A History of Modern French Literature

by Christopher Prendergast

  Marguerite’s historical situation is crucial to an understanding of her work, destined as she was to a life whose rhythms were set to those of high politics and dynastic scheming. Before examining aspects of the Heptameron in detail, it seems useful—given the claims it makes to documentary truthfulness—to explore something of the context both of this remarkable author’s life and of her influence on the work of her contemporaries. Born Marguerite d’Angoulême in 1492, the eldest child of one of several heirs presumptive to the throne of France, she died in 1549, queen of Navarre by her second marriage. The half-century in which she lived saw the world transformed, and her writing bears the traces of the discoveries, innovations, and intrigues of the time. From Renaissance through Reformation to the New World, the tales of the Heptameron offer insights into the everyday, lived experience that underscores world-historical change on the grand scale. Despite her being older than her brother, there was never any question that she, as a woman, might reign as queen of France by virtue of her own qualities or title. But her politically astute mother, Louise de Savoie, herself only nineteen years old when her husband had died, nonetheless devoted considerable energy and intelligence to ensuring that if (or as it turned out, when) the time came—in other words, when enough other people died, and not enough other boys had been born—both her children would be ready to assume royal power. Well educated herself, Louise insisted that the girl be offered the same humanist education as her brother: Marguerite became proficient in Latin, Hebrew, Spanish, and Italian, and widely read in philosophy, natural sciences, and theology. Much of this learning would find its way into the Heptameron, and it informed Marguerite’s other writings to such an extent that in her funeral oration she would be characterized as “perfect in Poetry, learned in Philosophy, and both completed and consumed by Holy Scripture.”

  The point of this exceptionally high level of education (at least as far as Marguerite’s mother was concerned) was to make the girl properly marriageable and to compensate for her relatively poor dowry. For ten years, she was the only French princess on offer on the matrimonial market. As she moved through puberty and adolescence, a long series of possible matches came and went, among which the most startling might have been the request, in 1505, by Henry VII of England for Marguerite’s hand either for himself or for his son, Henry (who would, of course, go on to marry several times). The then French king Louis (who had other plans for her) blocked the English match; in retrospect, this looks to have been a lucky escape, but the alternative was not all that much better. Persuaded by an exceptionally large dowry underwritten by the king himself, one Charles d’Alençon agreed to marry the girl in 1509; a courtly eyewitness suggests that Marguerite “wept enough tears to hollow out a stone” during the entire ceremony. Though her husband was highborn, he was also an illiterate oaf, who seems (like many of his noble kind) to have been proud of the fact. People of her station were not expected to marry for love, but this does seem to have been a spectacularly unlovely match.

  Not for nothing is marriage, whether dynastically arranged or clandestinely contracted, the subject of several of the Heptameron’s tales. Among these, stories 21 and 40, linked by being about different generations of the same noble family, have received much recent critical attention. Detailing the force of desire unconstrained by social convention, they also deal in the (pointless) violence of corrective action undertaken in the name of honor. In the first misbegotten generation, a count imprisons his sister in a castle in the forest and murders her secretly contracted husband, whose status as a lower order of noble had brought shame on the family. A generation later the same count imprisons his own daughter, Rolandine, in the same castle: following the example of her aunt, she too had secretly married an inappropriate suitor (in this case “the bastard son of a good and noble family”). In the discussions that follow both tales, some of the storytellers feel sympathy for Rolandine in particular, but most concur that she had exercised poor judgment in her choice of husband. It is the women in the group who are the most forceful advocates of parental control. Perhaps surprisingly for modern readers, it is they who plead most strongly the case against the legitimacy of clandestine marriages, arguing an experientially determined sense that men who engage in illicit love are unlikely to prove faithful, worthy husbands in the end. And as if to confirm both their specific argument, and the general sense that, morally speaking, things are going from bad to worse, Rolandine’s husband (the “bastard”) soon forgets his imprisoned bride, proves unfaithful, and dies an inglorious death—all this despite his being “as gallant and worthy as any man of his day” (in other words, hardly, if at all.)

  Responding to anagrammatic and other clues in what have been termed the most “fully historical” of all the stories, early readers soon identified the noble line under threat in these twinned tales as the illustrious Rohan family. But recent critics, starting from the observation that both stories stage heated arguments between mothers and their daughters, have also drawn further, persuasive inferences from these paired narratives. After careful analysis both of letters exchanged between family members, and of legal affidavits preserved in court archives, they have shown how the stories (also) rework events from the author’s own life. Behind the screen of the names and locations cited in the text, the sorry story of the marriage of Marguerite’s own daughter, Jeanne, enforced by François I, before being legally contested and annulled on the grounds of nonconsummation seems to be being played out across these tales. In such contexts, it is striking how “well” the story of Rolandine ends; all she really wanted was a husband, and so once the “bastard” has safely died, her father frees her and is able to secure a new and better (because arranged) match for his daughter. Political expediency is reimagined as desire, and everyone lives happily ever after.

  The young Marguerite’s own unhappy match, which proved childless, but lasted until d’Alençon’s death in 1525, served its dynastic purpose, in that it consolidated the family’s position. And when, in late 1514, the French king Louis XII died without a male heir, leaving his cousin François as next in line to accede to the throne, Marguerite was able not only to accompany her mother and brother to court but also to enter into her own, specific, inheritance. As princess, as well as older and clearly more intelligent sister to the king, she assumed the multiple roles for which she had been so assiduously prepared: political operator, patron of the arts, and religious reformer. Given the tenor of the times, many writers sought her protection, and the tone of praise for her character and writings was set early. Erasmus, for instance, wrote to her in the following gently subversive terms: “For many years I have cherished the many excellent gifts that God bestowed upon you; prudence worthy of a philosopher; chastity; moderation; piety; an invincible strength of soul, and a marvelous contempt for all the vanities of this world. Who could keep from admiring, in a great king’s sister, such qualities as these, so rare even among the priests and monks?” She resisted his efforts to secure her patronage and allegiance to his views but was more persuadable by Clément Marot, one of a number of poets whom she both promoted and protected, and from whom the now celebrated characterization of Marguerite as someone in possession of “a woman’s body, the heart of a man, and the mind of an angel” derives.

  The “royal trinity” of mother, brother, and sister was initially receptive to proposals for Reform, even in a context where radical thinkers were held to be dangerous fundamentalists, enemies of the established Christian way of life. Anyone found in possession of officially condemned works was liable to prosecution, but like most such regulations, this was not systematically enforced. Because of her privileged status, Marguerite was able to collect, have translated, and translate for herself a wide range of seditious writings, including several, such as Luther’s treatise on monastic vows of celibacy, that are (silently) quoted within the Heptameron itself. But the pressure to move against the Reform became impossible to resist after the night of concerted direct action known as the “Aff
air of the Placards” (October 17–18, 1534), when a group of Swiss radicals posted broadsheets titled “Genuine Articles on the Horrific, Great and Unbearable Abuses of the Papal Mass, Invented Directly Contrary to the Holy Supper of Our Lord, Sole Mediator and Sole Savior Jesus Christ” in towns across France. Because one of the heretical posters had been nailed to the door of the king’s own bedchamber, the threat to national security was invoked, and the clampdown began. Both the poet Marot and the young Calvin were among those who sought (and found) temporary refuge at Marguerite’s court in Nérac (which lay beyond the jurisdiction of Paris). Over the next ten years, many of Marguerite’s other early associates were executed: strangled and burned at the stake like the translator and poet Etienne Dolet, or, like Antoine Augereau, one of her printers, hanged. Others managed to survive, among them François Rabelais, another occasional member of her circle. In dedicating the Third Book of his Gargantua and Pantagruel to her at a particularly tricky moment in his life, Rabelais invokes Marguerite’s “abstracted mind, ravished and ecstatic,” and as a physician implores her to pay more attention (perhaps by reading his book) to pleasure and the needs of her body, “the mind’s host and domestic dwelling.” Evidence suggests she enjoyed Rabelais’s work; and, according to rumor and fiction, extending from Marguerite’s own time to our own, she was the secret mother of his two children.

  Marguerite was, clearly, far more than a marriageable princess, a patron, the subject of anti-Reformist attacks, and the object of male writerly fantasies; she was also, long before the posthumous publication of the Heptameron, a published poet. Her work inspired other women to follow her example, as two distinctive instances make clear, each emblematizing the significance and range of Marguerite’s influence on early modern European culture. First, the poetry and the politics of religion and of translation: when just eleven years old, Princess Elizabeth of England set about translating into English prose Marguerite’s long penitential poem Le miroir de l’âme pécheresse (1531), an extended meditation on (among other things) spiritual self-abasement in the context of complex family relations. She offered the manuscript, held together by an embroidered and initialed binding, as a New Year’s gift to her stepmother, Katherine Parr. It is unclear how Elizabeth came to own a copy of Marguerite’s poem, but it may have been passed on to her by her mother, Anne Boleyn, who had spent several years at the French court as a child. A cleaned-up version, prefaced by the Protestant Reformer John Bale, was published in book form as The Glasse of the Synnnefull Soule, and went through several editions (1548, 1568, 1582, and 1590) during Elizabeth’s lifetime. Between mother(s) and daughter, France and England, manuscript and print: the poem’s complex interweaving of licit and illicit desires and sublimation gained in both religious and political significance with each new move. The early reception of Marguerite’s poetic Mirror can be read as an emblem of the controversial half-century that followed her death.

  The prehistory and the psychology of narrative in French also derive much of their energy from Marguerite’s work. If Mme de Lafayette can be said to inaugurate the psychological novel with her Princesse de Clèves (1678), it surely matters that she does so by way of homage to her Renaissance precursor. Three salient points suggest Marguerite’s power and influence here: first, Lafayette’s novel is organized as a number of tales set within a frame; second, its action unfolds very precisely in the year of the Heptameron’s publication; third, and most pertinently, the only explicit reference to any other work of history or fiction in the novel is that made to the Heptameron, which the Princesse de Clèves is said to have been reading both to pass the time and in an effort to distract herself from her own increasingly anxious situation. These two actual and fictional princesses embody, then, early readings of Marguerite’s work, even as they each redefine still further what it meant to be an early modern woman reader, translator, and writer.

  Turning away from the text’s early reception to focus more closely on matters of structure and theme, it is important to recognize both that there is nothing altogether new about the Heptameron, and that this particular set of stories is properly groundbreaking. For it is through such a doubly determined description that the work can best be understood for what it is. A perpetuation of the medieval French tradition of the fictional fabliaux and a cutting-edge experiment in truth-telling; an unforgiving account of the intersecting worlds of early modern caste, religion, and sexual politics, disguised as a utopian fantasy about equality; a quasi-Rabelaisian intertwining of oral and written narrative, of text and commentary, debate and dissent; a foundational text in the history of women’s writing, and the mother of all realist narrative in French: the Heptameron is all of these things, and more. And yet, today, beyond the university, it is too little known, or read.

  It is not difficult to see why. For modern anglophone readers, especially those raised on the novel, the Heptameron can appear at first sight to be either strange or dull. Clearly more than the sum of its parts, it nonetheless does not really quite hang together; and given the elaborate introduction, what follows seems either inconsistent or incomplete. Similar things might be said of the work of other writers of the European Renaissance; narratives left unfinished, structured in ways that appear to privilege parts over the whole, and peopled by characters whose inner lives are, if not unexplored, then either opaque or inexplicable. But if, unlike the other two properly significant French prose writers of the time, Rabelais and Montaigne, Marguerite is hard to recognize as truly modern, then this is perhaps because she has had (as yet) no direct inheritors or imitators in English. The point here is less about translation than traffic, or trade. Florio, Bacon, and Shakespeare all trafficked in Montaigne, such that he now feels at home in the English language; Swift did the same both for and with Rabelais. Marguerite’s nouvelles are less transportable, and her legacy is, linguistically speaking, more parochial: her significant imitators have all, with the notable exception of Elizabeth I, been French; and they have all been women.

  But the difficulties that the Heptameron now presents to “nonprofessional” readers (in other words, precisely the kind of readers for whom it was originally intended) are not all attributable to reception history and the politics of canon formation. Some are inherent to the thing itself, which is to say to its structure, its internal design, or argument. Clearly, the collection is unfinished, since rather than a round hundred, there are just seventy-two stories; but twenty-eight more would not make the defining difference. It’s true that it ends well (the seventy-second is one of the best tales of all), but—and this is perhaps the most significantly disenchanting feature of the collection for modern readers—nothing really changes across the course of the book. Similarly disappointing, for many readers, is the minimal attention given to sustained characterization. While the first story makes clear the fact that each narrative is motivated by the personal interests of its narrator, attempts to tease out further, satisfyingly hidden (quasi-Chaucerian) connections between specific tales and their tellers soon prove either unfruitful or unconvincing. None of this has stopped readers from seeing in the Heptameron a kind of roman à clef: a disguised, sometimes anagrammatically encoded portrait of Marguerite and her courtly friends. This interpretive tradition was initiated by the court gossip-monger and fabulist Pierre de Brantôme. Trading on secrets passed on by his parents and grandmother, whom he numbers among the storytellers, Brantôme took pleasure in “outing” many of the characters in the tales as well. Given the salience of the theme of rape in the stories, some of Marguerite’s more recent biographically inflected feminist readers have (as suggested above) similarly read the collection as a kind of thinly veiled autobiography. Documenting the generally brutal world of dynastic and forced marriage, the Heptameron can be shown to record the repeated sexual assaults Marguerite herself suffered from supposedly chivalrous men at court, including (some argue) her own brother. Her characters’ repeated insistence that they are telling true stories has, then, consistently been matched by a re
aderly determination to make of Marguerite’s collection, above all, something akin to testimony, part of the historical record.

  And yet while the Heptameron richly repays such an approach, it also resists it. The prologue places the tales under the dual categories of “pastimes” and “examples”: these are not only true stories, but also exemplary fables, which extend—as the discussions between the characters amply demonstrate—beyond their specific, documentary worth and serve as lessons for those astute enough to apply them to their own situations and lives. An understanding of the poetics and the practice of “exemplarity” has been central to much recent literary debate about the Heptameron, with close attention paid to its defining terms: testimony and witness; lesson and example; evidence, judgment, and proof. Some critics have pointed out that from the outset—from the very first story onward—these terms are all subject to such different interpretations that any stable, let alone authorially sanctioned understanding of them is undermined. Others insist that the text nonetheless both invites and sustains exemplary readings, as well as supports allegories that have, over time, ranged from the Neoplatonic through the psychoanalytical to the queer, and beyond. From the very first (unauthorized, anonymous, and posthumous) printing of the tales, the reception history of Marguerite’s singular text shadows the twinned histories of interpretation and ideas.