Among the printer Pierre Gruget’s “improvements” to the text was the prefacing of each of the stories with a short summary, outlining its moral import, and most subsequent editions have preserved and perpetuated this editorializing of Marguerite’s nouvelles. This last term, included in the title Gruget assigned to the collection, is not readily translated into contemporary English. While it cannot properly mean “news” in any sense (whether Weekly World, Fox network, or Washington Post), its meaning might reasonably extend from the rather literal “new things” or “novelties,” through “short stories” or “novellas,” to “the gospels.” The fact that the term’s elasticity matters, with each of its key elements—innovation, brevity, and gospel truth—held in productive tension, is best grasped by way of further, close consideration of the structural and thematic changes that Marguerite made to the storytelling traditions she inherited.
The first of these innovations is the placing of the narrative exchange within the distinctive, and unsettling, context of extreme physical danger. Like refugees from a Hollywood disaster movie, or those who gather at the borders of contemporary Europe, the characters who share tales in the abbey garden of the Heptameron have been radically, often painfully, displaced from their ordinary lives. This point leads to the second, more significant alteration Marguerite makes to her sources: the constitution of the group and the nature of their exchange. As noted above, her Italianate models are reconfigured as an argument in favor of equality, as Marguerite gives voice to an equal number of men and women. What is more, since the characters take what we might call narrative turns in presenting their stories, they learn far more than just how to pass, or bide their time. For, by way of the discussions that intersperse the stories, at times heated, at others respectful, they also learn how to listen, and how to argue with each other. The effect of this arrangement, proposed by Parlamente (whose very name signifies dialogue or negotiation), is to suggest that trading in stories is at once an end in itself and a means to the (temporary, provisional) establishment of more equitable social structures. As each participant in the game nominates a successor once the discussion of his or her own tale is complete, they come to realize that (even more than the interrupted journeys on which they had been engaged) their narrative exchanges are properly boundary-crossing.
Marguerite deliberately calls the reader’s attention to this dually determined state of affairs: “We are, in this game, all equals!” declares one of the male characters, his surprise marking the fact that the same cannot be said of the world in which they normally operate: a world from which they have, temporarily, been exiled, but to whose dangers and inequalities they determinedly (even obsessively) return, as each tells a daily tale. This last point is underlined by the third and most significant of Marguerite’s innovations to narrative tradition: the group’s agreement concerning the matter and the manner of the tales they will share. It is worth recalling the terms of this agreement, as it amounts to a narrative contract and mirrors Marguerite’s own mimetic contract with her readers: we will choose only contemporary subjects for our stories; we will exclude all rhetorical flourishes from their telling; and we will narrate only tales that we know for a fact to be true. For the most part, the characters keep to the rules; on the one the occasion when they obviously do not (story 70, based on the thirteenth-century poem the Châtelaine de Vergy), the clarity of the reasons set out for and against deviation from the rules of game is striking. Oisille (urged to tell the tale) argues that “there are two reasons why I ought not to. One is that it is a long story, and the other is that it is not a story of our time, and although it is by a reliable author, we have after all sworn not to tell stories from a written source.” As Oisille warns, she would be explicitly breaching conditions one and two of the narrative contract, as well as sidestepping the third: the truth-telling condition, which perpetuates the orality of the tales, narrating only events either witnessed by the individual storyteller or heard from someone they knew to be truthful. But Parlamente counters that an exception can, in this one instance, be made: “That is true, but if it’s the story I think it is, then it’s written in such antiquated language, that apart from you and me, there’s no one here who will have heard it; so it can be regarded as new.” Her argument, a complex combination of old and new, familiar and strange, writing and hearing, public knowledge and truths intimately shared, does more than give permission to Oisille to rework an old story for a new audience; it also underwrites the worth of Marguerite’s own enterprise.
This degree of self-consciousness about translation, innovation, and the transition from oral to written narrative (like the peculiar quality of attention given to the tales’ anticipated reception) is one of the most intriguing features of the Heptameron for modern readers. By way of conclusion, it seems useful to explore one last instance of such reflexive consideration of the conditions of worthwhile narratability, found in an unlikely context. With its multiple incests and unwitting romance, story 30 stretches the limits of credibility. Set in the court of Navarre, it explores the actions and desires of a devout young widow, characterized in the introductory blurb by Gruget as “a remarkable example of human frailty, who tries to conceal her horror, but only goes from bad to worse.” Known for her sincere devotion, as evidenced by years of fasting, pilgrimages, and similar acts of piety undertaken since the death of her husband, the widow hears rumors about her fourteen-year-old son’s inappropriate (and, it seems to her, wholly unlikely) sexual advances toward one of her servants. To test the truth of these claims the widow resolves to swap beds with the chambermaid, and, before long finds herself unaccountably enjoying sex with her son. Both disturbed and ashamed by what she cannot quite recognize as her own actions, she attempts to make amends by sending her son away to the wars, and, when the time comes, by having the child born of their incest adopted and brought up by her own kindly brother. All this is done with the best of intentions and in the hope that distance from home would ensure that neither child became corrupted by her own clearly baleful presence. In due course (of course) her two children meet and fall in love. As if enjoying the tragic irony of it all, the tale’s narrator, Hircan (commonly thought to represent Marguerite’s own second husband, Henri d’Albret, king of Navarre), wickedly indulges the tropes of romantic love, cross-fertilized by those of family: “They were very much in love. Never was there such love between husband and wife. For she was his daughter, his sister, his wife. And he was her father, brother and husband.” In a society founded on closely contracted dynastic alliances, Hircan slyly suggests, things can’t get any better: “They endured for ever in this great love.” But the mother knows that for things to really be as they seem, she must both avoid the sight of the true love that they embody and keep her dark secret to herself: “in the extremity of her penitence, she could not see them show their love, but she would withdraw to weep alone.”
If the tale’s content seems to flout the truth condition the narrators have set themselves, then Hircan’s rhetorical embroidery certainly transgresses the collective agreement not to entertain flowery or studied poetic language. And yet story 30, for all that it has woven into its texture multiple echoes from medieval sources, Luther’s sermons, and poems inscribed on contemporary tombstones, is included by historians among the twenty or so tales that have been verified by research. More significantly, perhaps, none of the storytellers themselves find it in the least unlikely, nor do any object to Hircan’s narrative style. He acknowledges before he begins his story that it is “most piteous and strange,” but this is more by way of advertisement than warning. Oisille, for her part, agrees, after hearing it, that “one could not hear a stranger story than that.” But as the discussion develops, it becomes clear that there is no reason to doubt the tale’s veracity, since everyone recognizes, behind the widow’s folly, the truths that this woman’s “example” teaches, as well as the real villains of the piece. The interpretive tone is set by Parlamente: “For sure, the first step man takes
trusting in himself alone is a step away from trust in God.” The other characters then line up to trade in similarly sententious lessons, all of them redirecting the example away from this particular woman and toward either “man” in general or themselves: “He is a wise man, who recognizes no enemy but himself, and distrusts his own will and counsel, however good and holy they may appear to be,” says one; another concurs, adding, “and nothing should induce a woman to risk sharing a bed with a male relative, however close he may be to her.” Is Marguerite secretly (as some argue) talking about herself and her doubtful (some say incestuous) relations with her brother? Or is the lesson to be drawn here more general than specific? The text, rather than answering such questions, offers further instruction, this time disguised as an image: “It’s not safe to set a naked flame near tinder.” The novelty (or otherwise) of this image is not what matters; its function is to inscribe the events of the tale in the register of the proverbially true, the universally known. This is made clear by the last of the group’s interpretive glosses, offered by Ennasuite (a character Brantôme identifies as his own mother): “Without doubt [the widow] was one of those foolish, vainglorious women who had had her head filled with nonsense by the Franciscans, and thought she was so saintly that she was incapable of sin, as some of them would persuade us to believe that through our own efforts we actually can be, though this is an extreme error.”
The events of this story may well be “most strange,” and overdetermined self-assurance is clearly a mistake; but putting faith in mendacious and corrupt priests is, Marguerite suggests, the truly “extreme error.” This last point is underscored by a remarkable instance of something like a mise-en-abîme—the narrator Hircan’s self-conscious reference to monks not only as characters in his story, but also as habitual eavesdroppers on the storytellers’ exchanges. The presence of the local monks, hidden listeners to the group, goes all but unremarked, and Hircan’s mention of them here is their second (and final) appearance in the Heptameron: “But you’re not taking notice of what I can see!” he exclaims to his companions, interrupting in the process their devout and rather sententious moralizing of his tale. “While we’ve been telling our stories, the monks have been listening behind the hedge!” As if to draw attention to the topical parallelism of the monks’ position as the true villains metaphorically “behind the story” as well as literally behind the hedge, Hircan adds a satirical sting to his tale, observing that “they didn’t even hear the bell for vespers, but now that we’ve started talking about God, they’ve run off and they’re ringing the second bell.” The dually inflected moral of the story—sin manufactures opportunity from which grace alone can redeem us, and the teaching of the Church serves, more often than not, to make matters worse—is clear and compelling. Similarly compelling is the seductive force of this tale as story.
The extent of Marguerite de Navarre’s writings is still being established. Her significance and influence, already remarkable in her own lifetime, continues to be explored in novel forms. Julia Voznesenskaya’s The Women’s Decameron (1985), for instance, a collection of tales linked by a frame in which ten women confined to a maternity ward in Soviet Leningrad both narrate and discuss their experiences over the course of ten days, owes much to the Heptameron, though its author rather obscures the fact. More openly indebted to its precursor is Henriette Chardak’s recently published (and as yet untranslated) La passion secrète d’une reine (A queen’s secret passion). A direct descendant of the Heptameron in both structure and theme, it retells Marguerite’s story by way of a series of imagined analytical sessions interspersed with a factually based historical account, audaciously presenting Marguerite as a pioneering feminist, free-thinker, social worker, and (here’s the secret) lover of Rabelais, mother to their twin daughters, Françoise and Jeanne. From the young Elizabeth I’s translation of the Mirror, through the novel transpositions represented by La Princesse de Clèves and The Women’s Decameron, right down to the psychoanalytically inspired revelations of La passion secrète d’une reine, Marguerite’s is a body of work that has proved foundational in the history of women’s writing in several languages and cultures. It also urges its readers—whoever and wherever they might be: working in the library, commuting to work on the train, or hiding behind a hedge—to explore further the peculiar imaginative capacities generated by narrative fiction that locates itself within the domain of truth.
That Marguerite herself considered the touchstone of truth to be found in scripture—and more specifically in the gospels—seems clear; relocated in the context of their initial appearance, these nouvelles define the queen as (in the terms of her own time) an evangelical. Indeed, many contemporary readers took the Heptameron’s pessimistic theology of human fallibility, focused as it is on the consequences of the Fall, to be a posthumous declaration of their author’s religious affiliation: the queen, they argued, had been Protestant in all but name. Such arguments add a retrospective sheen to the work, and in making of the text an early example of littérature engagée, they make of Marguerite a religious rebel with a contemporary cause. And yet, while there is much to be gained from recapturing the particular, polemical energies of a work’s original context, it is important that in so doing we do not lose sight of other, similarly determining, truths. For Marguerite’s fiction also embodies a further distinctive belief, or habit of mind, which stands in constant tension with its pessimistic Reformist theology and its often brutal, socially situated realism: the idea of the perfectibility of humankind. It is the triangulation of these competing claims (or theories) about what it means to be human that make Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron such a compelling read. And it is her commitment to everyday human experience as the grounds on which all theories can, and must, be tested that makes the “first modern woman” a child of that distinctive cultural moment we call the Renaissance.
WORKS CITED AND RECOMMENDED FURTHER READING
Throughout, I have quoted Marguerite de Navarre from The Heptameron, trans. P. A. Chilton (London: Penguin, 2004), which has a fine introduction. As a sampler of recent approaches, 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) cannot be bettered. The following give a good sense of Marguerite’s work in relation to larger backgrounds—political, cultural, and religious: Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975); John D. Lyons, Exemplum: The Rhetoric of Example in Early Modern France and Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); Wes Williams, Pilgrimage and Narrative in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998); Timothy Hampton, Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Century: Inventing Renaissance France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); 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, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 73–94; and Margaret Ferguson, Dido’s Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
A French complete works is under way, published by Champion, in Paris. The most affordable (and best) French version of L’heptaméron des nouvelles is that edited by Nicole Cazauran and Sylvie Lefèvre (Paris: Gallimard [Folio], 2000). Renja Salminen’s edition of Le miroir de l’âme pécheresse (Helsinki: Soumalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1979) includes Elizabeth I’s translation. Few of the other poems (or plays) have been translated, but some are included in Selected Writings: A Bilingual Edition, ed. and trans. Rouben Cholakian and Mary Skemp (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). The standard and still very fine critical discussion of the poetry is Robert Cottrell, The Grammar of Silence (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1986); but see also Paula Sommers, Celestial Ladders (Geneva: Droz, 1989); Gary Ferguson, Mirroring Belief (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992); and Susan Snyder, “Guilty Siste
rs: Marguerite de Navarre, Elizabeth of England, and the Miroir de l’âme pécheresse,” Renaissance Quarterly 50, no. 2 (1997): 443–59.
The major French studies of the life and works remain those of Pierre Jourda, Marguerite d’Angoulême, duchesse d’Alençon, reine de Navarre (1492–1549): Etude biographique et littéraire. 2 vols. (Paris: Champion, 1930); and Lucien Febvre, Autour de l’Heptaméron: Amour sacré, amour profane, 2nd ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1944). Two useful formally attentive studies in French are Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani, La conversation conteuse (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992); and Philippe Lajarte, “D’une fonction l’autre: Pour une pragmatique de la nouvelle dans l’Heptaméron de Marguerite de Navarre,” Cahiers Textuel 10 (1992). Among the best formally focused studies in English are Marcel Tetel, Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron: Themes, Language, and Structure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1976) and B. J. Davis, The Storytellers in Marguerite de Navarre’s “Heptameron” (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1978).
The recent biography by Patricia F. Cholakian and Rouben C. Cholakian, Marguerite de Navarre: Mother of the Renaissance (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006) is an excellent, if distinctly partial account; it contextualizes the groundbreaking arguments of Patricia Cholakian’s earlier study, Rape and Writing in the Heptaméron of Marguerite de Navarre (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991). The best historical accounts of specific aspects of Marguerite’s life include Barry Collet, A Long and Troubled Pilgrimage: The Correspondence of Marguerite d’Angoulême and Vittoria Colonna, 1540–1545 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Carol Thysell, The Pleasure of Discernment: Marguerite de Navarre as Theologian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Barbara Stephenson, The Power and Patronage of Marguerite de Navarre (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2003).
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