricia Cholakian are convinced that it was, in fact, Marguerite who was responsible for the selection and printing of Les Marguerites; the figure of Jean de la Haye may serve as cover for this still unusual appearance in print by an aristocratic woman.13 In her own preface to the reader, Marguerite deploys modesty as a way of disarming criticism: Si vous lisez ceste oeuvre toute entiere, Arrestez vous, sans plus, à la matiere: En excusant la [sic] rhythme, & le langage, Voyant que c’est d’une femme l’ouvrage: Qui n’ha en soy science, ne sçavoir …14 If you read this work entire, Stop at the matter, without going further: Excuse the rhythm and the language, Seeing that it is a woman’s work: Who has neither knowledge nor learning …

Marguerite asks her reader to focus on the matter of her book, the moral and religious lessons that God will make visible despite its deficiencies, which she attributes to the gender of its author. As Susan Snyder points out, however, if Marguerite begins by excusing her work on gendered grounds, she ends with a point about universal human impotence and the necessity of faith.15 The humility that Marguerite displays here is a common feature of Renaissance prefaces by men and by women; but, as Susan Broomhall has argued, men tended to focus on their deficient education while women explicitly blamed their gender.16 Other strategies for printing included the appeal to a protector or to a community of women who could excuse, justify, and protect the work itself in its risky appearance in public. Men also called on their patrons to protect their book’s passage into the public domain of print, but women’s appeal to their protector often insisted on their particular gendered need for a chaperone. Dedicating her poetic Euvres in 1555 to Clemence de Bourges, the Lyonnais poet Louise Labé notably did not insist on her feebleness as a woman; instead, she emphasised her lack of learning and exhorted other Marguerites, p. 6. Marguerite de Navarre, p. 279. The Cholakians point out that in Marguerite’s circles, handwritten manuscripts were still preferred to print (p. 280). 14 Marguerites, p. 13. She uses the same ‘modesty topos’, or commonplace, in Le Miroir de treschrestienne princesse Marguerite de France (Paris: Augereau, 1533), p. 1. 15 Snyder, ‘Guilty Sisters’. 16 Susan Broomhall, ‘Teaching a Publishing History for the Heptameron’, in Approaches to Teaching, pp. 44–51 (p. 46). 12 13

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women to follow her into literature. But she did concede, ‘pource que les femmes ne se montrent volontiers en publiq seules, je vous ay choisie pour me servir de guide’ (‘because women are reluctant to appear in public alone, I have chosen you as my guide’).17 In Labé’s printed book, the company of women legitimises and authorises the woman writer’s appearance in public. When the Heptameron was published, nine years after Marguerite’s death in 1558 and then in a more complete version in 1559, it was through the work of two male editors, Pierre Boaistuau and Claude Gruget. Both were literary men: writers, translators, compilers, and editors. Pierre Boaistuau’s edition, Histoires des amans fortunez, contained (as we have seen) only the Prologue and sixty-seven reordered tales, with no division into days and no discussions. Marguerite’s name is not mentioned on the title page, or in Boaistuau’s preface to the reader, or in the royal privilege granted to the book’s backer and publisher Vincent Sertenas.18 In his dedicatory letter to the patron of the book, the duchess of Nevers, Marguerite de Bourbon, Boaistuau alludes nonetheless to the nobility and the learning of the original author: ‘ce present auteur, lequel n’a besoing de trompette & herault, pour magnifier ou exalter sa grandeur’ (the present author, who has no need of trumpet or herald to magnify or exalt their grandeur); he goes on to praise ‘ses autres escripts, esquelz il a si bien exprimé la sincerité de sa doctrine, la vivacité de sa foy, & l’integrité de ses meurs’ (their other writings, where they have expressed so well the sincerity of their doctrine, the vivacity of their faith, and the integrity of their manners).19 The ‘il’ in that last sentence is dictated by the gender of the word ‘auteur’, which is why I have translated it as ‘they’; nevertheless, the masculine third person does rather ostentatiously hide the gendered identity of its author. On the other hand, Boaistuau goes on to describe the author as a ‘prodige & miracle de nature’ (prodigious miracle of nature), suggesting an extraordinary and even unnatural achievement, terms that were often used to describe women’s writing.20 Marguerite’s authorship is implicit in these suggestions, which might act as a hint to those already in the know. Replacing the female writer is the male editor. Boaistuau emphasises his painstaking labour over the book, cleaning, polishing, and removing the faults in the manuscript: 17 Louise Labé, Complete Poetry and Prose: A Bilingual Edition, trans. Deborah Lesko Baker and Annie Finch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 44–5. 18 Sertenas was the publisher of the Histoires des amans fortunez, which was sold through a number of booksellers: Sertenas himself, Gilles Gilles, Gilles Robinot, and G. Caveiller. 19 Histoires des amans fortunez, dedicatory letter, p. iiir. There is another 1558 edition printed ‘pour Gilles Robinot, libraire’. 20 Broomhall, ‘Teaching’; and Anne R. Larsen, ‘Reading/Writing and Gender in the Renaissance’, Symposium 41.4 (1987), 292–307.



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il m’auroit esté moins penible de bastir l’oeuvre tout de neuf, de l’avoir tronqué en plusieurs endroits, changé, innové, adjousté, & supprimé en d’autres, ayant esté quasi contraint luy donner nouvelle forme. (‘Au Lecteur’, Histoires des amans fortunez, p. [*iiii]r) It would have been less laborious for me to start the work over from scratch, than to have edited it in several places, changed, revised, adjusted, and cut in others, being almost constrained to give it a new form.

The list of Boaistuau’s editorial tasks is long: cutting, changing, renewing, adjusting, suppressing, and the term he uses to summarise his labour is significant: he has practically given the work a new form, the Aristotelian masculine principle that actively shapes the feminine matter – the disordered, chaotic material of the manuscripts. While he does not draw explicit attention to the author’s gender, Boaistuau does depict her work as remarkably defenceless under the male gaze, and so in need of the protection of its dedicatee, Marguerite de Bourbon: Puis docq’, ma dame, que cest oeuvre se prepare pour estre exposé au jugement douteux de tant de milliers d’hommes, il vous plaira la recevoir soubz vostre protection & sauvegarde. (p. iiir) Since, my Lady, this work is preparing itself to be exposed to the dubious judgement of so many thousands of men, you will be good to accept it under your protection and safe-conduct.

As the book ventures out into the merciless world, Boaistuau seeks both the protection of the patron and the charity of the reader. Boaistuau’s anxiety about the judgement of thousands of men suggests that printing the work entails a certain loss of control as the book moves out into the world. Another perspective is given by François de Belleforest in an ode praising Boaistuau at the beginning of the book. Belleforest suggests that the Heptameron has already been circulating widely in manuscript and this has subjected it to hostile interpretations and unworthy readers. It is therefore (Belleforest argues) in great need of an editor and a protector. He has seen the work, he says, ‘vagabond, errant’ (vagabond and wandering), ‘Sans oser monstrer sa grandeur’ (not daring to show its greatness).21 It has also fallen into the wrong hands: ‘Courtisé des espritz ignares’ (courted by ignorant minds) and ‘Feuilleté par les plus Barbares’ (leafed through by the greatest barbarians) who failed to grasp its true significance. Boaistuau’s edition 21

Histoires des amans fortunez, ‘Au Seigneur de Launay […], Ode’, p. *iiv.

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will, Belleforest imagines, be able to control the reading public in a way the manuscripts could not. It should now reach a different kind of reading public, one that resembles Boccaccio’s anticipated lovelorn ladies: Ou les dames trouver pourront Quand lasses, & tristes seront Et dequoy chasser leur ennuy, Et dequoy leurs filles instruire … (p. *iiir) Where ladies may find When they are weary and sad Something to banish their chagrin And something to instruct their daughters.

Like the implied readers of the work itself, it is women readers who are explicitly targeted here as recipients of consolation or of moral lessons; a community of women, of mothers and daughters, is imagined in their own separate universe of sadness and instruction. Claude Gruget’s edition, printed in Paris a year later, flagged up in its title that it was a new improved version: L’Heptameron des Nouvelles de tresillustre et tresexcellente princesse Marguerite de Valois Royne de Navarre, Remis en son ordre, confus au paravant en sa premiere impression (The Heptameron of Novellas of the most illustrious and most excellent princess Marguerite de Valois queen of Navarre, restored to order, previously confused in the first edition).22 The royal privilege granted to the publisher Gilles Gilles emphasised the cost and the labour involved in bringing this new edition to light, and also mentioned the name of the author: ‘il a (avec grands fraiz, peine, & labeur) recouvré, & faict rediger par ordre les comptes & nouvelles, autresfois mises par escrit, par nostre treschere & tresamée tante, la feuë Royne de Navarre’ (p. Gg iiir; Gilles has (with great costs, pains, and labour) recovered, and had copied in their correct order the stories and tales in times past put into writing by our very dear and beloved aunt, the late Queen of Navarre). The privilege issued to Sertenas for Histoires des amans fortunez was for six years; Gilles would have had to show that this edition was substantially different from the edition that appeared just a year before, which is why the labour involved is emphasised. However, another bookseller of Gilles and Gruget’s edition is none other than Vincent Sertenas, the publisher of Boaistuau’s edition, of which Gilles was one bookseller; these interlocking interests explain why 22 The title continues: & dedié à tresillustre & tresvertueuse Princesse Jeanne de Foix Royne de Navarre, par Claude Gruget Parisien (Paris: [Benoist Prevost] for Vincent Sertenas, 1559).



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the holder of the first privilege, Sertenas, didn’t protest at the granting of the second.23 Dedicated to Marguerite’s daughter, Jeanne, and hinting that she may have commissioned it in anger at the revisions of the Histoires des amans fortunez, Gruget’s edition was the first to give it the title it retains today. His edition is, however, substantially different from the manuscript tradition, replacing a number of stories and cutting a few remarks, usually direct criticisms of the friars (although a large number remain, and he does not change the overall tone of the collection). It was the edition that was most often reprinted in the sixteenth century, and so the way most sixteenthcentury readers encountered the text.24 In his dedicatory letter to Jeanne de Navarre, Gruget is keen to emphasise the act of restitution that he believes his edition represents. Boaistuau had, he claims, removed her mother from her own book, so that it was almost unrecognisable. Boaistuau’s edition has ‘obmis ou celé son nom, & quasi changé toute sa forme, tellement que plusieurs le mescgnoissoient’ (p. a iir; omitted and hidden the name, and almost changed its entire form, so much that many did not recognise it). Here again is the Aristotelian form, this time granted to Marguerite’s creation itself rather than the work of her subsequent editor. He suggests that the first edition displeased Jeanne, and presents his own ‘comme l’ayant demasqué, pour le vous rendre en son naturel’ (p. a iiv; as if unmasking it, in order to return it to you in its natural state). Gruget claims a similar power of revelation to the storytellers themselves to unmask what has been hidden and disguised. While his emphasis on his own mediation is similar to Boaistuau’s, he does allow the book out into the world without the protection of a patron – the royal name of its author being enough of a guarantee, ‘qui luy servira de sauf-conduict par tout le monde, & le rendra bien-venu es bonnes compagnies’ (p. a iiv; which will serve it as safe-conduct throughout the world, and will make it welcome in good company). Printing is here once again imagined as a passage into the world, and a movement through different reading publics; Marguerite’s text is now put into circulation and will make its own way through good company and – presumably – bad.

23 On the publishing history of the first two editions, see Nicole Cazauran, ‘Boaistuau et Gruget éditeurs de L’Heptaméron: à chacun sa part’, in Variétés pour Marguerite de Navarre 1978–2004 (Paris: Champion, 2005), pp. 223–48, and Sylvie Lefèvre, ‘L’Heptaméron entre éditions et manuscrits’, Marguerite de Navarre 1492–1992, pp. 445–82. 24 Gruget’s edition has been re-edited as part of Nicole Cazuran’s edition of the Œuvres complètes: L’Heptaméron, 3 vols, ed. Nicole Cazauran and Sylvie Lefèvre (Paris: Champion, 2013); it is also available as L’Heptaméron, ed. Nicole Cazauran and Sylvie Lefèvre (Paris: Gallimard ‘Folio’, 2000).

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Legacy: The Monks behind the Hedge If Marguerite was known for her devotional poetry during her lifetime, it was her prose fiction that had the greatest influence after her death. In this final section, I look at the fortunes of Marguerite’s work as it moves through all sorts of publics, in adaptation, translation, and development. We saw in Chapter 6 how stories from the Heptameron reappeared in the histoires tragiques. Choosing the more dramatic and sensational stories, Bandello, Boaistuau, and Belleforest drew on the Heptameron as a reservoir of potential plots that would excite the emotions and provide moral lessons. Nouvelle 67, the story of a woman marooned with her husband on an island in the Atlantic during Jean-François de Roberval’s ill-fated colonial expedition to Canada in 1542, has left a particularly productive legacy.25 In Marguerite’s version, the heroine is an exemplar of evangelical faith and survives her exile on the island through trust in God. The story reappeared in the fifth volume of Belleforest’s Histoires tragiques (1572) and then in André Thevet’s Cosmographie universelle (1575), both considerably expanded and with less emphasis on the heroine’s evangelical faith. Belleforest makes the woman Roberval’s sister; Thevet names her Marguerite and adds an authenticity effect by claiming to have heard the story from the woman herself. The tale of the noblewoman on the desert island continues to fascinate writers today, and she speaks particularly to contemporary Canadian women writers. Leanna Rezvani lists twelve versions of the story published between 1990 and 2012, including novels by Annamarie Beckel (published simultaneously in French and English as Les Voix de l’île and Silence of Stone, 2008) and Rosette Laberge (La Noble sur l’île déserte, 2011), and a play by Shirley Barrie (I am Marguerite, 2005).26 In an interview with Rezvani, Barrie talks about how contemporary the story of the abandoned woman seemed to her when she first encountered it in the 1990s, fitting a political and feminist narrative that sought to reveal and challenge the assumptions of patriarchy.27 In this retelling, Marguerite de Roberval becomes a figure of resistance and an example for other women to adopt, adapt, and reflect upon. While Belleforest and Thevet exploited the exotic and sensational potential of the Heptameron, other writers were looking for different effects. The celebrated Protestant lexicographer Henri Estienne used many of Marguerite’s stories of Franciscan depravity as illustrations of the corruption of the Catholic Church in his Apologie pour Hérodote (Defence of Herodotus, 1565). 25 Michel Bideaux, Roberval, la demoiselle et le gentilhomme: les Robinsons de TerreNeuve (Paris: Garnier, 2009). 26 https://teachingmargueritederoberval.com/ 27 https://teachingmargueritederoberval.com/contemporary-canadian-womenmarguerite/. This page has interviews with Barrie, Beckel, and Laberge.



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Referring his readers to her ‘Nouvelles’, he claims that her purpose was, like his, to ‘faire entendre à la posterité combien desbordee a esté la vilanie de ceux qu’on jugeoit estre non seulement honnestes mais sainctes personnes’ (prove to posterity how excessive was the wickedness of those who were judged not only honourable but holy people).28 Estienne draws on the Heptameron’s stories of lustful and unscrupulous Franciscans as rhetorical weight, real-life examples to show the corruption of the Catholic Church. This view of the book has had some traction. We saw in Chapter 1 how a seventeenth-century reader, Charles Sorel, thought the Heptameron was actually the work of a Huguenot polemicist like Estienne. Pierre de Brantôme was another writer to draw on the Heptameron as reallife source material, but with a very different purpose from Estienne. We have seen how Brantôme claims that the Heptameron was a kind of roman à clé, the storytellers representing members of Marguerite’s inner circle, including his own mother, Anne de Vivonne. His salacious memoir of the court of the Valois monarchs, given the title Dames galantes (Gallant Ladies) when it was first printed in the seventeenth century, takes a number of the stories as truthful accounts; he names some protagonists (such as Bonnivet in nouvelle 4) but pointedly fails to reveal the identity of others (such as Jambicque in nouvelle 43, although here he does claim that the lover was his uncle).29 Brantôme’s account of nouvelle 26, Saffredent’s tale of a beautiful woman whose love for her adopted son is the cause of her death, shows him taking his cue from the storyteller, who claims the heroine was in effect a hypocrite who wanted only to ‘se monstrer plus vertueuse par dehors qu’elle n’estoit au cueur’ (p. 388; ‘show […] herself outwardly more virtuous than she was in her heart’, p. 304). She was, Brantôme agrees, in language typical of the Dames galantes, ‘dans son ame et de volonté pute, et bruslant de l’amour de Monsieur d’Avannes’ (a whore in heart and desire, burning with love for M. d’Avannes).30 Brantôme, like Saffredent, would have preferred the heroine to declare her love and save her own life. While we might doubt that Marguerite would have approved of his interpretation of the story, Brantôme’s reaction shows the enduring persuasive power of Saffredent’s perspective, an effect that the Heptameron both stages and exposes. The first of Marguerite’s works to be translated into English was not the Heptameron but Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse by the eleven-year-old princess who would become Elizabeth I. Elizabeth made the translation and bound it in an embroidered cover as a New Year’s gift for her stepmother 28 Henri Estienne, Traité preparative à l’Apologie pour Herodote, ed. Bénédicte Boudou, 2 vols (Geneva: Droz, 2007), vol. 1, p. 544. 29 Pierre de Brantôme, ‘Second Volume des Dames’, in Recueil des Dames, p. 554 (Bonnivet), p. 392 (Jambicque). 30 Brantôme, Recueil, p. 373.

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Katherine Parr in 1545. It is not known for sure how Elizabeth chose the poem; perhaps Marguerite sent a copy to her mother, Anne Boleyn, who had spent her youth at the French court and who shared her reformist views; or Queen Katherine, who was also interested in reform, may have recommended it to her stepdaughter.31 Elizabeth’s translation was printed in 1548 by the Protestant polemicist John Bale, who added a dedicatory letter to her denouncing the usurped authority of the bishops and friars.32 In the Miroir Marguerite adopts a series of personae that emphasise her sinfulness and her separation from God: the prodigal child, the despairing mother, the rebellious sister, and the adulterous wife. Susan Snyder has argued that Elizabeth may have found some affinity with Marguerite’s persona as ‘errant sister’ in the Miroir, an unusual familial relationship to strike with God; whether she knew much of the French queen or not, they were in similar positions, subordinate to younger and less gifted brothers.33 First offered to her reformist stepmother, then printed in the reign of her Protestant brother Edward by a well-known controversialist, Elizabeth’s translation of the Miroir moves through different contexts, as gift, polemic, and potentially self-expression. The Heptameron was at first translated into English in excerpted form. Stories were translated, adapted, and included in compilations of novellas by William Painter (The Palace of Pleasure, 1566) and George Whetstone (Heptameron of Civill Discourses, 1582).34 These early English versions exploited the novella as moral exemplum but ignored Marguerite’s explicit critique of organised religion and her programme for reform. Both writers 31 Elizabeth’s Glass: with ‘The Glass of the Sinful Soul’ (1544) by Elizabeth I, ed. Marc Shell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993). Elizabeth’s translation is also reproduced (with original spelling and syntax) in Marguerite de Navarre, Le Miroir de l’ame pecheresse, ed. Renja Salminen (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1979). See also Anne Lake Prescott, ‘The Pearl of the Valois and Elizabeth I: Marguerite de Navarre’s Miroir and Tudor England’, in Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works, ed. Margaret Patterson Hannay (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press), pp. 61–76. The presentation copy of Elizabeth’s translation in its embroidered binding is now in the Bodleian: https://iiif.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/iiif/viewer/ e3609380-b56e-4bde-9636-85736559db52#?c=0&m=0&s=0&cv=0&r=0&xywh=4569%2C-1%2C14508%2C6254. 32 Elizabeth I, A Godly Medytacyon of the Christen Sowle (n.p.: Dirik van der Straten, 1548). 33 Snyder, ‘Guilty Sisters’, p. 454. On the originality of Marguerite’s persona as Christ’s sister, see Ferguson, Mirroring Belief, p. 199. 34 William Painter, The Palace of Pleasure Beautified, Adorned and Well Furnished, with Pleasaunt Histories and Excellent Novelles, Selected out of Divers Good and Commendable Authors (London: John Kingston and Henry Denham for Richard Tottell and William Jones, 1566); George Whetstone, An Heptameron of Civill Discourses (London: Richard Jones, 1582). See Dora E. Polachek, ‘Scatology, Sexuality and the Logic of Laughter in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron’, Medieval Feminist Forum 33 (2002), 30–42.



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offer their translations of Italian and French novellas as models of civil behaviour, where readers could contemplate, as Whetstone’s title page put it, as it were in a Mirrour. Marguerite’s stories, then, continued to be used and reused as persuasive devices to reinforce or critique certain behaviours; but, as Melissa Walter argues, both Painter’s and Whetstone’s collections echoed the Heptameron’s fundamental understanding of reading and interpreting as a social and collective activity.35 An abridged English version of the Heptameron came out in 1597 with a title suggesting that Boaistuau’s edition was the source text: The Queen of Navarre’s Tales Containing Verie Pleasant Discourses of Fortunate Lovers. This was a partial translation containing fifteen tales from the first three days, plus two others not found in the French editions, with no discussions, by an unknown translator. The preface is concerned with the idle and malicious interpretations a writer may suffer in the public marketplace by those readers who ‘wil dry-bob any man that writes, of what subject soever’.36 In 1654, during Cromwell’s Commonwealth, Robert Codrington made the first full English translation based on Gruget’s edition, Heptameron or the History of the Fortunate Lovers. Codrington’s dedication to Thomas Stanley and his preface to the reader are both brief, but betray some anxiety about the reception of Marguerite’s bawdy tales in Puritan England. He commends the book to the reader as material for reflection and discrimination: ‘If any thing in the whole Work shall appear too light, you must ballance it with that which shall be found more solid.’37 In its English journey, the Heptameron continued to be presented as a continuation of the discussion its storytellers start. The conversation in Sarrance betrays little of the anxiety over interpretation that is evidenced by printed prefaces. The Heptameron’s storytellers are happy to hear their stories debated by their listeners. Admittedly, this is a carefully limited, elite group, homogeneous in terms of class if not in terms of gender. But there is a suggestion that the stories may escape from the small group in Sarrance and the royal circle for whom they are created. At the end of the second day, the storytellers discover that the monks from the monastery have been listening to their conversations. At first, the monks’ behaviour is represented as lax and even slightly sinister. The monks sneak away from their duties 35 Melissa Walter, ‘Constructing Readers and Reading Communities: Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron 32 in England’, Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme 27.1 (Winter 2003), 35–59 (p. 36). 36 The queen of Navarres tales Containing, verie pleasant discourses of fortunate lovers (London: V. Simmes for John Oxenbridge, 1597), p. Aiir. On English translations of the Heptameron, see Chilton’s Introduction to his translation, Heptameron, pp. 22–6. 37 Heptameron or the History of the Fortunate Lovers; written by the most excellent and most virtuous princess, Margaret de Valoys, Queen of Navarre (London: F. L. for Nath. Ekins, 1654), p. A3v.

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to listen: ‘comme ceulx qui aymoient mieulx leurs paisirs que les oraisons, s’estoient allez cacher dedans une fosse, le ventre contre terre, derrière une haye fort espesse’ (p. 297; ‘preferring their pleasures to their prayers, they had been hiding in a ditch behind a thick hedge, flat on their bellies’, p. 234). Lying on the ground, hiding in a ditch, the monks are eavesdroppers, insinuating themselves into unauthorised places, as they do in the stories. The storytellers are not worried by this potential intrusion and allow them to continue listening. The monks are not permitted to join the circle, however, but must remain behind the hedge. The stories and discussions of Franciscan moral corruption that the monks hear cannot be entirely pleasurable for them: they represent an audience in need of moral instruction for whom the stories may offer some edification and even enlightenment. This effect is not guaranteed, of course. As Hircan observes at the end of the third day, the monks are happy to listen to the stories, but they leave as soon as the discussion turns to God (pp. 410–11; p. 323). But more generally the eavesdropping monks suggest that the stories will escape from the limited circle and make their way through the outside world with unpredictable consequences. Both stories and frame, matter and form, had a fruitful afterlife in the seventeenth century, a period of unparalleled French literary and cultural production. The informal, intimate, reflective, but ultimately unresolved nature of the Heptameron’s discussions anticipates seventeenth-century French salon culture that was largely shaped and animated by aristocratic women.38 Shot through with class and gendered assumptions and tensions, seventeenthcentury salon culture was nevertheless exceptionally productive. Perhaps the most significant invention to emerge from the salons was the successor of the novella, the novel.39 Emerging from the novella’s commitment to the everyday and the ordinary, the novel eventually rejected its predecessor’s representation of types for psychological verisimilitude. Mme de Lafayette’s Princesse de Clèves (1678) is generally identified in French literary histories as an important precursor of the modern psychological novel. But it also looks back to the earlier storytelling tradition represented by Marguerite’s Heptameron.40 Lafayette’s work tracks the experience of a young, beautiful, and virtuous girl through the intrigues and machinations of the royal court. It is set more than a hundred years before it was written, in 1558 at the court of Henri II. The princess is brought 38 Nicole Cazauran, ‘Un nouveau “genre d’écrire”: les débuts du dialogue mondain’, in Variétés, pp. 287–335; Caroline Lougee, Le Paradis des femmes: Women, Salons and Social Stratification in Seventeenth-Century France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976). 39 431 Nicole Cazauran, ‘L’Heptaméron et les origines du roman moderne’, in Variétés, pp. 251–68. 40 Leanna Bridge Rezvanni, ‘Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron: The Inspiration behind La Princesse de Clèves’, Dalhousie French Studies 92 (Fall 2010), 3–9.



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up in relative isolation by her mother, married young to the duke of Cleves, and subsequently falls in love with the duke of Nemours, a handsome court celebrity. At one point in the princess’s negotiations with the world of the court, the Dauphine Mary Stuart mentions ‘Mme Marguerite’, ‘dont vous avez vu les contes’ (whose stories you have read).41 La Princesse de Clèves opens in 1558, when the Heptameron had just been printed for the first time. The princess is also told a series of four stories of other women, clearly designed to be exemplary in the sense that they should teach her how to live her own life, but problematic in ways familiar from the Heptameron. As John Lyons argues, the princess is unable to take these stories as warnings, and understands the bearing they might have on her own life only after she has made the same mistakes.42 Given the warning that her mother makes about the court – that appearances are always deceptive – the princess in the end chooses withdrawal and repos (rest, peace) over passion and social life. The suspicion with which the princess treats both outward appearances and her own feelings is also present in Marguerite’s Heptameron. If Marguerite’s evangelical ontology (that is, her understanding of human life as essentially fallen, and requiring faith to supplement it) is no longer a cultural given, the scrutiny of self and surroundings, which all her works advocate, remains a central part of literary culture. It is the model offered by the storytellers in the Heptameron – not always self-aware or self-critical, but committed to discussion. As the stories leak out from behind the hedge, they will always find new readers to interpret and deploy them in new ways.

41 Madame de Lafayette, La Princesse de Clèves, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Camille Esmein-Sarrazin (Paris: Gallimard, 2014), pp. 329–478 (p. 387). 42 Lyons, Exemplum, p. 219.

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Index Page numbers in bold type refer to illustrations. Affaire des placards  6, 20, 48–9, 52, 67 Agrippa, Henry Cornelius De la noblesse et preexcellence du sexe foeminin 117 Alençon  13, 17, 81, 93, 95, 193 Anamorphosis 143 Androgyne  15, 27 Angier, Paul L’Honneste Amant pour l’Amye de Court 118 Aristotle  13, 27 See also Biology, Aristotelian; Form, Aristotelian Augereau, Antoine  5, 20, 49, 53 Augustine City of God 135–6 Authority  79–80, 81, 85, 89, 93–6, 118 authorial  182, 185 Bale, John  202 Bandello, Matteo  184, 200 Barrie, Shirley  200 Beaujeu, Anne de  12, 13 Beckel, Annamaria  200 Béda, Noël  67 Belleforest, François de  197–8 Histoires tragiques  183, 184, 200 Berquin, Louis  17, 52 n.34 Bible  2, 29, 44, 54, 60, 67, 68, 73, 165 in the Heptameron  155, 169, 179 vernacular  44, 73 Vulgate  44, 155

Billon, François de Le Fort inexpugnable de l’honneur du sexe feminin 117 Biology, Aristotelian  113–14, 132–3, 191, 197, 199 Boaistuau, Pierre Histoires des amans fortunez 182, 185–6, 196–8, 199, 203 Histoires prodigieuses 182 Histoires tragiques  182, 183–5, 200 Boccaccio, Giovanni  13, 130 Decameron French translation of  7, 17 gender in  103, 105, 112 as go-between  32, 112 as inspiration for Heptameron 32, 33, 34, 164, 170, 173–4 narrative voice in  173–4 readers  176–7, 198 tradition of  142, 170, 173–4, 176–7, 178, 198 Bodin, Jean  182 Body  136, 139, 171–3 female  111, 133 male 106–7 as prison  55–8, 80 Boleyn, Anne  202 Bonnivet, Guillaume Goffier de  36, 76, 92, 126–7, 131, 149–50, 151, 201 Books  13, 22–6, 32, 65, 86–7 Bouchet, Guillaume  178

222 Index

Brantôme, Pierre de on the Heptameron  36, 39, 150, 201 on Marguerite  10–11, 13 n.11, 16–17, 46–7, 76, 84–5 Briçonnet, Guillaume  43 correspondence with Marguerite  4, 49, 57, 81, 164–6 evangelical theology of  54, 70, 154 Burkhardt, Jakob  2 Calvin, Jean  2, 10, 17, 42–3, 46 Excuse de Jean Calvin à MM. les Nicodémites 50–1 Canards  179, 184 Carnival  6, 29–30, 31, 72, 83, 84, 94, 168 Castiglione, Baldassare Book of the Courtier  14, 34, 85–6, 98, 154 n.47, 164 court lady in  117 social change in  14, 92–3, 107 Censorship  5, 20 Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles (anon.)  35, 109, 177 Charity  44, 64, 66, 173, 197 Charles V  2, 5, 6, 17, 52, 79, 82, 86 and Pavia  5, 48, 76, 92 Charles d’Alençon  4, 5, 13, 16, 81, 93, 95 Charles d’Angoulême  12 Charlotte de France  4, 16, 165–6, 168 Chartier, Alain La Belle dame sans merci 147, 149–50 Livre des quatre dames 26 Châtelaine de Vergy  124, 126, 185 Childbearing 78–84 Christine de Pizan  26, 130 Cité des dames 117 Cicero  27–8, 34, 109, 164, 192 Colonna, Vittoria  10, 20–2 Contrafactum 157 Conversation 170–3 Courtier  14, 39, 59–60, 85–6, 87, 107

Crenne, Hélisenne de Epîtres familières et invectives 192 Cuyder See under Pride Dante  13, 59, 112, 167 Death  16, 53, 55, 147, 193 desire and  124, 142–4, 156 of François I  7–8, 166–8 mystical  56–7, 69–74, 159–62, 193 Debate  7, 26–9, 31, 116–19, 169–70, 181 Denisot, Nicolas  193–4 Dentière, Marie  50 Desire for death  142–4, 160–2 and the Fall  57–8, 60, 61, 129–31, 134–6 feminine  113–14, 132–4 homosocial 108–11 for knowledge  136–7, 141 masculine 106–7 and power  148–51 for recognition  146 sublimation of  107–8, 154–62 as substitution  146–8 Des Périers, Bonaventure  6 n.13, 17, 69 Nouvelles recréations et joyeux devis  171 Dialogue  14, 16, 47, 98, 163–70, 193 Diplomacy  12, 76–8, 84–7, 88, 142, 192 Discrimination  118, 180–1, 203 Dissimulation  49–51, 78, 90, 131, 175 See also hypocrisy Dolet, Etienne  18, 20, 67 Dorat, Jean  194 Du Baïf, Antoine  194 Du Bellay, Joachim  194 Du Bois, Simon  4, 5, 53 Du Fail, Noël Propos rustiques 171 Dupont, Gratien Controverses des sexes masculin et femenin 117

Index 223

Edward VI  202 Elizabeth I  201–2 Epic  80, 178 Erasmus, Desiderius  17, 22, 44, 120 Adages 139 Education of a Christian Prince 89 In Praise of Marriage 119 Institution of Christian Marriage  119 Lingua 140 Estienne, Henri de Apologie pour Hérodote 200–1 Eucharist  47, 48–9, 69, 170 Evangelicals  2, 10, 55, 168, 170 beliefs of  42–7, 58, 63, 66 persecution of  5–6, 47–52 Evangiles des quenouilles 170 Exemplarity  52, 54, 80, 193, 202, 205 in Heptameron  88, 105, 116, 177, 180, 186–90 Faith  47, 51, 54, 63, 64–9, 152, 180, 195 and Neoplatonism  155–6 Fall  52–8, 61, 63, 190, 205 and desire  129, 134–6 and salvation  161, 162 of Satan  59 Farel, Guillaume  17, 43 Femininity  13, 111–16 Fetishism 144–8 Feudalism  95, 97, 98 Ficino, Marsilio  56, 154 Fontaine, Charles La Contr’amye de court 118 Form, Aristotelian  113, 197, 199 Francesco-Maria della Rovere (duke of Urbino) 98–100 Franciscans  35, 37, 44, 61–4, 150, 152, 180, 200–1, 204 François I  12–16, 76–7, 79–81, 84–5, 166–7 death of  7–8, 71, 161–2 in Heptameron  87–93, 95–6 and reform  2, 20, 46, 47–9, 53, 102

Freud, Sigmund fetish 144–5 theory of language  141 Friendship female 26–9 male  96, 109–11 Gender 103–31 and desire  132–6, 154 and exemplarity  187, 189 and politics  79, 84–5, 97, 181 and print culture  195–6 as social construction  108, 129–31 Gifts  21, 22–6, 33, 53, 86–7, 201 Gilles, Gilles  198 Gournay, Marie de  28 Egalité des hommes et des femmes  118 Governance  88–90, 93–102 Grace  44, 54, 64–9, 136, 138 Gruget, Claude  33, 124 n.29, 177, 182, 196, 198–9, 203 Henri II  8, 52, 77, 88, 174 Henri III  120 Henri de Navarre  5, 36, 81 Henry VIII  48, 93, 95 Heresy  22, 41, 48, 52 n.34, 67 Herod 100–1 Héroët, Antoine La Parfaite amye  117, 118 Histoire  177 n.25, 182–6, 190 Histoire prodigieuse 182 Histoire tragique  182, 183–6, 187, 200 History  17, 39, 177, 182–3, 187 Holbein, Hans The Ambassadors 143 Homosociality  106, 108, 109 Honour aristocratic  83, 87, 89, 90, 92, 97–100 feminine  37–8, 126–7, 137–40, 147, 149–50 masculine  114, 116, 125–8, 130–1, 150 socially constructed  94–5, 103, 114, 116, 128–31

224 Index

Huguenots 3 Humanism  1–2, 4, 12, 13, 34, 41, 44, 56, 164, 186–7 Humours  113, 133–4 Hypocrisy  14, 50–1, 78, 90, 114, 137, 149, 180 See also dissimulation

and gender  116, 130, 131, 137, 143 and marriage  121–3 Platonic  56, 152–7 and power  150 Lucian 164 Lucretia  88, 138 Luther, Martin  2, 4, 10, 42–4, 61, 63, 66

Indulgences 42 Interpretation  140, 163–4, 177, 185, 189, 197, 203 Italian Wars  76, 100 Italy  76, 96, 99–100, 149

Machiavelli, Niccolò The Prince  89–90, 96, 101, 110 Manuscript culture  20–6, 29, 39, 191 of the Heptameron  8–9, 58, 182, 184, 197–8, 199 Marguerite de France (Marguerite’s niece)  6, 61, 83, 192 Marguerite de Lorraine (Marguerite’s first mother–in–law)  13, 16, 45 Marguerite de Navarre Chansons spirituelles  8, 21, 71–2, 157–62, 163 La Coche  6, 8, 23–9, 31, 86–7 Comédie de l’adoration des rois 59, 100–1 Comédie des Innocents  30, 101–2 Comédie de Mont-de-Marsan 8, 29–30, 72–4 Comédie de la Nativité  30, 51 n.31, 59 Comédie des parfaits amants 8 Comédie de quatre femmes  6, 30– 1, 83–4, 118, 173 Comédie sur le trépas du roi  7, 31 Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne   4, 16, 163, 165–6, 167–8 Epîtres  8, 79–81 Fable du faux cuyder  6, 61 Heptaméron Prologue  7, 8, 31–5, 94, 103–5, 106, 157, 169, 174, 176, 178, 179, 181 N1  93–6, 111, 171–2, 176, 177, 189 N2  37, 112, 151, 176, 177 N4  36, 37–8, 126, 201 N5  37, 112, 176 N6 176

Jean de Navarre  5 Jeanne de Navarre  5, 8, 35, 39–40, 47, 102, 199 marriage to William of Cleves  6, 52, 81–3 Jouissance 161 Labé, Louise  195–6 Laberge, Rosette  200 La Borderie, Bertrand de L’Amie de court 117–18 Lacan, Jacques fetish 145–6 Real, Symbolic, Imaginary  143 theory of desire  141, 148 La Croix du Maine, François Grudé de 35 Lafayette, Mme de La Princesse de Clèves 204–5 Lefèvre d’Etaples, Jacques  4, 17, 43–4, 48, 54, 66, 67, 70 Le Maçon, Antoine  7, 17 Louise de Savoie  2, 5, 12–13, 36, 48, 49, 79–81, 88 Love  3, 6, 15, 31, 83, 90–1, 167, 175, 180, 184, 198 courtly  26–7, 32, 37, 60, 98, 106, 107, 114, 117–18, 124–8, 144–51, 157–60, 181 divine  16, 21, 59–60, 65, 69, 71, 73, 159, 161–2, 180 dying for  107–8

Index 225

N7  171, 187 N8  37, 108, 171, 177 N9  107–8, 124 N10  37, 107, 131, 178–9 N11 139–40 N12  96–8, 109–10, 127, 146, 170, 181 N14  36, 106, 126–7, 131, 149–51 N15  114–15, 118, 123, 124, 125, 133, 146, 189 N16 150 N17  35, 92–3 N18  108, 175–6, 187 N19  53 n.36, 66, 107, 153–5 N20 106 N21  114, 115, 116, 118, 121–2, 130, 189–90 N22  45, 51, 63, 96, 117 N23  62, 63–4, 65, 150, 184 N24  171, 189 N25  58, 90–2, 183 N26  129, 134, 136, 155–6, 201 N30  62, 151–4, 156 N31  62, 63 N32  140–4, 151, 186 N33 152 N34  61–2, 180 N36 155 N37  188, 116 N39 188 N40  112, 121–3, 189–90 N42  88–90, 92, 151 N43  51, 124–6, 201 N44 44–5 N46 63 N47 110–11 N48 62 N49  137, 146–7, 190 N50 124 N51 98–100 N56  51, 147 N57  144–8, 150–1 N61 171 N62  37–8, 137–40, 181 N63 152 N64 153

N65 180–1 N66 35 N67  184, 200 N70  124, 126, 185–6 N72  45, 96, 99 Heptaméron des nouvelles (1559)  33, 177, 198–9 Histoires des amans fortunez (1558)  182, 185–6, 196–8, 199 L’Inquisiteur  6, 67–9, 169 Le Malade 6 Marguerites de la Marguerite des princesses  7–8, 26, 29, 39–40, 50–1, 53, 71, 100, 161 preface  66, 194–5 Miroir de Jésus Christ crucifié 7, 49 n. 24, 53 Miroir de l’âme pécheresse  5, 8, 49, 53–7, 64–5, 66, 70–1, 72, 161, 193 censorship of  20, 48 translated by Elizabeth I  201–2 La Navire  7, 16, 39, 52, 163, 166–8 Pater Noster  4, 8 Les Prisons  7, 13 n.10, 16, 39, 45, 52, 56, 65–6, 69–70, 102, 136 on courtly love  127–8 on cuyder 59–61 Trop Prou Peu Moins  50–1, 168–9 Marot, Clément  15, 17–19, 22, 44, 49–50, 67, 71–2, 162 Marriage  81–4, 93–4, 115–16, 119–23 clandestine 121–3 mystical  70, 159–60, 166, 193 Masculinity 105–11 Mass  6, 32, 48–9 See also Eucharist Matthieu, Pierre  182–3 Medici, Alessandro de (duke of Florence)  35, 96–8, 109–10, 181 Medici, Catherine de (queen of France)   54, 170 in Heptameron Prologue 33–4 Medici, Lorenzino de  35, 96–8, 109– 10, 181 Melancholy  147, 151, 153, 189

226 Index

Men honour of  114, 116, 125–8, 130–1, 150 nature of  105–11, 129–31 Mind, theory of  171–2 Mirrors  53–4, 66, 75, 88, 192–3, 194 Monasteries  13, 45, 47, 63 Montaigne, Michel de ‘De l’amitié’  27–8, 109 ‘Des prières’  91 ‘Sur des vers de Virgile’  120, 130 Montmorency, Anne de  21–2, 46, 48, 52, 77–8, 79, 86, 89 Mortification  151–4, 169 Musset, Alfred de Lorenzaccio 96 Mysticism 15–16, 19–20, 69–74, 157–62, 166, 193 Narrative  136–40, 143–4, 147, 186 See also Voice, narrative Narrator  32, 36, 171, 173–7, 181 Nature  112–14, 123, 129, 132–5 Neoplatonism  6, 27, 57, 117, 154–7 Nérac  5, 17, 29, 38, 39, 40 News  178–81, 182, 187 Nicodemites 50 Nouvelle  34–5, 177–81 Office de Sainte Anne 22–3, 24 Orality  170–3, 178–9 Other  146–7, 148 Paget, William  6, 31 Parr, Katherine  53, 202 Patronage  4, 16–22, 68, 75 Paul, St  33, 55, 66, 71, 72, 155, 166 on the flesh and the spirit  57–8, 165 on human foolishness  62, 69, 168 Pavia  5, 21, 48, 76, 79, 92, 192 Peletier du Mans, Jacques  194 Persecution  3, 6, 17, 20, 41, 47–52, 67–8, 90 Persuasion  34, 187–8

Pisselieu, Anne de (duchess of Etampes)   23, 26, 29, 31, 86–7 Plato  27, 57, 117, 164, 192 Symposium  13, 15, 56, 154 Timaeus 134 Plutarch ‘How to Tell the Flatterer from a Friend’ 86 Poissenot, Bénigne  178, 184 Poissy, Colloque de  170 Polyphony 173 Power  28, 51, 100–2, 122 and desire  149–51 and gender  88, 93–4, 111, 118, 125 of Marguerite  11, 85, 95 Pride (cuyder)  58–64, 101–2, 129, 131, 134–5, 157–9 Print culture  8, 20, 22, 26, 38, 42, 53, 179, 191–2, 194–9 Prosopopoeia 166 Pseudo-Dionysius 70 Psychoanalysis  140–1, 143, 144–7, 148 Querelle des amies 117–18 Querelle des femmes  103, 116–19, 130 Quintilian  34, 166 Rabelais, François  19, 50, 70, 139, 178, 191 Tiers Livre  19–20, 113–14, 117, 119–20, 133–4, 135 Rape  36–8, 62–3, 108, 137 Reader  26, 103, 157, 172, 173 and exemplarity  184, 185, 187 female  112, 176–7, 198 and interpretation  191, 195, 197, 203 male 175 Reformation  1, 2–3, 41–7 Renaissance  1–2, 10–11, 12–14, 34, 92, 145, 164, 195 See also Humanism Rhetoric  1, 115, 117, 166, 187–8 manipulation of 109–10, 127, 155–6 and truth  34–5

Index 227

Romance  107, 109, 111, 112, 124, 126, 146, 178 Roman de la Rose  13, 31, 63, 90, 117 Ronsard, Pierre de  194 Roussel, Gérard  4, 17, 48 Ruteboeuf 63 Sainte-Marthe, Charles de Oraison funèbre  39, 54, 192–3, 194 Saint-Léger, Ysambert de Miroir des dames 23, 25, 54 Salon culture  204 Secrecy  36, 51, 107–8, 124–5, 137, 144, 175 Sertenas, Vincent  196, 198–9 Service aristocratic  79–81, 84, 94, 97, 110 courtly  32, 105, 124 Seymour, Anne, Margaret, and Jane Hecatodistichon 193–4 Shame  37–8, 134, 135–6, 147, 175, 190 Silence  70, 72, 107–8, 142 Silvius, Simon (aka Jean de la Haye) 194–5 Sin  52–8, 59, 61, 64–5, 127, 135–6, 138, 152, 155, 165 Sociability  10–11, 18, 39 Sola fides 66 Song  68, 71–2, 73, 157 Song of Songs  70, 166, 193 Sorbonne  5, 17, 19, 20, 43, 48, 49, 53, 67 Sorel, Charles  35 Sprezzatura  14, 34, 84 Storytelling  118, 132, 137, 147–8, 170–1, 174, 204 as exposure  37–8, 51, 125, 137– 40 and interpretation  177, 181 rules of  33–5, 104, 181

Terza rima 167–8 Testimony  34, 38, 94, 183, 185 Theatre  29–31, 101–2, 168, 173 Thevet, André Cosmographie universelle 200 Thou, Adrien de  8, 177 n.25 Tiraqueau, André de De legibus connubialibus 119 Tolerance  47, 169–70 Tragedy  184–5, 186 Transubstantiation 49 Trent, Council of  43, 120 Truth  34–6, 44–5, 85–6, 127, 139, 178, 179, 182–3, 185 Tyrannicide 98 Unconscious 141 Vice  61–2, 90, 186 feminine  113, 127, 129, 134, 137 Vigneulles, Philippe de Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles  137 n.7, 177 Violence  36–8, 67, 97, 98, 110, 112– 13, 126–7 Virtue  51, 62, 186 aristocratic 88–90 feminine  105, 113, 115, 117, 118, 127, 129, 131 masculine 175–6 Vivonne, Anne de  36, 201 Voice, narrative  173–7 Wars of Religion  3, 41, 47, 184 William of Cleves  6, 26, 52, 81–3 Women honour of  37–8, 114, 116, 126– 7, 128, 129, 131, 137–40, 147, 149 nature of  129–31, 111–16 Yver, Jacques  178