Marguerite de Navarre's Shifting Gaze: Perspectives on Gender, Class, and Politics in the Heptaméron 1472487303, 9781472487308

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
List of abbreviations
1 Introduction
2 Between life and literature: the many faces of Marguerite de Navarre
Preliminary considerations: questions of gender, periodization, and theory
Genealogy, genes, and gender: the making of a princess
Serving god and the king: Marguerite’s religious and political development
Family matters: one body, one spirit, one faith
The gathering storm: l’affaire des placards and its aftermath
Marguerite’s many loves: weighing and balancing multiple loyalties
Tribulations and triumphs: Marguerite’s final years
3 Gender and patriarchy: a many-sided view
Contexts and intertexts: rewriting and responding to male discourse
Female icons, exempla, and real women: alternative standpoints
Gendered violence and vice: making sense of “he said, she said”
Respectability and its double: the underside of male power and piety
The insides and outsides of patriarchy: beyond and beneath sexual difference and gender stereotypes
Re-viewing marriage and infidelity: coping with an “estate of long duration”
4 Upstairs, downstairs: the dynamics of class and rank in the Heptaméron
A view from the top: looking down at the lower classes
Cruel masters and abuses of high rank
Excavating the underside of power and privilege: “les choses basses” as vehicles of revelation
5 Power, politics, and modes of governance in the Heptaméron
The education of a Christian prince: positive models of governance and community
“When malice is joined with power”: evil leaders, abuses of authority, and ethical dilemmas
Reading between the lines: political allegory and metonymy in the Heptaméron
Conclusion
Selected bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Marguerite de Navarre’s Shifting Gaze

Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron, composed in the 1540s and first published posthumously in 1558 and 1559, has long been an interpretive puzzle. De Navarre (1492–1549), sister of King Francis I of France, was a controversial figure in her lifetime. Her evangelical activities and proximity to the Crown placed her at the epicenter of her country’s internecine strife and societal unrest. Yet her short stories appear to offer few traces of the sociopolitical turbulence that surrounded her. In Marguerite de Navarre’s Shifting Gaze, however, Elizabeth Zegura argues that the Heptaméron’s innocuous appearance camouflages its serious insights into patriarchy and gender, social class, and early modern French politics, which emerge from an analysis of the text’s shifting perspectives. Zegura’s approach, which focuses on visual cues and alternative standpoints and viewing positions within the text, hinges upon foregrounding “les choses basses” (lowly things) to which the devisante (storyteller) Oisille draws our attention in nouvelle (novella) 2 of the Heptaméron, using this downward, archaeological gaze to excavate layers of the text that merit more extensive critical attention. While her conclusions cast a new light on the literature, life, and times of Marguerite de Navarre, they are nevertheless closely aligned with recent scholarship on this important historical and literary figure. Elizabeth Chesney Zegura is Associate Professor (Emerita) of French and Italian at the University of Arizona, USA.

Women and Gender in the Early Modern World Series editor: Allyson Poska, University of Mary Washington, USA and Abby Zanger

The study of women and gender offers some of the most vital and innovative challenges to current scholarship on the early modern period. For more than a decade now, Women and Gender in the Early Modern World has served as a forum for presenting fresh ideas and original approaches to the field. Interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary in scope, this Ashgate series strives to reach beyond geographical limitations to explore the experiences of early modern women and the nature of gender in Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa. We welcome proposals for both single-author volumes and edited collections which expand and develop this continually evolving field of study. Recent titles in this series: Anna Maria van Schurman, ‘The Star of Utrecht’ Anne R. Larsen Scandal and Reputation at the Court of Catherine de Medici Una McIlvenna Women and Epistolary Agency in Early Modern Culture, 1450–1690 Edited by James Daybell and Andrew Gordon Women’s Somatic Training in Early Modern Spanish Theater Elizabeth Marie Cruz Petersen Women and Shakespeare’s Cuckoldry Plays Shifting Narratives of Marital Betrayal Cristina León Alfar Women’s Negotiations and Textual Agency in Latin America, 1500-1799 Edited by Mónica Díaz and Rocío Quispe-Agnoli Marguerite de Navarre’s Shifting Gaze Perspectives on gender, class, and politics in the Heptaméron Elizabeth Chesney Zegura

Marguerite de Navarre’s Shifting Gaze Perspectives on gender, class, and politics in the Heptaméron Elizabeth Chesney Zegura

First published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 Elizabeth Chesney Zegura The right of Elizabeth Chesney Zegura to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-4724-8730-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-39434-3 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Saxon Graphics Ltd, Derby

Contents

Acknowledgments List of abbreviations 1

Introduction

2

Between life and literature: the many faces of Marguerite de Navarre Preliminary considerations: questions of gender, periodization, and theory 30 Genealogy, genes, and gender: the making of a princess 33 Serving god and the king: Marguerite’s religious and political development 40 Family matters: one body, one spirit, one faith 44 The gathering storm: l’affaire des placards and its aftermath 46 Marguerite’s many loves: weighing and balancing multiple loyalties 49 Tribulations and triumphs: Marguerite’s final years 52

3

Gender and patriarchy: a many-sided view Contexts and intertexts: rewriting and responding to male discourse 66 Female icons, exempla, and real women: alternative standpoints 72 Gendered violence and vice: making sense of “he said, she said” 96 Respectability and its double: the underside of male power and piety 111

vii viii 1 29

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vi

Contents

The insides and outsides of patriarchy: beyond and beneath sexual difference and gender stereotypes 115 Re-viewing marriage and infidelity: coping with an “estate of long duration” 123 4

5

Upstairs, downstairs: the dynamics of class and rank in the Heptaméron A view from the top: looking down at the lower classes 149 Cruel masters and abuses of high rank 162 Excavating the underside of power and privilege: “les choses basses” as vehicles of revelation 170 Power, politics, and modes of governance in the Heptaméron The education of a Christian prince: positive models of governance and community 185 “When malice is joined with power”: evil leaders, abuses of authority, and ethical dilemmas 197 Reading between the lines: political allegory and metonymy in the Heptaméron 211 Conclusion Selected bibliography Index

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246 251 261

Acknowledgments

Scholarly works are collaborative ventures by their very nature, and this is especially true of the present monograph. For their insights, discoveries, and archival research, I am indebted to the many literary scholars and historians, medievalists and early modernists, whose work has informed and challenged my own views of Marguerite de Navarre and her era. I would also like to thank my colleagues in French and Italian at the University of Arizona for their friendship and inspiration, and for allowing me to teach Renaissance courses in both disciplines. I am grateful as well to the University of Arizona College of Humanities, for funding my sabbatical research for this volume; to our Interlibrary Loan staff, for providing hard-to-find books that I needed for this project; to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, for making its amazing digital collections available to scholars around the world, and for authorizing my use of cover art from its Manuscript Department; to Marian Cosic and my anonymous reviewer at Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme, whose encouragement and suggested revisions to an article published there have enriched the final chapter of this book as well; to the editors and reviewers at Ashgate Press and their successors at Taylor and Francis, for improving my analyses and working so hard to bring this volume to fruition; to my copy editor, Kate Duffy, for her extraordinary patience, attentiveness to detail, and discerning suggestions; and to Erika Gaffney, for shepherding my manuscript through the review and approval process with remarkable cordiality, patience, and skill. Finally, I thank my family, not only for their love, but also for the “pluralité d’opinions,” or competing standpoints, that enliven our household; and my students, for opening my eyes to alternative ways of reading the Heptaméron and seeing the world. It is to them—both my family and my students—that I dedicate this volume, with apologies for its shortcomings (as always, they are mine alone) and for the time it has stolen from those I care about most.

Abbreviations

BHR CL CLS DFS FF JHI JMRS MLN MLR MLS PartAns RH RHLF RMRLL RenQ Ren&Ref RSS SCJ SLF SN THR YFS

Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance Comparative Literature Comparative Literature Studies Dalhousie French Studies French Forum Journal of the History of Ideas Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies Modern Language Notes Modern Language Review Modern Language Studies Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas Revue historique Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature Renaissance Quarterly Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme Revue du seizième siècle Sixteenth Century Journal Studi di letteratura francese Studia neophilologica Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance Yale French Studies

1

Introduction

The gaze of Marguerite de Navarre (1492–1549) has long been elusive, even on a pictorial level. In the putative portrait of her that is attributed to Jean Clouet, which hangs in the Walker Gallery of the National Museums of Liverpool, the young noblewoman’s face and ornately clad body are angled slightly away from the viewer or artist, upon whom her eyes and one belonging to the green parrot she holds are fixed in contrapposto on the vertical axis of the painting.1 Because of her Spanish-style costume, betrothal ring, and small image of Cupid on the hat, scholars speculate that the threequarter-view painting, tentatively dated at around 1527, celebrates her engagement to Henri de Navarre.2 Despite the outward orientation and seeming directness of her gaze, which is unusual in extant images of Marguerite, her half-smile is enigmatic in the style of La Gioconda (Mona Lisa), causing collectors of the early nineteenth century to attribute the work to Leonardo.3 Moreover, the body language of the noblewoman and her bird, whose torsos are turned inward toward one another, points to an earlier, private gaze between Marguerite and the parrot that the artist and viewers have interrupted. Exactly what the conventional, public pose camouflages is uncertain: depending on the bird’s symbolism, it may have been an intimate exchange between the lady and her “amant vert” or “green lover,” echoing Jean Lemaire de Belges’ verses for an earlier Marguerite;4 or an allusion, grounded in the bird’s capacity for speech, to the female subject’s eloquence or even the Word of God.5 In subsequent likenesses of her, including portraits by François Clouet and illustrations for Le livre d’heures de Catherine de Médicis (Catherine de’ Medici’s Book of Hours), Ysambert de Saint-Léger’s translation of Le miroir des dames (The mirror for ladies), the anonymous Office de sainte Anne (St. Anne’s prayer book), and Marguerite’s own La coche ou le débat de l’amour (The coach, or the debate of love), the queen of Navarre’s enigmatic gaze is even less legible. Though her eyes are averted in these drawings and paintings, she appears to focus successively on a point in the distance (Clouet’s portraits), a mirror (Le livre d’heures de Catherine de Médicis), her ladies-in-waiting (L’office de sainte Anne), Saint-Léger himself (Le miroir des dames), a peasant or farm worker (La coche, MS Douce 91, fol.

2

Introduction

3r; Musée Condé MS 522, fol. 2r), and a book she herself has written (La coche, MS Douce 91, fol. 44v; Musée Condé MS 522, fol. 43v).6 On one level, lowered eyes such as hers are often a sign of female “modesty, chastity, and obeisance” in early Renaissance iconography.7 While the pose is not gender-specific in sixteenth-century France, as evidenced by her brother the king’s own averted glance in several paintings, Marguerite’s portraitists likely draw upon the aforementioned tradition to some degree, purposely (re)constructing the strong-willed and occasionally troublesome noblewoman as a circumspect, tractable matron with downturned eyes.8 Yet the queen’s superior, enthroned position in two of the illuminations (Le miroir des dames, L’office de sainte Anne), and her larger size relative to that of the menus gens or “little people” in a third one (La coche, MS Douce 91, fol. 3r), imbue her downward gaze with reminders of her lofty rank as well as her gender, splintering both the field of connotations at work in her portraits and the implications of her lowered eyes.9 Because of their conventional nature and semiotic multiplicity, these enigmatic poses tell us little about the private thoughts and emotions of the historical subject. Yet bits and pieces of Marguerite’s complex public persona and traces of her actions emerge in the margins of her portraits, as we consider the objects of her gaze. In the human figures and material items toward which she peers, we find iconographical allusions to the queen’s reflectiveness and outward beauty (the mirror, Le livre d’heures de Catherine de Médicis), to her patronage of the arts and scholarly activities (the translator, Le miroir des dames), to her solidarity with other women (the ladies-in-waiting, L’office de sainte Anne), to her concern for the underclasses (the fence maker, illustration for La coche), to her writings (the mirror, referring to Marguerite’s Le miroir de l’âme pécheresse or The Mirror of the Sinful Soul, in Le livre d’heures de Catherine de Médicis; and a proffered book, which Marguerite hands to the Duchess of Etampes, in an illumination for La coche), and to the world around her (a point outside the frame, portrait by François Clouet).10 Taken individually, the subject’s ocular expressions in most of the illustrations seem flat and static; yet together, they map the disparate objects and overwritten traces of an ulterior, moving gaze—one that lingers pointedly on mirrors and books, on the poor as well as the rich, and on the outside world as well as the inner psyche. It is this type of gaze—a kaleidoscope of framed looks, swiftly veiled glances, and shifting, elusive perspectives that may be visual or attitudinal in nature, and constitutive of either the viewing subject or the viewed object—that we encounter in Marguerite de Navarre’s enigmatic magnum opus as well.11 Composed in the 1540s and first published posthumously in 1558 and 1559, the multiscopic Heptaméron has long been a puzzle, in large measure because of the shifting perspectives that inform it.12 Words relating to “seeing” and “sight” abound in the work; and many of its 72 short stories hinge upon a revelatory diegetic gaze, the dialectics of dissimulation and (in)sight, and the characters’ divergent outlooks. To further complicate

Introduction

3

matters, the storytellers or devisants interpret each nouvelle (novella or short prose narrative) from differing viewpoints in their frame discussions, mobilizing our own gaze(s) in the process. In part, this perspectival maze is an outgrowth of the nouvelle, fabliau, and medieval “bourgeois” narratives with their reflective frames and metatexts, their wily “watchers” and unseeing victims, and their voyeuristic realism. Like these antecedents, Marguerite’s shifting gaze inverts and interrogates socially entrenched viewpoints by illuminating marginalized realities and viewing positions in her culture, including those of women and the underclasses. Yet myriad other ocular traditions and strategies, such as patriarchy’s hegemonic gaze, the rhetoric and rituals of looking in courtly literature, the experiential gaze of first-person testimonials and quasi-mimetic narrative, and the godly, heavenward focus of scripture and religious texts also inform the Heptaméron’s perspectival explosion, leaving readers at an interpretive impasse. On one level, the shortstory collection is an exercise in seeing that implicitly urges us to hone our viewing skills and judgmental acumen—so that we not only see, but see differently. At the same time, however, its myriad and conflicting points of view leave the narrative without a stabilizing perspectival anchor, and us, without a clear sense of its directionality or underlying goals. On the surface, the Heptaméron clearly aims to entertain us with its provocative tales of adultery, treachery, trickery, and murder. Yet according to narratological theory, we compose stories for other reasons as well: to share experiences and insights with others, to express ourselves in ways that fulfill emotional and psychological needs, and to teach readers and listeners either institutionalized values or idiosyncratic lessons that we have gleaned from the “school of life.”13 Traces of all these goals arguably figure in the Heptaméron; but most notably, narrative cues such as the nouvelles’ opening and closing morals suggest that they are teaching vehicles.14 That we must “see” to learn is implicit in the locution “Voylà, mes dames,” meaning “see here, my ladies,” a formula Marguerite uses to construct the moralizing conclusion of many of her stories in pointedly visual terms. For all its moralistic rhetoric, however, the Heptaméron’s instructional thrust is splintered by the competing viewpoints inscribed within it. As a result, the text’s intentionality is no less enigmatic than the historical Marguerite’s pictorial gaze. Ambiguity abounds in Renaissance literature, and reading the Heptaméron contextually—against the backdrop of the era’s religious, political, and ideological ferment, the querelle des femmes (woman question), the dialogic discourse so prevalent among humanists, and even Leonardo da Vinci’s experiments in optics and perspective—helps us understand Marguerite’s multiperspectivism as a function of her culture, and the polyvalent discourses and viewpoints that inform it. On a biographical and sociological level, however, contextualizing de Navarre’s nouvelles is more problematic. To borrow from Montesquieu, who warns that his satiric Lettres persanes may “clash” with his “character” and appear unworthy of a “serious man,”15 de

4

Introduction

Navarre’s gossipy, ribald, and oftentimes indecorous stories clash markedly with the sobriety and decorousness of her painted likenesses and with her public identity as a serious-minded matron and peer of France. The picture that Brantôme paints of an aging noblewoman who spins innocuous narratives casually, during journeys with friends—or that Marguerite herself constructs in the prologue, where amiable travelers opt to share stories recreationally en plein air, while lounging comfortably on the grass—is an appealing one; but the very nonchalance of these images sits uneasily with the darkness, and subversive realism, of many nouvelles. Underneath the volume’s placid exterior, the author’s use of marginalized standpoints and inferior viewing positions, which she associates with revelation or heightened objectivity, builds upon scriptural and literary traditions that privilege insights “from below,” such as those of servants and children; but it also smacks of an inverted class consciousness, privy to gender- and class-based brutality, that is unexpected in a princess of France. Moreover, the Heptaméron’s worldly, and oftentimes salacious, tales of sexual violence, marital infidelity, clerical malfeasance, and abusive masters—revealed by a downward, archaeological gaze that peels back layer after layer of surface appearances—differ radically from the pious, other-worldly image of Marguerite that we glean from her religious poetry.16 All of us, and especially writers, have many faces, to be sure—an observation that argues against attaching too much significance to the shifting gazes and inconsistent public personae of the historical Marguerite. We remain leery, after all, of venturing too close to the “intentional fallacy,” still mindful of Foucault’s famous paraphrase of Beckett: “What does it matter who is speaking—or why?”17 In the case of early modern female writers, however, Foucault’s “author question” strikes a false note. Banishing the flesh-and-blood author entirely from our critical gaze limits our ability to read contextually and diminishes the experiential resonances of the text— which, in the case of the Heptaméron, are underscored intratextually by reminders that the stories are “true” and by references to the “real-world” writer, her relatives, the French court, and public figures personally known to the author. Through the mediacy of these cues, which function as hinges between the literary and life worlds, the inside of the Heptaméron repeatedly points to its outside, drawing the reader’s gaze back and forth between Marguerite’s magnum opus and the cultural discourses and intertexts, contemporary and historical events, that fuel it. For this reason, both sociocultural and biographical contextualizations will inform the textual and scopic analyses of this study. In its departure from the radical textualism of much twentieth-century theory, the goal of this monograph is neither to construct a cultural biography of the author, nor to abandon the attentiveness to textuality and discourse that is a hallmark of the New Criticism and its poststructuralist and postmodern successors. Nor does the study purport to smooth out the dissonances in—and between—Marguerite’s text(s) and biography, or to

Introduction

5

affirm a relationship of direct causality between the queen of Navarre’s life and works. Rather, our discussion will reflect briefly on the interface between the Heptaméron and its contexts, cultural and historical as well as biographical, with an eye toward elucidating both the text and the social and political conditions under which it was written. Clearly we cannot fully know Marguerite d’Angoulême, her intentions, or her mindset at a distance of five centuries from her lifetime. Even if this were not the case, there is some wisdom in Foucault’s ruminations on “writing’s relationship with death,” on “the effacement of the writing subject’s individual characteristics” in literary texts, and on the subject’s role as “a variable and complex function of discourse”—a discourse, or network of swirling discourses, that neither begin nor end with the author or his or her œuvre.18 Despite the usefulness of these insights, however, the suggestion by Foucault and others that the writer’s identity is irrelevant seems untenable when applied to Marguerite de Navarre. “To women and people of color, who have been denied the privilege of writing, ‘who’ writes [indeed] makes a difference,” states Jeanne S. M. Willette: “Without this contextual tool, critique becomes difficult and Foucault, as did his colleagues, carefully neutered critique and rendered social criticism mute, coincidentally or not, at the time of a struggle for the rights of women and people of color.”19 Although Marguerite de Navarre was not, as far as we know, a person of color, she was a privileged woman—but a woman, nevertheless—who wrote during an era when female voices were more often than not muted by agents of patriarchy, and when women who dared to take pen or quill in hand risked being labeled whores, heretics, or godless monsters. She herself was censored—and censured—by the Sorbonne. To reprise Willette’s argument, Marguerite was also a woman who engaged in “social criticism,” which loses a portion of its experiential edge, and is diminished, when studied outside the context of her (gendered) life and times. To borrow loosely from Sartre, one might even call her an écrivain(e) engagé(e), or a politically, socially, and ethically committed writer, whose literary unveiling of institutional lies and injustices unfolds en situation rather than in an ivory tower.20 For Marguerite, no less than for contemporary Latina authors of feminist testimonios, it is incumbent upon us to try to elucidate this “situation” as we analyze her fictionalized, yet purposive, “true stories,” which are also social texts. Not to do so is to miss the point of the testimonial or quasi-testimonial genre, by imagining that its trauma narratives exist only in the rarefied space of disembodied discourse, rather than in the bodies and embodied viewpoints of its victims. Without entirely abandoning postmodernist conventions, then, this study will draw upon multiple (rather than traditional feminist) standpoint theory, experiential and intentionalist narratology, and theorizations of the social text and the gaze to suggest that Marguerite’s heterogeneous perspectives and experiences—as a privileged, yet oftentimes disempowered, woman—can offer a useful context for studying the shifting gaze(s) within her text.21

6

Introduction

So great are the superficial differences between Marguerite’s multiple literary faces that one might reasonably ask if her poetry, theater, and prose are the work of a single author.22 Particularly in view of Mireille Huchon’s paradigm-challenging scholarship on Louise Labé, which suggests that compositions attributed for centuries to “la belle cordière” might have been written by a group of well-known male literati,23 the mysterious nine-year gap between Marguerite’s death in 1549 and the posthumous appearance of her short stories, so different in tone and content from her poetry, raises questions about the Heptaméron’s authenticity as well. Pierre Jourda contends that early readers, reluctant to believe that a woman as pious as the queen could have penned such vile stories (“contes exécrables”), were slow to acknowledge her authorship of the volume.24 Because 67 of the nouvelles appeared anonymously in 1558, in an expurgated edition entitled Histoires des amans fortunez (Tales of the fortunate lovers) that was published by Pierre Boaistuau, Jourda’s thinly documented contention is not without merit: for despite Boaistuau’s suppression of several anticlerical novellas that made the volume marginally more decorous than its successor, and thus more plausibly the work of the most virtuous princess (“la princesse très vertueuse”), the publisher also purged the text of most passages that could have identified the author, such as well-known proper names and large portions of the frame discussions. Yet as Nicole Cazauran points out, Boaistuau’s dedicatory epistle to the author contains the same laudatory epithet (“miracle et prodige de Nature”) used by Charles de Sainte-Marthe in his eulogy for the queen, leaving little doubt among literati about the author’s identity.25 In Claude Gruget’s longer edition the next year, newly titled L’Heptameron des nouvelles de tresillustre et tresexcellente princesse Marguerite de Valois, Royne de Navarre, the publisher unequivocally attributes the volume to Marguerite and dedicates the narratives to her daughter, the reigning queen of Navarre, whom he calls “Jeanne de Foix” in reference to one of her lesser hereditary titles.26 In general, scholars of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, including Montaigne who considers the Heptaméron “a nice book for its type,”27 seem not to question the volume’s provenance.28 Even more compellingly, the historian Brantôme spent his childhood at Marguerite’s court during the years she was composing the Heptaméron. His eyewitness memories, coupled with those of his mother and grandmother, provide a fascinating record of the conditions under which Marguerite wrote and of the people and events that inspired her stories: “Queen Marguerite composed these tales mostly in her litter travelling through the country,” he writes, “for she had many other great occupations in her retirement. I have heard this from my grandmother, who always went with her in her litter as lady of honor, holding the inkstand while she wrote, which she did most deftly and quickly, more quickly than if she had dictated.”29 While Brantôme’s accounts are not uniformly trustworthy, the detail and frequency of his references to Marguerite and her circle lend

Introduction

7

substance to his chronicle, which he bolsters rhetorically with first-person observations and a wealth of historically accurate names and facts. Even if this were not the case, we have the testimony of Jeanne d’Albret, whose references to her mother’s short-story project in her own correspondence— if accurate—seem to establish the work’s authenticity beyond question. In the absence of credible proof contesting Marguerite’s authorship of the Heptaméron, we must turn to alternative hypotheses to elucidate and contextualize the deep-seeded polyphony and multiperspectivism of the queen of Navarre’s writing, her exposure of societal injustices, and the increased focus on worldly matters in her magnum opus. On one level, Jeanne d’Albret provides a plausible historical context for her mother’s shift from religious poetry to secular prose: weary of her battles with the Sorbonne and of the conservative backlash that her spiritual poetry often triggered, Marguerite’s brother and husband apparently urged her to avoid theological controversy, prompting the queen to turn her pen instead to romans jovials or “amusing stories” that were politically correct and unlikely to offend either her readers or her censors.30 To modern readers unfamiliar with theological politics in the mid-sixteenth century, Jeanne’s implication that her mother’s sacred texts were incendiary and that her profane writings were innocuous trifles may elicit a skeptical smile. To be sure, it was no secret that the Sorbonne opposed Marguerite’s association with reformist theologians such as Guillaume Briçonnet, Guillaume Farel, and Gérard Roussel, as well as the evangelical overtones of her poetry including Le miroir de l’âme pécheresse, which the Faculty of Theology condemned in 1533. While the Heptaméron is not as overtly religious as Marguerite’s verse, however, echoes of the new theology permeate her short-story collection as well, notwithstanding the imprecations of her husband and brother. In fact, if Jeanne d’Albret’s anecdote is accurate, and François I and Henri de Navarre did prompt the queen to write “silly little stories,” it is clear that she successfully circumvented their efforts to contain her independent voice and evangelical leanings. From its fictional characters who pray and read the Bible every day, to their myriad tales of clerical malfeasance, their pointed references to “faith” and “grace,” their scrutiny of outward “works,” and the theological weight they accord to personal conscience, the Heptaméron abounds with reformist allusions.31 Understated, they nevertheless reflect the queen’s evangelical theology, her ongoing focus upon abuses of power within the Church, and her continuing commitment to ecclesiastical reform in the 1540s. Arguably this perspectival position, divided between faith and revolt, and rooted in both the religious ferment of her era and the discourse that accompanied it, is a factor in Marguerite de Navarre’s shifting gaze. Because clergymen are often the targets of medieval and Renaissance satire, the storytellers’ anticlerical comments and anecdotes in no way detract from the entertainment value of Marguerite’s novellas, which indeed function on one level as amusing contes à rire or stories for laughing, just as

8

Introduction

Jeanne d’Albret implied.32 With a few exceptions, the content of most novellas in the Heptaméron is not inherently funny, hinging instead upon serious issues such as marital infidelity, clerical corruption, and abuses of power. Yet as a rule, Marguerite tempers even her darker novellas with humor, sprinkling her narratives and the frame discussions that follow with irony and puns that lighten the Heptaméron’s mood and veil her social commentary. She also allows us glimpses of her characters’ laughter, artfully embedding the smiling mask of comedy within her histoires tragiques and providing cues that condition our response to the text and invite us to smile in the face of adversity.33 Despite the tales of murder, incest, adultery, and rape that comprise the Heptaméron, then, the bantering, gossipy atmosphere of the frame discussions, along with the devisants’ mirth, allows the stories to pass muster as innocuous romans jovials—up to a point. Alongside the titillating scandals, lurid faits divers, and earthy grivoiseries that abound in the Heptaméron, however, it also holds echoes of doctrinal controversy, insights into human depravity and suffering, and sociopolitical observations that are far from frivolous. Whether one interprets these shifting registers as marks of Foucauldian discursivity, or as traces of the historical writer’s conflicted standpoint(s) and life experiences, clearly the stories are not merely contes à rire, but also serious reflections on complex ethical problems of the sixteenth century that have the potential to instruire as well as plaire, or instruct as well as entertain. Given the rifts and wrinkles in the nouvelles, however, precisely how, what, and—in some cases—if they signify is not always clear. There is little agreement among Marguerite’s devisants about the lessons to be extracted from each tale, and scholars also vary in their approaches to, and readings of, the shortstory collection. For example, Cazauran views the nouvelles and frame discussions as a vehicle for the queen’s evangelical theology;34 Lucien Febvre and Jules Gelernt, as an inquest into love’s wide-ranging permutations;35 Patricia Cholakian, as veiled representations of Marguerite’s own traumas;36 and Marcel Tetel, as a reflection of the era’s ethical and epistemological ferment.37 All of these interpretations contribute to our understanding of Marguerite de Navarre; but, like all masterworks, her Heptaméron nevertheless continues to intrigue and elude us with loose ends, shifting perspectives, and glimmers of veiled signifiers.38 Significantly, this plurivocity is far more pronounced in later versions of the nouvelles (BnF, MSS Fr. 1512, 2155) than in the earliest known copy of the short story collection (BnF, MS Fr. 1513), suggesting that the author purposely added new layers and complexity to her prose as she wrote and her project evolved.39 Would the Heptaméron’s principles of operation, and the mediated traces of intentionalities embedded within it, have been clearer if Marguerite de Navarre had lived to pen a foreword? On the one hand, we have learned not to interpret prefaces and introductions as complete, literal expressions of either authorial intent or the internal mechanisms of a work of literature; yet on the other hand, paratextual materials—even those composed by editors

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9

and publishers—are often useful for analyzing the play of signifiers within the text. Unlike Boccaccio, who tells us in advance, and satirically, that his Decameron is meant to distract love-sick ladies, or even Rabelais’s alter-ego Alcofrybas, who contends that his Gargantua will reveal “horrific mysteries” about religion, politics, and the economy, Marguerite gives us no formal preface or preamble, not even a facetious or cryptic one. Certainly it is appealing to imagine her adding a liminary anagram for fellow humanists, a dedicatory epistle to François I or Henri II, a preface for “mes dames,” or even a fleet-tongued apologia or sly jab at her detractors. The loss is ours; for as Brantôme tells us, “There was no one in the world so clever [as the queen] at making devices and mottoes in French, Latin, and other languages.”40 This observation is borne out within Marguerite’s fiction by the tongue-in-cheek caption, placed under a stag’s head, which she attributes to a resourceful husband who has been cuckolded by his king in nouvelle 3.41 The man’s ambiguous and superficially self-deprecating inscription at once hints at and veils its mockery of the monarch, directing our gaze to the underside of public, official truths as many of Marguerite’s other texts do.42 Similarly, the preliminary verses to the reader (“Marguerite de France au lecteur”) preceding Le miroir de l’âme pécheresse are self-deprecating on the surface (“Excuse the rhythm [var. rhyme] and the language, / Understanding that it’s the work of a woman”), yet urge us to look beyond and beneath outward appearances to discover the inward “matière,” in keeping with scriptural guidelines.43 Even without a prefatory anagram or introductory letter, the Heptaméron still yields abundant exegetical clues and narratological cues, especially in the prologue to the First Day, the frame discussions, and the early novellas. The prologue, which launches not only the frame narratives, but also the volume’s dominant themes and ideological tensions, is a fictional “pre-text” which emphasizes the nouvelles’ diversionary and “gift” value.44 Against the backdrop of a catastrophic flood, a band of aristocratic travelers stranded in an abbey choose storytelling as a pleasurable way to pass the time. These fictional characters, often linked by scholars to historical personages including Louise de Savoie (Oisille), Henri II de Navarre (Hircan), and the author herself (Parlamente), propose to present the written transcript of these 100 stories to Catherine de’ Medici, “madame Marguerite,” and other dignitaries at court, who had themselves talked of compiling a “French Decameron” before affairs of state (“les grandz affaires survenuz au Roy,” 9) and childbirth (“l’acouchement de madame la Daulphine,” 9) interrupted them.45 In a gesture reminiscent of Machiavelli’s “dono” or gift of The Prince to the reigning Florentine duke,46 Marguerite offers her own magnum opus not to us, the extratextual readers, but instead to the French court as a substitute for, and a perspectival alternative to, the latter’s unwritten chronicles. In doing this, the intratextual author establishes the shifting gaze as a compositional and cognitive principle of her work and as an interpretive tool for readers from the outset.

10

Introduction

This artful reflection of the queen and her coterie en abyme establishes a specular relationship between the text, its author(s), and its destinataires that is significant on a number of levels. In addition to casting the Heptaméron as both a satiric and revelatory looking glass, reminiscent of the medieval Speculum stultorum or Mirror of Fools, it also establishes the volume as a locus of self-reflection not unlike Marguerite’s The Mirror of the Sinful Soul. Visually, this authorial specularity recalls Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait (1432) and Velasquez’s Las Meninas (1656), showcasing the queen of Navarre’s literary skill; but more importantly, it also foregrounds the importance of “seeing” and sets in motion the reversible, shifting perspectives that inform the Heptaméron as a whole. The queen takes pains in this passage to establish her text’s collaborative conception and reception, by situating both the production and consumption, seed and fruition, of her literary efforts at court: there, a group of aristocratic friends and relatives not only conceive of—or author(ize)—a “French Decameron,” but figure as its eventual readers.47 In this secular setting’s sacred corollary, just outside an abbey or cloister, her fictional devisants or storytellers not only tell and discuss their tales together, much as their real-life counterparts do at court, but also weigh a “plurality of opinions” (“pluralité d’opinions,” 8) in choosing their communal pastime. In her prologue, Marguerite deftly constructs both the king and dauphin as “authorizers” and recipients of the volume: “I don’t think there’s one of us who hasn’t read the hundred tales by Boccaccio,” says Parlamente, “which have recently been translated from Italian into French, and which are so highly thought of by the [most Christian] King Francis I [and] by Monseigneur the Dauphin.”48 By emphasizing François’s enthusiasm for Antoine le Maçon’s translation of Boccaccio into French, which Marguerite herself spearheaded, the queen artfully suggests that her Heptaméron bears his imprimatur.49 In the above passage, the close proximity of the king’s name and that of the French language or “tongue,” identical phonemes and graphemes (“en françois, que le roy François”), reinforces his authorizing role in both the oral narrative and its written transcript, while drawing our attention to the project’s nationalistic overtones.50 In addition to protecting herself and bolstering the work’s legitimacy by implying that François and his successor Henri (“Monseigneur le Daulphin”) participated in its conception, Marguerite also emphasizes their role as destinataires by making them recipients of the devisants’ literary “gift.” On one level, this “present” seems intended to garner favor with the king and dauphin, whose religious and sociopolitical differences with the historical Marguerite, at least in the 1540s, are well-known: by representing their seminal role in, and enthusiasm for, the project in her prologue, the queen inscribes their a priori approval within her text before it reaches their eyes, effectively anticipating and silencing their objections. The author’s implicit inclusion of François and Henri among her dedicatees also lends support to Margaret Ferguson’s suggestion, fleshed out by Carla Freccero, that the Heptaméron functions to

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some degree as a how-to manual—and perhaps a “how-not-to” manual as well—for “Christian princes,” in the style of Erasmus’s Institutio principis Christiani (The Education of a Christian Prince, 1536) and Castiglione’s Il libro del cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier, 1528).51 Far from targeting and teaching princes alone, the Heptaméron offers all its readers a practicum in seeing or in the formation of judgment, beginning with lexical ambiguities in the prologue that thwart our quest for interpretive closure and culminating in the 72 novellas, many of them profoundly problematic, that hone our critical-thinking skills. A case in point is Marguerite’s own theological and semiotic ambivalence in the prologue. Although the traditional symbolism and metaphors that structure her liminal narrative—including the journey of life that the pilgrims undertake, the archetypal flood that tests and cleanses them, the external obstacles that reflect their inner foibles in classic Dantean fashion, and the good shepherd with his Christological resonances who rescues Simontaut—all tease readers with hints of a “higher meaning,” the prologue’s allegorical trajectory seems to stall once the pilgrims find temporary shelter. While their haven is an abbey and thus ostensibly a sacred space (“devot lieu,” 2) that might pass for the apotheosis of a figurative quest for godliness, Marguerite’s satire of the monks for their “avarice” (6), hypocrisy (“estoit vray hypocrithe,” 6), and cowardice (“s’il y avoit moyen d’eschapper d’un dangier, les moynes le debvoient trouver,” 2) undercuts the expected spiritual symbolism of this refuge. For a moment, it appears that Marguerite will rewrite this failed apotheosis in reformist terms when Oisille encourages the devisants to pray and read the Bible during the time that they are stranded: “I have found only one [pastime for alleviating boredom and sorrow]—the reading of holy Scripture, in which one may find true and perfect spiritual joy” (66).52 While the funloving devisants agree to let Oisille read the gospel to them each morning, however, they propose to supplement this spiritual “joie” with both corporal activity, including sex, and the earthly and earthy “plaisir” (9) of secular storytelling. On one level, this shift in focus from the sacred Word to secular words and Parlamente’s emphasis on the entertainment value of the nouvelles, which she characterizes as a pleasurable “game” or “pastime,” suggest that the tales are indeed romans jovials, devoid of deeper meaning. Yet almost immediately afterward, Marguerite hints that the game is her own and that her text is meaningful, as she leads us on a circuitous interpretive chase. The term “jeu” that she uses to describe her storytelling is itself ambiguous, after all: it refers not only to a “game,” which, despite its frivolous connotations, figures as an educational device in Renaissance pedagogical treatises, but also to a medieval theatrical genre—Le jeu d’Adam, for example—that was often didactic and religious in nature. In constructing the stories as a present for French royals, moreover, Parlamente emphasizes their high worth. The sources must be trustworthy or “digne[s] de foy” (10); and she asks God to bless the group’s narrative “labeur,” so that its fruit will be both worthy of its recipients and more edifying than the

12

Introduction

typical icons and rosaries (“ymaiges” and “patenostres,” 10) that returning travelers bring to friends back home.53 If the prologue suspends readers between the pleasure of the text and its possible didactic function, the novellas themselves leave little doubt that the storytellers intend them to be instructive.54 Despite their entertainment value, the narratives revolve superficially around behavioral and moral lessons reminiscent of medieval and classical exempla, as illustrated by the opening and closing morals.55 Yet as Pollie Bromilow and others point out, these overly simplistic lessons often unravel in the face of real-world complexity and the text’s discursive polyphony.56 This monograph will suggest that the Heptaméron’s multiperspectivism, or shifting angles of vision, also contribute to this unraveling process, or to the crisis of meaning and authority that the writer stages. In their symposia, the devisants’ multiple and more or less egalitarian viewing angles may be likened to the horizontal axis of an interpretive grid, similar but not identical to the one described by Brook Thomas, which he contrasts to the vertical axis of prescriptive morals, authorial “paternalism,” and “transcendental position[s] of judgment” found in traditional authoritarian texts.57 Functioning as “conversational partner[s]”58 with the text rather than passive recipients, Marguerite’s storyteller-discussants reassess each narrative from multiple angles without reaching a consensus, revisit the protagonist’s or antagonist’s ethics, and introduce extradiegetic considerations that complicate the story’s “meaning.” From a sociological and spatial perspective, moreover, both Hircan’s dissolution of rank-based distinctions among the storytellers and the relatively flat topography of the meadow where they all sit down contribute to the leveling effect or egalitarianism of the frame discussions—an impression that is borne out physiologically by the horizontal, side-to-side movement of the devisants’ gazes. Marguerite’s invocation of extradiegetic narratees or implied readers like ourselves reinforces this effect, by extending the Heptaméron’s field of interpretation laterally beyond the scope of her devisants, and encouraging us as well us to participate in the readerly “negotiation and exchange” that Thomas describes. Marguerite’s shifting literary gaze is not exclusively horizontal, however. No negotiation and exchange seem to follow nouvelle 2, for instance, where a transcendent position of judgment and vertical perspectives appear to dominate the narrative and its moral. In this story of a mule-driver’s wife (muletière) who dies resisting her rapist and the commentary that follows it, Oisille’s lessons about the merits of feminine chastity appear to unfold along a vertical rather than horizontal axis, anchored in a transcendent moral code that is not subject to negotiation, and reinforced by the protagonist’s upturned eyes and heavenward gaze as she dies. Indeed, no debate follows the story, which makes it unique among Marguerite’s nouvelles; and the moral of the tale, which casts the muletière as a model of virtue whom all women should strive to emulate, seems to brook no opposition. Not only

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here, but elsewhere in the Heptaméron, a type of vertical ordering principle is present, given the text’s references to God’s higher authority and Marguerite’s penchant for uncovering buried truths with a descending gaze. In fact, the volume’s first two nouvelles train the reader’s gaze vertically, by drawing our eyes up to the top of a stairway (where du Mesnil is murdered, N. 1), down to the mortar of the dwelling (where his bones are buried, N. 1), underneath a bed (where a serving girl hides during the rape and murder of her mistress, N. 2), and upward toward heaven (the muletière’s death and presumed ascension, N. 2). While only the last of these examples enforces the hierarchical moral order that Thomas associates with a “vertical appeal to meaning,” the pronounced verticality of all these visual paths, together with their pivotal roles in the narratives, hints at the possibility that there is more perspectival guidance in the Heptaméron than first meets the eye. This guidance is not always authoritarian, prescriptive, or transcendent, however. Even in nouvelle 2 with its truncated frame discussion, the story’s moral absolutism and vertical ordering principles compete with traces of alternative perspectives. While the devisants remain silent in the wake of Oisille’s stirring rape narrative and long-winded moral, ostensibly because they agree with her, an omniscient narrator, who rarely intrudes into the dialogic space of the symposia, complicates the group’s seeming consensus about the muletière’s heroism by divulging the female discussants’ inner thoughts about her martyrdom. Without publicly “vow[ing]” to follow the muletière’s lead, as the translator Chilton suggests, each devisante “thinks to herself” (“pensa en elle-mesme,” 21) that if a similar misfortune should befall her, she would strive or “take pains” (“mectroient peyne,” 21) to follow the matron’s example; yet Marguerite’s choice of the word “peine” to express this striving adds connotations of difficulty (avoir de la peine) and even reluctance to their aspirations. The devisants’ silence, coupled with the ambiguous signifier peine, draws readers into Marguerite’s multilayered text, prompting us to raise questions where the storytellers do not.59 Instead of fighting to the death, for example, should the muleteer’s wife have attempted to placate her attacker and save her life, as modern law enforcement authorities and criminal psychologists often suggest? Even more importantly, do the muletière’s tribulations and choices hold a lesson for all women, as the oldest devisante insists? Or is the entire concept of universal exemplarity or a “vertical ordering model” an outmoded relic in the Renaissance? Subsequent stories and frame discussions suggest that other female characters and storytellers would have reacted far differently than the muletière, resisting with brains rather than brawn (N. 5), scratching the assailant’s face and calling out for help (N. 4), submitting in order to survive, and converting the ordeal into a short story (N. 62) as Marguerite herself appears to have done. 60 Counterexamples such as these encourage readers to re-evaluate the “lesson” of nouvelle 2 from alternative perspectives along a diachronic axis, balancing Oisille’s moral absolutism against the more secular values and pragmatic approaches to decision

14

Introduction

making that figure elsewhere in the Heptaméron. Intertextually, moreover, the strong hagiographic resonances of nouvelle 2, which resembles a medieval saint’s tale on occasion, recall both Boccaccio’s demystification of sainthood in his first novella and reformist objections to the cult of saints. Finally, even vertical perspectives in the volume also function subversively more often than not, by drawing our gaze downward to nonhegemonic realities that contest the hegemonic “truths” and prescriptive morals of traditional didactic texts. Rather than being dominated by a single perspectival mode or standpoint, the Heptaméron is a scopic maze. In a very general sense, the queen of Navarre’s dialogic discourse and interrogation of culturally ordained beliefs are hallmarks of Christian humanism, bear traces of her evangelism, and are informed by realist intertexts and worldly stimuli, including her own experiences. In addition to the aforementioned studies of Cholakian, Tetel, and Febvre, which draw our attention to links between Marguerite’s nouvelles, her life, and her culture, Catharine Randall’s stimulating monograph on material objects ranging from tapestries to chalices, emblems, and pieces of clothing in the Heptaméron emphasizes the traces of reformist aesthetics in these unprepossessing minutiae, which draw our gaze upward to the heavenly noumena they represent.61 Equally important are Barbara Stephenson’s indispensable work on the power and patronage of Marguerite de Navarre, which details the dialogic business and political transactions that were a part of the queen’s everyday standpoint, 62 and Jonathan Reid’s characterization of the historical Marguerite as a canny evangelical leader, who helped the movement survive clandestinely by lobbying on its behalf to the king, protecting fellow reformers, and dissimulating her own key role in the movement.63 Elucidations such as these of Marguerite’s biography and of the cultural context in which she wrote offer readers an indispensable vantage for studying the interface between the multiperspectivism of her text and her life, and the discourses that connect them. What the present study purports to add to this discussion is a better understanding of the ways in which the Heptaméron’s shifting perspectives— as marked by narrative cues, intertextual resonances, and signifiers of direction and point of view—function textually, by mobilizing the reader’s standpoint, supplementing canonical views with alternative modes of seeing, and contributing to the era’s discourses of gender, class, and politics. The rationale for limiting the scope of my analysis to these three areas is twofold. First, reflections on gender, politics, and social class are threaded throughout the entire Heptaméron, from the end of the prologue where a woman (Parlamente) organizes the stranded group’s pastime, and Hircan suspends distinctions of rank among the devisants, to the seventy-second nouvelle where a prior uses theological rhetoric to seduce a gullible young nun. Along with religion, these topics constitute the thematic and scopic mainsprings of the Heptaméron; and all are marked by institutionalized hierarchies connected to abuses of power and class- and gender-based violence. Second,

Introduction

15

the hierarchical properties of each of these institutional groupings lend themselves to hegemonic (male, aristocratic, empowered) and nonhegemonic (female, serving class, disempowered) viewing positions. As a result, it is in matters pertaining to these three topics that Marguerite’s shifting gaze is most powerful, in its exposure of disempowered standpoints and perspectives of otherness that rarely figure in official discourse. While issues of gender and patriarchy, social class, and politics are often intertwined in the Heptaméron, each topic constitutes a separate chapter in this volume. To help elucidate my hypotheses biographically and historically, an overview of Marguerite’s life is included in chapter 2. In addition to reviewing her poetry and theater, this biographical sketch focuses upon events and situations in her life and times that help contextualize her shifting literary gaze, alternative viewing positions, and exploration of otherness in the Heptaméron. The third chapter is devoted to representations of patriarchy and genderrelated issues in the text, and to ways in which the author’s shifting gaze scrutinizes and contests gender-based biases and norms. The chapter will focus in particular on traces of intertexts related to the querelle des femmes in the text; on Marguerite’s multiple rape narratives and the differing lenses through which male abuses of women are filtered; on the iconographic and perspectival erosion of female exempla and lessons for “mesdames”; on the author’s appropriation of and response to the male gaze in instances where men attempt to tell “her-story”; on the rivalry between gynocracy and patriarchy in key nouvelles; and on gendered barriers to communication, as well as sexually differentiated views toward marriage and fidelity, that undermine marital and romantic unions. The queen’s portrayal of different classes, and her examination of their interactions and the power and perspectival differentials that separate them, will form the focus of chapter 4. On the surface, Marguerite’s most memorable treatment of social class seems to occur in her courtly tales of thwarted love, where disparities of rank in the upper echelons of society create obstacles between suitors and their ladies. Yet a closer look reveals that the queen’s scrutiny of social hierarchies encompasses the lower strata of society as well. In this chapter, we will examine the viewing positions of, and attitudes toward, both noble serviteurs, or aristocratic courtiers in the service of a noble lady, and household servants; the violence and abuse these characters suffer and occasionally inflict; their narrative function as catalysts or purveyors of truth, by virtue of their privileged standpoints as outsiders; and the discourse on social class that emerges from the frame discussions. Chapter 5 will be devoted to reflections and representations of the body politic in the Heptaméron. Although we do not normally think of Marguerite as a political writer, her status as the sister of François I afforded her a wellpublicized role in governance during her brother’s imprisonment, and she continued to exert a strong influence on the king at least until 1534, the year of the affaire des placards. Her correspondence also reveals that Marguerite

16

Introduction

was involved almost daily in small-scale politics, negotiations with and for her clients, and requests on their behalf to the king and other officials for tax relief, judicial clemency, and governmental appointments. Not surprisingly, this interest in community, fair play, justice, and governance also informs her magnum opus, but not always overtly. Interwoven with her “amusing trifles” in the Heptaméron we find multiple portrayals of community, leaders, and leadership styles; recurring insights into the behavioral strategies of underlings subjected to abuses of power; a comparative look at different forms of justice and modes of governance; and household dramas that figure crises of the body politic. Although they constitute separate chapters in this monograph, the abovementioned analyses of patriarchy and gender, social class, and political references in the Heptaméron are closely interconnected and occasionally overlapping, as they are in the text itself. On a methodological level, chapters 3 through 5 all examine perspectival cues and shifts, the rhetoric of seeing, and the interplay of hegemonic and nonhegemonic standpoints in Marguerite’s magnum opus; and the content, topics of inquiry, and findings of each chapter reinforce and build upon those of surrounding chapters, by virtue of their common focus on abuses of power, patterns of violence and victimization, and perspectives of otherness in early modern society. With a nod to Marguerite de Navarre’s own practices, this study analyzes these scopic patterns and the “slices of life” that they illuminate through differing lenses, studying their operations and implications within the overlapping contexts of gender, class, and politics. While repetitions from one chapter to the next have been minimized whenever possible, some of Marguerite’s more richly developed nouvelles yield insights into not just one, but all three, of the aforementioned topics; as a result, we will occasionally revisit these stories in successive chapters of this monograph, in keeping with de Navarre’s own penchant for reassessing her characters’ behaviors, ethical debates, and narrative events—such as rape and infidelity—from multiple viewing positions. Finally, a few additional words about the methodology and critical perspective of this volume are in order. In general, the study’s treatment of gender, social class, and politics in the Heptaméron is based on a close reading of the text, grounded in the cultural history of the era, and informed by critical theory and recent scholarship. However, one key facet of this approach is less conventional than the thematic structure of the monograph might suggest. Rather like Tarrou in Camus’s La peste (The Plague),64 I have at times privileged the reverse over the obverse of Marguerite’s text, on the premise that signposts or narratological cues for this practice are embedded within her writings. Among these are her exclusion of learned, and thus artful, storytellers in the prologue; Hircan’s paradigm-shaking admission that “in sport we are all equal,” as he allows the lower-ranking Simontaut to launch the narrations; Oisille’s insistence on the worth hidden in “les choses basses,” or lowly places and people, as she praises the muletière’s

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martyrdom in story 2;65 the discerning gaze of pivotal characters in the nouvelles, often women or servants, who direct our attention to hidden truths that lie buried beneath misleading surface appearances; small oddities, inconsistencies, and “tears” in the fabric of the tales, which wrest our gaze away from the dominant discourse and muddy our interpretive lens with aporiae and dissonant intertextual or iconographic associations; the frame discussions, which introduce and legitimize alternative readings of the narratives; and secondary or inscribed readers within the narratives, who, like Bernage in nouvelle 32, reinterpret events from alternative perspectives and invite us to do the same.66 To some degree these heterogeneous and occasionally upside-down points of view, as well as the discourses that make them legible, relate to the poetics of suspicion and dissimulation, which scholars have long recognized as key themes and exegetical tools within the Heptaméron: “Suspicion,” notes Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani, “leads [us] to go look underneath, to raise the veil or covering, to strip off the mask, to hike up the long robe, to discover what they are hiding, filth and vileness.”67 In other words, both Marguerite’s fictionalized world—like the real world— and her text dissimulate their truths, schooling readers in the hermeneutics of doubt and suspicion. Following the queen’s own lead, what this study proposes is an archaeological “counter reading” of the Heptaméron that at once elucidates Marguerite de Navarre’s dialogic discourse and attempts to excavate beneath the surface of the short-story collection to reveal the private transgressions of public figures, the tribulations of the disempowered, and the underside of gender- and class-based privilege.68 The callousness, perfidy, and corruption that she unveils, ranging from priests who rape their parishioners to a pious widow who sleeps with her son, are intentionally imbued with a certain shock value guaranteed to scandalize moralistic readers and titillate aficionados of salacious discourse. By directing our gaze behind closed doors, at shadows and behind curtains, into closets and trunks, down alleyways, and underneath the respectable facades of polite society, however, the queen of Navarre also offers us sociological insights into the “other side” of sixteenth-century life that public discourse often suppresses. We learn much about Marguerite’s world through her incisive literary gaze. For our purposes, the how and why of Marguerite’s revelatory techniques, including her dialogic discourse, her provocative ambiguities, and her downward gaze, are no less important than the content of her revelations.69 In chapter 2 we will touch briefly on biographical circumstances such as the possible rape that she suffered, which link her to other targets of violence and oppression in her culture: not just female rape victims from all echelons of society, but male serviteurs subjected to their mistress’s cruelty, disempowered servants of both sexes, and devout men and women of all classes who trusted the outward piety of corrupt clergymen. Using a technique that exploits the revelatory potential of the frame stories she

18

Introduction

inherited from Boccaccio, moreover, Marguerite typically achieves her revelations by directing our gaze telescopically inside and downward through the myriad, multilayered casings that make up her narrative, peeling back layer after layer of appearances until alternative “truths” emerge. In looking at her stories and analyzing her treatment of gender, class, and politics within them, we will examine this technique. Finally, the queen of Navarre’s wide-ranging experimentation with multiple and shifting perspectives links her to countless humanists of the early modern period ranging from her countryman Rabelais to Boccaccio, Erasmus, and Machiavelli. The dialogic form itself of Marguerite’s frame discussions recalls Plato’s Symposium, which influenced Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier. In these works, as well as those of countless imitators, the dialogism stems in large measure from the principle that multiple voices and insights together elucidate, rather than obscure, the truth, both by subjecting hypotheses to the rigors of dialectical argumentation and by uncovering facts and airing insights that might otherwise go unexamined. Far from imitating the external form alone of these dialogues, Marguerite develops her own symposium within the context of a truth project that informs her text from start to finish: the short stories, she contends, will not only be devoid of the artful rhetoric that Machiavelli also disparages, because it veils the truth, but will also include “no story that is not true” (“nulle nouvelle qui ne soit veritable histoire,” prol., 9).70 No less importantly, Marguerite’s vacillating and occasionally upside-down authorial lens, which periodically examines lofty characters from the perspective of the disempowered, is reminiscent of Machiavelli’s contention that “to know well the nature of princes one must be of the people.”71 On a sociohistorical level, it is difficult to imagine that an aristocrat of Marguerite’s high rank would be capable, in the life world, of viewing governance through the alternative perspective of the governed; but from a literary standpoint, we must recall that the author had read and discussed The Book of the Courtier, which would have conditioned her, as a writer, to identify with perspectives and discourses other than her own. As Richard Rorty remarks in his Philosophy as Cultural Politics (2000), in reference to Harold Bloom’s theories of reading, “The point of reading a great many books is to become aware of a great number of alternative purposes.”72 As an avid and thoughtful reader, the historical Marguerite d’Angoulême would have come to see life through the eyes of otherness as a young woman; and her sensitivity to these alternative perspectives, seemingly anomalous in a woman of her position, was likely honed by her personal tribulations as well, by her exposure to competing fields of discourse, and by her increased marginalization as a political advisor to her brother. As Stephenson points out, the queen of Navarre was both client and patron, subject and ruler; and arguably, the duality of these viewpoints leaves traces in her art, not only in her treatment of politics, but in her approaches to gender- and class-based inequities. In the Heptaméron, Marguerite’s perspectival alterity serves as a

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vehicle of revelation that she uses to satirize abuses of power, explore the diversity of the human condition, weigh and balance opposing opinions, and expose the gap between public and private truths in early modern culture. Her authorial multiperspectivism is present not only in the counterdiscourse of beleaguered servants in the Heptaméron, but also in the dissenting views of her devisants; in the ambiguous signifiers that subvert and splinter simplistic readings of her text; in the differing angles from which she scrutinizes matters of gender, social rank, and politics; and in the expansiveness of her narrative lens, which breaches closed doors and illuminates blind spots in her era’s cultural history. By following Marguerite’s mercurial gaze and examining her discourse and counterdiscourse, the different viewing positions at work in the Heptaméron, and the polysemous nature of her signifiers, this study attempts to shed new light on the internal operations of de Navarre’s magnum opus, on its sociopolitical resonances and gendered standpoints, and on the complexity of its intellectual and experiential mainsprings.73 In this regard, the present monograph joins other analyses of the Heptaméron that take issue with Pierre Jourda’s paradigm-shaping assertion about Marguerite’s artistic and intellectual limitations: “It would be useless to try and make her out to be a great poet or a great thinker,” he contends. “Both her verse and her prose have many good points, but these are not sufficient to place her in the first rank [of Renaissance writers].”74 Certainly the author of the Heptaméron is neither a traditional philosopher, nor a simplistic thinker who espouses a clearly defined ideology, nor an overtly revolutionary writer in the mold of Rabelais. Yet for readers willing to linger on the odd details, shifting perspectives, and jarring dissonances in the fabric of her deceptively unassuming prose, the wealth of insights she offers into the religious, political, and sociological tensions of the French Renaissance and into the nooks and crannies of private spaces in early modern culture is remarkable. The goal of this volume is to elucidate some of these insights and to open the door to renewed discussion about the many faces of Marguerite de Navarre and her era, and the many ways of reading her Heptaméron.

1RWHV 1

“Princess Marguerite de Navarre, by Jean Clouet (attributed to),” Walker Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool, http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ picture-of-month/displaypicture.aspx?id=368. For other portraits of Marguerite discussed here, see “Les derniers Valois,” http://derniersvalois. canalblog.com/tag/Marguerite%20de%20Navarre. Originals or variants of these images are in collections of the Musée Condé, Chantilly (i.e., portraits of Marguerite, Paintings and Drawings Collections; La coche ou Débat d’amour, MS 522, fol. 2r and 43v, illus. Maître de François de Rohan, 1542, Miniature and Illumination Collection); the Bodleian Library, Oxford (La coche ou Débat d’amour, MS Douce 91, fol. 3r and 44v, workshop of François de Rohan, 1540); and the BnF (MSS Fr. 1035, L’office de sainte Anne, fol. 1v; 1189, Le myroer des dames nobles, fol. 1v; NAL 82, Les heures de Catherine de Médicis,

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Introduction fol. 151v; and NAL 83, Les heures de Marguerite de Valois, soeur de François Ier, fol. 185v). In this grouping of pictorial images of Marguerite, we might also include the textual portrait of her by Brantôme, which will figure later in this monograph. See Dora E. Polachek, “Brantôme’s Dames illustres: Remembering Marguerite de Navarre,” in Memory and Community in Sixteenth-Century France, ed. David P. LaGuardia and Cathy Yandell (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 137–48. See “Princess Marguerite de Navarre.” Throughout this monograph, I refer to Marguerite not only as “Marguerite de Navarre,” a title dating from her marriage to Henri, but also as  “Marguerite d’Angoulême” (by virtue of her birth to Charles d’Angoulême and Louise de Savoie), “Marguerite d’Alençon” (by virtue of her first marriage to Charles d’Alençon, which lasted from 1509– 25), and, occasionally, as the “queen,” the “duchess,” or the “princess.” “Princess Marguerite de Navarre.” Margaret of Austria (1480–1530). Indeed, a parrot sits in Mary’s lap, where both she and the Christ child caress it, in Van Eyck’s Madonna with the Canon Van der Paele. The parrot was associated with both royalty and virginity in the Renaissance, in addition to symbolizing eloquence; and its green color in the Walker Gallery portrait may well signal the hope and sense of renewal that accompanied Marguerite’s marriage to Henri de Navarre. Because the focus is primarily on Marguerite de Navarre’s literary gaze in this monograph, this cursory overview of the queen’s pictorial gaze and its varying objects barely scratches the surface of each painting’s rich scopic connotations. For example, the mirror into which Marguerite gazes in Catherine de’ Medici’s Book of Hours (“Les derniers Valois”), while alluding to the queen of Navarre’s authorship of The Mirror of the Sinful Soul and, by extension, to her spiritual reflectiveness, may also signal her quest for truth and knowledge or, more frivolously, her appreciation for earthly beauty and worldly pleasures. Patricia Simons, “The Gaze, the Eye, the Profile in Renaissance Portraiture,” History Workshop: A Journal of Socialist and Feminist Historians 25 (Spring 1988): 4–30; reprinted in Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), 50. To further complicate matters, Marguerite’s three-quarter poses and lowered, sidelong gaze find echoes in several portraits of her brother, King François I, reminding us that averted eyes and oblique glances, notwithstanding their association with female decorum in patriarchal societies, are neither genderspecific nor figuratively defined in early modern French portaiture. Whether these poses are mimetic, driven by convention or technical considerations, connotative or symbolic in nature, or intended to construct the “most Christian king” as a man of humility, slyness, or aristocratic aloofness as well as majesty is unclear. Indeed, oblique glances are a staple of early modern potraiture that figure myriad traits ranging from Christian humility to Machiavellian duplicity. While there is no direct, causal link between her gaze in the two genres, the one graphic and the other literary, their convergence likely reflects, in a general way, the circumspection expected of women, both in their public appearance and in their written expression. To be sure, pictorial and literary gazes are rarely coterminous; and constructed, painted likenesses of Marguerite are not entirely of the same ilk as either the historical writer’s real-world ocular expressions and outlook on life, or the optical, intellectual, and moral viewpoints at play within the Heptaméron. In their elusiveness and diversity, however, the artistic representations of the

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queen of Navarre’s enigmatic gaze at once straddle the permeable divide between the life world and its (re)constructed double, as Marguerite’s own nouvelles and this monograph (to a lesser degree) attempt to do; and provide a fitting visual introduction to a text that at once focuses thematically on, and provides an exercise in, seeing. Moreover, one might argue that Marguerite’s oblique and elusive gaze in her portraits, oftentimes accompanied by downcast eyes, functions as a pictorial (inter)text emblematizing the culturally prescribed and constructed viewing position for women within the broader social (con)text of the Renaissance, of which the Heptaméron with its equally elusive “female gaze” is also a part. This volume focuses primarily on the Heptaméron’s multiperspectivism rather than on the Lacanian or Foucauldian gaze per se, as one might expect given the title; and on the ways in which this multiperspectivism affects and informs the discourses of gender and patriarchy, social class, and politics in Marguerite’s magnum opus. This does not mean that Lacanian and Foucauldian concepts of the gaze never figure in the pages that follow, or that a systematic Lacanian and/or Foucauldian analysis of the gaze, or perspectival shifts, in the Heptaméron would not be feasible; but such an approach lies outside the scope of this project, which began as a study of gender, class, and politics alone. Nevertheless, my analyses do occasionally draw upon scholarship on the male gaze that is informed in part by Lacan, such as Laura Mulvey’s seminal “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16 (Fall 1975): 6–18. Occasionally we have other goals when we narrate stories, such as showing off our rhetorical, oratorical, or performative skills; and some of the goals listed overlap with others. For example, sharing insights with friends and family, listeners and readers, through storytelling is often a pedagogical exercise as well. The experiences shared, according to narratological theory, may be one’s own or those passed on by others either orally, pictorially, or in writing; and they may be “real” or fictional experiences, both of which are processed by the reader or listener in a similar fashion according to recent neuroimaging studies. See Anne Murphy Paul, “Your Brain on Fiction,” The New York Times, March 18, 2012, SR6, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/theneuroscience-of-your-brain-on-fiction.html?r=0: “The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life.” See also Monika Fludernik, Towards a “Natural” Narratology (London: Routledge, 1996); and Marco Caracciolo, “Experientiality,” in The Living Handbook of Narratology, http://www.lhn. uni-hamburg.de/article/experientiality (revision of the Handbook of Narratology, ed. John Pier, Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert [Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009]). In narratological terms, textual or narrative “cues” prompt readers to make inferences about the story’s intentionality and to reconstruct its “narrative world.” See David Herman, “Narrative Theory and the Intentional Stance,” PartAns 6 (June 2008): 246. Narrative cues may also draw our attention to perspectival shifts in the absence of verbs, nouns, or other linguistic indicators of seeing (Herman, 250–51). “Si l’on savait qui je suis, on dirait, ‘Son livre jure avec son caractère; il devrait employer son temps à quelque chose de mieux: cela n’est pas digne d’un homme grave.’” Lettres persanes, ed. Jacques Roger (Paris: Garnier Flammarion, 1964), 23. Not all scholars see a radical difference between Marguerite’s poetry and theater and her prose masterwork. See Nicole Cazauran, “L’Heptaméron” de Marguerite de Navarre (Paris: SEDES, 1976), 259. As for the other-worldly quality of de Navarre’s poetry, see Paula Sommers, Celestial Ladders: Readings

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Introduction in Marguerite de Navarre’s Poetry of Spiritual Ascent (Geneva: Droz, 1989). Sommers contends that Marguerite “rarely takes an interest in what is ‘outside us’” in her Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne, focusing instead on the “interior landscape of the soul” (16). “What Is an Author?” From a lecture before the Société française de philosophie in February 1969, reported in the Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie 63 (July–September 1969): 73–104, and revised in a lecture given by Foucault at SUNY, Buffalo in 1970 and printed in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. and trans. Josué V. Harari (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 141–60. The text cited is a slight modification by Robert Hurley of Harari’s translation, in Essential Works of Michel Foucault: 1954–1984, ed. James D. Faubion and trans. Hurley and others (New York: The New Press, 1998), vol. 2 (Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology), 205. From a narratological perspective, however, we would do well to consider Herman’s more recent contention, grounded in evolutionary and cognitive theory, that the tendency to read for intentions is “innate” in higher primates, that intentionality is a “phylogenetic as well as ontogenetic hallmark of humans’ communicative and cognitive capacities,” and that narratives themselves are “anchored in intentional systems that license [intentional] interpretive strategies” (240). Foucault, 206, 221. “Michel Foucault: ‘What is an Author?’” in “Art History Unstuffed,” http:// www.arthistoryunstuffed.com/michel-foucault-what-author. On a similar note, see Nancy Hartsock, “Foucault on Power: A Theory for Women,” in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1990), 163–64: “Why is it that just at the moment when so many of us who have been silenced begin to demand the right to name ourselves, to act as subjects rather than objects of history, that just then the concept of subjecthood becomes problematic?” In all fairness to Foucault, however, it is not clear that he intended his critique of modernism’s fixation on the author to extend to late medieval and Renaissance texts. Narratological theory recognizes a similar type of purposive writing, which Caracciolo traces back to “intentional states that … aim at bringing about a change in the world” (201). See his “On the Experientiality of Stories: A Follow-Up on David Herman’s ‘Narrative Theory and the Intentional Stance,’” PartAns 10 (June 2012): 197–221. From a critical perspective even further distanced from the subject or author, poststructuralists often classify documents and other intertexts that “are shaped by the intellectual climate, and in turn contribute to and shape that climate,” as types of “social texts” that may effect change in larger social (inter)texts (David Penchansky, “Staying the Night: Intertextuality in Genesis and Judges,” in Reading between Texts: Intertextuality and the Hebrew Bible, ed. Danna Nolan Fewell [Louisville, KY: Westminster/ John Knox Press, 1992], 78). See also Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez and trans. Thomas Gora and Alice A. Jardine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 36–37; Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 103; and Richard Harvey Brown, Society as Text: Essays on Rhetoric, Reason, and Reality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 144. For more on the “social text,” see Kristeva, 36–37; and for elucidations of intentionalist and experiential theories of narratology, see Fludernik; Herman, “Narrative Theory and the Intentional Stance,” 233–60; and Caracciolo, 197– 221. Introduced as early as the 1970s and 1980s in the writings of scholars including Sandra Harding, Dorothy Smith, and Nancy Hartsock, and informed

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by Marxist and Lukacsian views of power differentials between oppressors and the oppressed, early versions of (feminist) standpoint theory focused on the privileged viewing position of individuals in marginalized groups, and the greater objectivity of their perspectives, in patriarchal societies that were typically capitalistic. Notwithstanding theories situating capitalism’s origins in both the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation, I will not argue that the usefulness of standpoint theory for the analysis of Marguerite de Navarre’s work is rooted in capitalism, but I will suggest connections to the dominant views of patriarchy. For essays summarizing the various applications, strengths, and limitations of standpoint theory, see The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies, ed. Sandra Harding (New York and London: Routledge, 2004). In the last few decades, writes Joan Tronto (“Moral Perspectives: Gender, Ethics, and Political Theory,” in Handbook of Gender and Women’s Studies, ed. Kathy Davis, Mary Evans, and Judith Lorber [Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications Ltd., 2006], 416–35), “feminist scholars (including Hartsock  herself in 1998) have agreed that multiple standpoints are possible. Nevertheless, it is still possible to describe how a standpoint provides knowledge that is different, and more comprehensive, than knowledge understood as simply facts about the world around us. Knowledge from a standpoint always involves an analysis and a realization of the power differentials operating among different individuals. It requires recognition of multiple ways of seeing, and of understanding why the centrally powerful way of seeing operates to exclude other points of view. Although feminists no longer believe that there is a single ‘feminist standpoint,’ standpoint epistemology, and the knowledge that comes from taking multiple perspectives, continue to be powerful tools for understanding feminist ethics and politics” (421). See also Hartsock, Feminist Standpoint Revisited: And Other Essays (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998). This concept of the multiple “faces” women adopt, oftentimes consciously, to “negotiate public life simultaneously with their inner realities” also figures in writings on multiple standpoint theory. See Thérèse M. Craine Bertsch, “The Standpoint of Homeless Single Mothers on Recurrent Episodes of Homelessness” (DSW Diss.: Adelphi University, 2012), 12. Louise Labé: créature de papier (Geneva: Droz, 2006). Marguerite d’Angoulême (Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1930), 2: 661–63. “L’Heptaméron” de Marguerite de Navarre, 19. Through her father’s and paternal grandmother’s line, Jeanne d’Albret was also the Countess of Foix. “De la cruauté,” Essais, Book 2.11 (Paris: Garnier, 1925): “un gentil livre pour son étoffe.” For a discussion of specific nouvelles (11, 44, 46) that may be spurious, see Cazauran, “Sur L’Heptaméron de Marguerite de Navarre. Enquêtes d’authenticité,” RHLF 104 (Apr.–Jun. 2004): 269–82. Pierre de Bourdeille and C.-A. Saint-Beuve, Illustrious Dames of the Court of the Valois Kings, trans. Katharine Prescott Wormeley (New York: Lamb Publishing Company, 1912), 243; and de Bourdeille, Recueil des dames, poésies et tombeaux, ed. Etienne Vaucheret (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 183. See Nancy Lyman Roelker, Queen of Navarre: Jeanne d’Albret (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 127. In her “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], 73–94), Carla Freccero also addresses Jeanne d’Albret’s recollection of the Heptaméron’s genesis, noting that “Marguerite’s involvement

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Introduction in doctrinal matters more than once brought her under the punitive scrutiny of both her brother and king and her husband. Jeanne, in a letter written after Marguerite’s death, seems, at the very least, to have been persuaded of the threat her mother’s religious activities posed and to attribute to that threat her retreat into ‘romans jovials’” (76). However, Mary B. McKinley notes that the threat did not work: “If it appeared to Jeanne d’Albret that François I’s attempt at intimidation had worked, we know that Marguerite’s move to ‘romans jovials’ did not stifle her ideological voice” (155). See “Telling Secrets: Sacramental Confession and Narrative Authority in the Heptaméron,” in Critical Tales: New Studies of the “Heptaméron” and Early Modern Culture, ed. John D. Lyons and Mary B. McKinley (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 146–71. In her “Gendered Virtue, Vernacular Theology, and the Nature of Authority in the Heptameron” (SCJ 29 [Spring 1998]: 39–53), Carol Thysell discusses the relationship between Marguerite’s focus on the individual conscience and reformist thought, particularly that of Calvin, while relating both to the androgynous moral code, and “the equality of women and men before both God and humankind’” (citing Mary Potter, “Gender Equality and Gender Hierarchy in Calvin’s Theology,” Signs 2 [Summer 1986]: 725) that begin to emerge in the Heptaméron (48). Marguerite uses the term “conscience” 89 times in her work, 88 times in the singular and once in the plural. Suzanne Hanon, Le vocabulaire de “L’Heptaméron” de Marguerite de Navarre: Index et concordance (Paris and Geneva: Champion-Slatkine, 1990), 40. This evocation of the conte à rire is only one component of the many fields of discourse that intersect within the Heptaméron. Notably, the wit, resourcefulness, and mirth of intratextual characters such as the wife in nouvelle 54, who bursts out laughing when she spies her husband embracing a chambermaid, or the lady of Tours in nouvelle 37, who shames her husband by stocking his lover’s bedchamber with fine linens, provide us valuable and nonviolent strategies for coping with adversity, in keeping with New Testament admonitions against revenge (Rom. 12: 18–20; Matt. 5: 43; and Luke 6: 27). Nevertheless, the author is inviting us to do more than smile in the face of adversity. In her “Constructing Readers and Reading Communities: Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron 32 in England” (Ren&Ref 23 [Winter 2003]: 35–59), Melissa Walter notes that inscribed readers within the texts, such as Bernage in nouvelle 32, often invite “the reader to consider how to respond in historical terms to aesthetic and fictional forms” (37), not just through laughter, but also “through action” (42). “L’Heptaméron” de Marguerite de Navarre. See Febvre, Amour sacré, amour divin: autour de “L’Heptaméron” (1944; repr., Paris: Gallimard, 1971); and Gelernt, World of Many Loves (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1966). Rape and Writing in the Heptaméron (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991). See also Kathleen Bradley, A Transgenerational, Cryptonomic, and Sociometric Analysis of Marguerite de Navarre’s “L’Heptaméron” (Ph.D. diss., University of Arizona, 2007). Marcel Tetel, Marguerite de Navarre’s “Heptaméron”: Themes, Language, and Structure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1973). In particular, Tetel notes that Marguerite was “buffeted by a world of paradoxes and contradictions and tossed on a sea of doubt …. True to the Renaissance spirit,” he contends, “the Heptameron refutes absolutes in the face of a multitude of equally valid choices” (207). Accordingly, it is “marked by an all-pervasive concept of dichotomies” (206) including spirituality and earthiness (5), the ideal and the empiric.

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In his elucidation of Fredric Jameson, William C. Dowling argues that narrative, in the Marxist critic’s view, always has both “manifest and latent meaning written into it” (98), offering us therefore a “complex and tangled realm of meaning that demands interpretation” (99). See his Jameson, Althusser, Marx: An Introduction to the Political Unconscious (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984). This complexity comes in the form of additional stories, on the one hand, which were inserted before, between, and after the various tales from Fr. 5013 rather than being appended to the last, or twenty-eighth, nouvelle of that manuscript; and, on the other hand, in the form of an added prologue and frame discussions with heterogeneous, gendered narrative voices—in contrast to the single female narrator and women-only narratees present in B.N. Fr. 5013. See Cazauran, “Sur l’élaboration de L’Heptaméron,” in Les visages et les voix de Marguerite de Navarre, ed. Marcel Tetel (Paris: Klincksieck, 1995), 19–39; Cazauran, “En marge du texte de L’Heptaméron: du manuscrit B.N. Fr. 1512 au manuscrit B.N. Fr. 2155,” Information littéraire 43 (Sept.–Oct. 1991): 45–47, and 44 (Jan.–Feb. 1992): 44–47. Wormeley, Illustrious Dames, 243; de Bourdeille, 183. “I wear horns [of cuckoldry, as] everyone sees; but someone else [i.e., the king] wears them without suspecting [he is a cuckold]” (my translation), writes the wily gentleman, in reference to both the deer’s horns and those of cuckoldry, which both he (knowingly) and his monarch (unknowingly) wear. In this enigma, the gentleman alludes not only to King Alfonso’s public affair with his wife, but also to his own private affair with the queen of Naples—a hidden truth known only to the cerf (stag) or serf (servant), but beyond the shortsighted ruler’s ken. See also L’Heptaméron, ed. Michel François (Paris: Garnier, 1960), 26: “Io porto le corna, ciascun lo vede; Ma tal le porta, che no lo crede.” Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from the Heptaméron in middle French are from François’s edition, English translations of the work are by Paul Chilton (The Heptameron [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984]), and translations of other texts are my own. The theme and hermeneutics of the gaze and of (in)sight in the Heptaméron are richly developed. In the current reference, I am alluding to the reader’s critical and discerning gaze, awakened by the queen of Navarre’s own perspectives(s), those of her devisants, and the viewpoints of her characters. While scholarship on the gaze is primarily pertinent to the last of these categories, both the dominant, reductive male perspective and the reversed insights of women and servants are so important in the Heptaméron that some of these critical writings on the gendered gaze—as well as what Lawrence Kritzman calls the “readerly gaze”—need to be mentioned. See Kritzman, “Changing Places: Marguerite de Navarre and the Rhetoric of the Gaze (L’Heptaméron: 70),” in Les visages et les voix, 67–78. For a more theological discussion of the discerning “œil (intérieur) de la foi,” or the “eye of faith,” and the “œil extérieur” or outward gaze that is fooled by worldly appearances, see Jan Miernowski, “L’intentionnalité dans l’Heptaméron de Marguerite de Navarre,” BHR 63, no. 2 (2001): 202–11. Les Marguerites de la Marguerite des Princesses, ed. Félix Frank (Paris: Librairie des Bibliophiles, 1973), 1: 13–14: “Excus[ez] la rhythme et le langage, / Voyant que c’est d’une femme l’ouvrage.” Frank’s text is based on the 1547 edition of Les Marguerites (Lyon: Jean de Tournes), 1: 13. See also Le miroir de treschretienne princesse Marguerite de France (Paris: Antoine Augereau, 1533), for this variant: “Si vous lisez ceste œuvre toute entiere, / Arrestez vous, sans plus, à la matiere, / En excusant la Rhyme & le langaige, / Voyant que c’est d’une femme l’ouvraige” (“Au lecteur,” 1). By juxtaposing “matiere” with

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Introduction “ceste oeuvre toute entere,” the author hints that literal interpretations and hasty appraisals of a writer’s style and words elucidate no more than a small portion of the entiere text, even when we have “read” every word. Only by unveiling the hidden meanings and figurative connotations do we come to appreciate the “entire work,” a concept to which the writer alludes not just once but twice: “Take the time to read all of this work” (“Prenez la patience [de] lire du tout ceste oeuvre”), she reiterates in the poem’s closing lines. For more on the prologue, see Sommers, “Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron: The Case for the Cornice,” The French Review 57 (May 1984): 786–93; Yves Delègue, “Autour de deux prologues: L’Heptaméron est-il un anti-Boccace?”, Travaux de linguistique et de littérature de l’Université de Strasbourg 4, no. 2 (1968): 23–37; Glyn P. Norton, “The Emilio Ferreti Letter: A Critical Preface for Marguerite de Navarre, JMRS 4 (1974): 287–300; Claude-Gilbert Dubois, “Fonds mythique et jeu des sens dans le ‘prologue’ de l’Heptaméron” in Etudes seiziémistes, ed. Robert Aulotte (Geneve: Droz, 1980), 141–68; Philippe de Lajarte, “Le prologue de l’Heptaméron et le processus de production de l’œuvre,” in La nouvelle française à la Renaissance, ed. Lionello Sozzi (Paris: Slatkine, 1981), 397–424; and Norton, “Narrative Fiction in the Heptameron Frame-Story,” in La nouvelle française, 435–48. Recent criticism has avoided the traditional practice of identifying the devisants’ historical models, on the premise that the storytellers are fictional characters who may represent an amalgam of real-life figures whom Marguerite knew, an outward projection of different facets of her own personality, or even stock figures or abstract qualities that she has fleshed out and personified. For more on the devisants, both from historical and more modern perspectives, see François, 447–48; and Regine Reynolds, Les devisants de “l’Heptaméron”: Dix personnages en quête d’audience (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1977). “Dedicatory Letter to Lorenzo de’ Medici, the Magnificent,” introduction to The Prince, in The Portable Machiavelli, trans. Peter Bondanella and Mark Musa (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 77–78. See also Niccolò Machiavelli, Il principe, in Opere, ed. Mario Bonfantini (Milano: Ricciardi, 1954), 3. In her Literary Circles and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 1–19, Julie Campbell elucidates the dynamics of this type of courtly discussion. Chilton, 68; François, 9: “Il n’y a nulle de vous qui n’ait leu les cent Nouvelles de Bocace, nouvellement traduictes d’ytalien en françois, que le roy François …, monseigneur le Daulphin [et d’autres] font tant de cas.” See Febvre, Amour sacré, amour divin, 179; John D. Bernard, “Realism and Closure in the Heptameron: Marguerite de Navarre and Boccaccio,” MLR 84 (Apr. 1989): 305–18; Sozzi, “Boccaccio in Francia nel Cinquecento,” in Boccaccio nella cultura francese, ed. Carlo Pellegrini (Florence, 1971), 295–99. For more on the nationalistic overtones of the Heptaméron, see Timothy Hampton, Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Century: Inventing Renaissance France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); and Freccero, “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), 107–23. Freccero notes a possible directive in the text for French women “to let their honor, virtue, and selfrestraint be the civilizing force behind the nation’s barbaric, appetite-driven, but nevertheless noble, virtuous, and heroic men, even as those men learn that women, as citizen-subjects, have the right (and duty) to accede to honor and virtue, to be themselves citizens, françoises” (118).

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In her “Recreating the Rules of the Game: Marguerite de Navarre” (in Creative Imitation: New Essays on Renaissance Literature in Honor of Thomas M. Greene, ed. David Quint, Margaret W. Ferguson, G.W. Pigman III, and Wayne A. Rebhorn [Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992]), Margaret Ferguson argues that Marguerite de Navarre “gives us the portrait of the author as courtier—someone who needs exquisite skills of persuasion as she attempts to play one of the most difficult of the roles Castiglione’s male interlocutors discuss: the role of the courtier not only as ‘ornament,’ but as educator of the prince” (178). In her “Archives in the Fiction,” Freccero clarifies and develops Ferguson’s hypothesis (175–76). “Mes enfans, vous me demandez une chose que je trouve fort difficille, de vous enseigner ung passetemps qui vous puisse delivrer de vos ennuyctz; car, aiant chergé le remede toute ma vye, n’en ay jamais trouvé que ung, qui est la lecture des sainctes lettres en laquelle se trouve la vraie et parfaicte joie de l’esprit” (7). Given Marguerite’s emblematic imagination and the strikingly visual quality of key scenes, such as the muletière’s dying pose with her hands lifted toward God (N. 2), one might venture that the queen of Navarre has generated her own iconography in the nouvelles as an alternative to the conventional “ymaiges” and “patenostres” mentioned in her prologue. See David LaGuardia, The Iconography of Power: The French Nouvelle at the End of the Middle Ages (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1999): “Every detail of iconographic representation signifies … This ‘iconography’ of the nouvelle, the writing of significant images that invite the reader to interpret them,” helps define the genre (39). Indeed, arguably most scholars believe that Marguerite intended to do far more in the Heptaméron than simply entertain her readers. In “De la Bonne Nouvelle aux nouvelles: remarques sur la structure de L’Heptaméron” (FF 27 [Winter 2002]: 23–43), Gérard Defaux notes “une volonté de construire et de signifier” (33) in the structure of the tome, while Miernowski writes that “il semble exclu que le dessin du recueil soit fortuit” (201). Cathleen Bauschatz, “‘Voylà, mes dames…’: Inscribed Women Listeners and Readers in the Heptameron,” in Critical Tales, 104–22. See Pollie Bromilow, Models of Women in Sixteenth-Century French Literature: Female Exemplarity in the “Histoires Tragiques” (1559) and the “Heptameron” (1559) (New York: Mellen, 2007). In his “Exemplarity as Misogyny: Variations on the Tale of the One-Eyed Cuckold” (in Narrative Worlds: Essays on the French Nouvelle in 15th and 16th Century France, ed. David LaGuardia and Gary Ferguson [Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, Arizona State University, 2005]), LaGuardia goes so far as to contend that Marguerite’s nouvelles are often “emphatic inversions of exemplary stories” (151), which previously “trade[d] in women’s bodies” in the male-dominated economy of patriarchal discourse (145). Within the context of American realism, Brook Thomas uses this terminology to distinguish between the vertical subordination of reader to author in authoritarian-style texts, and those that posit readers as “conversational partners” along a horizontal axis. See his American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), introduction, 1–24, and especially 8–15. Winfried Fluck, Inszenierte Wirklichkeit (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1992), 362; quoted by Thomas, 9. For a useful analysis of Marguerite’s artful use of silence in her theatrical works, see Regine Reynolds-Cornell, “Silence as a Rhetorical Device in Marguerite de Navarre’s Théâtre Profane,” SCJ 17 (Spring 1986): 17–31.

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In his “Fictions of the Eyewitness” (in Gary Ferguson and LaGuardia, Narrative Worlds, 123–38), John O’Brien observes that Marguerite de Navarre reprises key themes, situations, and narrative strands from early stories later in the Heptaméron, creating revised—and sometimes inverted—“companion” novellas that assay the different ways that individuals respond to similar stimuli and circumstances, and the differing ways that we as readers judge them. For example, O’Brien contends that nouvelle 20 is an inverted version of nouvelle 16 and that nouvelle 43 is a variation on the “pursuit of a virtuous widow” in nouvelle 4. Earthly Treasures: Material Culture and Metaphysics in the “Heptaméron” and Evangelical Narrative (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2007). The Power and Patronage of Marguerite de Navarre (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004). King’s Sister—Queen of Dissent, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2009). “On pourrait croire que Tarrou s’est ingénié à considérer les choses et les êtres par le gros bout de la lorgnette.” Camus, La peste (1947; repr., Paris: Livre de Poche, 1968), 22. Particularly among reformers, references to “lowly things” frequently camouflaged spiritual truths. See, for example, Henry Heller, “Marguerite de Navarre and the Reformers of Meaux,” BHR 33, no. 2 (1971): 271–310. See Walter, “Constructing Readers and Reading Communities,” 35–59. “L’Heptaméron: l’ère du soupcon,” in Les visages et les voix, 123–34: “Le soupçon conduit ainsi à aller voir dessous, à soulever le voile ou la couverture, à ôter le masque, à retrousser la longue robe, pour découvrir ce qu’ils dissimulent, l’ordure et la vilénie” (132). My use of the terms “archaeology” and “archaeological” in this monograph does not coincide with Foucault’s usage of the words, or even, strictly speaking, with their etymology and definitions, which pertain to the study or knowledge of ancient or primitive peoples and their material remains, often by means of excavation. Rather, I am using these terms metaphorically to refer to a process of perspectival “excavation,” which cuts through multiple layers of culturally ordained lies and beliefs to uncover alternative “truths” that hegemonic discourse has systematically “buried.” Tetel also points out the “downward movement” of certain nouvelles (117– 18), which he links to their all-pervasive ambiguity and fluid meanings. See Nicolas Russell, Transformations of Memory and Forgetting in SixteenthCentury France: Marguerite de Navarre, Pierre de Ronsard, Michel de Montaigne (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2011), 35–39. While noting that “the Heptaméron apparently aspires to historical truth” (37), Russell does not discount the possibility that Marguerite is alluding instead to the “hidden truths” (37) that often lie buried in works of fiction. See also André Berthiaume, “Rhétorique et vérité chez Marguerite de Navarre,” DFS 26 (Spring 1994): 3–9. “Dedicatory Letter,” in The Portable Machiavelli, 78. See also Bonfantini, 4: “A conoscere bene la natura de’ principi bisogna essere populare.” Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 90. With this statement, my goal is not to join modernist criticism in its glorification of the artistic imagination, but rather to reverse patriarchal assessments which deemed Marguerite a minor writer—implicitly because of her gender. Jourda, Marguerite d’Angoulême, 1: xi: “Il serait vain de faire d’elle un grand poète ou un grand penseur. Ses vers comme sa prose témoignent de réelles qualités, mais qui ne suffisent pas à la mettre au premier rang.”

61 62 63 64 65 66 67

68

69 70

71 72 73 74

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Between life and literature The many faces of Marguerite de Navarre

Marguerite d’Angoulême, future Duchess of Alençon, queen of Navarre, and author of the Heptaméron, was born in 1492, the same year as Columbus’s first journey to the New World. When she died four days before Christmas in 1549, Du Bellay had just published his Défense et illustration de la langue française, and Ronsard was still a fledgling poet and classicist.1 Columbus in particular epitomizes the Renaissance spirit of discovery—and Ronsard, its classicizing fervor and cult of beauty—for many of us. Yet despite the fact that these luminaries were near-contemporaries of hers, Marguerite’s literary gaze differs profoundly from theirs. Born in Angoulême, she traveled no farther than Spain; and while one of Marguerite’s characters sails to Canada with her “unfortunate” (“malheureux,” N. 67, 392) husband, who betrays Cartier and his second-in-command, Captain Robertval, the author focuses more on the antagonist’s treachery and on his wife’s longsuffering fidelity than on navigational details, geographical realism, or the encomium of contemporary explorers. If Ronsard glorifies outdoor settings in his verse, she more often explores the nooks and crannies of architectural interiors; and while he idealizes even the most mundane subject matter, she excavates its shadowy depths in her Heptaméron.2 At first glance, one might easily ascribe Marguerite’s microscopic focus on small-scale faits divers and the private spaces of feminine experience, such as the home, the bedchamber, closets, and stairways, primarily to her gender, linking her seemingly circumscribed gaze to contemporary portraits of tractable women with modestly averted eyes.3 The hypothesis becomes problematic, however, as we read further and discover the immodest and eye-opening accounts of rape, clerical perversion, abusive governance, and licentious behavior that fill the pages of the Heptaméron. That the writer consciously intended her romans jovials to pass for unprepossessing “woman’s work” remains uncertain, notwithstanding Jeanne d’Albret’s reflections on their frivolity, or the paratextual designation of Marguerite’s Miroir de l’âme pécheresse as “matière de femme.” In the nouvelle tradition, after all, male as well as female writers make liberal use of indoor spaces to stage their domestic intrigues. Intended or not, however, the Heptaméron’s gossipy trappings and domiciliary settings provide an effective foil for the

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serious reflections on Church and State, and the critique of both patriarchy and gender- and class-based oppression, that are addressed in Marguerite’s magnum opus.

Preliminary considerations: questions of gender, periodization, and theory Despite the Heptaméron’s hidden depths, and the glimpses of sixteenthcentury culture that it affords us, neither the work as a whole nor Marguerite’s literary gaze are entirely characteristic of the heroic, luminous Renaissance that many of us once imagined, and that Ronsard appeared to celebrate. To paraphrase Joan Kelly, one might ask if women, and de Navarre in particular, actually had a Renaissance; but in Marguerite’s case, the question is moot, since she epitomizes, and indeed surpasses, our image of the versatile “Renaissance Woman.” By all accounts, the king’s sister was charming and witty, well-educated, adept in the social graces, modest and decorous in her behavior, and as skilled as Ariosto’s Bradamante in horseback riding. Praised by Erasmus for her virtue, her graciousness, and her strength of soul,4 she had been weaned on the classics, exposed to Italian humanist texts from an early age, and tutored in etiquette according to the precepts of Anne de Beaujeu; all of this, together with her sparkling wit and intelligence, and her familiarity with a wide variety of topics ranging from literature and art to matters of state and international affairs, made her as adept at clever conversation as Castiglione’s perfect female courtier.5 Yet cultural constructions of femininity far different from those associated with the mythical “Renaissance Woman” figure in the queen’s upbringing, in her correspondence, in her behavioral and literary choices, and in criticisms levied against her. In addition to losing the ascendancy they had enjoyed during the age of courtly love and governing and defending their domains with decreasing frequency, Kelly argues, most middle- and upperclass Renaissance women were increasingly marginalized and subordinate to men under the “new division between personal and public life” that rose up in the wake of early modern state building and its precapitalistic economy: “Noblewomen … were increasingly removed from public concerns— economic, political, and cultural,” says Kelly, “and although they did not disappear into a private realm of family and domestic concerns as fully as their sisters in the patrician bourgeoisie, their loss of public power made itself felt in new constraints placed upon their personal as well as their social lives.”6 Like her female predecessors since 1328, Charles d’Angoulême’s first-born legitimate child was barred from inheriting the throne by Salic law;7 and while Kelly’s thesis, focused on Renaissance Italy, is not perfectly applicable to French women in general or to Marguerite in particular, de Navarre’s authority in the res publica was limited by constraints similar in kind—if not in degree—to those affecting other early modern noblewomen, who faced censure if they strayed too far from patriarchal models of feminine

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decorum or voiced their own thoughts too forcefully or publicly. In this sense, it is small wonder that the author embeds her reflections on patriarchy and the res publica in small-scale household dramas, training her literary gaze cannily on the “feminine” space of hearth, home, and convents. If many women experienced the Renaissance differently than the men who mythicized it, one might argue that this was true of most males as well. Under the influence of Michelet and Burckhardt, Pierre Jourda attributes the anomalies of Marguerite’s prose not to her gender, but to medieval tendencies in her style, literary proclivities, and mindset. In contending that “Marguerite n’est nullement de son temps,”8 or that she is a throwback to an earlier era, however, Jourda undervalues the diversity of the queen’s world in the interest of prevailing notions of literary periodization. Not only was the Renaissance profoundly pluralistic, but Marguerite is not alone among her contemporaries in representing the period’s darker realities rather than its mythical optimism. One need only think of Machiavelli’s radical empiricism, Bandello’s tragic tales, or the glimpses of violence, disease, and poverty that we encounter in Rabelais’s work.9 Scholars as diverse as J. H. M. Salmon and J. K. Brackett have drawn our attention to the ugly, irrational underbelly of Renaissance culture, labeling it the “other” or “dark” side of the era.”10 Frequent wars, marauding highwaymen, high mortality rates, widespread political and religious persecution, unprosecuted rape, abject poverty among the peasantry, and a panoply of diseases ranging from plague to syphilis made survival itself a challenge. To find echoes of these real-life problems in the mock epics of Rabelais, a monk-turned-physician who cared for the sick and dying, or in the verse of Marot, who baited the authorities with his evangelical faith and penchant for resistance, is not surprising; but the presence of such phenomena in the writings of a princess—particularly one whom Jules Michelet calls the “mother of the Renaissance” in France— gives one pause for thought.11 As we shall see in this chapter, high status alone did not shield early modern women from rape, disease, or early mortality any more that it shielded them from gender-based constraints on their behavior. If the historical writer’s rank made her privy, on the one hand, to the new learning, literary and artistic innovations, geographical discoveries, and technological advances, it did not protect her, on the other hand, from the despair of infertility, sexual assault, the responsibility of caring for the sick and wounded on their deathbeds, or the grief of losing family members to war and disease. Events and circumstances such as these, together with the political and religious upheavals of Reformation-era France, in which Marguerite herself played a major role, made up the fabric—or at least, the “archives”—of her life and informed her viewing positions.12 For this reason, they will figure in this chapter, which chronicles the multifaceted life of Marguerite and her era. The goal of this monograph is not, however, to explain the darkness and multiperspectivism of Marguerite’s text as a function of specific adversities she suffered or witnessed. Instead, I propose

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to contextualize the Heptaméron historically and biographically, on the premise that the juncture between text and context is permeable and that experiences and standpoints forged in life, as hypothesized by standpoint theory and experiential theories of narratology, can color our literary worlds as well. While both of the above theories are rooted in experience, the first focuses primarily on the strong objectivity of marginalized perspectives, particularly those of women, the underclasses, and nonhegemonic races, who figure as “outsiders within” the dominant culture; as a result, they are privy to, and able to criticize, facets and behaviors of their societies that nonmarginalized members fail to recognize. This marginalized, and yet enlightened, perspective is present in the testimonies and alternative gaze of abused women and lower-class observers in the Heptaméron. Arguably, we also find the possible makings of such a standpoint or standpoints in Marguerite de Navarre’s biography, as exemplified by the hybrid blend of privilege and pathos, power and disempowerment, in historical constructions and selfconstructions of the queen. This does not mean that de Navarre’s literary gaze holds no traces of the humanistic dialogism, bourgeois realism, scriptural teachings, or competing discourses that circulated freely in her culture. As an exceptionally well-read woman, the writer was familiar with these literary and oral traditions; and traces of all of them are present in her Heptaméron. Adding standpoint theory to our critical toolbox, however, helps us bridge the divide between text and context. In particular, it allows us to address the experiential quality of Marguerite’s literary gaze, to elucidate its nonhegemonic otherness with a theory that is perspectival rather than purely discursive, and to study the dynamics of sight and insight in the text with theoretical concepts grounded in ocularity. Instead of ascribing a single, relatively stable viewing position to the enlightened “outsider within,” moreover, recent developments in standpoint theory have begun to grapple with epistemic and perspectival pluralism of the type that we see in Marguerite de Navarre. Moving “beyond the idea that women, or … non-white males, have a privileged and unique view on the world,” newer iterations of the theory acknowledge the possibility of multiple viewing positions in both groups and individuals, evolving instead toward what might be called “multiple standpoint theory,” which “asks about the interrelationship of ideas and social positions” from a wider range of viewpoints.13 Not only standpoint theory, but experiential narratology as well helps us theorize connections between the text and its historical and biographical contexts.14 First proposed by Monika Fludernik in 1996 and further developed by such scholars as Marco Caracciolo and David Herman, the theory establishes a powerful link between author, text, and reader—and between real-life and fictionalized worlds—that draws support from linguistics and cognitive science. As Caracciolo notes, a “cognitively grounded relation between human experience and human representations of experience

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is at the root of Fludernik’s definition of narrative”; and brain imaging used to track the physiological imprinting of experiences in our memories further suggests that real-life and fictional narratives are processed similarly.15 This finding emphasizes the cognitive intertwining of lived, recounted, and invented experiences. While most textual analyses based on this model prioritize the characters’ and readers’ experiences over those of the writer, the author’s life experiences are not completely excluded from the experiential paradigm. At the very least, Caracciolo tells us, experiential traces of the author’s and recipient’s own lives seep into, and color their experiences of, the literary narrative; and in “natural narratives” where the “experiencer” and storyteller coincide, we find not only traces, but also “embodied and emotional” chronicles, of the narrator’s or author’s past experiences.16 This experiential connection between the queen of Navarre’s life world and story world is particularly relevant to the Heptaméron’s rape narratives, which Patricia Cholakian has linked to Marguerite’s own probable experience of sexual assault; but even in nouvelles and frame discussions where connections between the protagonist’s experiences and discussants’ viewpoints, on the one hand, and those of the historical writer, on the other hand, are far more tenuous, experiential narratology provides a useful springboard for considering both the real-world resonances of the Heptaméron and the experiential traces that inform the text’s shifting gaze(s). This biographical sketch does not purport to offer a definitive portrait of Marguerite de Navarre, or an exhaustive inventory of the standpoints or experiences that connect her life to her prose. This is not the primary thrust of my study, which is rooted in the text’s internal operations. However, I will suggest that glimmers of multiple viewing positions, including that of the “outsider within,” figure in the “archives” of Marguerite’s life as well as in her prose, and that traces of these and other experiences inform the Heptaméron. Organized chronologically, this chapter will focus in particular on historical and biographical events, circumstances, and testimony that help contextualize de Navarre’s treatment of gender and patriarchy, social class, and politics, while providing a springboard for the analysis of her multiperspectivism.17 Most of all, the biographical elucidations that follow are intended to situate the Heptaméron, its sociopolitical discourses, its equivocal battle of the sexes, and its oftentimes subversive ocularity against the backdrop of Marguerite’s complex life and times.

Genealogy, genes, and gender: the making of a princess Celebrated by Marot for her “Corps femenin, Cueur d’homme et Teste d’enge” (“feminine body, man’s heart, and head of an angel”),18 Marguerite d’Angoulême on one level led a life of extraordinary power and privilege against a backdrop of unprecedented artistic and intellectual ferment in France. A descendant of Saint Louis and Charles the Wise, she was the sister of King François I of France, the wife of King Henri II of Navarre, the

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mother of the Huguenot Queen Jeanne III of Navarre, and the grandmother of King Henri IV of France. In a culture that prized noble bloodlines, hers were superlative; although she was “born to the manner,” however, with a genealogy comprised of monarchs, a saint, and learned women as well as men, the future queen of Navarre used the opportunities afforded her and artfully navigated many of the challenges facing her to forge an identity in many ways distinct from that of other family members. In the early years of her brother’s reign, when she was still in her twenties, Marguerite d’Alençon presided over sumptuous banquets and lavish balls at the French court, typically accompanied by festive tournaments, trumpet fanfares, and mummers masquerading as classical gods and goddesses, and entertained visiting dignitaries with her remarkable wit and charm. The royal princess’s beauty was in “full bloom,” observes Jourda, as she reigned over “la société brillante” that flourished between 1515 and the early 1520s.19 By virtue of her position and intellectual vitality, Marguerite was personally acquainted with, and garnered the respect of, celebrated Renaissance artists, intellectuals, and heads of state, including King Henry VIII of England and Cardinal Wolsey; and her own accomplishments as a writer, stateswoman, patron of the arts, and protector of religious dissidents place her in the first rank of early modern luminaries. Despite the wealth and cultural advantages that were at her disposal, however, Marguerite’s existence was not all sweetness and light, but instead resembles the chiaroscuro of her stories. Even her birth was a less joyful occasion than that of her brother François two years later. Their mother Louise, so fearful of sterility that she consulted a soothsayer, was ecstatic to find herself with child in 1491.20 Despite her relief that she was able to bear children, however, the young matron still longed for a son and possible heir to the throne. After the birth of her daughter Marguerite in 1492, Louise tersely recorded the date and time of the event in her journal: “My daughter Marguerite,” she tells us, “was born in the year 1492, on the eleventh day of April at two o’clock in the morning.”21 When we juxtapose this unemotional diary entry with her elation at the birth of François, the contrast is striking: “Francis, by the Grace of God, King of France, and my pacific Caesar, first saw the light of day at Cognac, at around 10 o’clock in the evening on the 12th day of September, 1494.”22 While any number of factors might explain these disparities, the care and adulation Louise later heaped on François confirm our first impression: Louise’s reaction to her first born, excluded from the royal succession, pales in comparison to her exultation at producing a son who stood third in line to the throne. Aside from an incident where Louise apparently “[beat] and berated” her young daughter,23 there is little evidence that the countess mistreated her firstborn. Far from being resentful of the baby brother who supplanted her in her mother’s affection, Marguerite shared Louise’s joy at the birth of François in 1494, rapidly becoming his playmate and champion. Although their paths and ideologies later diverged, by all accounts the siblings’ affection for one

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another never waned. Together with Louise they formed a tight-knit trinité renowned for its power and influence in early sixteenth-century France; and while Marguerite held a lesser, and oftentimes marginalized, position in the familial hierarchy, arguably her strength of character, well-developed intellectual skills, and ability to negotiate the fine line between speaking her mind and offending those more powerful than herself may be traced back to Louise’s strong hand in her daughter’s upbringing. Born into a family of readers and writers, whose genteel poverty did not prevent them from amassing an extraordinary library, Louise de Savoie was exposed during her youth to the writings of a wide assortment of classical and modern authors ranging from Aristotle to Dante, Christine de Pizan, and Poggio Bracciolini. Her husband’s library holdings at Cognac were also considerable.24 In addition to inculcating a love of learning and literature in her children, whom she also tutored in Italian and Spanish, the countess engaged humanist preceptors to teach them Latin, philosophy, and biblical history. Notwithstanding her youth, Louise fought to maintain her guardianship of François and Marguerite, and thus control over their upbringing and education, even after the death of her husband in 1496 and the ascension of Louis XII to the throne two years later. While Louis obliged the trinité to leave their home and its sumptuous library for his own castles in Chinon, Blois, and Amboise, Louise de Savoie transported many of the books from Cognac to their new residences; and in the years to follow, she actively oversaw her children’s academic curriculum, their moral development, and their exposure to the arts and letters, including the new learning of the Renaissance. The moral handbook and spiritual guide that she commissioned François Demoulin (or du Moulin), one of her children’s tutors, to write in 1507 is notable for its numerous references to classical authors including Plato, Cicero, and Virgil; and for its allegorical methods, which Marguerite herself adopts in her religious poetry and possibly in the Heptaméron as well.25 Louise de Savoie’s rigorous curriculum, with its focus on textual exegesis, also helped foster the habit of critical thinking in her daughter, whose willingness to ferret out hidden truths and to unveil the transgressions of clergymen and nobles, notwithstanding their rank or facades of respectability, is a hallmark of the Heptaméron. Whether Marguerite’s ability to see the underside of Renaissance culture stems in part from a troubled relationship with Louise, as one might suspect given the latter’s fixation on François, is less certain.26 Had she been a taciturn, moody, and introverted child or young adult, one might be more inclined to hypothesize that her mother’s neglect and clear favoritism for François predisposed Marguerite to adopt the critical gaze of an outsider. In addition to harboring no visible bitterness toward her brother,27 however, Marguerite is credited with having a sunny and gregarious disposition.28 Nor did she lack for playmates, thanks to the proximity of her half-sisters Jeanne and Madeleine, daughters of her father’s mistress Antoinette de Polignac, who remained at Cognac even after his marriage. Aside from the

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death of her father in 1496, when Marguerite was almost four, there is little indication that her early childhood was unhappy. On the contrary, Louise offered her daughter a striking example of female agency, and of deft political maneuvering behind the scenes, that likely informed Marguerite’s own character and political practices. Particularly for Louise, the family’s move to Blois upon the death of Charles VIII in 1498—though a signal event in the trinité’s accession to power—was not entirely felicitous. Notwithstanding her jubilation at François’s new status as Duke of Valois and heir apparent to the throne, Louise’s feelings of isolation in the “prison dorée,” or golden prison, to which Louis XII relegated the family following his coronation likely left their mark on her daughter as well.29 By invoking the laws of Angoulême, which set the age of female majority at 21 rather than 25, Louise successfully resisted the king’s efforts to abrogate her maternal authority and won the right to oversee her children’s education—in a pedagogical victory that would change the cultural landscape of France. The king’s concession came at a price, however. Instead of installing the family officially at court, where Louise’s presence would have threatened his own queen, Anne de Bretagne, as she struggled to produce sons, the king sequestered the countess and her children first at Blois and later at Amboise, under the strict watch of the Maréchal de Gié. The sense of marginalization the young widow experienced almost certainly dredged up memories of her childhood at the court of Anne de Beaujeu, where Louise “subsisted on the fringes of the court” and was treated as a poor relation following the death of her mother.30 If Marguerite became Louise’s confidante, as some scholars suggest, she likely honed her own skills as an observer of human nature during this period, under her mother’s tutelage.31 Marguerite’s circumspection probably also stems in part from her upbringing. Under her mother’s supervision, the future queen of Navarre acquired the education of a humanistic prince but the manners of a lady, both reinforced by the example of feminine strength and cunning that her mother set for her. At the court of Anne de Beaujeu, Louise de Savoie learned very early in childhood “that women had to appear submissive” in order to “exercise power without calling down opprobrium” upon themselves.32 Given the self-effacing, effusive rhetoric of Marguerite’s correspondence, it seems likely that Louise communicated this lesson to her daughter, who learned to couch her requests in persuasive language, veil her true feelings, and curry favor with flattery and obsequiousness. The appearance of submissiveness considered appropriate for women did not always come easily to Marguerite, however: in 1505 she apparently refused a match with King Henry VII of England, more than 35 years her senior, voicing a preference instead for a husband closer to home who was “young, rich, and noble.”33 Four years later Marguerite accepted her lot as a matrimonial pawn, marrying Charles d’Alençon, a man closer to her own age who she later contended had “never read nor studied.” 34 That Marguerite made the best of the union, thanks in part to the skills for coping

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that Louise instilled in her, seems clear. Despite the myriad ways in which Marguerite and Charles were ill-suited, the future queen of Navarre adapted to her role as duchesse d’Alençon with grace and dignity, forming a close friendship with her mother-in-law, Marguerite de Lorraine, and committing herself to charitable works and the reform of local abbeys. Although her union with Charles may have lacked the romance that Marguerite dreamed of as a girl, her care and concern for him are evident. In her early correspondence with Guillaume Briçonnet, she asked the clergyman to pray for the duke while he was away at war;35 and when her husband fell ill in 1525, she defied her mother’s directives and attended Charles on his deathbed, in a touching scene that she chronicles in Les prisons. The dying words she attributes to her husband in these verses construct him as a man of courage, godliness, and integrity, far different from the publicly reviled scapegoat who was jeered for his cowardice following the battle of Pavia: “I am above all beholden to God,” he says, “who showered so many blessings upon me in my youth [and who] has permitted me to maintain my honour in war and in peace.”36 With this politic and poetic rendering of his last confession, which carries with it an added weight of truth, Marguerite uses her artistry to restore Charles’s reputation and honor, both tarnished by rumors that he abandoned his king at Pavia. As Marguerite’s arranged marriage and early widowhood demonstrate, the lot of women and even princesses in Renaissance France was not easy. Between tending the sick and dying, enduring frequent pregnancies that often led to early mortality for both mother and children, facing the stigma of childlessness, and coping with sexual assault in a culture that camouflaged its existence, early modern women faced daunting physical challenges; but arguably their mental, emotional, and moral hardships—and the burdens of being dutiful wives, daughters, mothers, and sisters—were even greater. On the surface, Marguerite d’Angoulême appears to have been successful at negotiating the conflicts between her own convictions and desires, on the one hand, and the protocols for female behavior, on the other; but in her correspondence, she occasionally expresses frustration at the limitations of her gender and regret that she is not a man.37 In a missive to Montmorency, for example, Marguerite complains that her gender prevents her from joining the king in battle.38 Variations on this statement figure in the writings of other literate Renaissance women,39 suggesting that Marguerite’s use of the trope in this instance is largely rhetorical: without reflecting a real desire to engage in combat, the transgendered fantasy serves primarily to emphasize her love for, and loyalty to, François. Yet recurrences of the “if I were not a woman” motif may signal an underlying seriousness: not rebellion against her femininity on Marguerite’s part, but resentment at the double standard governing behavior for men and women, and frustration at her lesser physical prowess and vulnerability to sexual aggression.40 Indeed, Patricia Cholakian contends that Guillaume Gouffier, the seigneur of Bonnivet and a companion of Marguerite’s brother whom she had known

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since childhood, assaulted the princess in either 1513 or 1520, while she was traveling with François’s retinue.41 Cholakian bases her assertion on Brantôme’s memoirs, which identify the historical prototypes of both victim and assailant in nouvelle 4, and on additional parallels between Marguerite’s biography and rape narratives in the Heptaméron.42 Interpolating from nouvelle 10, Cholakian speculates that Marguerite, like Floride, was attracted to her assailant—a plausible hypothesis given the author’s unfulfilling marriage, her frequent absences from Alençon, and the culture of “honnête amour” that governed courtly flirtations. In nouvelle 14, where Bonnivet disguises himself as a lady’s admirer and slips into her bed, the author adds fuel to Cholakian’s hypothesis by portraying the admiral as a charming and persuasive rogue, who pursues his female prey tenaciously. Clearly, we cannot know for certain whether Marguerite de Navarre was raped: from a methodological perspective, the objections to drawing biographical inferences from fictionalized narratives—even those that purport to be true, or those based on sixteenth-century gossip—are considerable. As Natalie Zemon Davis has shown, not even pardon tales, confessions, or evidentiary testimonies are uniformly factual; and nowhere do the author, narrator, or discussants so much as hint that any of the sexual victims might be Marguerite de Navarre herself.43 The sheer quantity of rape narratives in the Heptaméron, however, together with Brantôme’s hearsay testimony, the experiential “feel” of the stories, and scattered parallels between the historical writer and several of the victims, makes Cholakian’s thesis difficult to ignore.44 Even if none of the narratives are entirely autobiographical, at the very least they hold traces of early modern feminine trauma discourse— experiential and often private rather than public in nature—that help us understand the culture in which Marguerite lived, the gender tensions and violence that permeated it, and the myriad standpoints that were forged in the living, reliving, and retelling of these experiences. In this sense, the Heptaméron’s rape narratives, whether factual or fictionalized, are an essential component of the historical writer’s biography that allow us to imagine the queen of Navarre’s real-world concerns, and those of female contemporaries, about the physical vulnerability of women to sexual predators, their lack of satisfactory legal recourse for such violence, and the greater stigma incurred by victims than by their attackers. While the author does not directly address the question of female agency in her rape narratives, at least two of them involve assaults by men of lesser rank upon strong, capable women like Marguerite herself, whose power within the body politic, or the body of the household, exceeds their own. When the mule-driver’s wife in nouvelle 2 resists her servant’s overtures, the valet engages in male-pattern violence to reverse their power relationship, nullify her agency, and subjugate his own mistress. Yet in her refusal to acquiesce, the muletière affirms a different type of female agency: rather than beseeching her assailant for mercy, she prays humbly to her God, while

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asserting the inviolability of her own identity in the face of male aggression and her own death. Conversely, the aristocratic Flemish widow in nouvelle 4 survives with the support of another woman, who both doubles the corporal resistance facing the assailant and figures as a witness to his crime. However, the storyteller does not focus long on the collective power of women, or even on the power they can bring to bear upon the gentleman by making their testimony public. Instead she emphasizes the widow’s anger, her cries for justice, and her decisional quandary: if she tells her brother how his friend betrayed him and dishonored his sister, the gentil homme will be executed— but at the price of her good reputation. If indeed she herself was attacked, Marguerite must have reflected on all the preceding issues, while asking herself the same existential question that the Flemish widow and others have posed: “What is to be done,” not just in matters of rape, but in the face of all class- and gender-based oppression? In nouvelle 4, the elderly companion’s cautious answer is to do nothing; but this was not Marguerite’s way. Long before she turned to the Heptaméron, Marguerite’s response to adversity was to write, by appropriating the stylus of phallogocentric culture and making it her own weapon of choice.45 True, she occasionally belittled her compositions by referring to them as “woman’s work,” which suggests to Cholakian and Cholakian that Marguerite “automatically viewed a woman writing as an outsider, and a woman’s text as less than a man’s” (215).46 If this was indeed the case, the marginality of her gendered perspective undoubtedly served the queen of Navarre well in the Heptaméron, affording her a privileged position of otherness from which she observed the inner workings of her culture. One might venture, moreover, that gender was less of a handicap than Marguerite implies in formulaic self-constructions such as the above, which blame any literary shortcomings she exhibits on her sex, given the wide-ranging and mutually respectful nature of her correspondence with humanists and reform theologians—many of them male. To be sure, considerations of gender figure at times in her letters to and from Guillaume Briçonnet, the Bishop of Meaux and a leader of the humanistic and reform movement based there. Initially, the cleric adopts a paternalistic tone, offering the king’s sister theological guidance, urging her to press her brother for Church reform, and censuring the royal family for its insufficient piety.47 By the early 1520s, however, their roles had reversed. In 1522 the bishop begged the duchess, whose reformist fervor now outstripped his own, to exercise more caution in her evangelical activities for fear of triggering a “fire,” meaning reprisals from ultraconservative factions of the Church and the Faculty of Theology.48 While Marguerite persisted in her evangelism, Briçonnet’s prudence proved prescient by mid1523, when an order to burn all heretical books, including those of Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples and Erasmus, was issued. At around the same time, a shift in the gendered language of their letters appears. Out of sympathy for Marguerite’s childless condition, the Bishop of Meaulx offers himself as her adoptive “child” or “son,” addressing her as his “mother.”49 This rhetoric

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of filiation recognizes the synergistic nature of their dialogues and Marguerite’s formative role in his own theological development. While Briçonnet’s theological insights informed her Miroir de l’âme pécheresse (Mirror of the Sinful Soul, 1531), she in turn supported his monastic reforms, protected him and his associates from persecution, and propagated his evangelical message in circles he himself could not reach. That she was coming of age, and exercising theological as well as political power in France, seems clear.

Serving god and the king: Marguerite’s religious and political development Once François acceded to the throne in 1515, Marguerite acquired a role of power and influence that was second to few in the realm. In addition to being the king’s sister, the Duchess of Alençon had been his closest friend since childhood, and most agree that hers was the livelier intellect. Upon the death of Louis XII, who failed to produce a son in either his annulled marriage to Joan of France, his second union with Anne of Brittany, or his third marriage to Mary Tudor, François promptly summoned Marguerite to court, engaging her to preside over state functions and meet with visiting dignitaries. She traveled with the royal entourage, advised her brother on cultural and diplomatic matters, and set in motion their shared agenda for refashioning the French State. Theirs was a synergistic relationship, particularly in matters of arts and letters: while François referred Clément Marot to his sister for her support and patronage, she in turn shared her enthusiasm for Guillaume Briçonnet’s humanistic theology with her brother.50 Together the siblings were instrumental in bringing the southern Renaissance to France by supporting the new learning and the work of humanistic scholars, by inviting artists such as Leonardo da Vinci to their court, and by embarking on ambitious building and renovation projects inspired by Italian architecture. In addition to being “more than a sister” to François, Marguerite was effectively “queen in all but name,” a state of affairs made possible by her own childless marriage to Charles d’Alençon, which left her free to engage in courtly activities.51 The king also trusted her judgment. In contrast, François’s pious wife and second cousin, Claude de France, whom he married in 1514, was not only shy and retiring, but almost constantly pregnant.52 In addition to serving as a lively hostess, Marguerite also impressed François with the merits of her reformist agenda during the early years of his reign, influencing the ecclesiastical appointments he made and pressing him to protect humanists and evangelicals who ran afoul of the Sorbonne. One such example is Louis de Berquin, an apologist of Erasmus and Luther whom the Sorbonne initially accused of heresy in 1523. At his sister’s behest, the king intervened and secured the reformer’s release in this instance and again in 1526, following Berquin’s second arrest. Despite

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Marguerite’s repeated pleas to her brother on Berquin’s behalf, however, the reformist scholar was burned to death following a third trial in 1529. Whether François did all he could to spare the dissident’s life is a matter of some debate. Some argue that Parlement acted quickly, during the king’s absence, to avoid yet another royal intervention in 1529, while others attribute the execution in part to François’s fickleness.53 One thing is clear, however: as much influence as the duchess had on her brother, whom she described as her “other half,”54 her advisory power decreased over the course of his reign, either because François disagreed with her positions, or because he feared for his own hegemony in the face of mounting religious dissent. No rift between brother and sister was yet on the horizon in 1525, however, when the imperial army slaughtered more than 10,000 French troops at the Battle of Pavia in northern Italy, taking François prisoner and holding him captive in Spain for more than a year. During his internment Louise de Savoie ruled France in her son’s stead. As a devout and conservative Catholic, she was less receptive than François to her daughter’s appeals on behalf of fellow reformers; as a result, Marguerite’s pleas for religious tolerance lost much of their force. With the regent’s approval, Parlement had the bishop of Paris set up a special commission in March, 1525 to expedite the identification, apprehension, and trial of suspected heretics.55 In other matters, however, Louise relied heavily upon her daughter’s counsel: “During the King’s captivity,” Brantôme tells us, “she greatly assisted her mother, the regent, in looking after the needs of the kingdom, pacifying the princes and powerful of the land, and keeping the nobility at bay.”56 Marguerite’s most important diplomatic assignment, entrusted to her by François, was to negotiate his release from captivity. To this end, she set out for Spain in mid-July of 1525, riding ten or twelve leagues a day in her haste to reach him. On September 19 the emperor himself met Marguerite in Madrid and led her to the Alcazar, where François, during his imprisonment, had fallen gravely ill. Once she had nursed the king back to health, the Duchess of Alençon traveled to Toledo to meet again with the emperor in early October. The concessions she was prepared to offer for the king’s release included a ransom of 350,000 crowns; an agreement that he would marry Eleanor, the emperor’s sister; and the renunciation of French claims to Naples, Milan, Genoa, Aragon, Barcelona, and Valencia. The most crucial point of the negotiations, other than the rescue of François himself, involved the emperor’s claims to Burgundy. While the French never intended to honor this demand, Marguerite stipulated they would do so if Parlement approved the measure. The emperor in turn sought to manipulate Marguerite by reneging on promises made by his emissaries and rejecting the terms of France’s offer. In this protracted struggle of wills, the duchess refused to resume talks with Charles for several days after their initial negotiations, complaining to her brother than the emperor was engaging in trickery and dissimulation.57 “I believe that by continuing to be

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adamant, we will force them to speak another language,” she wrote to her brother, employing a diplomatic ruse of her own.58 Despite her fears for François, Marguerite attempted to call Charles’s bluff, pretending she would rather go home empty-handed than accept the emperor’s terms for her brother’s release.59 When the emperor did not yield, the duchess approved a desperate plot to orchestrate François’s escape that was foiled.60 As a result of this debacle, which made her persona non grata in Spain, Marguerite had little choice but to set out for home in late November, in despair at her mission’s failure.61 On January 14, 1526, however, François signed the Treaty of Madrid, which would soon free him under slightly different conditions: the king agreed to cede Burgundy to the emperor, and he guaranteed this pledge by handing over his sons—François III, Duke of Brittany, and the future King Henri II—as hostages. For the sake of national security, Marguerite encouraged her brother to take this drastic step: “Do not be held back by lands or children,” she advises him, “for your kingdom needs you.”62 As a result of this exchange, the young princes spent four years in captivity in Spain, an experience that weighed heavily on their aunt and left the youths forever changed. Moody and melancholy following his release and return to France in 1529, the dauphin never fully regained his health and died suddenly following a tennis match in 1536, possibly as a result of either tuberculosis or poisoning.63 As for Henri, who followed his father as king during the last two years of Marguerite’s life, historians contend he not only held a grudge against François I, but also blamed his aunt for her role in his imprisonment. At best, Marguerite’s foray into power brokering and international diplomacy was a two-edged sword. Despite her initial despair at failing to rescue François, the duchess may have contributed more than she had realized to his release: first, by praising her brother to the emperor’s sister Eleanor, who eventually married the French king; second, by standing firm in her negotiations with Charles V; and third, by serving as a sounding board for François as they plotted his release. Yet the letters Marguerite composed during her journey home from Spain are deeply troubled. They attest to her guilt at failing her brother, her frustration over the emperor’s intransigence, her disgust at the lies and trickery of his advisors, and her frantic concern for the king. In the space of 12 months, she had witnessed France’s crushing defeat at Pavia, grieved over the capture and internment of François, and endured her own husband’s disgrace, mortal illness, and lingering death—only to undertake an exhausting, and seemingly futile, journey to Spain. Far from reflecting “unnatural” affection for her brother, as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholars suggested, the love for him that she expresses in these letters, and her despair at his continued imprisonment, seem entirely natural under the circumstances.64 In addition to her worries about François, Marguerite’s outrage over the Spaniards’ alleged “dishonesty” and dissimulation is worth noting.65

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Contingent as it was on ratification by Parlement, France’s proposal to cede Burgundy to Charles stood little chance of being approved; and the emperor likely saw the offer for what it was—an artful stratagem that would allow the French to renege lawfully on the agreement once François had been freed. While diplomats and politicians, rather than Marguerite, had crafted this phantom offer, the duchess appears to have engaged in duplicity of her own. In addition to countering the emperor’s repeated delays of their bargaining sessions with feigned threats to end their negotiations and return home, as noted earlier, she also encouraged her brother to put on a “feeble and afflicted countenance” before his guards and the messenger to strengthen her hand.66 In view of her piety, the duchess’s willingness to engage in subterfuge, and her outrage at similar behavior on the part of her hosts, is puzzling. From a familial perspective, her love for the king likely allowed her to rationalize minor ethical compromises that would help him and the French State. François was, after all, the titular “roi très chrétien” (most Christian king) whose wishes and well-being were conflated in France with the will of God; and while the same might be said of the Holy Roman Emperor, the prestige of the Empire had declined by the sixteenth century, and Marguerite was aware of the ruthless politicking that had secured Charles’s election. Moreover, he was a devout and conservative Catholic who strongly opposed the reform movement in Germany, which Marguerite and other French évangeliques supported. True, the negotiations to procure François’s release had included talk of a marriage between the widowed Duchess of Alençon and Charles V, who would not wed his cousin Isabella of Portugal until March of 1526. Reluctantly, Marguerite might even have agreed to the match in return for François’s freedom; but there is little suggestion that she would actively have welcomed such a marriage or that she considered Charles a defender of the faith. In 1525 this was a role she still envisioned for François: had she not been born a woman, Marguerite writes, she would have joined him at the battlefront, presumably to slay his enemies in a righteous war.67 For a woman willing to hew down her brother’s adversaries with lance and sword, a few white lies intended to speed up his release seem innocuous indeed—especially when his return to France promised to curtail the persecution of religious dissidents.68 Aside from the despair we see in the letters she wrote immediately following this episode and the heightened cruelty that figures in her Spanish novellas, one may well ask what life lessons the duchess gleaned from her experiences in Toledo and Madrid. Her early correspondence from the visit suggests that Marguerite enjoyed certain facets of the diplomatic gamesmanship in which she was involved, especially at the beginning of her stay: as a daughter of France and aficionada of both Gallic farce and Boccaccio’s Decameron, how could she resist trying to trick the Spanishimperial tricksters? We see vestiges of this justifiable and immensely satisfying deceit in the Heptaméron as well—in nouvelle 5, for example,

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where a wily and virtuous oarswoman succeeds in humiliating the two clergymen who plan to rape her. In the long term, however, the future queen of Navarre found the pervasive dissimulation of her Spanish hosts, and possibly her own as well, both reprehensible and distasteful. The experience would have prompted serious reflections on the gap between words and truth and on the difficulty of distinguishing between seeming and being in social interactions. These ruminations likely informed her literary output indirectly and in two radically different ways: first, by the retreat from earthly vanity and focus on communion with God that we find in her religious poetry; and second, by her excavation of buried truths and her unveiling of hypocritical masks and lies in the Heptaméron.

Family matters: one body, one spirit, one faith Following her return to France in January 1526 and François’s release two months later, Marguerite entered one of the happiest and most influential periods of her life. Despite her despair over what she perceived as a diplomatic and personal failure in Spain, admiration for her efforts in negotiating her brother’s release grew in the wake of the king’s liberation. She resumed her position as “queen in all but name” at court, accompanying the royal retinue on its celebratory journey throughout France and advising François on political and religious matters. During this period, Marguerite also exchanged letters with some of the most powerful men in Europe, ranging from the pope to Henry VIII, who sought her advice and paid tribute to her intelligence and virtue. The young princes’ imprisonment in Spain tempered Marguerite’s happiness, of course, as did the funeral service in November for Queen Claude and Princess Charlotte, who had both died in 1524 while the king was in Italy. As he worked to reestablish his control over the country and his influence with Parlement, Marguerite joined him in seeking the release of his sons; in fighting to protect humanists and evangelicals from charges of heresy, which had escalated during François’s absence; and in reflecting on ways of circumventing the Treaty of Madrid, in which the king had agreed to cede Burgundy to the emperor in exchange for his own release. The princes would not be ransomed until 1530, following a diplomatic summit at Cambrai the previous year between the king’s mother and the emperor’s aunt and godmother, Margaret of Austria. Marguerite de Navarre was also present, both in her official capacity as a hostage guaranteeing the security of the imperial regent and in her unofficial role as companion and advisor to her mother. The compromise that the women carved out in the “Peace of the Ladies” provided for the release of the dauphin and his brother, the future Henri II, in exchange for a monetary ransom. According to the terms of the agreement, the emperor allowed France to retain possession of Burgundy, in part for pragmatic reasons: historians suggest he had grown tired of juggling conflicts in different corners of Europe, realizing

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that neither the French nor the Burgundians would accept his claims to the territory without a struggle. Despite the small fortune François spent to ransom the princes, which added to the financial crisis that France would soon face, their release was cause for great celebration. During the late 1520s, François followed his sister’s lead in trying to rein in religious conservatives at the Faculty of Theology, who had taken advantage of his imprisonment to ban the publication and possession of all religious books, including the scriptures; and to denounce all those who deviated from orthodoxy or sought reform, such as Guillaume Briçonnet, for heresy. Because the political climate was so volatile during Louise’s regency, several other reform-minded theologians and scholars fled France for Strasburg, Switzerland, and other havens, fearing for their lives. Among these were Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples, Gérard Roussel, and Guillaume Farel, members of Marguerite’s “family” of evangelicals. When the king attempted to call off the witch hunts and reassert his authority in the spring of 1526, Parlement and the Sorbonne balked at his request, affirming their own autonomy in doctrinal matters. Gradually, however, François succeeded in stemming the tide of arrests for heresy, retaking a modicum of control over the judiciary system, and reasserting his patronage and protection of French humanists and evangelicals, at least when doing so was politically expedient. As a result, religious refugees such as Lefèvre and Roussel soon returned to France, the former as librarian at Blois and the latter as Marguerite’s personal chaplain. At the behest of his sister and of Guillaume Budé, the king also authorized a forum for the new learning in 1529, in defiance of Sorbonne strictures on acceptable disciplines: featuring a curriculum that included Greek and Hebrew, the cornerstones of humanistic and evangelical inquiry, the future Collège de France would open in 1530. If Marguerite’s personal convictions, including her commitment to the new learning and her evangelical beliefs, drove her public life, the converse is also true: her private life was inextricably linked to the res publica, and her body, far from being entirely her own, was a commodity within the economy of the corpus politicum. Almost immediately after the death of Charles d’Alençon, speculation arose about a politically advantageous remarriage for the king’s sister, with potential bridegrooms ranging from Duke Francesco Maria Sforza of Milan to Emperor Charles V, both enemies of the French during the ill-fated Italian Wars. Rather than forging an alliance with one of France’s powerful adversaries, however, Marguerite became engaged in December 1526 to King Henri d’Albret of Navarre, a small but strategically located kingdom on the Atlantic coast between France and Spain. In addition to having a long and noble lineage, Henri was a friend of Marguerite’s brother and more than ten years younger than his prospective bride. They were married in January 1527; and while neither Henri nor François would reap the political benefits they anticipated from the union, including a return of Spanish Navarre to the House of Albret and the renewal of French dominion over it, the marriage itself was by all reports

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a close and congenial relationship, notwithstanding the bridegroom’s infidelities. By early the next year, the new queen of Navarre was pregnant, a fact that did little to curtail her ceremonial activities; and on November 16, following a long and difficult labor, she gave birth to a daughter named Jeanne. Shortly afterward, Henri de Navarre jubilantly announced that his kingdom, which lay outside the jurisdiction of Salic law, had an heir: his daughter could, and eventually would, inherit the throne. A second pregnancy followed within two years when Marguerite was 38. Her son Jean d’Albret was born on July 16, 1530; and the queen’s midwife, Louise de Toirviron, proclaimed that both mother and child were doing well.69 In view of the family’s journey to Alençon in December, a trip they would not have taken had Jean been ailing, there is nothing to suggest that the infant was particularly frail. On Christmas day, however, when he was only five and a half months old, Jean d’Albret fell ill and died within a few hours. There would be future pregnancies, including a miscarriage that same winter on the road to Chambord, but never again would de Navarre carry a child to term. Following Jean’s death, the queen confided to her most intimate friends that she had difficulty coping with the loss of her son; but officially, she accepted God’s will. Many believe that her first published volume of verse, the Miroir de l’âme pécheresse (1531), stems from her spiritual struggle during this era. Within a year, on September 22, 1531, Marguerite’s mother also died, crying out for her absent son—rather than the daughter who attended her—during her final hours. Her death, along with Jean’s passing and the Sorbonne’s hostile reception of Marguerite’s recently published volume of poetry, ushered in a new era of personal struggle for the queen and a time of political and social unrest for France.

The gathering storm: l’affaire des placards and its aftermath Despite the king’s temporary success at stemming the tide of religious persecution following his return from Spain, hostilities between the two sides continued unabated. In 1528 religious iconoclasts defaced a statue of the Virgin and Child on a street corner in Paris, triggering a backlash from orthodox Catholics and earning the reform-minded king’s displeasure. As reformist protestors would discover in 1534, his tolerance for dissent was limited, even when it came to evangelical groups he had previously protected. By 1529, areas of Germany and Switzerland were officially Protestant, and their model of success buoyed the spirits of the more radical French reformers, who found cause for optimism in the triumph of Protestantism abroad. More moderate Gallic reformers, however, including evangelicals like Marguerite, still clung to the cornerstones of Catholic doctrine and hoped for changes within the existing church that would ban the sale of indulgences, monitor priestly corruption, and prioritize faith over works. The Faculty of Theology and other traditionalist factions often made little distinction between these two types of “heretics.” In the wake of Protestant

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success abroad and their increased activism at home, Sorbonne conservatives instead escalated their attack on heterodoxy. When Gérard Roussel, the queen’s reform-minded chaplain, preached to a crowd of thousands at the Louvre in 1533, conservative theologians responded by having him arrested for heresy. Moreover, many scholars attribute the Sorbonne’s censorship of Marguerite’s second edition of the Miroir de l’âme pécheresse (1533) to her patronage of Roussel. At the very least, her book’s inclusion on the official index of proscribed publications, along with her representation in a contemporary farce as a religious fanatic, attests to negative perceptions about the queen’s religious politics among orthodox Parisian Catholics— many of whom held her culpable for patronizing heretics and poisoning the monarchy with her unorthodox views. In February 1534, a Sorbonne representative went so far as to accuse Marguerite, in an interview with the king, of “being the official spokesperson of the reformists.”70 Far from triggering reprisals against the queen, the allegation so infuriated François that he had the theologian imprisoned and reprimanded his grand master, the conservative Catholic Anne de Montmorency, for not protecting his sister more effectively against slanderous accusations that painted her as a heretic. Despite Marguerite’s continued defense and patronage of religious dissidents ranging from Guillaume Farel to John Calvin and Clément Marot, however, generally the king supported his sister against her detractors, engaged in negotiations with German Protestants, and struck a middle road between religious orthodoxy and reform until October 17, 1534. On that night and in the early hours of the next morning, Antoine Marcourt and other reformists nailed incendiary placards protesting the Catholic mass in the streets of half a dozen French cities—Paris, Amboise, Orleans, Blois, Tours, and Rouen— and on the door of the king’s bedchamber in Amboise. If the reformers hoped their actions would nudge François from the middle road he was straddling and push him toward Protestantism, they had miscalculated. Instead of enlisting his support for their cause, the dissidents propelled the king in the opposite direction. As a devout Catholic and the “most Christian king,” whom the Sorbonne had long pressured to defend his faith more aggressively, François deplored the reformers’ desecration of consecrated buildings and vilification of the mass; but more importantly, he viewed their violation of his royal chambers as an act of sedition threatening the monarchy itself. Accordingly, the king set up a special commission to try those suspected of creating and posting the placards; and by the end of November, Parlement had convicted six dissidents and ordered them executed as heretics. When a second flurry of tracts protesting the mass appeared in January 1535, François took even harsher measures aimed at eradicating the pockets of Lutheranism in France once and for all. Joining forces with conservative Catholics, Parlement, and the Sorbonne, the king staged an elaborate procession and mass as a show of divine and monarchical solidarity against the dissidents. More importantly, he commanded all his

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subjects to denounce suspected heretics, including friends and relatives, to the authorities in a massive crackdown on heterodoxy. By the end of the month, authorities had banned the publication of Lutheran texts; and scores of dissidents, including some with connections to Marguerite and her intellectual circle, had either fled France or gone into hiding. Numbered among these was Clément Marot, who would seek asylum at Nérac before traveling south to Ferrara; but others of the queen’s acquaintance were less fortunate. Antoine Augereau, publisher of the second edition of Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse, was burned at the stake for blasphemy in December 1534, while two evangelical theologians that the queen had favored, Gérard Roussel and Pierre Caroli, were arrested and brought to trial for their reformist ideas. Within this incendiary climate, which authorities fueled by offering informers a portion of the “heretic’s” property, even those accused of protecting dissidents were subject to arrest. Had she remained in France, the queen of Navarre herself would have been in danger. Not only had she patronized and sheltered reformers, but Marguerite had written unorthodox religious poetry, helped disseminate the ideas of evangelical preachers and theology, and lobbied government officials on their behalf. During the months following the affaire des placards, she was conspicuously absent from Paris and the court, seeking refuge instead in her properties at Béarn. Although tensions had lessened by mid-1535, when François I agreed to free religious prisoners in the Edict of Coucy, he would never again support evangelical humanists, or accede to Marguerite’s requests on their behalf, with the same fervor that he did in the early years of his reign. At best, his gestures of tolerance were provisional. Exiles who returned to France under the terms of the Edict of Coucy, as well as those incarcerated for religious dissidence who were released at the same time, had to renounce their “heresy” within six months or face execution; and while the king’s imprimatur appears regularly on controversial books that elicited the ire of Sorbonne theologians, such as Rabelais’s Tiers livre in 1546, François was increasingly a party to religious oppression and persecution during the last decade of his monarchy. True, he would continue to curry the favor of German Protestants in the mid- and late 1530s, courting an alliance with them against Charles V; and at Marguerite’s behest he even supported an invitation for Melanchthon, the reformist author of the Augsburg Confession, to visit France in a spirit of religious conciliation.71 When the king nominated a moderate clergyman, Louis de Rochete, as the new inquisitor of Toulouse at Marguerite’s instigation, moreover, orthodox theologians overruled François, trying the friar himself for heresy and burning him at the stake in 1538.72 Possibly as a result of incidents such as this one, François’s gestures of tolerance and moderation would become increasingly rare in the 1540s, as he reined in his inclination to be merciful in the face of increasing religious turmoil.

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Marguerite’s many loves: weighing and balancing multiple loyalties The queen of Navarre and her brother loved each other deeply, but they did not always agree with one another in later years. In his a posteriori account of a confrontation between Anne de Montmorency and the king over Marguerite’s unorthodox religious beliefs and practices, which the Grand Chancellor considered heretical, Brantôme claims François defended his sister by insisting that she always followed his lead: “She will never believe anything that I do not believe,” the monarch reputedly proclaimed, “and will never belong to any religion that would be prejudicial to my Estate.”73 The second portion of this pronouncement is undoubtedly true: not only was Marguerite a proponent of reforming the Church from within rather than through the formation of rival splinter groups, but she would never have knowingly damaged the king’s prestige or undermined his ability to govern effectively. The opening clause of the king’s statement is a different matter, however. In addition to being untrue, the first point nullifies Marguerite’s own agency as a thinker, notwithstanding its rhetorical similarity to some of the queen’s own pronouncements. In her writings, as we have seen, she describes herself in familial terms as the king’s “other half” and dear sister or “mignonne,” emphasizing the common goals, thoughts, and values that she and François have shared since birth.74 For all the queen’s rhetoric, however, the king’s reputed words strike a false note. Did Brantôme quote him correctly? And if so, was François’s retort sincere, ironic, or simply annoyed? Like many powerful men surrounded by sycophants, François I may occasionally have deluded himself into believing that his sister’s thoughts echoed his own, an impression that Marguerite worked hard to cultivate; but his remonstrance to Marguerite over her involvement in “matters of doctrine,” recounted by Jeanne d’Albret, suggests he was less deluded than Brantôme’s anecdote suggests. Born in 1540, the memorialist drew the bulk of his anecdotes about the king and his sister from his mother’s recollections and other second- and third-hand sources: as a result, he may simply have misquoted François. Alternatively, the king’s claim that Marguerite thought as he did may have been a rueful exercise in wishful thinking, as he fielded yet another complaint about his headstrong sister’s reputation as a reformer. As annoyed as he was at Montmorency for daring to voice his criticism of the royal family, François was undoubtedly frustrated at Marguerite as well for drawing attention to her unorthodox beliefs. In classic hortatory fashion, François was likely willing his sister to be more circumspect, without worrying overmuch about the factuality of his words: true or false, they served an important rhetorical function, which was to shield Marguerite from slander and to reprimand Montmorency for overstepping his bounds. Yet in his seemingly fatuous response to the chancellor, where he emphasizes the improbable identity of his beliefs and those of his sister, was François actually signaling his own agreement with Marguerite’s calls for ecclesiastical

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reform and with portions of her evangelical faith? While the king and his sister did not see eye to eye on everything, Marguerite clearly shared the king’s disapproval of reformist groups that desecrated the sacraments and religious icons. In turn, might we not suppose that François himself shared his sister’s interest in scripture, her loathing for abusive clerics, her desire for reform, and other facets of her evangelical faith? Even in the last decade of his reign, the king’s private distaste for the persecution of heretics seems to clash with the public witch hunts he organized to restore order and curry favor with conservative Catholics. For her part, Marguerite persisted in her evangelical faith and patronage of religious dissidents as she aged and as civil unrest escalated, while maintaining a lower public profile.75 In her correspondence, she repeatedly stresses her eagerness to do François’s bidding—to the point of regretting a miscarriage she suffered because it deprived François of a loyal subject.76 With the exception of her Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne (Dialogue in the form of a dream), moreover, none of Marguerite’s major works following the Miroir appeared in print before 1547, the year her brother died, suggesting that she consciously attempted to spare him public embarrassment and avoid the Sorbonne’s opprobrium. Yet what she wrote during this period attests to her continued evangelism. References to salvation by faith and to grace, cornerstones of the new theology, figure prominently in both her secular and religious theater. One of these works, entitled L’inquisiteur (The inquisitor) also satirizes the ignorance of Sorbonne theologians and their reliance on the politics of fear: “If I only had ignorant people to deal with,” says the title character, “I could undo them with fear / but I cannot silence the clever ones / who know the Holy Scripture better than I do.”77 Indeed, Marguerite portrays the Inquisitor himself as a dullard, in a clear satire of the “Sorbonniqueurs” who persecuted evangelicals. As much as Marguerite cared for François, her duties toward fellow evangelicals, her own subjects, and her husband and daughter occasionally conflicted with his wishes. Despite Henri de Navarre’s chronic infidelity, their matrimonial bond commanded the queen’s respect and loyalty; and Marguerite’s jealous efforts to curtail her errant spouse’s dalliances, by asking friends to supervise his flirtations, suggest that she loved him as well.78 Together with Henri, the queen lobbied her brother to use his power and influence to effect the reunification of Spanish and French Navarre, an eventuality that François resisted for dynastic reasons. Marguerite and her brother also disagreed on the details of her daughter’s betrothal and marriage, which pitted the French king’s interests against those of Henri and Jeanne herself. To solidify his support among the German Protestant states, the French king signed a marriage contract on July 16, 1540, in which he agreed to unite Jeanne d’Albret with William, Duke of Cleves. In and of itself, François’s action was in no way remarkable: during the Middle Ages and early modern period, the highest-ranking male head of household typically

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arranged the nuptials of young relatives with an eye toward forging or solidifying alliances, acquiring more territory, and improving his family’s finances. In this case, France’s “most Christian king” was currying favor with northern reformist groups in exchange for military support in his campaign against the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor. We have no evidence that François, who was Henri d’Albret’s suzerain, ever questioned his own right to contract his niece’s marriage, although he did seek the pro forma consent of her parents and of the girl herself. For her part, Jeanne opposed the marriage vehemently: when the nuptials eventually took place, François had Montmorency carry his protesting niece forcibly up the aisle. Her parents also opposed the match, albeit more discreetly. Henri in particular had hoped to negotiate a marriage between Jeanne and the future Philip II of Spain, the emperor’s son, with the goal of reuniting French and Spanish Navarre. When he learned of this plan, François irately nipped it in the bud, out of fear that Philip would accede to the throne of Navarre if he married Jeanne, affording Charles a foothold in France. As for Marguerite, her position was more ambivalent. Torn between her brother’s interests and those of her husband and daughter, she opted not to defy the king directly: instead, she appealed to his gentler emotions, arguing Jeanne was too young to be married. Once it became clear that the king would not yield, scholars are divided on whether the queen attempted to coerce her daughter into complying, or whether the coercion was staged to lay the groundwork for an annulment. Basing her assessment on the letters of Jeanne d’Albret, who contends that Marguerite ordered her beaten into submission when she refused to marry the Duke of Cleves, Freccero emphasizes the queen’s solidarity with her brother; but Cholakian and Cholakian view the episode differently, arguing that the queen was at once placating François and establishing the grounds for dissolution of Jeanne’s marriage at a later date.79 Whatever her motives, the resulting stress left Marguerite on the “verge of nervous collapse” and so ill that even her brother expressed concern for her health, urging her to rest and seek treatment.80 To this end, the queen and her husband set out in the spring of 1541 for a spa at Cauterets, high in the Pyrenees, which eventually became the setting for the prologue to her Heptaméron. Not just her fledgling magnum opus, which she probably began in the early 1540s, but most of Marguerite’s writing from this era reflects the tensions surrounding her daughter’s marriage. Notably, La comédie des quatre femmes (The comedy of four women, 1542), probably composed just after Jeanne’s marriage, “opens up a space in which [women] are allowed to make up their own minds about who and how to love.”81 While the play’s subtext is profoundly serious, drawing upon Marguerite’s own unhappiness in love and François’s troublesome meddling in Jeanne’s marriage, the lighthearted tone and comic genre cushion the work’s satirical bite in keeping with the courtly, carnivalesque setting in which Marguerite wrote and produced it. Following their daughter’s marriage in June 1541, Marguerite

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and Henri d’Albret rejoined François’s court while the Duke of Cleves traveled home alone: Jeanne, deemed too young to consummate the marriage, returned to Plessis with Madame de la Fayette to continue her studies. What followed was a period of respite for Marguerite as she relaxed in the company of old friends and relatives, basked in the king’s good will, and enjoyed the esteem of political and religious luminaries from around the world. Just before Lent in 1542, she staged a festive production of La comédie des quatre femmes before aristocratic friends and relatives, with a cast that included the king’s daughter Marguerite and his mistress, Madame d’Etampes. The joyful atmosphere was to be short-lived, however: for the next five years would bring a new war, increased religious violence, a fruitless pregnancy for Marguerite, the sudden death of the king’s favorite son, and the demise of François I himself.

Tribulations and triumphs: Marguerite’s final years By mid-1542 François and the emperor were at war once again, and the Duke of Cleves was growing impatient with his absentee wife, notwithstanding the efforts of Jeanne and her mother to placate him. In a show of national unity intended to eradicate dissent of all types, persecutions against suspected heretics increased dramatically with the onset of war. Troubled by the renewed hostilities, Marguerite retreated to Béarn in the fall of 1542, where François visited her on the way to La Rochelle. The strife-torn western city was in the throes of a rebellion over the salt tax (la gabelle) that also had religious overtones, with reformers protesting against Church authority and the king ordering periodic searches to weed out heretics. Following her brother’s visit, Marguerite attempted to steer the king toward moderation and tolerance one more time. In a letter dated shortly after his departure, the queen of Navarre urged François to temper justice with mercy and to end the reign of terror that so frightened his countrymen, particularly in Languedoc, where atrocities such as the forcible abortion of an accused heretic’s unborn child were becoming far too common.82 Whether Marguerite’s advice influenced François is uncertain, but in January 1543 he pardoned the rebels in La Rochelle, in a gesture of conciliation that did not find favor in all quarters. The reactionary Bishop of Condom would accuse the king, as well as his evangelical sister, of aiding and abetting heretics in the south—an allegation that may strike modern readers as ludicrous given François’s decreasing tolerance for dissent in the 1540s. Despite this gradual shift toward the Faculty of Theology’s position on unorthodoxy, however, the king continued to balance severity with occasional clemency toward religious dissidents, tempering the politics of repression with unexpected gestures of conciliation toward suspected reformers. These overtures, such as François’s failed offer of pardon in 1545 to Waldensians willing to renounce their faith, typically demanded compromise and fence-mending on the part of reformers and conservatives

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alike—a course of action that risked offending both sides. Overall, the controversy triggered by his attempts to appease rebels, on the one hand, and reactionaries, on the other, is a testament to the growing polarization of religious factions in mid-sixteenth-century France and to the unwillingness among members of these factions to compromise or countenance acts of mercy toward their “enemies.” That the king clung to even a modicum of even-handedness in later years, amid the hatred and witch hunts that ravaged his country, is in part a function of Marguerite’s influence on him. At the time of François’s visit to Béarn in late 1542, Marguerite was suffering from severe morning sickness that probably stemmed from a molar pregnancy lasting into the sixth month. It would cause her to take to her bed in December and remain there through the winter, even as she wrote copiously and entertained friends. At the age of 50, Marguerite still hoped to provide her husband a male heir and her brother, another loyal subject in her “old age”; but her optimism had turned to grief by the spring, upon learning there would be no child. None of this curtailed the queen’s creative efforts, however. De Navarre received the king’s privilège in 1543 to publish Le Maçon’s translation of Boccaccio’s Decameron, worked on her nouvelles, composed short poems, and wrote the Fable du faux cuyder (Fable of false pride), an adaptation of Sannazaro’s Salices (Willows) that anticipates the Heptaméron in its gender-related subject matter. Notwithstanding her confinement and discomfort, Marguerite also kept abreast of the religious and political ferment around her. Credible rumors that the Bishop of Condom, whose hostility toward the queen and her brother were well-known, was plotting to assassinate the queen reached her ears,83 as did news of setbacks in her brother’s war efforts, aggravated by the Duke of Cleves’s surrender to Charles V in the North.84 From Marguerite’s perspective, the duke’s putative breach of faith with François had a silver lining, in that it set the stage for an eventual annulment of his marriage to Jeanne d’Albret; but the surrender drew the king northward against his sister’s wishes, into combat against the emperor and his English allies. While her brother prevailed militarily,85 the renewal of his alliance with the Ottoman Sultan Suleyman in the South united the other powers of Europe in their condemnation of the “unholy” French king and the “infidels” who served him. Whether these charges contributed to François’s renewed persecution of “heretics” the next year, as he sought to shore up his image as the “most Christian king,” is uncertain; but given the harsh policies of his government toward reformers, François’s collaboration with an Islamic ruler abroad is not only ironic, but also emblematic of the shifting standpoints, allegiances, and tactics that we associate with Machiavellianstyle Renaissance princes. Despite her own declining health and the reservations she may have harbored about his “unholy” alliance with an “infidel,” Marguerite sought to assist François “comme frère,” or as a brother rather than as a sister, during the military and political crises of 1544. 86 In addition to keeping her

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eyes and ears open, and orchestrating François’s reconnaissance efforts in the region of Bayonne and Guyenne, where incursions by the Spaniards seemed imminent, de Navarre traveled to Normandy to meet with her beleaguered brother, whom she found in flagging health. Battle weary and almost bankrupt, the king awaited new offensives from the north by English and imperial forces. As he feared, the English seized Boulogne, which they occupied until 1550; but despite France’s curiously understated resistance, the anticipated siege of Paris did not take place—in part because Charles V, like his rival François, was short of funds after decades of war. The Peace of Crépy, signed by the emperor and French king in September 1544, united the Catholic princes of Europe against the German Protestants and “heretics” in general, setting the stage for France’s Waldensian massacre the next year. Despite the long-awaited annulment of Jeanne d’Albret’s marriage to the Duke of Cleves, which paved the way for her union with Antoine de Bourbon (1548) and the birth of their son, the future Henri IV of France, the final period of Marguerite’s life was anything but tranquil. 1545 began with a grave medical crisis for the king, who most scholars believe suffered from syphilis contracted in 1539.87 While his physicians treated and drained a large abscess in François’s lower body, the queen rushed to his side from Alençon, where she was spending the winter with her daughter. Although Marguerite’s correspondence implies that he recuperated quickly and fully, rumors abounded that the king was dying; and indeed, he lived only two years longer, until March of 1547. During his illness, the French king ordered the uncharacteristically brutal attack on the Vaudois population of Mérindol, despite pardoning and commuting the Waldensians’ sentences on two prior occasions. Given the king’s youthful openness to intellectual diversity and his general eschewal of brutality for its own sake, the reasons for his decision are not completely clear. To be sure, he was under immense pressure from the pope, Parlement, and the Faculty of Theology to suppress the Waldensian “heretics,” and François had agreed in the Peace of Crépy to join Charles V in suppressing Protestantism. Yet François had withstood similar pressures before and still acted temperately. In the face of impending death, did he view the attack as a holy war, undertaken in God’s name and in defense of the faith, which would hold him in good stead as he prepared to meet his maker? Or was he simply equating religious unorthodoxy with political dissent and striving to restore domestic order by force, after all peaceful negotiations had failed? Or despite the testimony of foreign ambassadors, who claimed François showed “no evidence of the mental disorders commonly associated with the tertiary stage of syphilis,” was the king’s judgment affected by ill health?88 Whatever the case, the slaughter at Mérindol sent a message to proliferating groups of reformers throughout the country, providing a gruesome example of the consequences they faced if they persisted in their “heresy.” Moreover, the Parlement at Aix had apparently persuaded François that the Vaudois reformers were in open rebellion and that they were plotting an attack on

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Marseilles. In April 1545, French forces slaughtered almost 3,000 men, women, and children at Mérindol. While we have no record of François’s reaction upon hearing the news, historical documents tell us that his sister was devastated, as she would be again in September, when her nephew Charles, Duke of Orléans, died unexpectedly of the plague.89 As a result of the Peace of Crépy, Charles was to have married either the emperor’s daughter Maria, who would have received the Netherlands or Franche-Comté as a dowry, or his niece Anna, who would have given Charles Milan. In addition to the lands that would have become his by marriage, the Duke of Orléans also acquired the duchies of Bourbon, Châtellerault, and Angoulême from his father, in a pact that would effectively have divided France between the future Henri II and his brother. That this was the wily emperor’s intention is likely: the prospect of defusing the French monarch’s power and the threat of French military incursions into his own territory must have been attractive. Yet François wholeheartedly approved these provisions of the treaty as well, perhaps sensing that shared governance would serve his country and its various factions better than a single ruler after he himself died. His words bear out this hypothesis: for upon the demise of his even-tempered, good-natured younger son, the French king reputedly opined that Charles has been the last great hope for France and her future.90 Weary and in flagging health, Marguerite returned home early in 1546, having persuaded her brother to grant one last boon for the cause of evangelical humanism—the royal imprimatur, or privilège du roy, for Rabelais’s Tiers livre, published that same year. The queen of Navarre would be less successful at blocking the executions of Etienne Dolet in August and of reformers at Meaux in October. Arrests and executions continued unabated into the next year, which brought the death of Henry VIII of England in January and the demise of François himself two months later, on March 31, 1547. Upon hearing of her brother’s illness, Marguerite left Navarre in hopes of seeing him one last time and perhaps nursing him back to health; but as her own strength failed her, de Navarre sought refuge in the convent of Tusson in Poitou, where the nuns and members of her entourage shielded her from news of François’s demise for several weeks.91 Despite the differences that separated them in later years, Marguerite’s grief was immense. In her Chansons spirituelles, Dernières poésies, and Comédie sur le trépas du roy, the queen of Navarre not only expresses her own despair (“douleur voyre desmesurée”) and sense of emptiness at being separated from her brother, with whom she shared “one life, one body, one heart, one will,”92 but also eulogizes his life and works in almost hagiographic terms that idealize his character and his reign. Comparing François allegorically to the “great god Pan,” often conflated with Christ in humanistic texts, she writes that he “protected us from all evil and dangers / Indeed and from the wolf who never managed to steal / Any sheep, for he only sought / To protect his pasture and his flock.”93 As Cholakian and Cholakian say, “Gone is the persecutor of heretics. The poet

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transforms him into the perfect Christian, a true believer who not only upheld the faith but practiced justice and charity.”94 Despite the muting of her voice at the French court and the end of her role as an ex officio royal advisor, up until her death in 1549 Marguerite continued to express herself on paper, refining and adding more stories to her “French Decameron,” continuing her correspondence, and adding soulsearching verses to her corpus of religious poetry. The queen of Navarre had most likely arranged for the publication of Les Marguerites de la Marguerite des princesses tresillustre royne de Navarre (1547) and her Suyte des Marguerites de la Marguerite (1547) prior to François’s death. Following his demise, she produced her Chansons spirituelles, a play entitled Comédie de Mont-de-Marsan, and two long poems entitled Le navire (The ship) and Les prisons. In the former, which includes both an ongoing dialogue between the heartsick queen of Navarre and the transcendent spirit of her deceased brother and asides to other royal family members, Marguerite idealizes François as a man without vice who ruled judiciously and succored the poor. She also attributes reformist precepts to the king’s omniscient shade, who refers to God’s “elect” in evangelical fashion and turns the tables on his reform-minded sister by urging her to read and take solace in “la Sainte Ecriture,” a hallmark of the Protestant movement that Marguerite herself practiced and advocated.95 By portraying Henri II as the heir of his father’s liberality, moreover, and as the surviving image of François on earth (“te monstrer saige et vertueux prince / Afin que tel que ton pere on te voye,” 422), Marguerite models the new king heuristically after the François of her imagination, imbuing Henri rhetorically with qualities she hopes he will acquire: godliness, liberality, honor (“aimez l’honneur,” 429), a peaceloving nature (“aimer la paix,” 428), even-handed treatment of the poor and disempowered (“ne prefferant jamais le grand au moindre,” 428), a love of knowledge and learning (“Aimez scavoir, … les lettres,” 429), and respect for wise and experienced counselors (“Aimez aussi le sens et la sagesse, / Le bon conseil, bien experimenté,” 429). Underneath its mournful tonality and eulogistic content, then, Le navire is a profoundly political poem, not only for its attribution of evangelical precepts to the dead king, but also for the way Marguerite uses it both to advise the new king and to set forth a model of kingship and good governance for the future. While her Heptaméron would not be published until a decade later, many of her suppressed critical insights about grace, faith, religious abuses, gender inequities, politics, and social injustice find their way into these late-life writings. Given her wide-ranging experiences and the rich variety of the written works she produced, defining the relationship between Marguerite’s biography and the Heptaméron is no easy task. Even so, a few key insights emerge from this biographical overview. First, de Navarre’s involvement in governance, patronage of the new learning, and concern for the res publica challenge Jourda’s view of a “medieval Marguerite” whose thinking owed more to models provided by her predecessors than to humanistic scholarship,

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contemporary politics, and the ethical and epistemological ferment of the Renaissance. On the contrary, we find in her a woman of many faces, outwardly diffident and yet capable of dissent and dissimulation, who was at once deeply spiritual and firmly rooted in the troubled world of her times. Second, far from being a sycophant who simply echoed what the king wished to hear, Marguerite was a critical thinker who adored her brother but not slavishly, as evidenced by their divergent ideas on religious reform; and while her shifting gaze was necessarily born of her familiarity with scriptural imprecations to fix her eyes on high, and yet value and affect the humility of a little child, the mutable point of view that we see in her writings also holds traces of her own joys and sorrows, adversities, and triumphs. These ranged from her likely abjection as a victim of sexual assault—and from her devastation as a grieving mother and sister, disappointed wife, and horrified witness to the atrocities of her time—to the heights of wealth, power, and influence she experienced in the early decades of her brother’s reign. Third, this perspectival suppleness, which reflects de Navarre’s opposing roles as client and patron, subject and ruler, also informs Marguerite’s outlook on the world and is part and parcel of the Renaissance experiments with perspective that figure in the works of Leonardo. This motif is reinforced by the deep-seated ocularity of her Heptaméron, which contains countless references to eyes, sight, and seeing.96 Finally, Marguerite’s previous use of allegory in her poetry and theater, her familiarity with the danger of dissenting too openly, and her longtime practice of exercising reasoned caution in expressing her ideas support the thesis that she embedded camouflaged truths and messages not only about theology, but also about gender, politics, and her society as a whole, in the Heptaméron, often within the nonthreatening, deflected context of household dramas.97 It is these topics that we will explore in the next three chapters.

Notes 1 2

3

See Isidore Silver, “Marguerite de Navarre and Ronsard (I),” BHR 55, no. 3 (1993): 527–46. Jourda emphasizes Marguerite’s realism, noting that “la Reine s’efforcera de tracer à ses compagnons un modèle de vie plus pratique, plus réalisable que ne l’est la Thélème de Rabelais” (Marguerite d’Angoulême, 1: xiii). However, her realism is visible not only in positive models, but also, perhaps more strikingly, in the antimodels of abuse, injustice, and violence that she weaves throughout her work. One might note the parallels between Marguerite’s literary gaze and the demeanor that Anne de Beaujeu, her mother’s childhood mentor, prescribed for both her own daughter and the girls under her tutelage: “Anne believed that a woman should have a humble glance, a low voice, and a modest, simple, and reserved demeanor that was at the same time affable and courteous to all, even strangers and social inferiors” (Cholakian and Cholakian, 18). See also Anne de Beaujeu, Les enseignements d’Anne de France, duchesse de Bourbonnais et d’Auvergne, à sa fille Suzanne de Bourbonne, ed. A.-M. Chazaud (Moulins: C. Desroziers, 1878; repr., Marseille: Lafitte, 1978).

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The many faces of Marguerite de Navarre In August, 1527, Erasmus called her a “queen more illustrious for her piety than for her race and crown.” See François Génin, Lettres de Marguerite d’Angoulême, sœur de François Ier, reine de Navarre, publiées d’après les manuscrits de la Bibliothèque du roi (1841; repr., Société de l’Histoire de France, 1965), 229–30; cited and translated by Cholakian and Cholakian, 137. See Book 3 of Baldassare Castiglione, Il libro del cortegiano, ed. Giulio Preti (Torino: Einaudi, 1965); and The Book of the Courtier, trans. George Bull (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967). In this text, the discussant Giuliano de’ Medici opines that women “should possess a knowledge of many subjects” (Bull, 213), including painting and literature; and should “know how to dance and play games” (Bull, 216), perform gracefully on musical instruments, and “converse in a suitable manner … making use of agreeable witticisms and jokes” (Bull, 216). Significantly, however, female characters speak far less often than male characters in The Book of the Courtier, suggesting that women’s conversation should be tailored to the interests of men. Kelly, 47. For a discussion of the apocryphal Salic law that authorities invoked as a basis for excluding women from the throne in France, see Sarah Hanley, “The Monarchic State in Early Modern France: Marital Regime Government and Male Right,” in Politics, Ideology, and the Law in Early Modern France: Essays in Honor of J. H. M. Salmon, ed. Adrianna Bakos (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1994), 107–26. Original Salic law pertained specifically to familial property rights, rather than to questions of monarchical succession, Hanley observes, but was supplemented by fraudulent emendations and forgeries restricting kingship to males that sixteenth-century historians, legists, and philologists discredited. “Even so,” continues Hanley, “these scholars, legists, and parlementaires were not bold enough to reassess the case on its own merits. They failed to transcend the glaring legal and moral problems, because legitimation of male right in the early modern nascent French State was no longer simply a legal or constitutional matter. It had become a singular obsession aimed at defining all authority to govern as fundamentally masculine in nature during a time of interrelated family formation and state building” (109). In the absence of an authentic Salic law prohibiting female succession to the monarchy, French jurists and parlementarians proceeded to craft a new French Law Canon that excluded females from royal succession on the basis of natural law, thereby securing “legal foundations for the male right to govern along the lines of a Marital Regime in law” (109). Jourda, Marguerite d’Angoulême, 1: xii. Clearly not all of Bandello’s novellas are tragic, but those that are (including one based on Marguerite’s own N. 23) inspired Pierre Boaistuau’s Histoires tragiques (1559) and those of François de Belleforest (1570). See Kelver Hartley, Bandello and the “Heptaméron”: A Study in Comparative Literature (Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 1960). See Salmon, Society in Crisis: France in the Sixteenth Century (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975); John K. Brackett, “The Florentine Criminal Underworld: The Other Side of the Renaissance,” in Society and Individual in Renaissance Florence (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), 293–314; Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995); and The Darker Vision of the Renaissance: Beyond the Fields of Reason, ed. Robert S. Kinsman (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1974). Michelet, Histoire de France 1484–1515 (Librairie Internationale A. Lacroix, 1876), 9: 359. Borrowing from Michelet, Cholakian and Cholakian include this term in the title of their biography of Marguerite.

The many faces of Marguerite de Navarre 12 13

14

15 16

17

18 19

20 21

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Here, I am borrowing from Freccero, “Queer Nation, Female Nation: Marguerite de Navarre, Incest, and the State in Early Modern France,” MLQ 65 (March 2004): 27; and her “Archives in the Fiction.” Alison Kathryn Staudinger, Work under Democracy: Labor, Gender, and Arendtian Citizenship (Ph.D. Diss., University of Maryland, 2013), 32–33. See also Miriam Solomon, “Situated Cognition,” in Philosophy of Psychology and Cognitive Science, ed. Paul Thagard (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2007), 419; Bertsch, The Standpoint of Homeless Single Mothers, 13–16; Tronto, “Moral Perspectives”; and Hartsock, Feminist Standpoint Revisited. Experiential theories of narrative focus primarily upon the textual mimesis of lived experience in fictional characters, and upon the ways in which the author and readers in turn respond to—and, indeed, experience—these characters’ stories, often by drawing upon experiential traces from their own past lives. The quotation is from “Experientiality,” 149; for a review of neuroimaging research confirming parallels between first-hand and narrative experiences, see Paul, “Your Brain on Fiction.” Ultimately, “the only real consciousness with which readers come into contact through a literary work is that of the author” (198), observes Caracciolo in “On the Experientiality of Stories”; and it is the writer who helps “steer them to experiences similar to [his or her] own” (199). While the permeable, but always provisional, interface that I am suggesting between Marguerite’s life and times and her text is meant to enrich our appreciation of the Heptaméron and its historical backdrop, particularly in chapter 5, it should not be viewed as the primary thesis or generative principle of this monograph. Instead, both the biographical and historical contextualizations in this chapter and the critical apparatus used to theorize their relevance are secondary to, and intended to enhance, rather than “prove” the historical validity of, the textual analyses in chapters 3 through 5. “De Ma Dame la Duchesse d’Alençon,” in Œuvres de Clément Marot de Cahors, valet de chambre du Roy, ed. Benjamin Pifteau (Paris: Delarue, n.d.), 2: 159. Marguerite d’Angoulême, 1: 61. I am indebted to Jourda (41–92) for many details in this paragraph about Marguerite’s life following her brother’s accession to the throne and for much of the information in this biographical overview. I have also drawn at length upon the research and insights of Cholakian and Cholakian and upon de Navarre’s own correspondence throughout this chapter. Cholakian and Cholakian, 8–9. “Journal de Louise de Savoye,” in Nouvelle collection des mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de France depuis le XIIIe siècle jusqu’à la fin du XVIIIe: Histoire des choses mémorables advenues du reigne de Louis XII et François Ier, ed. Joseph-François Michaud and Jean-Joseph-François Poujoulat, Series 1 (Paris: Chez l’Editeur du Commentaire Analytique du Code Civil, 1838), 5: 87–93: “Ma fille Margueritte fut née l’an 1492, l’unzième jour d’avril à deux heures au matin” (89). In her “Quelques remarques critiques sur François de Moulins,” BHR 52, no. 1 (1990): 23–36, Marie Holban hypothesizes that François de Moulins de Rochefort, François et Marguerite’s preceptor, helped Louise edit her journal and personal notes in 1519, long after the actual birth of her children (24). In her “François Du Moulin and the Journal of Louise of Savoy,” SCJ 13 (Spring 1982): 55–66, Myra Dickman Orth goes so far as to call de Moulins the “ghostwriter” of the diary, which she dates even later—in 1522 rather than 1519 (55). See also Henri Hauser, “Etude critique sur le Journal de Louise de Savoie,” RH 86 (Sept.–Dec. 1904): 280–303.

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Michaud and Poujoulat, 89: “François, par la Grâce de Dieu, Roi de France, et mon César pacifique, print la première expérience de lumière mondaine à Cognac, environ dix heures après midi 1494, le douzième jour de Septembre.” Cholakian and Cholakian, 36. The reference figures in Marguerite’s correspondence with Briçonnet. See Correspondance, 1521–1524: Guillaume Briçonnet, Marguerite d’Angouleme, ed. Christine Martineau et al. (Geneva : Droz, 1975), 2: 243. Jourda, 5. Jourda, 22, 25–27. See also Holban, “François du Moulin de Rochefort et la querelle de la Madeleine,” BHR 2, no. 1 (1935): 26–43; and 2, no. 2 (1935): 147–71. For more on the mother–daughter relationship, see Bradley, 80–85, 103; Cholakian and Cholakian, 15; and Jourda, 20. Jourda, 29. Jourda cites a eulogy that describes Marguerite’s “visage riant” (20). Jourda, 9. Cholakian and Cholakian, 11, 19. Cholakian and Cholakian, 19. Cholakian and Cholakian, 10. For instance, Anne de France advises her daughter to keep her eyes and ears open in order to hear, see, and understand the inner workings of the court, while feigning ignorance and drawing no attention to herself: “Au regard de la court, il n’apartient à femme jeune de soy mesler ne embesongner de plusieurs choses, et dient les saiges que on doit avoir yeulx pour toutes choses regarder, et rien veoir, oreilles pour tout ouyr et rien sçavoir, langue pour respondre à chascun, sans dire mot qui à nully puisse estre en rien préjudiciable” (Les enseignements d’Anne de France, 20). Anne de France goes on to urge her daughter to ingratiate herself with everyone according to the person’s “estate,” especially those who are influential and held to be wise (21). As Cholakian and Cholakian point out, “the secret of Anne’s [own] success as regent was to make herself as invisible as possible” (10), a strategy followed by Louise herself, who hid her “ambitions behind impeccable virtue and seeming self-effacement” (11). Arguably the same may be said of Marguerite. Cholakian and Cholakian, 25; Jourda, 16. See Les prisons de la reine de Navarre, in Dernières poésies de Marguerite de Navarre, ed. Abel Lefranc (Paris: Armand Colin, 1896), 264: “Car luy, n’ayant jamais leu ni apris, / Lequel l’on n’eust pour [ung] orateur pris, / Parla si bien, que cinq docteurs presens / Furent longtemps pour l’escouter taisans.” Génin, Lettres, 155. “Je suys plus que nul à Dieu tenu, / Qui m’a tant fait de biens en ma jeunesse [et qui] / Vivre m’a fait … / En guerre et paix conservant mon honneur.” Les prisons, 265. For example, Marguerite notes in a letter to her brother from the fall of 1536 that Charles V’s mad, outrageous responses to François’s overtures make all women want to be men, in order to deflate the emperor’s pride: “Saichant l’honnesteté dont vous usastes envers luy et les folles et oultrecuidées responses qu’il fist, … cela suffit seulement pour faire désirer à toutes femmes estre hommes, pour vous servir à rabaisser son orgueil” (Génin, Lettres, 333–34). Earlier, in a letter dated 1525, she had complained to Montmorency about Fortune’s error in making her a woman, and preventing her from serving her brother in battle: “Bien est vray que toute ma vie j’auray envie que je ne puis faire pour luy office pareil au vostre … la fortune me tient tort, qui, pour estre femme, me rend le moyen difficile” (Genin, Lettres, 176–77). See also Epitre 127, dated 1536, where Marguerite promises to display masculine courage and

23

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33 34

35 36 37

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38 39 40

41 42

43 44

45 46

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strength in turning back the Emperor despite her gender: “Vous vous contenterés des Gascons; et pleust à Dieu que l’Empereur s’essayast de passer le Rosne quant je suis icy! car avecques le secours que vous m’envoyriés (et sy n’en fault pas beaucoup!) j’entreprendrois bien sus ma vie, toute femme que je suis, de le garder de passer” (Génin, Lettres, 327). Genin, Lettres, 176–77. See, for example, Ann Crabb, “‘If I could write’: Margherita Datini and Letter Writing, 1385–1410,” RenQ 60 (Winter 2007): 1180. Marguerite’s most overt literary condemnation of this double standard occurs in nouvelle 15 of the Heptaméron, where a young wife with an unfaithful husband defends her discreet flirtation in egalitarian—and religious—terms: “Although the law of men attaches dishonor to women who fall in love with those who aren’t their husbands, the law of God does not exempt men who fall in love with women who aren’t their wives” (196–97; “Combien que la loy des hommes donne grand deshonneur aux femmes qui ayment autres que leurs mariz, si est-ce que la loy de Dieu n’exempte poinct les mariz qui ayment autres que leurs femmes,” 123). While the wife’s subsequent lies and licentiousness may appear to undermine the moral force of her statement, its very presence in the Heptaméron challenges sex-based cultural norms. Cholakian and Cholakian, 21–39. For example, Brantôme identifies the Flemish widow and her assailant in nouvelle 4 as Marguerite de Navarre and Bonnivet, respectively: “Et si voulez sçavoir de qui la nouvelle s’entend, c’estoit de la Reyne mesme de Navarre, et de l’Admiral de Bonivet, ainsi que je tiens de ma feu grand mere” (Recueil des dames, 554). See also Génin, Lettres, 10–11. Fiction in the Archives (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987). Not only is the young Flemish widow in nouvelle 4 the sister of a prince, who would almost certainly put her assailant to death if he knew of the assault, but the noblewoman’s laughing countenance, physical strength and assertiveness, high rank, and circumspection—which prompts her to refrain from accusing her attacker lest her own reputation be damaged in the process—are all qualities we associate with Marguerite, in part as a result of descriptions of her dating from the sixteenth century, and in part as a result of biographical extrapolations from the nouvelles themselves, which scholars long used to flesh out the historical writer’s life story. While the muletière in nouvelle 2 is rarely likened to Marguerite de Navarre, moreover, perhaps because she is identified as a mule-driver’s wife, one might also venture that her piety and recourse to prayer echo the historical writer’s own spirituality; and by the same token, the victim’s sense of humor and transformation of her ordeal into an entertaining story in nouvelle 62 seem to encapsulate, in miniature, Marguerite’s almost obsessive retelling of what many believe is her own trauma—rewritten from different viewing angles—in the Heptaméron. From a psychological perspective, the widow’s forceful resistance in nouvelle 4, the women’s disbelief that they are actually being attacked in nouvelles 22 and 31, the violated matron’s suicidal impulse in nouvelle 23, and the widow’s eventual acquiescence in nouvelle 14 are all plausible responses to sexual aggression—particularly by a beloved friend or respected community member—that a woman such as Marguerite de Navarre might well have experienced during or after her assault by Bonnivet. Bradley, 58–70. See chap. 1, n. 43; and La coche, ed. Robert Marichal (Geneva: Droz, 1971), 205, lines 1312–13: “Celle qui peult la deffendre de blasme / Et l’excuser comme une œuvre de femme.”

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47

See Cholakian and Cholakian, 79; and Guillaume Briçonnet and Marguerite d’Angoulême, Correspondance 1521–1524, ed. Christine Martineau, Michel Veissière, and Henry Heller, THR 141 (Geneva: Droz, 1975), 1: 219–22. Martineau and Veissière, 1: 230: “Il vous plaira couvrir le feu pour quelque temps.” See also Cholakian and Cholakian, 82. Cholakian and Cholakian, 81. See also Stephenson (45–77), who discusses Marguerite’s use of kinship terms in her closings within the context of the language–game model, and notes the queen’s use of maternal and filial language in her correspondence with the clergy (61). Cholakian and Cholakian, 47, 54, 67, 324 n. 30; Jourda, 55. “Plus que sœur” (Nouvelles lettres de la reine de Navarre, adressées au roi François Ier, son frère, ed. François Génin [Paris: Crapelet, 1842], 15). The term “queen in all but name” is from Cholakian and Cholakian, 40. See my “Maternal Death and Patriarchal Succession in Renaissance France,” in Death and the Culture of Death in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time: The Material and Spiritual Conditions of the Culture of Death, ed. Albrecht Classen (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2016), 457–89. “A change soon came over the policy of the fickle King,” writes Arthur Henry Johnson, Europe in the Sixteenth Century, 1494–1598 (London: Rivingtons, 1898), 388. François attempted to skew the makeup of the judicial body charged with hearing Berquin’s case in the latter’s favor in 1528, by prevailing upon the pope to appoint laymen rather than theologians to the commission. Amid complaints from the Faculty of Theology, however, Clement VII would later revoke these appointments, shifting his allegiance from the French to the emperor later that year. This loss of leverage with the papacy, together with hopes of extracting military and ransom monies from France’s Catholic clergy during his sons’ captivity, likely tempered François’s response to the Sorbonne’s persecution of suspected “Luthériens.” See Knecht, 261–63, 282–83; Reid, King’s Sister, 1: 339–40, 365–66; and James K. Farge, Orthodoxy and Reform in Early Reformation France: The Faculty of Theology of Paris, 1500–1543 (Leiden: Brill, 1985), 264. “Et toy, François, de mon cœur la moitié” (460). In “Complainte pour un détenu prisionnier,” Les Marguerites de la Marguerite des princesses (Lyon: Jean Tournes, 1547), 1: 444–66. For a discussion of the poem’s authenticity, see Jourda, 1: 1129–33. Cholakian, 112; Reid, 265. The commission was instituted to hear accusations against the Dominican Aimé Meigret, whose evangelical preaching had resulted in charges of heresy against him. Ultimately the commission, known as the juges délégués, became a permanent inquisitorial court, supported by Louise and approved by the pope in May 1525 (Reid, 265). For more on Louise’s concessions to Parlement and the Sorbonne in regard to cases of so-called “heresy” during her regency, see Reid, 1: 235–47. Translation by Cholakian and Cholakian, 106. See also Recueil des dames, 181. “ [Qu’] il vous plaise entendre les bons tours qu’ils nous font” (Génin, Lettres, 190). “Et me samble que, en leur tenant encores ung peu la main haulte, l’on les contraindra parler aultre langaige.” “Lettre de Marguerite, Duchesse d’Alençon, au Roy,” CLXXXI, October 1525, in Aimé Champollion-Figeac, Captivité du roi François Ier (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1847), 358– 59; trans. Cholakian and Cholakian, 120, with French original, 340, n. 54. See Marguerite’s letter (XXX) to her brother, written from Toledo in October 1525: “Ils ont grant peur que je m’en ennuye, car je leur donne à entendre que s’ils ne font mieux, que je m’en veux retourner” (Génin, Lettres, 190; trans.

48 49

50 51 52

53

54

55

56 57 58

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60 61 62 63 64 65 66

67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

76 77

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Cholakian and Cholakian, 119: “I am quite sure that they are very fearful that I will lose patience, for I have given them to understand that if they don’t do any better, I have every intention of leaving”). See M. Georges Salles, Un traître au XVIe siècle: Clément Champion, valet de chambre de François Ier (Paris: Aux bureaux de la revue, 1900). Cholakian and Cholakain, 121. “Le plus est … de ne vous arester à terre ny à enfans; car votre réaulme a besoing de vous” (Génin, Nouvelles lettres, 63). Trans. Cholakian and Cholakian, 129. The prince’s secretary, Count Montecuccoli, confessed to the crime under duress and was executed for regicide. Building upon the speculation of N. Lenglet du Fresnoy (1721), Génin bases his contention that Marguerite’s relationship with her brother was incestuous in part on their correspondence from this period (Nouvelles lettres, 15). Cholakian and Cholakian, 119, 129. Champollion-Figeac, La Captivité, 342: “Ce soir vous manderay ce qui sera fait; vous suplyant, monseigneur, fere davant le sieur Larcon contenance foible et ennuyée, car vostre debilité me fortifiera et advancera ma despeche” (“Lettre de Marguerite d’Alençon au roi,” CLXVII, October 1525). Trans. Cholakian and Cholakian, 118. See n. 37. As Reid notes in his King’s Sister, this did not turn out to be the case (1: 362). Génin, Lettres, 261–62. Cholakian and Cholakian, 172–73. Melanchthon would refuse the invitation, which neither orthodox Catholics nor European Protestants endorsed. Reid, 1: 78. Trans. Cholakian and Cholakian, 210. See also Brantôme, Recueil des dames, 178. See, for example, n. 54; and Génin, Lettres, 328, 334. In his “Church and State in the French Reformation” (The Journal of Modern History 86 (Dec. 2014): 826–61), Allan A. Tulchin cites Reid in contending that “Marguerite favored a consistent ideological position, namely, a conservative, ‘magisterial’ (élite-led) Reformation. Her views were thus quite similar to those of many of her contemporaries among the German princes and King Henry VIII of England. Over time, that position became more and more difficult to maintain, however” (832–33). Tulchin contends that Marguerite, as a result of the growing gap between her views and those of other reformers, grew estranged from the mainstream of Protestant groups in France. It is also possible, however, that she dissimulated her views increasingly in the 1540s. Génin, Nouvelles lettres, 218–19. Marguerite de Navarre, Théâtre profane, ed. Verdun-Louis Saulnier (Geneva: Droz, 1963), 48; trans. Cholakian and Cholakian, 178. For an elucidation of Marguerite’s artful use of silence, both as a theme and as a rhetorical device designed in part to veil her discourse from Sorbonne censors, see ReynoldsCornell, “Silence,” 21–22. See, for example, Génin, Lettres, 246, 337; Cholakian and Cholakian, 153–54, 192, 296. Freccero, “Archives in the Fiction,” 81. See also Roelker, Queen of Navarre: Jeanne d’Albret and Alphonse de Ruble, Le mariage de Jeanne d’Albret (Paris: Adolphe Labitte, 1877), particularly pages 80–110, in which de Ruble quotes extensively from the reports of Juan Descurra, a Hapsburg agent involved in discussions between Henri d’Albret and Charles V regarding the possible marriage of their children. Descurra contends that Marguerite’s apparent

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93 94 95 96

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The many faces of Marguerite de Navarre support of her brother’s position, and of a marriage between her daughter and the Duke of Cleves, was staged. Cholakian and Cholakian, 213, 218. Cholakian and Cholakian, 231. Génin, Nouvelles lettres, 214. Génin, Lettres, 75–76, 372–73; Cholakian and Cholakian, 236. Cholakian and Cholakian, 249. Génin, Nouvelles lettres, 238. In Marguerite’s “Lettre XC, Au Roi” (Génin, Nouvelles lettres), Marguerite writes of “le desir que j’ay eu toute ma vie de vous pouvoir fere service, non coume seur, mais coume frère” (148). Génin, Lettres, 473–74; Cholakian and Cholakian, 260; Knecht, Renaissance Warrior and Patron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 495–97, 544–45. Knecht, Renaissance Warrior, 497. Jourda, Marguerite d’Angoulême, 1: 307. Knecht, Renaissance Warrior, 494. Cholakian and Cholakian, 270; Jourda, 1: 315. “Une vie, un corps, un cueur, ung vouloir” (“Epitre de la Reine de Navarre au Roy, Henri II, son neveu, après la mort du feu roy François, son frère,” in Les dernières poésies de Marguerite de Navarre, ed. Abel Lefranc [Paris: Armand Colin, 1896], 4). “Qui nous gardoit de tous maulx et dangers / Voire et du loup qui ne sçeut onc saisir / Nulle brebis, car il n’avoit désir / Que de garder son parc et son troupeau” (Dernières poésies, 37). Cholakian and Cholakian, 273. “Le navire,” Dernières poesies, 396. In his “The Graphics of Dissimulation: Between Heptameron 10 and L’Histoire tragique” (Critical Tales, 65–81), Tom Conley notes the play of ocularity not only in references to seeing and sight in the text, but also to its echoes in the printed graphemes. “A critical privilege seems to be accorded to sight,” he notes (66); “the text begs the reader to discover patterns of events through camouflaged signifiers” (68). The reference to “reasoned caution” is from Reynolds-Cornell, “Silence,” 17–31.

3

Gender and patriarchy A many-sided view

Notwithstanding the examples of Christine de Pizan and Hélisenne de Crenne, women who wrote—and especially those who wrote for publication—were still curiosities in late medieval and early modern France. In Rabelais’s Pantagruel, the old king Gargantua marvels that even “women and girls … reach out for the celestial manna of sound learning”;1 and female intellectuals as diverse as Louise Labé, Anne des Roches, and Marie de Gournay proclaim their right to exchange the distaff and spindle, age-old symbols of women’s work, for quills, books, and writing.2 That Marguerite did just that clearly angered religious conservatives, who, in an allegorical farce at the College of Navarre in 1533, depicted her as a crazed woman who abandons her spinning and weaving for biblical texts translated into French.3 In addition to condemning the queen for reading and writing, these orthodox Catholics portray her as a shrewish, unwomanly virago, who has breached the natural order and upended the patriarchal transmission of knowledge by asserting her own right to participate in, contest, and revise male discourse. By virtue of Marguerite’s sex alone, the Heptaméron is a gendered work; but the author compounds its sexual valence by using it as a forum to explore the battle of the sexes, male violence toward women, sexual infidelity, female vices and virtues, and the nature of patriarchy. In keeping with her detractors’ fears, there is also much to suggest that Marguerite is rewriting androcentric discourse from a feminine perspective and subverting the dominant patriarchal ideology in her magnum opus: her spirited and vocal devisantes, portraits of wives who resist the strictures of patriarchy, rape narratives, invocation of feminine narratees, and foregrounding of female standpoints all support this thesis. Indeed, John Parkin calls her a “feminist author before her time,” and Samuel Putnam labels her “the first modern woman.”4 Yet, numerous counterfactors weigh against this thesis. These include the presence of androcentric rhetoric in the Heptaméron;5 the didactic, and thus potentially paternalistic, tenor of Marguerite’s vocative references to “mesdames”; the smattering of stories that focus on male rather than female pathos and victimization; and echoes of patriarchal-style exempla that reinforce hegemonic constructions of female identity. In this

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chapter, I will examine inconsistencies such as these in Marguerite’s representation of gender and patriarchy as we follow her shifting gaze. In addition to noting visual and linguistic cues, intertextual resonances, and perspectival changes in the text that alter our own viewing angles, we will explore the ways in which these shifts and the interpretive alternatives they generate erode patriarchal constructions of female exemplarity, and contest normative assumptions about gender relations, male and female identity, and gender-based power hierarchies in sixteenth-century French culture.

Contexts and intertexts: rewriting and responding to male discourse Despite the temporal and gender gap between them, Marguerite foregrounds her debt to Boccaccio and his Decameron, at once bifurcating our gaze and authorizing an intertextual reading of the two works.6 Rather than copying the fourteenth-century text faithfully, de Navarre appropriates, corrects, and transforms her model, using it as a palimpsest on which she etches her stories and insights in place of Boccaccio’s, along with newer nouvelles and truer, feminized accounts of life as she knows it. On the one hand, a majority (7) of her Italian predecessor’s ten intratextual storytellers are women, suggesting a strong profeminist bias on the author’s part that is also present in his De mulieribus claris (1361). Yet, on the other hand, his dedication of the Decameron to female readers is couched in half sympathetic, half disparaging terms that Marguerite will repudiate: “[Women] are forced to follow the whims, fancies and dictates of their fathers, mothers, brothers and husbands, so that they spend most of their time cooped up within the narrow confines of their rooms, where they sit in apparent idleness” (46).7 Marguerite would likely have identified with the first of these propositions, for she and many of her female characters, much like the women to whom Boccaccio addresses his novellas, at least occasionally experience the feminine condition as a type of societal and familial imprisonment.8 Yet far from remaining passively enclosed within the narrow confines of their rooms, leading a life of “idle ease” as Boccaccio suggests, Marguerite’s devisantes and many of her female characters are mentally and physically agile and energetic, adept at asserting their own will and identity. In her prologue to the First Day, Marguerite tells us pointedly that her mouthpiece Parlamente, unlike Boccaccio’s “donne vaghe” and “oziose,” is “jamays oisifve” (6) or never idle; and in that same liminary text the queen herself is inscribed en abyme not as a woman reading fiction in private, like Boccaccio’s passive destinataire who spins futile dreams within the confines of her room, but instead as a woman who actively tells and writes the truth in a public setting, alongside her friends and relatives at court. As tempting as it may be to interpret the queen’s deviation from her model as a protofeminist gesture, however, let us note that the prologue to the First Day of the Heptaméron, despite its preliminary position in the text, is neither a simple rewriting nor the structural equivalent of Boccaccio’s

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proemio. Unlike her Italian predecessor, who lived long enough to complete all 100 novellas as well as a preamble and conclusion, Marguerite provides no preface outlining the relevance of her work for women. Instead, her prologue corresponds structurally and thematically to the Introduction to the First Day of the Decameron, which, in contrast to Boccaccio’s tonguein-cheek proemio, includes proactive female characters who leave the narrow confines of their rooms (“piccolo circuito delle loro camere”) to reason together, exchange ideas, revel in the beauties of nature, and establish a new community based on principles of sexual equality. Of Boccaccio’s ten intratextual storytellers, moreover, seven are female, provisionally suggesting that the queen of Navarre’s magnum opus with its even balance of male (5) and female (5) devisants is less a “feminized” than a de-feminized Decameron which accords women less power and a weaker voice than its medieval Italian model. In truth, both Marguerite and Boccaccio explore gender roles and the feminine condition with uncommon acuity, and the Italian author’s sensitivity to the plight of women doubtless informed the queen’s decision to pen a “French Decameron.” While one may argue that Boccaccio is patronizing toward women in his proemio, that occasionally his female narrators sound more misogynistic than men (particularly Elissa, who insists that “man is the head of woman,” 62),9 or that Griselda’s longsuffering obedience to her despotic husband in novella 100 is more of a flaw than a virtue, overall the Italian master is remarkably even-handed in his representations of the two sexes. For confirmation, we need only look at his decision to have a woman preside over the First Day’s narrations, at his willingness to satirize both men and women, and at his sympathetic portrayals of strong females, who either contest or manage to navigate sexual and social taboos. Arguably the most forceful of these figures is Prince Tancredi’s daughter Ghismonda, whose extraordinary intellect and resourcefulness at once explode female stereotypes and anticipate Marguerite’s strong-willed heroines, including Rolandine (N. 21).10 Possessed of what Fiammetta calls “more intelligence than a woman needs” (332),11 the widowed Ghismonda quietly ascertains that Tancredi is unlikely to contract a new marriage for her, not because he is uncaring like Rolandine’s father or too miserly to provide her a dowry, but rather because he loves his daughter too much to let her go a second time. Rather than asking her father outright to arrange a match for her, an option she considers unseemly, the young noblewoman surveys all the men at her father’s court before choosing a virtuous valet named Guiscardo as her lover. Despite the pains Ghismonda takes to orchestrate her love affair discreetly, her father discovers his daughter’s subterfuge when he transgresses the privacy of her room and falls asleep beneath curtains at the foot of her bed, only to be awakened by the couple’s love-making. In the face of her father’s outrage, Ghismonda does not weep in stereotypically female fashion, but rather defends her extramarital liaison

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with brilliant argumentation—much like Rolandine, whose remarkable apologia of her own autonomy,12 though laced with reformist rhetoric, is no less forceful than Ghismonda’s defense of Guiscardo and of her own right to choose, which demolishes Tancredi’s logic point by point, reducing him to “feminine” tears. For her part, Marguerite’s Rolandine (N. 21) opts for a clandestine but unconsummated marriage with a “bâtard” instead of a sexually fulfilling affair with a valet; over time, moreover, her lover proves unfaithful, abandoning her for one wealthy woman and dying in the pursuit of another (“mourut à la poursuicte d’une autre femme,” 173).13 Yet unlike her largerthan-life Italian counterpart, who drinks poison from a chalice that holds her dead lover’s heart, Rolandine manages to survive, not simply as a victim, but as the heir to her father and brother’s “bonne et grosse maison” (174; “fine large house,” 253; page numbers following French and English quotations from the Heptaméron refer to the François and Chilton editions, respectively). Whether intentional or not, in fact, contrasts between the Boccaccian and de Navarrian intertexts draw our attention to Marguerite’s focus on survival, forgiveness, and building a better world for the future. Reconciling with her remorseful father before the latter’s death, Rolandine eventually marries a wise and virtuous “gentil homme” with her parent’s blessing and lives “a devout and respectable life” (253)14 in the love of her husband and two sons. Less flamboyantly heroic than Boccaccio’s uncompromising Ghismonda, Rolandine nevertheless emerges as a different type of female model: as a survivor who retains her integrity, practices forgiveness, and carves out a long life for herself with dignity, grace, and forbearance.15 Given Jossebelin’s transformation, moreover, and his realization that “there is more right on [her] side than on [his]” (252),16 Marguerite allows us to imagine that Rolandine will raise her sons to accord women greater esteem than her father and brother did, inculcating in them an ability to see through the eyes of otherness. Similarly, Marguerite’s identical number of male and female storytellers, or her eschewal of the feminine majority favored by Boccaccio, is less a concession to patriarchal norms than it is an experiment in sexual and social equality.17 The highest ranking male devisant, Hircan, introduces this concept at the end of Marguerite’s prologue, when he acknowledges the right of Simontaut, a serviteur, to narrate the opening story—a privilege that would be his own under traditional rules of precedence. “Where games are concerned everybody is equal” (70),18 observes Hircan, voicing a principle that will apply, at least for the duration of their game, not just to disparities in rank among the storytellers, but also to the gender differences that typically empower males and disempower women in Renaissance culture. Far from being a pale shadow of their fourteenth-century counterparts, moreover, Marguerite’s five female devisantes express their opinions far more often and amply than either the seven women in Boccaccio’s brigata or the five male storytellers who are stranded at Notre Dame de Serrance with

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them. In fact, there is no real argumentation by either males or females in Boccaccio’s rudimentary frame discussions, which consist primarily of brief transitions from one story to the next. In the Heptaméron, with its protracted postnarrative debates, commentaries by women slightly outnumber those of males by a ratio of 10:9, effectively refuting any speculation that Marguerite’s magnum opus is a “de-feminized” Decameron.19 Notwithstanding Boccaccio’s greater number of women storytellers, Marguerite expands his focus on female characters, gender-related themes, and the battle of the sexes. Of the queen’s 72 short stories, 90 percent deal with love, marriage, or sex in comparison to fewer than 50 percent of the tales in Boccaccio’s “mercantile epic,” where accounts of marketplace trickery and the “selling” of religion outnumber love stories and tales of sexual transgression. Rather than signaling a simple feminization of Boccaccio’s model, however, this shift in focus also reflects France’s heightened interest in the querelle des femmes, which “broke out with renewed vigor upon the publication of Héroët’s La parfaicte amye (The perfect friend) in 1542.”20 Already, Marguerite was familiar with Jean de Meun’s misogynist conclusion to the Roman de la rose (Romance of the Rose, ca. 1275), which Christine de Pizan refuted in her Livre de la cité des dames (Book of the City of Ladies, 1405). Far from dissipating in the sixteenth century, this polemic on the merits and weaknesses of women gathered momentum during Marguerite’s lifetime, as witnessed by André Tiraqueau’s De legibus connubialibus  (On the laws of marriage, 1513), Amaury Bouchard’s Feminei sexus apologia (Apology of the Feminine Sex, 1512), and Cornelius Agrippa’s Declamatio de nobilitate et praecellentia foeminei sexus (Declamation on the Nobility and Preeiminence of the Female Sex, 1529). The debate reached its apex in France when Marguerite was penning her Heptaméron in the 1540s: in addition to La parfaicte amye, Rabelais’s controversial Tiers livre (1546) was published during that decade, bearing a dedication to Marguerite de Navarre and a burlesque colloquium on the woman question. While this volume likely appeared in print too late to influence the queen’s early nouvelles, we cannot discount the possibility that her contributions to the querelle respond in part to Rabelais’s tonguein-cheek antifeminism. Unwritten symposia on the woman question, impossible to document at a distance of 470 years, would also have colored the Heptaméron. As Julie Campbell points out, oral enactments of the querelle at court, in salons, and in humanistic circles were ultimately no less influential on female authors than the better-known written treatises of male literati mentioned above.21 Book 3 of Castiglione’s Libro del cortegiano, which combines a narrowly focused debate on the ideal female courtier with a wide-ranging colloquium on women, is ostensibly the transcript of one such discussion that took place in Urbino during the early 1500s. Due to the author’s admitted absence during these dialogues, his testimony figures as both truth and hearsay, transmitted from one “authorizing” male to another in a way that suppresses

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female discourse. Notably, he accuses Vittoria Colonna, a correspondent of Marguerite de Navarre to whom he entrusted a draft of the text, of exposing it to possible “mishaps” or “inconvenienti.”22 Scholars generally agree that the Book of the Courtier influenced Marguerite, who likely appropriated its dialogic structure for her own frame discussions in the Heptaméron. Moreover, her contributions to the querelle des femmes may respond in part to Gaspare Pallavicino’s radical misogyny in Castiglione’s work: “Women bring no benefit to the world,” he argues, “save the bearing of children.”23 Up to a point, Marguerite builds upon the counterarguments of Signor Gaspare’s detractors in Il libro del cortegiano, who acknowledge female intelligence and deplore the plight of battered wives and daughters,24 which is exacerbated by the formers’ inability to secure divorces.25 In contrast to these profeminist interlocutors, who rely primarily on rhetorical gamesmanship and clever abstractions to defend women, de Navarre grounds her own querelle in the less rarefied terrain of female experience and eye-witness testimony. Unlike Castiglione, whose discussions by male interlocutors foreground masculine authority, de Navarre authorizes feminine discourse and excludes learned tales chronicled by “gens de lettres,” predominantly male, from her Heptaméron. Suggesting that learned rhetoric compromises raw truth, Marguerite may also be hinting that men’s pronouncements about women, such as those in the Book of the Courtier, too often stem from patriarchal texts and traditions rather than fact. In this sense, the queen’s experiment in veracity, which she introduces in the prologue, is also an exercise in empiricism, which challenges male authority and its myths about women with the observed truths of lower-class or female experience. More often than not, her vehicles of revelation are women rather than men, whose subordinate status and watchful silence “from below” provide privileged insights into household intrigues, seigniorial abuses, and the underside of power. Many of these discerning women are servants as well, whose low status, sexual vulnerability, and virtual invisibility within the patriarchal order afford them insights into the woman question that Castiglione’s courtiers fail to comprehend from atop the social hierarchy. Despite the nominal importance Castiglione accords to Duchess Elisabetta Gonzaga of Urbino, who presides over the Book of the Courtier’s symposia, he tends, with rare exceptions, to mute the voices of women present at Guido da Montefeltro’s court. In contrast, Marguerite’s frame discussions provide female interlocutors a rare opportunity to contest male hegemony in an egalitarian setting. Clearly, de Navarre’s treatment of gender echoes and contests early modern texts and contexts far too numerous to outline here; but as we attempt to position her writings on women within the broad cultural framework of sixteenth-century France, a few observations are in order. First, the fact that she eschews the idealized portraits of feminine pulchritude and virtue found in High Renaissance art by no means tempers her protofeminist tendencies, but is instead a mark of her realism, which she

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shares with artists of the Northern Renaissance. Second, the queen’s “unmuting” of female voices is an important trait of the evangelical movement, a distinctly French iteration of Northern Europe’s religious ferment. At first glance, Reformation theology and protofeminism seem to make strange bedfellows: John Calvin, after all, who labeled Louise Labé a “plebeia meretrix” or common whore in 1561, is rarely viewed as a champion of women’s rights.26 Yet 16 years earlier, in 1545, he argued with surprising liberality that women as well as men were entitled to initiate divorce proceedings, and that within the household and in the raising of children, “authority is attributed as much to one parent as to the other.”27 This provisional equality between the sexes, which tempers the hierarchical ascendancy of males over females in Catholic theology and French politics, has its roots in the early reformers’ emphasis on the unmediated relationship between each individual—male or female—and God, and their belief in a non-gender-specific “sovereignty of the soul,” which allows women as well as men to make ethical judgments, interpret the Gospel, and act on their consciences. In practice as well as theory, women participated fully in France’s early evangelical movement, as evidenced not only by Marguerite’s protection of reformers and patronage of biblical translations and scholarship, but also by conservative Catholic complaints against “unnatural” female preachers.28 Traces of these and other reformist innovations permeate the Heptaméron, which is remarkable for what Freccero calls its “foregrounding of feminine authority.”29 Women such as Oisille and Parlamente take the lead in scriptural exegesis, disagree openly, lucidly, and persuasively with males (and each other), and narrate myriad tales about strong female characters who take responsibility for their own moral choices and actions.30 Despite her debt to Boccaccio, however, whose De mulieribus claris inspired Le livre de la cité des dames, Marguerite offers no systematic apology of women akin to Christine de Pizan’s feminist summa. Nor do we have a conclusion or closing sequence of nouvelles to provide interpretive clues. In her final story, would the queen have followed Boccaccio’s lead and ended with an exemplar of wifely obedience? Or might she instead have offered a counterexample, inspired by the mixed reaction of Boccaccio’s female storytellers to Griselda’s extreme submissiveness?31 Following the devisants’ return home from Notre Dame de Serrance, would their postdiluvian, postapocalyptical world have been marked by social change and improved gender relations, or by a return to rape, infidelity, and cruelty toward courtly serviteurs? At the end of his Decameron, Boccaccio tells us only that his brigata returns to Florence, apparently to resume their original, gender-specific pursuits: after taking leave of their female companions in the Church of Santa Maria Novella, the men go back to their “pleasures”; and once the epidemic has subsided, the women return home, presumably to the same narrow rooms we saw inscribed in the proemio.32 Yet Marguerite’s substitution of a cleansing flood for Boccaccio’s plague and her conflation in

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the prologue of bridge building and discourse suggest the possibility of a more constructive ending: one in which society’s old roads or “ways” and its unsound social structures, all washed away in the prologue, are replaced not by a return to sameness à la Boccaccio, but rather by new ways, a new bridge, and improved relations with others—including the opposite sex.

Female icons, exempla, and real women: alternative standpoints Despite the complexity of Marguerite’s opus and her characterizations of women, to suggest that she never constructs feminine models and antimodels would be misleading. On the contrary, the Heptaméron at first glance seems permeated with female exempla, lessons for “mes dames,” and recognizable feminine “types.” They include a virtuous matron who defends her chastity to the death, much like Lucretia (N. 2); a fallen but repentant matron who is eventually forgiven, in an echo of the New Testament’s Mary Magdalene (N. 32); a wily peasant who tricks and publicly humiliates her would-be seducers (N. 5); and an adulterous wife so clever that her one-eyed husband never catches her in flagrante delicto (N. 6). Because reductive morals, often addressed to “mes dames,” introduce and conclude Marguerite’s nouvelles, training our interpretive gaze in what appears to be a single direction, many of them initially have the look and feel of exempla, used didactically in classical and medieval times to illustrate ethical precepts and provide examples of good and bad behavior for the reader or listener’s edification. Particularly in exempla interpolated into medieval sermons, both the viewing position and content are typically patriarchal; and at first glance, this appears to be true of de Navarre’s nouvelles as well.33 As John Lyons and Pollie Bromilow have demonstrated, however, this impression is misleading. We now understand that a variety of narrative and discursive processes in Marguerite’s “true stories” erode the moral clarity and universalizing pretensions we expect of exempla, particularly those for and about women. These processes, I suggest, are ultimately perspectival in nature; for they emanate from narrative and interlocutory shifts of focus or standpoint that disrupt the readerly gaze as well. Plot complications draw our attention away from the storyteller’s message, for instance, enriching Marguerite’s narratives with the muddiness of experience but diluting their validity as exempla; and her expansive frame discussions, where devisants air their divergent viewpoints and digress about tangential issues, open our eyes to alternative “morals” and to the gap between exemplarity and life. Marguerite also subverts the various storytellers’ lessons diachronically by introducing counterexamples whose didactic content is diametrically opposed to that of earlier stories. Finally, her devisants’ repeated invocation of destinataires who are female (“mes dames”) adds yet another interpretive level to the Heptaméron, honing an audience of critical readers and “seers” conditioned to question both traditional gender models and the simplistic morals that storytellers draw from their texts.

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Of all Marguerite’s novellas, Oisille’s tale of the muletière (N. 2) who dies after struggling with her rapist, summarized in the introduction to this volume, most closely resembles the format of a traditional exemplum. Unlike many of Marguerite’s other virtuous characters, the mule-driver’s wife as represented by Oisille has no discernible faults: not only does she fight to the death for her honor and chastity, but she renders her soul to God in a posture of Christian martyrdom that permeates medieval and early modern religious texts and iconography.34 From this perfectly constructed parable Oisille extrapolates two conventional and seemingly unassailable lessons: first, an exhortation for women to guard their chastity as courageously as the muletière, and second, a reminder that God often “elects” the lowly (“les choses basses”), imbuing them with grace, strength, and virtue far beyond their earthly station. As indicated in the introduction, however, reading nouvelle 2 not as a freestanding, paternalistic exemplum along its vertical axis, but diachronically within the context of the entire Heptaméron, reveals alternative perspectives, as the discussants lose their enthusiasm for martyrdom and voice their dissent more freely. After the Cordeliers’ attempted rape of the oarswoman in nouvelle 5, for example, Nomerfide claims she would rather throw herself into the river than sleep with a monk (“j’eusse myeulx aymé estre gectée en la riviere que de coucher avecq ung Cordelier,” 37); in a striking rejoinder, however, Oisille subtly revises her own contention that death is preferable to dishonor by asking the younger woman if she can swim (“Vous sçavez doncques bien nouer,” 38), implicitly acknowledging the primacy of survival. Ennasuite interrogates the wisdom of dying for one’s honor even further at the end of nouvelle 32, when she opines that nothing—not even the ideal of feminine chastity so prized by her elders—is “worth dying for” (“Il n’y a rien pourquoy je voulsisse morir,” 246), in direct contravention of the muletière’s example. The absence of debate following nouvelle 2, where unspoken differences are festering but remain suppressed, is reminiscent of Boccaccio’s truncated frame discussions, which minimize expressions of dissent. Among the Italian master’s novellas, perhaps the one most analogous to the muletière’s story, at least in terms of traditional female exemplarity, is his tale of Griselda, whose iconic patience in the face of spousal abuse is ultimately rewarded by untold riches and lavish praise—at least within the parameters of the fiction. At the level of the frame or cornice, however, Boccaccio shades his exemplum of the “best woman in the world” with an unusual hint of equivocacy, which emanates from the female discussants: “[T]he ladies, some taking one side and some another,” he tells us, “some finding fault with one of its details and some commending another, had talked about it at length” (824).35 In nouvelle 2, Marguerite does not directly imitate Boccaccio’s momentary interrogation of Griselda’s exemplarity, which is a tersely worded male précis of female discourse that suppresses far more than it reveals about the female storytellers’ disagreement. But she does undermine

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the muletière’s appeal as an effective role model for all women in other ways: by having her female devisantes express dissenting views later in the Heptaméron, by invoking responses from an extratextual community of female destinataires, and by offering readers counterexamples within the novellas themselves, much as Boccaccio himself did.36 If the first part of Oisille’s lesson is tempered over the next seventy novellas by an abundance of alternative behaviors and perspectives, the second point she makes is a key to interpreting the Heptaméron. Within the context of the second novella, the devisante’s reminder that people should humble themselves, since “God’s graces are not given to men for their noble birth and for their riches” (81),37 refers specifically to the muletière’s low social standing, similar to that of Boccaccio’s Griselda, which contrasts dramatically with her superlative virtue. In terms of gender as well as class, moreover, one might argue that the chaste martyr is in reality doubly “low,” since she—like Griselda—is both a peasant and a woman: this reading seems particularly persuasive in view of Marguerite’s assimilation of “men” (“hommes”) and “noble birth” (“noblesses”) in the aforementioned passage. Further, Oisille’s contention that God often chooses lowly people (“eslit les choses basses,” 21) over males who are wealthy and well-born pointedly directs our attention downward to the lowest echelons of society in a graphic reenactment of the Feast of Fools; and while “les choses basses” may refer primarily to the serving classes, Marguerite’s choice of an expression that is both grammatically feminine and subhuman in its connotations vividly captures the objectification of women and the disparagement of the working classes among Renaissance aristocrats. From a religious or evangelical perspective, this rhetorical subordination of “that which the world places high and considers worthy” (82)38 and concomitant exaltation of a “pauvre” and lowborn mule-driver’s wife clearly echo the New Testament warning that “the last shall be first; and the first, last” (Matt. 20: 16).39 This vertical symbolism is reinforced by the revelatory role of the martyr’s diminutive serving girl (“une petite garse de unze à douze ans,” 19) who hides under the bed (“soubz le lict,” 20) before raising her voice and using the upper bodily strata to summon help. While this foregrounding of serviteurs will be analyzed at length in chapter 4, Marguerite’s characterization of her servant as a “little girl” reinforces the evangelical overtones of this novella, by recalling the biblical exhortation that “a little child shall lead them” (Isa. 11: 6). In addition to suggesting an evangelical reading of the text, the second part of Oisille’s moral alerts readers to the possibility of hidden meanings and realities, both inside and outside the queen of Navarre’s text. By directing our attention downward and reminding us that God often prefers “les choses basses” to great wealth, superior rank, and what the world considers “high and honorable,” the oldest devisante provides a template for reading Marguerite’s world and work that requires looking beneath the surface, reversing earthly hierarchies, and excavating buried truths.40

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One manner of contesting established “truths” about gender is to splinter stereotypic models of female conduct and morality, which Marguerite does throughout the Heptaméron with her counterexamples and shifting gaze. In addition to undermining the universal validity of previous exempla by suggesting alternative behaviors and choices for women, these countermodels offer readers a plethora of contrasting female “types” and, paradoxically, explode the very concept of a feminine ideal by drawing our gaze to the empiric diversity of both women and the real-world crises they face. In nouvelle 2, the model of virtue, self-sacrifice, and chastity that the muletière appears to represent counterbalances the negative female stereotype portrayed in story 1: not the idealized virgin but rather her adulterous, scheming, and lascivious double, who like Eve defies God and corrupts her husband. In addition to sleeping with a bishop for profit (“pour son proffict,” 12) and out of greed (“plus par avarice que par amour,” 11–12), SaintAignan’s wife takes a second paramour named du Mesnil “for her pleasure” (“pour son plaisir,” 12), swearing to the sincere and honorable young man that he is her only lover. At the urging of a servant, however, the youth discovers the matron’s subterfuge and ends their affair, prompting the spurned woman to take preemptive action against him. Fearful that he will disclose her liaison with the bishop, Saint-Aignan’s wife systematically discredits both du Mesnil and the damaging truths to which he is privy with her own lies. Most egregiously, she convinces her own gullible husband that du Mesnil is stalking and harassing her, persuading him to murder the young man she once loved (“lequel elle aimoit si fort,” 12). Despite Simontaut’s use of this story to warn against female trickery (“je mectray peine de faire ung recueil de tous les mauvais tours que les femmes ont faict aux pauvres hommes,” 11), Marguerite complicates what appears to be a negative feminine stereotype by making both the bishop and husband accomplices of the woman’s wrongdoings. It is the clergyman rather than the matron who initiates their relationship by “pursuing” her (“fut fort pursuivye de l’evesque,” 11), and while her consort is unaware of the bishop’s sexual involvement with his wife (“il ne s’apparceut du vice de sa femme et de l’evesque,” 11), he does insist that she entertain the influential cleric (“son mary la sollicitoit de l’entretenir,” 12), much like Pacifico in Ariosto’s La Lena, who encourages his wife’s prostitution for economic reasons.41 Instead of taking responsibility for his own crimes, however, Saint-Aignan sees only that his wife is “at the bottom of all his trouble” (77)42 and engages a sorcerer to kill her, with a hex that targets the Duchess of Alençon (Marguerite herself) and du Mesnil’s father as well. The husband’s and bishop’s complicity in story 1 in no way exculpates the wife, whose sins are complex and egregious, worthy of Dante’s bottom circles: not only is she a temptress and murderer whom Simontaut describes as “more beautiful than virtuous” (“plus belle que vertueuse,” 11), but she also bears false witness against her lover to protect her “honor” and preemptively betrays her husband to the authorities upon learning that he

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plans to kill her. Despite the woman’s evil behavior, however, which may exceed Cepparello’s villainy in novella 1 of the Decameron, Marguerite undermines Simontaut’s efforts to make the wife a scapegoat for either the bishop’s or her husband’s corruption: instead, her allusions to male as well as female transgressions extend the sphere of culpability for both antagonists’ sins by widening the narrow-angle lens we typically use to assess blame, and by complicating the moral clarity traditionally present in exempla. If Marguerite muddies her portrait of “the worst woman in the world”43 through the glimpses she affords us of the husband’s and bishop’s complicity, she also revisits the themes and moral of the muletière’s story from alternative viewing angles in subsequent nouvelles. Instead of being pursued by a single lascivious male like her counterpart in story 2, the batelière in nouvelle 5 is propositioned by not one but two Cordeliers whom she is ferrying across the river. Firmly, but less harshly than the muletière before her, the ferrywoman rebuffs the unwanted declarations of love from her admirers, who respond much as the valet did in story 2: “They decided to rape her, both of them, and if she resisted, to throw her into the river” (98).44 Once she guesses the friars’ intention, the “saige” or wise peasant changes her tactics with the insight of a savvy “outsider within,” pretending to play along with the miscreants, and promising to satisfy their desires if they grant her two requests: first, they must never speak of the affair; and second, to spare her the embarrassment of having one cleric watch while she has sex with his companion, the men must split up and let her ferry them to separate islands. Without realizing that the cunning ferrywoman plans to “divide and conquer” them, the feeble-minded clerics acquiesce to her demands and wind up marooned and sexually unrequited—until the authorities, accompanied by the woman’s husband and a band of heckling spectators, arrest them and gloat over their humiliation. With this conclusion, the Cordeliers’ own voyeuristic expectations are reversed, transforming them, rather than the batelière, into the shamed objects of her gaze and that of her community. In contrast to the muletière, the ferrywoman relies on her wits rather than flight or brute strength to resist her assailants, and the outcome is happy on two counts: first, the Cordeliers neither rape nor kill the batelière, who emerges as a live secular heroine rather than a dead religious martyr; and second, the friars are both apprehended and punished, unlike the valet in story 2, who escapes and is never heard from again. Although one might easily assume that Marguerite is correcting the muletière’s tragic strategy in novella 2 with the ferrywoman’s more felicitous choices in story 5, it is probably more accurate to say that she is comparing the two approaches and letting readers decide which is preferable or even suggesting that different contexts call for different tactics. Whereas the muletière is blunt and honest to a fault, threatening to have the valet beaten rather than attempting to placate him, the batelière’s moral code is more flexible: to survive, she is willing to lie and deceive the two friars, manipulating them with salacious promises she has no intention of keeping. Lest we overlook

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the ethical ramifications of her survival strategy, Marguerite foregrounds the ferrywoman’s deceit by referring to it as “tromperie” (36) or trickery— in a context which is paradoxically laudatory: for the Franciscan masters of deceit, previously blinded by their own lust, eventually recognize their intended victim’s subterfuge (“congnoiss[oient] la tromperie,” 36) and their own abjection as “tricked trickster(s),” a trope common in late-medieval farce and bourgeois prose that hinges upon scopic inversions such as those seen here.45 In addition to offering a real-world alternative to the muletière’s martyrdom, story 5 draws our attention retrospectively to hybrid iconographical elements within the second nouvelle itself. Whereas the mule-driver’s wife dies a martyr, leaving readers with a transcendent image of her praying hands and upturned face, this sublime pose of “chastity triumphant” arguably supersedes, and is grafted onto, a radically different model of female strength present in popular iconography46: not the gently bred female who passively endures her violation, but rather the gritty fishwife or “woman beating a man” who crops up repeatedly in medieval and early modern farce, marginalia, choir stalls, and other artwork.47 Although the mule-driver’s wife initially threatens to have her husband beat the valet rather than taking a bâton into her own hands, she herself is “so strong” (“si forte,” 19) that she fends the servant off twice, convincing him that he will never subdue her with his bare hands. In this important inversion of stereotypical gender roles, the muletière’s superior brawn and tenacity finally “out-man” the valet, prompting him to draw his sword to forestall his own emasculation and to compensate for his own inadequacy. With this gesture, Marguerite sublimates and assimilates the tale’s burlesque physicality into a paean to the matron’s chastity and martyrdom.48 Far from being an occasional theme in the Heptaméron, sexual assaults appear with disquieting frequency throughout Marguerite’s discourse, as illustrated by her inclusion of a third rape narrative and a third type of female heroine within the first half-day of storytelling. In nouvelle 4, often considered semiautobiographical, an aristocratic young widow is attacked by “an extremely tall man [with] charm and good looks” (90).49 Like the assailants in stories 2 and 5, the young gentleman initially makes verbal advances or “propos d’une honneste amityé” (28) to the widow, who responds much as the batelière (“feit la responce qu’elle devoit,” 35) and mule-driver’s wife (“estoit si vraie femme de bien,” 19) do, with the conventional “no” expected of any virtuous woman. What differentiates her response from that of the muletière and batelière is the style in which it is proffered. While the muletière’s refusal is outraged and threatening, and the ferrywoman’s, canny, cerebral, and battle-ready, the Flemish widow graciously forgives her charming and handsome admirer for his audacity in daring to proposition her, never imagining the violence that lies camouflaged beneath his “honest” demeanor and courtly manners: “She had … no difficulty in forgiving this good-looking and well-bred man for having been so presumptuous. Indeed,

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she made it plain that she did not at all mind his talking to her, though she also frequently reminded him that he must be careful what he said” (90).50 At this point, before their gazes diverge, the widow sees the gentleman (“le voyant tant beau et honneste,” 28) much as he sees himself, in something akin to Lacan’s imaginary order, and indeed pardons him because of the same “beauty” that he admires in his mirror (29). For his part, the enamored gentleman is similarly deceived upon “seeing” the widow’s laughing and joyous countenance (“voyant la seur de son maistre femme joyeuse et qui ryoit voluntiers,” 28), which convinces him that she will be receptive to a sexual dalliance, even after she has said “no.” His error lies in conflating two different senses of the verb “veoir”: the outward “sight” that causes him to fall in love (“voyant la seur,” 28) with the widow, and the (in)sight required to gauge her interest in him (“pour veoir si les propos d’une honneste amityé luy desplairoient,” 28). In the absence of insight, the gentleman turns to his own reflected image, which persuades him scopically that his desires will be reciprocated: “As he admired himself in his mirror, he was absolutely convinced that there was not a woman in the world who could possibly resist such a handsome and elegant sight” (91).51 The differing perspectives that the gentleman and widow bring to their flirtation, and their differing interpretations of the word “no,” help explain what transpires next. Imagining that a young and healthy woman of her experience will almost certainly take pity upon him as well as herself (“prandroit peult-estre pitié de luy et d’elle ensemble,” 29), especially if he can corner her in a well-chosen place that offers him a tactical advantage (“un lieu à son advantaige,” 29), the gentil homme devises an elaborate scheme that involves inviting the lady, her brother, and their retinue to his own estate and then rigging a trap door to her bedchamber, where he plans to pursue his suit nonverbally. When she finally “feels” (“le sentit … entre ses bras,” 30) the gentil homme beside her in bed and “sees” his aggression and true character (“elle veid qu’il n’espargnoit riens de toutes ses forces,” 30), however, the polite and aristocratic widow, much like the muletière, responds to his “forces” with her own: “She was a strong woman,” Marguerite tells us, “and proceeded to lash out, scratching and biting [him]” (92) on the face.52 Not only does the Flemish woman explode the gentil homme’s stereotype of a “merry widow,” but she also dispels—with body language—the myth that a woman’s “no” means “yes” and that mere friendliness bespeaks sexual receptiveness. Given the gentleman’s inattentiveness to the widow’s words, there is some irony in the fact that language saves her, albeit somewhat differently than it does the batelière: for instead of lying and tricking her assailant, like the ferrywoman, she cries out for help to her dame d’honneur, whose potential role as an aural witness to his crime frightens the gentleman away. If her vocalizations save the widow’s life, it is silence that protects her reputation, in contrast to what transpires in the muletière’s and batelière’s

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tales. When the ferrywoman (N. 5) tells her husband, the judicial authorities, and her neighbors that the Cordeliers plotted to rape and kill her, for example, no one doubts her testimony: her accusations, after all, in no way contest the townspeople’s beliefs, but rather confirm their own views of the friars’ wickedness. Aside from the clergymen, all the characters achieve a perspectival consensus. As a result, the ferrywoman’s success in eluding and entrapping the notorious Cordeliers brings her glory, while forcing the friars to see themselves being seen: “When [they] saw [the villagers], they did their best to hide,” writes Marguerite, “even as Adam hid … when he saw that he was naked” (99).53 By the same token, the serving girl’s cries for help after the muletière’s rape bring the townspeople running; and her retelling of the story, together with the visual testimony of the matron’s martyred body, offers visible proof of the valet’s crime and his victim’s resistance. In the absence of the murderer, this nouvelle also concludes with a communitywide perspectival consensus. The ocular patterns, body imagery, and perspectival responses to the widow’s assault, as well as the focus on discourse and its dangers, are far more complicated in nouvelle 4. Much like the batelière, the Flemish widow (N. 4) initially proposes to publicize her ordeal and bring her assailant to justice. “I shall speak to my brother [a highly placed prince] in the morning,” she says, “and I’ll have the man’s head as proof of my chastity” (93; “le matin je feray en sorte vers mon frere, que sa teste sera tesmoing de ma chasteté, 31). This allusion to the gentil homme’s head refers not only to the bloody “scratches” and “bites” (92; “esgratineures et morsures,” 30) the widow inflicted on his face, which serve as outward indicators of his character flaws, but also to the decapitation, or other form of execution, that he faces for the crime. As a symbol and displaced image of his own attack on the widow, the disfiguring lacerations that the gentil homme regards in the mirror (“voiant son visaige si deschiré,” 31) make him both a vicarious witness to his own crime and, through specular transference, its bloodied victim. Rather than seeking pardon, however, the young man curses his own beauty (“Beaulté! … par ta vaine promesse, j’ay entrepris une chose impossible,” 30) with an androgynous lament more often associated with attractive women, such as Ariosto’s Angelica,54 and promptly takes to his bed, avoiding the light so that no one will see him. From her righteous and politically privileged viewing position, the widow sees no drawback in denouncing her assailant; but her elderly companion, who herself doubts her lady’s story, has a different perspective based upon her familiarity with gossipmongers and aficionados of scandal. Consequently, she urges the young widow to praise God that she escaped unscathed rather than seeking vengeance, and warns her that publicizing the attack could backfire: So take care, Madame—if you try to make your honour even more impressive, you may only end up doing the opposite. If you make an

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Gender and patriarchy: a many-sided view official complaint against him, you will have to bring the whole thing into the open, whereas at the moment nobody knows anything, and he certainly won’t go and tell anybody. What is more, just suppose you did go ahead, and Monseigneur, your brother, did bring the case to justice, and the poor man was put to death—people will say that he must have had his way with you. Most people will argue that it’s not very easy to accept that a man can carry out such an act, unless he has been given a certain amount of encouragement by the lady concerned (94).55

Informed in part by patriarchal tradition, and in part by the stylized etiquette of courtly love and honnête amitié, the code of silence that the widow’s female companion invokes is so consistent with the devisants’ own mores that they praise the dame d’honneur’s “good sense” in covering up the crime, rather than condemning her reluctance to bring a sexual predator to justice. At the same time, however, the storytellers in no way disparage the batelière for publicizing her near-rape, and they tacitly applaud Oisille’s narration of the muletière’s story, which brings honor rather than shame to the victim. How do we explain these perspectival distinctions? Given the disparity in rank between the Flemish widow and the two other women who are assaulted, one might perhaps conclude that considerations of class determine whether to “tell” or “not tell”; but clearly other factors, ranging from the perpetrator’s standing in the community to the credibility and visibility of the evidence amassed against him, play an important role as well. The muletière’s mutilated corpse or body language, for example, along with the young girl’s eyewitness testimony, leaves no room for doubt about the circumstances of her death, the culpability of her assailant, or the fervor of her own resistance to his illicit advances; and the Cordeliers’ notorious reputation for sexual misconduct, along with the compromising circumstances in which they are found, makes the batelière’s story unassailable. In these two instances, the good of telling what happened far outweighs the potential danger of disclosing the truth. Because the “strong” Flemish aristocrat has no wounds to show for her struggle, however, and her assailant is well regarded in the courtly circles they both frequent, her elderly attendant fears that denouncing the attacker will damage the widow’s own reputation or, in perspectival terms, the way she is seen by others.56 Invoking a sexual stereotype that persists even today, the dame d’honneur warns that “most people” (94) will believe her mistress encouraged or even yielded to the handsome man before crying foul. Many of them have “seen” (94, 32) her friendliness toward him, after all; and this, along with the man’s “beauty,” will predispose them to substitute their own view of what happened for her own. Unlike the elderly attendant, however, whose advice clashes with modern ideals of justice, de Navarre implicitly contests this sexist stereotype of the female rape victim by breaking the silence of the Flemish widow through her own storytelling—a gesture that is particularly significant if the tale is autobiographical. Even if it is not, the widow’s

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compelling first-hand testimony and the counterexamples of both the muletière and batelière undercut the gender-related biases that the elderly attendant perpetrates: namely, the myth that women are responsible for their assailants’ crimes and that pointing the finger of blame at one’s attacker is even more dishonorable. Far from bringing shame on the ferrywoman and mule-driver’s wife, the widely disseminated rape narratives in nouvelles 2 and 5 honor the women involved, celebrate their moral triumph, and offer strength and new options to other potential victims, who may feel doubly violated by societal pressure to remain silent and internalize their angst. In addition to her portraits of strong and admirable women in the Heptaméron, which revisit, challenge, and expand notions of feminine exemplarity within differing contexts, and from myriad viewing angles, Marguerite also offers us a broad range of flawed female figures: not just feminine villains such as Saint-Aignan’s conniving wife in nouvelle 1, but also chaste women who yield to temptation, female characters whose public virtue masks private transgressions, self-satisfied and proud women whose honor verges on hubris, and models of feminine decorum whose virtue is inhumane and mean-spirited. While these flawed female characters may initially appear to be antimodels or negative exempla, together they muddy and contest the very concept of female models, exempla, and stereotypes, serving instead to enrich and add complexity to traditional portrayals of both the feminine and human condition. In story 20, which Saffredent narrates, the handsome serviteur of a seemingly virtuous widow discovers that his lady’s “honnesté,” or the chaste façade she uses to keep him at arm’s length, is merely a cover for her lusty affair with a dirty stablehand (“palefronier,” 154) or muleteer (“mulletier,” 155). In a different context, this narrative might serve as an antifeminist argument in the querelle des femmes; but Saffredent, who models himself as an admirer rather than a detractor of women in his prefatory comments, offers his story instead as a cautionary tale about the stylized conventions of courtly love and honnête amitié, which provide a perfect foil for hypocrites. Specifically, the narrator warns women not to emulate the widow in story 20 and deceive their frustrated suitors with the hollow rhetoric of chastity and Platonic love, especially when the lies serve merely to enhance the ladies’ own glory and mask their vices. Despite Saffredent’s insistence that he loves women and does not want to anger them with his story, one might easily interpret his tale as a stereotypical indictment of feminine mendacity, a charge that we see elsewhere in the Heptaméron. Yet when Oisille contends she would not believe Saffredent’s story if the devisants had not sworn to tell the truth, she indirectly reminds us that males as well as females lie upon occasion—an argument that Parlamente later uses to defend the queen of Castile (N. 24).57 By pointing out that both sexes are duplicitous, Oisille adroitly enlarges the gender-specific moral of nouvelle 20, doubles its narrowly drawn frame of reference, and subtly transforms Saffredent’s strange story of feminine

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mendacity into a cautionary tale for everyone. That Marguerite is consciously severing morality from gender, even provisionally, may seem far-fetched given the patriarchal biases of her culture. Far from being desensitized by the deeply entrenched sexual inequalities that permeate her culture, however, the author expresses her reservations about the gendering of morality as early as nouvelle 15, where a cuckolded young matron justifies her own dalliance with an attractive suitor by insisting she merely followed her husband’s “exemple” (123). Unable to discredit his wife’s arguments logically, with an articulate defense of the gender-specific morality he espouses without question, the taciturn husband merely cites his society’s double standard: “He did not know what to say, except that men’s honour and women’s honour were not the same thing” (197).58 At first glance, this vague affirmation of sexual difference on a cultural as well as biological level seems to nullify the wife’s argument, effectively quashing her implicit advocacy of a single moral code for both sexes and replacing it with an essentialist view of both gender and morality. Yet upon closer inspection, the husband’s inability to justify rationally either his own infidelity or society’s double standard weakens the strength of his argument, leaving readers to grapple with two “wrongs”: for while the wife’s judgment in imitating a transgressor, even in the name of vengeance, is clearly flawed from an evangelical standpoint, the same is true of her husband’s infidelity, which contravenes the seventh commandment of the Old Testament. If story 20, like nouvelle 15, seems to yield a moral for men as well as women, a closer reading of the narrative and frame discussion suggests alternative lessons, as well as the possibility that the widow’s tale is so singular, and relationships between ladies and stablehands so rare, that they hold no didactic value either for women or anyone else. While it is inconceivable to Oisille that a gentlewoman would opt for a muleteer rather than an “honneste gentil homme” as her lover, Hircan half-jokingly notes one important advantage in the widow’s choice: “If you only knew … what a 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, you’d excuse the poor widow in this story!” (232).59 Although the female devisantes do not take Hircan seriously, his laughing aside upends the normative and myopic perspective of Saffredent and the other discussants, who had heretofore envisioned what happened through the gentil homme’s eyes alone: for despite the abundant information that we glean from Saffredent’s narrative about the suitor’s desires (“ce qu’il desiroit le plus,” 153; “desirant sur toutes choses de la povoir trouver seulle,” 154; my italics), his high opinion of himself (“se sentoit beau et digne d’estre aymé,”153), and the widow’s perversity (“par vostre meschanceté suis guery,” 154; my italics), his androcentric discourse fails to touch on, or even imagine, the woman’s desires or her suitor’s own possible shortcomings.60 Hircan is an unlikely spokesperson for the female perspective, but the well-documented historical facts that inform his facetious comment at once

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throw the moralistic discussion off-course, by shifting our sympathies from the “pauvre gentil homme” (153) to the “pauvre vefve” (155) or poor widow, and signal two possible drawbacks to taking an aristocratic lover: on the one hand, it is true that noble courtiers of the Middle Ages and Renaissance regularly abandoned their ladies for war and adventure; and on the other hand, even those who did not often articulated their courtship in military terms, as a strategical campaign or “siege” aimed at the “conquest” and surrender of their prey. True, we have no indication that the gentil homme in story 20 is either militarily inclined or particularly aggressive; but Hircan’s shift of focus from the gentleman’s desires to those of his lady obliquely encourages readers to reevaluate the novella from her perspective and through the eyes of her desire. On the one hand, the widow expresses her love for the gentleman unequivocally, as one might in a purely linguistic flirtation; but there is nothing in her conventional “honnête” rhetoric to suggest that she wants him or is even seriously considering him as a sexual partner. Rather, she hypothetically indicates, perhaps to placate his healthy ego, that if she were “obliged to do anything for a gentleman” (231),61 he is the only nobleman with whom she would contemplate having an affair—a statement that remains unimpeached by her liaison with the ungentlemanly muleteer. To prevent him from mistaking her diplomacy for encouragement, however, the widow makes it clear that she will tolerate no sexual advances from the gentleman, insisting that any hint that he hopes for more (“qu’il pretendist davantaige,” 153) will end their friendship forever. Precisely why the widow chooses to sleep with her retainer rather than her courtly admirer remains a mystery, primarily because we view the relationship and its collapse through the gentleman’s eyes. From a less biased perspective, one might speculate that the coarse palefrenier holds a greater biological attraction for her than the refined gentil homme, as symbolized by his lexical association with nature rather than culture: for the servant is characterized not only by his ugly and dirty appearance, but also by the horses he tends and the outdoor setting where he and the widow make love, away from the stylized rituals of honnête amour. If we recognize the widow as a desiring subject, moreover, and not simply as a desired object, a second possibility emerges: as Simontaut suggests, perhaps the widow is seeking a discreet way to sate her sexual desires without damaging her reputation, far from the prying eyes and wagging tongues of courtly society.62 Indeed, one might argue, as Simontaut does, that the groom’s low rank and economic dependency make him more attractive to the widow than a social equal would be: unlike a nobleman, a servant would not “have the courage to talk” (“ne sçauroi[t] avoir hardiesse de parler,” 155) about their liaison, and would “not be believed” if he did (“ne seroyent pas creuz,” 155). Even if the widow is physically attracted to the gentleman she claims to love, which is by no means certain, arguably the rift between culture and nature that alienates this chaste and “honneste” woman from her biological

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desires, creating a breach between her public and private persona, would also be an impediment to any sexual relationship she might consider having with her admirer. Since the gentleman prizes her in part because of her honor and unavailability, the widow may sense that he will lose respect for her if she yields to him, just as he does when he finds her in the muleteer’s embrace. Clearly a fair number of the “honnête” relationships that we see in the Heptaméron, and in the Renaissance as a whole, are sexual in nature; and rather than shying away voluntarily from such a liaison, the gentleman in story 20 “burns” (“d’un feu si plaisant, que plus on brusle, plus on veult brusler,” 153) with desire for the widow. Indeed, it is ironically his own impatience to consummate their union that disillusions the gentleman, when he violates the widow’s privacy and discovers her in flagrante delicto with the muleteer. Yet the ease with which he breaks his promise not to pursue her sexually, and, conversely, his scornful response to her sexuality once he discovers her with the stablehand and sees her “shame” (232; “sa honte,” 154), suggest that the gentleman himself has difficulty reconciling the paragon of chastity he reveres with the sensual temptress he desires. In this sense, the love scene between the widow and her servant which the gentleman happens upon in the garden, a locus that is rife with sexual symbolism, may be read in at least two different ways: not only does it unmask the widow’s visceral and wanton otherness on a literal level, freeing the gentleman from her spell, but it also functions psychologically and symbolically as a projection of the gentleman’s own libido, or as a reversed mirror image of his own erotic dreams.63 As for the widow’s pose at the end of the story, when the gentleman repudiates her, it is significant that she covers her face and eyes rather than her nakedness, ostensibly to avoid seeing her own fallen image reflected in the gentleman’s eyes. While Saffredent takes this to mean that the woman is simply hiding from the truth, or from “the man who … could now see her all too clearly” (232),64 the powerful iconic image also lends itself to a number of alternative interpretations: on one level, the widow’s covered eyes figure her blindness to morality and virtue; but on another level, the woman appears to be resisting both the gentleman’s efforts to define her as a whore and the more insidious danger of seeing herself through androcentric eyes and adopting his world view as her own.65 This patriarchal perspective dominates nouvelle 32, where Marguerite again uses the male gaze and male discourse to define female transgression. The story, one of Marguerite’s most famous, tells of a repentant adulteress whose husband, after murdering her lover, forces his wife to dress completely in black, drink from her murdered lover’s skull, keep his skeleton in her bedroom armoire, and maintain a shaven head to signal her shame. While Oisille is the nominal narrator, it is largely through the husband’s eyes, as he recounts his-story to a guest, that we see and form our impressions of his wife, who like many of Marguerite’s female characters is a visually iconic figure: appearing and disappearing from behind a tapestry in theatrical

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fashion, she has little to say for herself, but instead functions as pure spectacle, defined by the gaze and discourse of others.66 When the guest, known as Bernage or the sieur de Sivray, finally speaks with the woman after observing her at dinner and hearing her-story from her husband, the adulterous wife validates his patriarchal discourse by expressing her profound remorse, not just for her “sins … so great (333) or “faulte ... si grande” (244), but also for offending “le seigneur de ceans,” or her husband, whose harsh castigation she seems to welcome as a partial expiation for her wrongdoings. Given Oisille’s somewhat grisly claim that her story will unveil a punishment worse than death, it is easy to read the husband’s pained and reasonable testimony about his wife’s transgression as a cautionary tale about the fruits of female adultery. Realizing that Bernage is troubled by the macabre spectacle he was witnessed and by the beautiful woman’s sadness, the husband attempts to dispel any doubts his guest might have about his own apparent cruelty (“afin que vous ne pensiez qu’il y ayt en moy telle cruaulté sans grande occasion,” 243) with an explanation that justifies his own harshness and blames his wife. Despite his enormous love for her and her own apparent love for him, the husband tells us, his wife inexplicably fell in love with a young gentleman in the household, whom the husband killed when the gentil homme started to climb into his wife’s bed. The woman’s punishment, he contends, is commensurate with her sin: in the room where she “used to go to wallow in her pleasures” (332)67 with her lover, he has displayed the dead man’s bones “like some precious object” (332).68 Beyond the mental torture he imposes upon her with the skull-cup and skeleton, however, the husband claims that he imposes no physical penalty on his wife, but rather treats her just as he treats himself: “Au demorant, je la traicte comme moy-mesmes” (244). While the husband’s revenge is harsh, the woman neither denies the substance of his accusations nor decries the punishment he visits upon her, which appears to confirm his account. Nevertheless, his testimony raises questions that merit our attention. First, the husband indicates that he loved his future wife so much, or so obsessively, that “in order to marry her,” he brought her to his house “maulgré ses parens” (243) or despite her family or parents. While this could be an oblique reference to the wife’s inferior social status, the husband’s references to the fear (“craincte,” 243) and danger he experienced suggest that his marriage was clandestine, a common but controversial practice in Renaissance France that Marguerite writes about elsewhere in the Heptaméron. What the husband fails to tell us clearly, however, is whether the bride was a willing participant in the elopement, or rather a love object whom he abducted. Because he contends that she “showed [him] many signs of affection” (332),69 our initial inclination is to accept the first hypothesis, which is strengthened by the devisants’ silence on the matter. If valid, however, the second hypothesis would go a long way toward explaining the wife’s behavior, including her puppet-like demeanor

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and unwillingness to speak freely, and that of her husband, whose selfabsorption, pathological sense of rejection (“she had preferred [his love] to mine,” 333),70 conflation of her desires with his own (“à son ayse et à la myenne,” 243), and penchant for hyperbole all bespeak a troubled psyche that is prone to emotional and behavioral excesses. One such excess is his fixation on perfection, which is vaguely reminiscent of Camus’s Caligula, who opts to become perfectly evil when absolute goodness eludes him: for when his superlative marriage is broken, the husband cannily restages it as a perfect punishment, brilliantly adapted to both the crime and his own soif d’absolu. Even if we abandon this alternative reading, the husband’s reduction of his own crime to three short words (“[I] slew him,” 332; “je le tuay,” 243) and his deft attribution of the killing to his wife (“mort pour l’amour d’elle,” 244; “mort ... par son peché,” 244) bespeak an effort to minimize his own culpability and manipulate both others and the truth. By counterbalancing the husband’s discourse with alternative perspectives, including those of the guest and devisants, and embedding within it echoes of pertinent intertexts, Marguerite successfully transforms what begins as a cautionary tale about female adultery into a richly layered meditation on marriage, gender, and the human condition. From the outset, readers of Boccaccio may well be predisposed to sympathize with the wife and mistrust her unforgiving husband, who is in many ways a throwback to the vengeful Guillaume de Roussillon in Day 4, novella 9, of the Decameron.71 In this equally macabre tale, Roussillon serves his adulterous wife her lover’s heart in a stew; but rather than accepting her punishment remorsefully, like her counterpart in the Heptaméron, Roussillon’s wife jumps from the window and dies. In a conclusion radically different from Marguerite’s, it is the husband rather than the wife who is conscience-stricken, and it is he rather than she who is vilified. Despite the important differences between the two tales, it seems likely that the queen of Navarre was inspired in part by Boccaccio’s grisly narrative, which would have been well-known to her aristocratic and humanistic readers. That she chooses not to glorify either suicide or fin amors as her predecessor did, opting instead to showcase the adulterous wife’s repentance and eventual rehabilitation, is probably less an antifeminist gesture on Marguerite’s part than a reflection of her évangélisme, as well as a statement in favor of survival rather than self-destruction. Notwithstanding the different endings, moreover, and the absence of any direct criticism of the husband in Marguerite’s story 32, Boccaccio’s vilification of Roussillon lurks in the background as a palimpsest, casting a negative light on his sixteenth-century counterpart. As Ennasuite reminds us, and as scholars such as François Rigolot have amply demonstrated, Marguerite’s story 32 holds numerous New Testament echoes, veiled allusions to Mary Magdalene, and references to Christian liturgy and practices.72 Lest we fail to note these references in the narrative itself, the youngest devisante draws our attention to them midway through the frame discussion, when she responds to Longarine’s contention that

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nothing can salvage an adulterous woman’s lost honor by evoking Mary Magdalene: “Tell me, I beg you, whether the Magdalene does or does not have more honour amongst men than her sister, who was the virgin?” (335).73 While Longarine grudgingly concedes that the New Testament female character is praised in many quarters for “her great love for Jesus Christ” (335)74 and for her “grand penitence” (246), she points out that the Magdalen continues to be known as “La Pecheresse” or “The Sinner,” a name that even repentance cannot erase.75 In her self-congratulatory scorn for fallen women, however, the virtuous and recently widowed Longarine implicitly denies the divine power of forgiveness, a cornerstone of both New Testament and evangelical theology that Ennasuite is quick to invoke: “I don’t care … what names men call me, only that God pardons me and my husband” (335).76 In this quick-witted response to Longarine’s theological lapse, which subtly reminds us that “the first shall be last, and the last, first,” Ennasuite observes that within Christian ethics, God alone is the ultimate judge, and that divine mercy and absolution extend even—and perhaps especially—to repentant sinners whom men revile, notwithstanding the censure of self-righteous dévôts who rush to cast the first stone. In addition to its veiled references to Decameron 4.9 and the New Testament, nouvelle 32 also contains allusions to the Christian Eucharist that enrich and complicate the narrative’s connotations: for when the repentant matron drinks from the bejeweled skull of her dead lover, who according to the husband died for her sin, the scene’s linguistic and iconographic reminders of the sacrament of communion divert our attention from Marguerite’s literal discourse on female transgression, and draw our gaze instead to glimmers of theological allegory in the episode.77 As the sadistic orchestrator of his wife’s punishment, the gentil homme recalls Boccaccio’s Gualtieri (N. 100), who resembles a harsh Old Testament deity as he tests Griselda’s obedience by pretending to kill their children, divorce her, and marry a younger woman. In turn, his chaste and uncomplaining wife—whose unmerited tribulations anticipate, but seem radically different from, those of Marguerite’s repentant adulteress—personifies the blind obedience and long-suffering patience of both Job and Griselda. By analogy, when we attempt to read Marguerite’s nouvelle 32 allegorically, the stern but merciful patriarch initially appears to represent God; his errant wife, the world he “so loved” (“l’amour que je lui portois estoit si grand,” 243) that he sent a son (“un jeune gentil homme que j’avois nourry ceans,” 243) to save it; the lover, a martyred Christ who died for her sins (“l’amy ... mort par son peché,” 244) and the love he bore her (“mort pour l’amour d’elle,” 244); and the guest Bernage, an intercessor who secures the wife’s forgiveness after she confesses and drinks (“en beuvant et mangeant,” 244) from “the cup of salvation” (literally, the “head” of the Church) in remembrance of her martyred lover (“affin qu’elle n’en oblye la memoire,” 244).78 Notwithstanding the neatness of this patriarchal and theological reading of the text, loose ends cause the provisional analysis to unravel. Certainly,

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the husband’s “furor and despair” (“fureur et desespoir,” 243) over his wife’s infidelity and sinfulness, which appear ungodlike at first glance, seem more plausible when we reread biblical accounts of God’s reactions to human corruption; and while the notion of an allegorized Christ climbing into bed with a married woman may initially strike us as unseemly and surprisingly inconsistent with Marguerite’s usual decorum in matters of religion, the analogy between Christ and an “amy” or lover not only occurs elsewhere in the Heptaméron, but is also widespread in religious iconography, theological treatises, and the Middle Ages and Renaissance in general.79 What ultimately causes the allegorical reading to collapse, however, is the animosity between the husband and lover in story 32. Unlike the Trinitarian Christian Father who is consubstantial with the Son and Holy Ghost, the husband in this novella neither sends the lover to his wife nor welcomes his presence: and while he never imputes any sin to the lover, preserving our analogy between the “amy” and Christ, the husband does describe himself as the “enemy” of his wife’s friend, in a statement that links him more closely on a lexical level to the devil than to the Father, Son, or Holy Spirit. Indeed, the interchangeability of the terms “Enemy” and “Satan” in many Renaissance texts, supported by the contention of Martin Luther and other reformers that papist abuses were the work of the devil, draws our attention to what appear to be evangelical overtones in Marguerite’s New Testament, rather than Old Testament, allegory. Because Jesus is likened to a “bridegroom” in the gospels, the husband’s suggestion in story 32 that his marriage was clandestine, undertaken without the consent of his bride’s family, allows us to view him as an illicit or false bridegroom who has taken his bride (the Church) captive by estranging her from both her real Father’s house and the true Bridegroom (Christ the Lover). This interpretation, consistent with the reformers’ belief that clerical corruption and sophistry have diverted Catholicism from its apostolic and scriptural roots, finds support in Marguerite’s allegorical exploration within the novella of Church practices and tenets that troubled evangelicals and “prereformers”: among these are idolatry, represented by the skeletal relics of the lover that are “hung … like some precious object” (332);80 transubstantiation, ironically suggested by the physical presence of the lover’s dead body and the “head” of the Church in the Eucharistic ritual; the privileging of harsh penance or outward “works” over inward contrition and forgiveness, which contravenes “the promotion of faith and the service of love” that Luther advocates;81 the wife’s enforced mourning and black clothing, which the Catholic Church required but many reformers eschewed during periods of penance such as Lent; and the virtual imprisonment of the penitent, whom the husband forces to engage in bizarre rites that he himself has instituted, rather than acknowledging her freedom of conscience and the futility of what Luther calls “forced service.”82 With its embedded references to biblical texts and theological controversies, this story about female transgression, gender relations, and family dynamics seems to reflect on evangelical themes and Church practices; but the allegory

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cuts both ways, since the likening of Christ to a bridegroom in the New Testament has familial as well as ecclesiastical implications. While St. Paul, in his Letters to the Ephesians (5: 25–27), instructs wives to obey and respect their husbands, he also requires a reciprocal commitment on the bridegroom’s part to love his wife as he loves himself; and although one might argue that this injunction is abrogated by the wife’s infidelity, given the evangelist’s exhortation to avoid those who engage in sexual immorality, there is nothing in the New Testament that specifically exempts husbands from this Christological obligation to love and give themselves up to their wives—an injunction to which the husband in nouvelle 32 does not fully adhere. Toward the end of the narrative itself, the guest Bernage diplomatically offers an outsider’s opinion of the couple’s dysfunctional household, tempering the husband’s “fureur” and “desespoir” with pragmatic and humanitarian considerations: in addition to suggesting that the man reward his wife’s penance and treat her mercifully, Bernage also reminds the husband that he has no children and that normalizing relations with his spouse would allow him to continue his family line. Subsequently, Oisille tells us, the husband “took [his wife] back,” both because of his desire to have legitimate heirs and “because of the compassion he felt for his wife” (334).83 Particularly in light of Boccaccio’s novella 39, moreover, where Roussillon realizes he has sinned following his wife’s suicide (“vedendo questo, stordí forte, e parvegli aver mal fatto,” 250), it is significant that Marguerite appears to embed a brief reference to the punitive husband’s own penitence in the very last sentence of her narrative, implying that he too, like his predecessor, finally recognizes the sinful nature of his cruelty and—unlike Roussillon, who merely flees—attempts to atone for it: [Le Roi] envoya son painctre, nommé Jehan de Paris, pour luy rapporter ceste dame au vif. Ce qu’il feit après le consentement de son mary, lequel, après longue penitence, pour le desir qu’il avoit d’avoir enfans et pour la pitié qu’il eut de sa femme, qui en si grande humilité recepvoit ceste penitence, il la reprint avecq soy, et en eut depuis beaucoup de beaulx enfans (245). [The king] sent his painter, Jean de Paris, to bring back her living likeness. This the painter did, with the approval of the husband, who because of his desire to have children, and because of the compassion he felt for his wife in her humble submission to her penance, took her back, and subsequently had many fine children by her (334).

While many translators and scholars, including Chilton, attribute Marguerite’s references to “penitence” in this passage to the wife rather than the husband, presumably on the grounds that she rather than he is the penitent sinner throughout nouvelle 32, the clear antecedent for “longue

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penitence” is “son mary” or “her husband”; and despite the fluctuating grammatical practices of sixteenth-century French and the frequent ambivalence of Marguerite’s own convoluted prose, one might even argue that “recepvoit ceste penitence” later in the sentence means that the wife forgave her husband by “accepting his show of repentance,” rather than the more conventional interpretation—that she humbly endured and embraced the long penance he imposed upon her. Among the various intertexts, perspectives, and visual cues that enrich and complicate our interpretation of nouvelle 32, perhaps the most important is Oisille’s surprising observation immediately after the narrative, which effectively reverses the female protagonist’s apparent role as a behavioral antimodel, suggesting instead that she is Everywoman: “If all the women who behaved like this one were to drink from cups like hers,” she contends, “I fear that many a golden goblet would be replaced by a skull” (334).84 Not only do many women commit adultery without being discovered or subjected to such a harsh punishment, says Oisille, but little except the grace of God protects even the most virtuous women from sins far worse than the penitent matron’s infidelity. Despite Parlamente’s surprisingly censorious insistence that the punishment fits the crime, both of which are “worse than death,” the normally prudish Oisille encourages virtuous females to reverse their perspectives and to identify with the fallen woman rather than marginalizing her as the Other, realizing that her dishonor could easily be their own. Some of the transgressive female characters in the Heptaméron are less easy to “de-construct” that the preceding ones. Among these is the upstanding widow so confident of her own virtue that she trades places with a serving girl and sleeps with her adolescent son to prove his chastity, never anticipating she will lose her own honor and conceive a child (N. 30). In this “piteous story” (316), recounted by Hircan to “bring the ignorance of one woman into the open,” Marguerite acknowledges female desire as well as the strength of biological drives in the face of cultural taboos; but the story focuses less on the transgression itself than on its consequences and the widow’s misguided efforts to cope morally, or in ways that she considers “moral,” with her own behavioral lapse. Without realizing that the root of her wrongdoing is excessive pride rather than simple lust, the pious woman opts to put the occasion of sin behind her by distancing herself from both the son she loves and the unfortunate fruit of their union. The next day after their coupling, she ships the boy off to a relative in the army without so much as a goodbye, not so much to spare him the trauma of discovering what happened as to shield herself from further temptation; and to protect her own “honor,” she bears their daughter in secret, arranging for the child to be raised by her illegitimate brother. Perhaps out of respect for his female cohorts, to whom he apologizes halfheartedly for providing fodder to “malicious” (316) men who blame all women for the sins of “une seulle” (229), Hircan focuses at length on the

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pathos as well as the wrongdoings of the widow. By portraying her as a penitent crying alone in her room (“passa toute la nuyct à pleurer et crier toute seulle,” 231) just after her transgression, the narrator elicits our sympathy for the errant mother; but his ambivalent iconography also holds a key to her moral shortcomings. The widow’s tearful and solitary posture not only reflects the inward nature of her grief and the marginalizing effect of her transgression, but also foreshadows the arrogant self-reliance and self-interest that, according to Hircan, inform her choices and exacerbate her adversities: Yet, instead of humbling herself and recognizing how impossible it is for our flesh to do otherwise than sin unless we have God’s help, she tried to give satisfaction for past deeds through her own means, through her tears and through her own prudence, to avoid future evil. Her excuse for her sin was the situation she had been placed in, never evil inclination, for which there can be no remedy but the grace of God. (319–20).85 If Hircan is right, the widow’s proud and unilateral approach to problemsolving, undertaken without prayers for divine assistance (“sans l’ayde de Dieu,” 231) or any apparent thought for the common good, dooms her modus operandi from the outset. As he predicts, her myopic cover-up of “one evil” triggers “several others” (231), culminating in the son’s return home with a “perfect” wife who, unbeknownst to the young man, is actually his daughter and sister. As a last resort (“ne sceut aultre chose faire,” 233), the widow confesses her sin and seeks guidance from a papal legate at Avignon, who pointedly consults with other theologians before advising her to do penitence privately without ever mentioning the affair to her children (“jamais rien dire de ceste affaire à ses enffans,” 233), whose ignorance of their incest makes them theologically blameless. That the clerics advocate deceit is not in itself surprising, given their penchant for subterfuge throughout the Heptaméron, but nothing suggests that Marguerite finds fault with their decision, despite her devisants’ vow to tell nothing but the truth. By replacing the mother’s selfish fixation on “her honor” and “her misfortune” with concern for others, the theologians together redefine the widow’s narrow and self-serving view of morality as a collective and compassionate enterprise which transcends her narrowly crafted “fasts and other disciplines” (320).86 On a narrative level, moreover, the widow’s enforced silence and her instructions not to tell the truth, as well as the solitary penance that the theologians impose upon her, form a perfect contrapasso for her sins: for her transgressions are triggered not only by her own solitude and self-reliance, but also by her refusal to believe the serving girl’s true story years earlier, or to see what the servant saw, when the demoiselle claimed that the woman’s son, despite being steeped in “saincteté et devotion” (230), was pursuing her sexually.

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While the rhetoric of sight is understated in nouvelle 30, the story is nevertheless richly perspectival, framed as it is by the storyteller Hircan’s sexually permissive standpoint, and his puzzlement at the repressed widow’s morally ossified, narrow-angle lens, which leaves her blind to, and unwilling to see, realities that deviate from her world view. Her son’s desire for the serving girl is born of a gaze (317; “commencea à regarder et desirer,” 230) to which his mother, unlike the damoiselle, remains oblivious, in part because she loves him and has “such a high opinion of him” (317; “estimoit tant de son filz,” 230) and in part because she has reared him so austerely.87 After their love-making, the mother removes the boy from her view to short-circuit her own desiring gaze; and once he and her (grand)daughter marry and return home, the widow cannot bear to “see them show their love [for one another]” (321; “ne les voyoit jamais faire bonne chere,” 233), shielding her eyes from the fruit of her transgression. In addition to remaining willfully blind to her son’s sexual development and to her own desire, the widow is also motivated in part by a fear that others may see her for who she is: while pregnant, she “pretend[s] to be ill, [and wears] an outer garment to conceal her fault” (319; my italics; “elle faingnyt d’estre mallade, [et] vestit son manteau, pour couvrir son imperfection,” 231). As for the incest itself, which takes place in a dark room, the fact that the widow actually “sees” her son enter the bed, but waits to find out what will transpire, adds fuel to Freccero’s intriguing hypothesis that the “incestuous liaison” is not wholly accidental on the mother’s part, and that “the fantasy of maternal sovereignty” and of a matrilineal family bloodline at once informs the text and connects it to other nouvelles that resist the exclusion of women from family-state rule.88 If this is indeed the case, Hircan largely suppresses the glimmers of resistance to patrilineal succession in the nouvelle, filtering the widow’s actions and thoughts instead through the lens of his own masculinist point of view. Despite Hircan’s disclaimer in his introduction to this tale, when he contends that he is “reluctant” (316) to speak ill of any lady (“il me fasche fort de racompter chose qui soit à la honte d’une d’entre vous,” 229), his contextualization of the widow’s transgression is gender-specific. Not only does he link her sin to the querelle des femmes, by citing misogynists who would surely use this “strange case” to impugn all women, but he also constructs her as a figure of motherly love gone awry and makes her a countermodel of excessive virtue and pride, two flaws more often associated with female than male characters in the Heptaméron. Moreover, the moral that Hircan draws from the tale focuses on women alone: There, Ladies, that is what becomes of those women who presume by their own strength and virtue to overcome love and nature and all the powers that God has placed therein. Better were it to recognize one’s weakness, better not to try to do battle with such an enemy, but turning to the one true lover, to say with the Psalmist: “Lord, I am oppressed, answer thou for me” (321).89

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While the lesson is couched in religious rhetoric, Hircan’s suggestion that women should stop defending their chastity with their own “forces et vertu,” trusting instead in God’s will, betrays a hint of self-interest on the hedonistic narrator’s part: for despite his implication that the “Amy” and “Seigneur” to whom women should yield is Christ, the terms might just as easily refer to an earthly lover, in a counter reading of the text that is consistent with Hircan’s recurring advocacy of following nature and respecting one’s instincts unrepentantly. As soon as Hircan finishes speaking, Oisille corrects and reformulates his gender-specific moral, which targets “those women” (“celles”) who propose to vanquish love and nature through their own strength, with a lesson applicable to both men and women: “Every man and woman here,” she tells us, “should bow their heads in the fear of God” (321).90 Despite Hircan’s insertion of his narrative within the battle of the sexes, one might argue that even the widow’s transgressions are not specifically feminine. Certainly paternal incest was at least as frequent as maternal abuse in Marguerite’s era; and the widow’s choice to remain silent and cover up her wrongdoing is reminiscent of Bornet’s indisputably male efforts in novella 8 to conceal his own self-inflicted cuckoldry, which occurs when he shares his paramour with a friend without realizing that the sensuous woman is actually his wife—who has mischievously and protectively traded places with the frightened chambermaid he had planned to bed.91 Much like the proper widow, who asks her illegitimate brother to save her honor by camouflaging her illicit pregnancy and rearing her own natural child, Bornet begs the friend who has cuckolded him unwittingly not to reveal his shame (“de ne reveler sa honte,” 47) which would disgrace both him and his wife, whom he has corrupted without her knowledge (111, 46). Certainly the two cover-ups are neither completely analogous nor inherently related to gender. For one thing, the news of Bornet’s cuckoldry eventually becomes known despite his imprecations, in contrast to the widow’s apparent success at keeping her transgressions private, at least within the parameters of Hircan’s pseudo-omniscient narration. But since the devisants who relate both tales are privy to the scandals, along with the peers with whom they share the stories and the readers of the Heptaméron, we can only conclude that even the widow’s “secret” is not entirely exempt from the bruits or rumors that circulate in Renaissance society, nor from Marguerite’s archaeological “truth project.” Although “the facts [about Bornet’s cuckoldry] became public knowledge” (111–12; “la vérité fut congneue,” 47), the female devisante Longarine emphasizes the fact that no blame attaches to the wife (“sans honte de sa femme,” 47) for her husband’s sin. Given the indiscriminate malice of many rumormongers, Longarine’s contention that gossips did not target Bornet’s wife may be overstated; but her point seems to be that the technically adulterous woman’s ignorance, like that of the widow’s incestuous children in nouvelle 30, is exculpatory and exempts her not only from blame, but also from shame in the affair. By

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implicitly contesting the psychological displacement which often makes women scapegoats for male transgressions, Longarine also moves toward the modernist notion that each woman’s individual identity is separate from that of her husband, requiring that she be judged on her own merits rather than on those of her spouse, other women, or even her parents. In many of the preceding examples, Marguerite’s exploration of the delicate and oftentimes blurred line between vice and virtue, particularly in female characters, at once muddies and humanizes her multiperspectival representations of gender. Much like Montaigne, who generally advocates médiocrité or moderation rather than the extremes of human behavior, the queen of Navarre seems to suggest in nouvelle 30, the incestuous widow’s tale, that stereotypically female virtues such as honor and chastity can quickly become vices when exaggerated. For example, it is the widow’s extreme piety that prompts her to shun the company of all others except “gens de devotion” in an effort to avoid worldly vices and the occasion of sin, as she embarks on a path of solitary devoutness and self-reliance that at once causes and exacerbates her transgression. Muddy, hybrid portraits such as this one—in which feminine concern for the outward protocols of propriety is so extreme that it obscures common sense, causes harm to others, and becomes tainted with vice—appear in several other nouvelles as well. For example, an exaggerated sense of honor contributes to a young matron’s death, and that of her newborn son and husband, following her rape by a Franciscan friar in nouvelle 23, an episode that blurs the lines of demarcation between victims and victimizers: for by imploring her husband (who himself triggered the tragic events by overtrusting the clergyman) to avenge her lost, all-important honor, the wife unwittingly sends him to his death; and in strangling herself with the “corde” of her bedding, which identifies the cincture-girded Cordelier as the real culprit, she accidentally kills her child with her flailing limbs, in a frenzy of misplaced shame for his transgression. With its complex web of culpability, skewed virtues that double as vices, and thematics of ocularity, which warn against mistaking Satan for an “angel of light” (“ange de lumière,” 186) and being “blinded” (“aveuglé,” 186) by “outward appearance[s],” nouvelle 23 eschews all semblance of gender-specific exemplarity. From an evangelical perspective, however, it does explore the misplaced priorities, and perspectival errors or “slippages,” to which patriarchy as a whole is prone: these include the conflation of Church Fathers with God the Father, the confusion of patristically ordained “good works,” “fasts,” and “disciplines” (190) with true godliness, and the substitution of patriarchy’s secular virtues, such as “honor” and revenge, for Christological teachings. 92 This prideful, exaggerated sense of feminine honor, which so often camouflages, or devolves into, vice and dishonor in the Heptaméron, is not limited to patriarchal cultures, but finds corollaries in Marguerite’s portrayals of courtly societies and la belle dame sans merci as well. We see this not only in nouvelle 43, where Jambique’s obsession with her virtuous

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reputation and the distorted protocols of courtoisie turns vicious, but also in the overlong trials that the chaste and virtuous queen of Castile imposes upon her admirer Elisor in nouvelle 24, in an exaggerated test of his worthiness that gauges the magnitude of her cruelty as well. For after acquiescing to the queen’s demands and absenting himself from her court for seven years to prove his sincerity, Elisor concludes that the woman he formerly believed to be “the most virtuous lady in the whole of Christendom” (275) and “the most beautiful and the most perfect lady in all the world” (275) is actually harsh and cruel.93 Upon closer inspection, however, this judgment’s validity and the story’s exemplarity are undercut by the competing, gendered perspectives at work in the narrative and frame discussion, by intertextual reminders of harsher trials, and by Elisor’s own extreme response to the test his lady imposes upon him. While the male narrator, Dagoucin, initially sides with his beleaguered protagonist in labeling the resistant queen cruel, filtering the provisional female dominance of courtoisie through the lens of patriarchy and his own trials as a serviteur, he shifts much of the blame away from la belle dame sans merci and back to Elisor in his concluding moral, where, upon reflection, he faults the gentil homme for “confess[ing] what can only harm and do no good.” Here, most scholars believe Dagoucin is referring to Elisor’s breach of courtly etiquette in revealing his love to the queen, an action that runs counter to the code of silence surrounding perfect love; or, from a slightly different standpoint, the gentle, platonic-minded devisant may be decrying the harsh words with which Elisor ends their relationship, which equal or surpass the queen’s own cruelty toward him. Whatever his referent, Dagoucin’s closing moral differs in tonality and viewpoint from his initial one, setting the stage for further shifts of perspective in the frame discussion. Most notably, Parlamente uses the vantage of her own female experience to deflect Geburon’s slurs upon the queen, and to defend the virtuous lady’s extraordinary caution in vetting her admirer so thoroughly. Because men lie so frequently (“les hommes ont tant accoustumé de mentir,” 201), Parlamente contends, testing an admirer’s veracity and fidelity for seven years, or as long as it takes to be sure of his affection and character, is merely prudent. From an intertextual vantage, readers well-versed in tribulation narratives cannot help but compare Elisor’s trials to those of Boccaccio’s Griselda and the biblical character Job. The forbearance of these archetypes in the face of adversity far greater, and less voluntary, than Elisor’s is implicitly invoked and yet sexually inverted in nouvelle 24, which replaces the patriarchal ethos of the earlier stories with the gynocracy of courtly love. In and of themselves, these intertextual resonances vindicate neither the queen, who is certainly not an allegorical figure of God in the mold of Gualtieri, nor Elisor, whose self-proclaimed religious epiphany rejects feminine authority and refigures “perfect love” in androcentric terms. But they do help erode the queen’s negative exemplarity, by drawing our attention instead to Elisor’s

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failure to persevere—and keep faith as he has promised—with Job-like steadfastness, while raising questions about the gendering of power, and the ways in which gender affects both the exercise of power and our respect for authority figures, male and female. In his refutation of matriarchally imposed trials (which he himself intensified to acquire even greater honor) in favor of a “higher love” that is patriarchal in nature, Elisor severs the uneasy conflation of romantic and spiritual love underlying the courtly paradigm and revolts against the queen’s “false,” misgendered power over him. While this antifeminist epiphany resonates with sexually frustrated males in the group, Elisor’s condemnation of the queen’s “cruelty” echoes neither Job’s nor Griselda’s exemplary patience, but instead recalls Gualtieri’s subjects’ denunciation of their lord as a “cruel tyrant” (Decameron 10.10) and the misguided wife’s call for Job to “curse God and die” (Job 2: 9). Elisor’s association with both exemplary and nonexemplary archetypes, as well as the maze of gendered perspectives at work in the episode, ultimately prevents us from taking his patriarchally inflected condemnation of female cruelty at face value. Rather, the text’s scopic variability opens the text up to alternative readings and potential retellings from nonpatriarchal viewing angles.

Gendered violence and vice: making sense of “he said, she said” While patriarchal viewpoints abound in the Heptaméron, they are often contested; but the contestation is not always direct, immediate, or clear. In the frame discussion following story 40, for example, where Rolandine’s father objects to his sister’s marriage to a husband of lesser status, Saffredent contends that even lowborn men are superior to the highest-ranking women: “The [ancient] philosophers assert that the lowliest of men is worth far more than the highest born and most virtuous woman in the world” (374).94 Even Parlamente, moreover, in response to her husband’s charge that women want to “be masters,”95 acknowledges that “it’s reasonable that the man should govern us as our head, … but not that he should abandon us or treat us badly” (361).96 As Marguerite points out repeatedly, however, men do abandon and abuse women, a fact that subtly challenges the androcentric paradigm that Saffredent espouses.97 Despite appearances to the contrary, including Saffredent’s chauvinistic discourse, Parlamente’s nominal acceptance of patriarchy, and the high proportion of households dominated by males in the Heptaméron, the queen of Navarre does not allow this androcentric model of gender relations to escape scrutiny. From a purely rhetorical standpoint, Saffredent’s affirmation of male ascendancy is itself so exaggerated that it invites criticism and verges on the comic.98 Moreover, Parlamente’s provisional acknowledgement that men are entitled to govern women, if they do so judiciously and humanely, arguably erodes rather than strengthens the foundations of male hegemony by making it a practice contingent upon real-world performance, rather than an unqualified right

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ordained by God or natural law. As Patricia Cholakian has demonstrated, the queen’s “true stories” focus repeatedly on male violence toward women, supporting Parlamente’s hypothetical restrictions on masculine authority with factual examples of “mistreatment” and “abandonment.”99 Far from limiting her scrutiny of gender relations to a reassessment of female stereotypes, Marguerite includes in her Heptaméron a subtle reexamination of male identity, patriarchal norms, and gender relations within early modern society. In addition to exploding masculine stereotypes and portraying males as victims and villains as well as heroes, the queen of Navarre includes feminine counterdiscourse as well as chauvinistic rhetoric in her frame discussions; draws our attention to fundamental differences between male and female honor;100 unveils the gap between nature and culture, or between polite protocols of courtship and the biological urges they mask; qualifies affirmations of male supremacy with caveats and realworld counterexamples that subvert the patriarchal paradigm; and counterbalances patriarchal gender relations with nonandrocentric, courtly protocols that feature “women on top.” Underneath the queen’s conventional invocation of female narratees, in fact, as illustrated by the formulaic imprecations to “my ladies” (“mes dames”) that she uses to introduce moral precepts, the gentle ladies specifically targeted by moral exhortations in the Heptaméron are by no means her only destinataires. Not only does the dauphin play a seminal role in her storytelling project (prol., 9; 68–69), reminding us that Marguerite’s “French Decameron” is constructed by and for both sexes, at least on a fictional level, but its wide-ranging criticisms of males as well as females subvert the queen’s gender-specific exordia, dispelling our illusion that this is a handbook for women alone. In addition to doubling as an educational manual for “Christian princes,”101 the Heptaméron also holds insights for fathers, brothers, husbands, and lovers. More than simple models and antimodels of gentlemanly behavior, or “do’s and don’ts” for prospective lovers disseminated in such works as Ovid’s Ars amatoria (The Art of Love, 2 AD) or Capellanus’s De arte honesti amandi (The Art of Courtly Love, ca. 1180s), Marguerite’s nouvelles offer us thought-provoking tales of male transgressions and illusions that together complement her anatomies of female experience. Proffered from the “other” side of patriarchal privilege, these stories reflect and refract the feelings and foibles of both sexes, who not only glimpse their own images in Marguerite’s speculum, but also, if they are perceptive, “see themselves being seen.”102 Despite abundant allusions to female cruelty, portraits of violent and abusive male characters in the Heptaméron outnumber those of women by a wide margin. Given the high incidence of violence in the Renaissance and the greater degree of power, both physical and political, typically wielded by males, this fact is not surprising. Notwithstanding medieval and Renaissance iconography portraying shrews, aggressive fishwives, and women beating their husbands, lists of violent criminals were comprised primarily of males;

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and many other acts of violence by local lords, heads of household, and clergymen either went unreported or were not prosecuted. In this sense, de Navarre’s disproportional focus on instances of aggression and physical brutality by men is rooted firmly in her “truth project” and in her archaeology of silence. Yet when coupled interpretively with Parlamente’s conditional approval of patriarchy, which she deems acceptable only if it is benign, Marguerite’s repeated focus on male brutality raises questions about the origins, nature, and wisdom of androcentric governance: is patriarchal rule ordained by God, in accordance with civil and canon law, or is it contingent instead upon both the assent of the governed and the morality, justice, and benevolence of those in power? In the early sixteenth century, with its long tradition of male primogeniture and Salic law, these questions may seem anachronistic. Certainly the concept of patriarchy existed in the Renaissance, dating back to biblical times. While the Middle French terms patriarche, patriarcal, patriarché, and patriarchité do not appear in the Heptaméron, they figure in other documents of the medieval and early modern eras as referents to high-ranking bishops or Church “fathers”; to scriptural heads of household, particularly in the Old Testament; and to elderly and respected males in general.103 One cornerstone of patriarchy during this era was the analogy between God the Father’s relationship to humankind, a monarch’s power over his people, and a husband’s right to command his wife; and this paradigm, which constructs earthly rulers and husbands as God’s surrogates, helps shape the Heptaméron on two levels. First, the transitive relationship between God, kings, and husbands in this analogy informs Marguerite’s implicit comparison of the body of the family and the body politic throughout her text. Second, Marguerite repeatedly excavates the negative double of the good patriarch assumed in the God-king-husband analogy, unveiling male rulers who exploit their subjects, husbands who mistreat or neglect their wives, Church fathers who abuse their parishioners, and men of rank and authority who violate women sexually.104 In the first instance, there is little in Marguerite’s correspondence to suggest she begrudged her brother the throne of France or advocated matriarchal rule. While she exercised far more power than the typical female of her era, both politically and in her own household, these activities seem in general to have complemented male hegemony rather than challenging it. Given Marguerite’s probable personal experience with sexual violence, to be sure, along with her familiarity with Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies, her part-time residency in a kingdom that permitted female monarchs, and her own proximity to the French throne, she would have been better positioned than most to question her society’s patriarchal biases. Did de Navarre ever wonder if she herself could have done a better job of handling France’s reformist ferment? The answer is probably “yes,” but criticizing the patriarchal nature of France’s monarchy does not appear to be a goal of the Heptaméron. Even male theorists including Claude de

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Seyssel tiptoed cautiously around issues concerning the monarchy, extolling its popular origins, its limitations and accountability, and its built-in checks and balances designed to guard against monarchical abuses of power and injustices.105 As nouvelles 12 and 51 demonstrate, neither Marguerite nor other French humanists were oblivious to the dangers of tyranny, particularly in the Italian city-states with their ruthless condottieri. Yet her portraits of weak and ineffectual patriarchs suggest an equally grave danger at the opposite end of the spectrum, in the form of inattentive, laissez-faire governance that leaves the ship of state rudderless, and the body of the family, headless. At most, Marguerite may envision an androgynous form of mediocritas in the ruler, as emblematized by the combination of male and female traits informing contemporary portraits of François I.106 The second level of Marguerite’s response to patriarchy’s defining premises challenges androcentric precepts with real-world examples of weak and abusive heads of household and ungodly Church fathers, who together undermine the original God-king-father paradigm. Behind the unprepossessing facade of her household dramas, which divert our gaze from the body politic to the body of the family, Marguerite de Navarre uses the world-upside-down motif, the vantage of her own otherness, and the gendered gazes of her devisants to explore the insides and outsides of patriarchy. While women who commit adultery, leave their husbands, and rebuff prospective suitors abound in the queen’s short-story collection, few of Marguerite’s female characters cause real injury to life and limb. The most notable exceptions are Saint-Aignan’s wife (N. 1), who persuades her husband to kill her lover; and the peevish matron in nouvelle 70, whose lies about a recalcitrant courtier—guilty only of not loving her—trigger his death and that of his amye. On the other hand, the tally of violent acts by masculine perpetrators is comparatively high: male characters are responsible for four sexual assaults that are foiled, six actual rapes, two attempted murders, nine homicides, and two plots against heads of state—one successful (N. 12) and the other (N. 17) thwarted by the king. As clear-cut and as damning for males as this tally may appear, not all these killings are unjustified, at least from the vantage of male honor, self-defense, or family justice. While Marguerite scrutinizes her culture’s equation of honor and violence, particularly in instances where males respond to insults with bloodshed, she does not use these masculine antimodels to condemn the opposite sex as a whole. If we ignore the fact that Saint-Aignan encourages his wife’s friendship with the Bishop of Sees, for example, there is little doubt that she—rather than he—is the driving force behind du Mesnil’s murder (N. 1), discussed earlier. While the storyteller, Simontaut, stresses the noblewoman’s role in orchestrating her lover’s murder, however, he does not exempt Saint-Aignan from blame, instead emphasizing the husband’s nefarious intentions107 and the dishonorable secrecy of his methods, which give the surprised youth no chance to defend himself when he is ambushed.108 In addition to hiring

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assassins rather than meeting du Mesnil face to face in honorable combat, Saint Aignan compounds his crime by having the victim’s body incinerated (“feit brusler le corps du pauvre trespassé,” 15) and by using his power to discredit a young female witness whom his henchman takes to Paris (“mena a Paris au lieu publicq,” 15), forcing her into apparent prostitution. By mobilizing our readerly standpoints, these shifts in focus from female to male malfeasance allow us to see the complex etiology of feminine transgression from differing angles, which implicate not just the conniving matron, but also her husband and key fallacies of androcentrism: for as the story reminds us, moral patriarchy functions as it should only when familial, governmental, and religious patriarchs are wise and good men who respond judiciously to crises. Saint-Aignan’s failure to do this draws our attention to pitfalls in the system, which typically invests power in males on the basis of their gender, patrimonial lineage, and birth order, rather than on the virtue, courage, wisdom, and leadership skills needed by heads of household, family patriarchs, and rulers in moral patriarchies.109 From Simontaut’s masculine perspective, the procurer’s gravest transgression may well be his cowardice and uxoriousness, or the error of believing and obeying his wife, instead of his lack of an internal moral compass. Rather than governing his own household judiciously, the husband allows his wife to rule him (“se laissoit gouverner par elle,” 13), following her lead and agreeing (“s’y accorda,” 13) with her plans, in a show of submissiveness that signals the breakdown of patriarchy and his own emasculation. Although he willingly hires others to eliminate his adversaries, never does Saint-Aignan himself raise a sword—or even his voice—to challenge or threaten his victims. While this makes him an object of scorn for Simontaut, the digressive, multiscopic storyteller closes his narrative with a shift back to his original focus on female transgression: “The depraved wife … led a more immoral life than ever, once her husband was [convicted and] out of the way” (77), Simontaut tells us, hinting not only that women escape punishment disproportionately to men, but also that they need strong husbands, representatives of God in the home, to guide and protect them from sin.110 The story’s antifeminist bent is however mitigated by the male narrator’s own ludic, and ultimately profeminist, motive, which is not really to condemn women, as his rhetoric suggests, but rather to persuade a virtuous woman—Parlamente—to sleep with him: Just consider now, Ladies, the amount of trouble that was caused by one woman. Just think of the whole train of disasters that this one woman’s behavior led to. I think you’ll agree that ever since Eve made Adam sin, women have taken it upon themselves to torture men, kill them and damn them to Hell. I know. I’ve experienced feminine cruelty, and I know what will bring me to death and damnation—nothing other than the despair that I’m thrown into by a certain lady! And yet, I am mad enough to

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admit that though I suffer Hell, it’s a Hell far more delightful to me than any Paradise that any other woman could offer” (78).111 While Simontaut’s stated goal in this story, indicated earlier, is to “avenge [himself] on Love and on the woman who is so cruel to [him]” (70),112 the false analogy he playfully draws between virtuous and villainous cruelty, or between a chaste belle dame sans merci and an adulterous murderess, at once unveils his ulterior motives and weakens the misogynistic tenor of both his rhetoric and his exemplum. Without defending Saint-Aignan’s wife, whose cruelty clearly has no relationship to her own, Parlamente easily cuts through Simontaut’s sophistry with an equivocal jibe of her own: “Since Hell is as agreeable as you say, you presumably have no fear of the devil who put you there” (78).113 On the one hand, Parlamente’s rejoinder seems merely to confirm what her admirer has admitted: despite his specious argumentation, Simontaut is well aware that his own “hell,” or the unrequited lust he feels, is far preferable to the literal death du Mesnil suffers in his narrative, and to the requited desire, or “paradis,” that he himself might achieve with a different woman. His rhetoric is empty verbiage. Yet on the other hand, Parlamente’s female discourse hints at a deeper message: not simply the flirtatious confirmation that she and Simontaut enjoy each other’s company, or even a coded reminder that platonic pleasures can be savored and cherished, but rather the veiled trace or glimmer of her own desire, at once expressed and repressed in her imprecation for Simontaut not to “fear” her. Underneath the tale of self-serving violence wielded by both Saint-Aignan and his wife, then, what we ultimately find is a complex web of male–female relationships, marked not only by aggression and betrayal, but also by rhetorical subterfuge and gamesmanship—and by the potential for mutual respect and love. Far from being limited to personal or amorous relationships, Parlamente’s rejoinder about the “devil” has social and political implications as well: in response to Simontaut’s traditional patriarchal contention that Eve, in collusion with the Devil, “made Adam sin” (78), ensuring that women would always be blamed for her sin, Parlamente assures her admirer that women are not to be feared. Indeed, if we reread the entire frame discussion about the Garden of Eden, women, and devils against the backdrop of the Decameron 3.10, where “diavolo” clearly refers to men— and specifically male genitalia—rather than women, an entirely new interpretation emerges.114 Since “putting the devil back in hell” is a male euphemism for sex in Boccaccio, coined by a hermit for the express purpose of seducing a gullible young girl, then arguably the “diable” who has put Simontaut in hell is nothing other than his own libido.115 If this is indeed the implication, Parlamente has turned the tables very neatly on her admirer in this playful and discursive battle of the sexes. As we study the tangled web of culpability for acts of violence in the Heptaméron, clearly men are prone to blame women—and women,

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men—not simply for crimes committed by the other sex, but for their own as well … at least up to a point. Much as Saint-Aignan holds his wife responsible for all his trouble, including his plot to kill Marguerite d’Alençon herself, the parliamentary president of Grenoble (N. 36) who poisons his unfaithful wife believes that only she, and not he, is the transgressor. While he plans the murder for several weeks and camouflages it with lavish displays of love before, and grief after, her death, ostensibly to spare their daughters the disgrace of a public scandal, the magistrate considers his act honorable and even righteous: “So he avenged himself on his enemy,” Ennasuite tells us, “and saved the honour of his house” (355).116 In an attempt at evenhandedness, the young female narrator tries not to take sides, arguing instead that “both men and women have their share of vice as well as of virtue” (355).117 More surprisingly, Parlamente crosses gender lines to praise the president’s patience and ingenuity, with a foolhardy statement that she must later amend: “This poor woman paid a penalty which not a few deserve. And I think that the husband, considering that he was intent on revenge, conducted himself with remarkable prudence and good sense” (355–56).118 Only Longarine initially questions the morality of the crime overtly, pointing out that the president acted with malice aforethought, having neither “God nor conscience in mind” (356).119 As the devisants warm to their discussion of justifiable versus unjustifiable homicide, even Longarine admits that the president’s methods, more than his crime, are objectionable. If he had slain his wife in a fit of passion, she concedes, the act could have been forgiven: “The first movements of the soul are not within man’s powers. So if he had acted out of anger he might have received forgiveness” (356).120 For Saffredent, who is adept at casuistry, Longarine’s objection is easy to demolish rhetorically. Simply stated, the president’s first throes of passion never abated, he contends, even during the long weeks that he plotted his wife’s murder and pretended to love her; and while Saffredent is willing to admit that the murder is a sin, he blithely tells us that “the theologians regard this kind of sin as readily pardonable” (356).121 Given Marguerite’s lack of confidence in the clergy, whose selfserving legitimization of ungodly acts is legendary, Saffredent’s statement, if read closely, not only fails to exculpate the president, but also implicates the patristic Church culture that routinely condones violence toward women. In contrast to Saffredent, moreover, Hircan does not resort to theological hairsplitting, but simply argues that the slaying was profoundly moral—and the only possible reaction to such extraordinary provocation. From his indefatigably patriarchal perspective, the president’s violent response to his wife’s infidelity is commensurate with the wrong previously done to him, and Hircan scoffs at the very thought of finding him culpable: “And what would you have wanted him to do, then, … to avenge himself for the worst outrage a woman can perpetrate against a man?”(356).122 Speaking for most males and some women in the group, Hircan is expressing a moral tenet of his culture, based in large measure on Old Testament morality: not only is

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adultery a mortal sin, proscribed by the seventh commandment, but adulteresses can legitimately be stoned or even killed. Lest we conclude that all devisants subscribe to this principle, Marguerite quickly curbs the men’s increasingly bloodthirsty discourse with a timely retraction by Parlamente: “One needs to watch one’s words with people as dangerous as you, … But what I said was meant to apply to cases where the passion is so great that it suddenly overwhelms the senses, and does so to such an extent that reason cannot operate” (356).123 In other words, she understands the psychology of crimes of passion—or what we might call temporary insanity—but does not condone them; and if, in a high-spirited burst of enthusiasm for their game, she seemed to suggest otherwise, by waxing poetic over an ingenious murder, Parlamente sets the record straight. Within the parameters of their game, anything goes, she seems to say: but in real life, men should not kill their adulterous wives, despite patriarchal laws, customs, and judicial protocols that condone these homicides.124 Indeed, de Navarre’s portrayal of the parliamentary president, a high-ranking representative of the judiciary, as a cold-blooded deceiver who carefully plans and camouflages his revenge over a protracted period of time, and in a way designed to circumvent the legal system he himself represents, subtly interrogates the patriarchal biases of early modern “justice” and the casuistry that authorized spousal killings and crimes of passion. In nouvelle 32, as we have seen, Oisille’s exemplar of “the greatest punishment” a husband can inflict upon an unfaithful wife also yields a critique of patriarchal cruelty when we read closely; but this alternative, nonhegemonic interpretation does not appear to be triggered by a dissenting female standpoint such as Longarine’s. Instead, the penitent wife’s discourse in nouvelle 32 merely echoes her husband’s, not an uncommon phenomenon in patriarchal societies, with hints of a counter reading hinging upon other factors. These include lexical ambiguities, tears, and blind spots within the narrative that awaken our suspicions about the couple’s “backstory,” signs of psychological impairment in the husband’s self-serving discourse, intertextual echoes that focus on male culpability in similar stories, and shifting perspectives including that of an “objective outsider” (Bernal) who is male, and thus an “outsider within.” On the surface, the story’s interpretive axis thus seems to waver between “his and his” rather than “his and her” views of patriarchal vindictiveness, with Bernal functioning as a male raisonneur who corrects and recalibrates the abusive husband’s excesses while speaking for the beleaguered adulteress, but in rhetoric appealing to the husband’s patrilineal desires. Upon closer inspection, however, this refigured male discourse doubles as a gesture of female ventriloquism, orchestrated by a female narrator (Oisille) and author (Marguerite de Navarre) whose feminine standpoints disrupt and contest his-story, or patriarchy’s self-justificatory accounts of its own violence toward the “other,” from within.

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From a purely archetypal and structural standpoint, nouvelle 12 offers a tragedy of triangulation not unlike that of nouvelle 32: in this true and infamous story about a man who commits murder, ostensibly for familial honor, the main characters include a male bent on bedding a widow out of wedlock; the woman’s outraged brother, who takes on the patriarchal role of protector and avenger; and the disputed lady herself, whose voice and desires are curiously muted within the story. Given this schema, one might expect to see the woman scapegoated once again, if only by the male devisants, for her brother’s crime of honor; but here, and in other facets of the narrative, nouvelles 32 and 12 differ radically. First, the aspiring lover is the brother’s lord, unlike the serviteur who bedded the wife in nouvelle 32; second, not only has the liaison not yet been consummated, but the sister, as far as we know, is not romantically involved with her admirer; and third, the same male devisants who applauded the vengeful husbands condemn this third crime of honor. The brother is the same infamous Lorenzaccio—also known as Lorenzo and Lorenzino de’ Medici—immortalized by writers as diverse as Guicciardini and Alfred Musset.125 Ostensibly to protect his sister’s virtue and liberate his homeland from a tyrant, Lorenzino ambushed and assassinated his distant cousin and friend Alessandro de’ Medici, Duke of Florence, in 1537. That Florence was not freed, perhaps because Lorenzino failed to eliminate his duke’s cronies and heirs, is a matter of historical fact; and this, along with the aspiring liberator’s forcible exile from the city, may account in part for his future reputation as an unscrupulous traitor and assassin rather than a savior. Wanted for murder and crimes against the state, Lorenzino sought asylum with Catherine de’ Medici, the wife of Marguerite’s nephew Henri, at the French court. As a result, the queen of Navarre’s account of the crime likely stems from unpublished as well as published reports, including Lorenzino’s own first-hand testimony, and upon versions of the killing that are both favorable and unfavorable to him. Amid this hodgepodge of fact and rumor, condemnation and praise, Marguerite weighs the ignominy of Lorenzino’s ambush of a friend against her admiration for his brotherly loyalty; his brutal slaying of a cousin, against the assaults by powerful men against her own honor; and her fear of lèse-majesté in France, against the antipathy she would have felt for Alessandro, a son-in-law of Charles V whose reputation for despotism and licentiousness was well known.126 We will discuss the political ramifications of this nouvelle in chapter 5; but for the moment, let us focus briefly on the gendering of both the crime and reactions to it among the devisants. From Lorenzino’s perspective, as reported by Marguerite, killing the duke is a means of protecting the “honnesteté” and “chasteté” (91) of his sister, whom he describes as “one of the most virtuous women in all Italy” (160).127 Adding insult to injury, Alessandro asks his “friend” to procure his sister’s favors for him, a service that Lorenzino finds repugnant. Up to a point, his reaction is similar to that of the young gentleman in nouvelle 63, whose king

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invites him to join a party at which four young women will provide sexual favors to the men. Because he has both a wife and a mistress whom he loves, the gentleman is appalled by the royal command, which he feels he cannot refuse: as his wife points out, “high-born princes are in the habit of taking exception to those who do not applaud everything that they themselves enjoy” (489).128 Insisting he would sooner die than be unfaithful (“de luy aymoit autant morir”), and that he would rather be killed than kill his king if honor did not oblige him to do so (“aymeroit mieulx morir, que de faire un meurdre, si l’honneur ne le y contraingnoit,” 380), the gentleman outlines his dilemma to his wife and requests her input. Together they devise a nonviolent alternative which all the devisants applaud: the gentleman will pretend to be violently ill, practicing “une bonne et saincte ypocrisie” (381), and feigning the saddest expression he can manage to convince his king he is distraught at missing the party. For Lorenzino’s dilemma, at least as he sees it, there is no such happy solution. On the one hand, Alessandro has rebuffed his pleas to spare his sister, giving his cousin the choice of either yielding or being killed: “Take care for my life, and I will do the same for you” (159).129 Yet on the other hand, dying honorably for his “maison” and “seur” (91) would be futile, since his death would remove the only impediments standing between Alessandro’s lust and his sister’s virtue. As reprehensible as it may be, slaying the duke thus emerges as the only logical solution from Lorenzino’s perspective. As he begins to rationalize his “noble crime,” Lorenzino constructs his evolving identity in patriarchal, paternalistic terms: not only is he saving his sister, but he also envisions himself as the savior of “sa patrye” (92) and “la chose publicque” (93), both feminine in gender. In his self-styled role as a protector of the weak, never does the brother consult or seek advice from his sister, as the gentleman did from his wife in nouvelle 63: “Without breathing a word to his sister” (160),130 the narrator Dagoucin tells us, Lorenzo plots the assassination of Alessandro, taking unilateral action on behalf of his family and country. Based on his own reading of her virtue, the brother decides for his sister that “she would never consent to such vice” (159; “sa seur … jamais ne se consenter[oit] à telle meschanceté,” 91); and while both we and the devisants assume that this assessment of her character and desires is accurate, there is no evidence in either the story or frame discussion to affirm or contest this conjecture. Could she have scratched Alessandro’s face as the woman in nouvelle 4 did to her admirer? Or would she have made herself repulsive, using tactics similar to those of the apothecary’s assistant in nouvelle 52? Or might she have welcomed his advances, as the Milanese widow ultimately chose to do in nouvelle 14? While one can speculate, drawing examples from Marguerite’s remarkably rich “resource manual,” the devisants themselves never question the assumption that Alessandro would have raped his friend’s sibling: we know only that Lorenzino, convinced that this will happen, thinks and acts for his sister, as he does for his country.

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To guide our reaction, Dagoucin constructs Lorenzino from the outset with painstaking suppleness, depicting him in his introduction neither as a villain nor a hero, but as something in between: sympathetic but flawed, and blinded by familial love (“amour aveuglist,” 89), he fails to realize that few crimes can be redeemed by either the best of intentions or the good (“benefice ne biens,” 89) that may spring from them. In his concluding moral, however, which is in many ways a mirror image of his exordium, Dagoucin focuses on Alessandro’s transgressions rather than Lorenzino’s crime, using the former to illustrate that even princes can “forget … God [and] their conscience[s]” (163), especially when blinded by lust; and suggesting that Lorenzino, despite being a murderer, was on one level an instrument of God. Not surprisingly, the storytellers’ responses to Dagoucin’s tale are genderspecific, although not predictably so. With unexpected unanimity, given the predominantly masculine nature of violence in the Heptaméron, Marguerite’s female devisantes applaud Lorenzo’s assassination of Alessandro, focusing not on the brutality of the killing, which devolves into butchery, or even on his failure to consult his sister about her wishes in the matter, but rather on the strength and loyalty with which he protected her virtue. From a feudal, patriarchal standpoint, however, their masculine counterparts deplore the solicitous brother’s disloyalty toward his master and friend—a maledominant and “ascending” bond of fealty, which in their eyes trumps Lorenzino’s lesser obligation to protect the chastity of a female subordinate, even his own sister, against Alexander’s droit du seigneur. To male narrators, moreover, the duke’s wish to bed Lorenzo’s sister may well appear unobjectionable or even politically desirable: after all, the woman is sexually experienced, unlike the duke’s prepubescent wife, and within seigniorial societies, a ruler’s sexual interest in a female subject was often a mark of honor rather than shame for her family. By emphasizing the devisantes’ outrage at both the duke’s sexual aggression and his sense of entitlement, as well as their appreciation for brothers willing to protect their honor even when it is not politically expedient to do so, the author is not simply depicting women who favor violence as it may first appear. Rather, it is the women’s opposition to violence, and especially to violence toward women, that paradoxically motivates their approval of Lorenzino’s crime. Through the women’s voices, Marguerite weighs the public outcry over Lorenzino’s disloyalty to his lord against his loyalty toward his sister; and his violence toward Alessandro, against the latter’s aggression toward women and other subordinates. What she has done is to restore a female perspective, often suppressed or discounted, to official accounts of Lorenzaccio’s crime, excavating the other side of the story rather than advocating violence. Far from applauding bloodshed, both Marguerite and her devisantes seem to view it instead as a regrettable, but occasionally necessary, last resort, reserved for situations where negotiations have failed and where taking one life will save others. Embedded within the women’s perspective, moreover, is an implicit but

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stern warning to male readers, urging them to be as outraged by violence against women as they are by “more serious” crimes of state. By way of contrast, many would argue that nouvelle 43, an apparent antimodel of female behavior within a quasi-courtly setting, has little to do with patriarchy, violence toward women, or the excavation of suppressed feminine perspectives. The social milieu that Geburon describes, and implicitly condemns, in Jambique’s tale substitutes “women on top” for the patriarchal paradigm governing power relations in many other nouvelles; and a belle dame sans merci, who has her admirer banished from court when he defies her directives, for a female victim. Even the devisantes fail to muster a defense for Jambique, who, despite her reputation as “the most sensible and virtuous lady of her day” (392) and her position as a “great and powerful” princess’s closest advisor, is lascivious, hypocritical, and mendacious as well as cruel. For when Jambique’s lover, who sees her only in disguise during their trysts, discovers his lady’s identity and confronts her with this knowledge, the belle dame denounces her serviteur as a liar, directing her mistress to banish him permanently from her household. As we shall see, Oisille condemns the much-maligned lady from a godly, patriarchal perspective, while Parlamente critiques Jambique’s mannishness with a deft barb that targets her male companions as well: “Women who are dominated by pleasure have no right to call themselves women,” she contends; “[t]hey might as well call themselves men, since it is men who regard violence and lust as something honourable” (396–97; “Celles qui sont vaincues en plaisir ne se doibvent plus nommer femmes, mais hommes, desquelz la fureur et la concupiscence augmente leur honneur,” 301). At first glance, Parlamente’s tongue-in-cheek, essentializing pronouncement appears to uphold patriarchy’s double standard for chastity: for without denouncing female desire itself, she condemns Jambique’s “unwomanly” decision to act on her passion and take a lover of her choosing, in a manner vaguely reminiscent of Boccaccio’s Ghismonda. Yet upon closer inspection, Parlamente’s objection to Jambique’s mannishness alerts readers to the proverbial “elephant in the room,” or the unspoken fact that Jambique is behaving like a man not only in her love life, but also in terms of the power she wields, the orders she gives, and the obedience she commands. In other words, nouvelle 43 offers us a distorted version of courtly protocols that feature “women on top,” filtered through the disapproving lens of Geburon’s patriarchal biases and the eyes of Jambique’s rejected lover. Geburon’s androcentric vantage is not the only standpoint available to us as readers, however, despite the devisants’ unanimous condemnation of Jambique. Shifting viewpoints within the text itself, together with Marguerite’s emphasis on the thematics of seeing, her anatomy of the male gaze, and Parlamente’s acknowledgement that normatively gendered attitudes can be reversed, draw our attention to oddities in what is primarily a one-sided narrative—not “Jambique’s tale,” but “his-story.” From a less androcentric perspective, Jambique is not blameless, but neither is her

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serviteur: having sworn that he would neither seek to know, nor divulge, her identity, he is culpable of having broken his word, which constitutes a significant breach of faith within the ethos of courtly love, and arguably makes him a liar as well. Moreover, Hope Glidden rightly observes that the gentil homme’s quest to “voir” and “savoir,” or to see and know the woman with whom he is consorting in a darkened room, is both narcissistic and self-serving.131 In the male lover’s efforts to “[master] the subject through visual objectification,” whether in modern cinema or in early modern texts such as this one, Glidden tells us, he is typically bent on dominating and “capturing” the female body, which causes “women [to] lose status as subjects [and be reduced to] objects of spectral pleasure.”132 This gendered disconnect between self and the other, and between male and female subjectivities, is further illustrated in nouvelle 43 by the serviteur’s inability to “imagine that any woman would not want to be seen and loved” (394).133 Judging Jambique on the basis of his own universalizing ideas about womankind, the serviteur fails to see, understand, or respect her singularity as an individual. Instead, he refashions his mistress according to his own patriarchal view of femininity, likely fueled by medieval and Renaissance poetry, in which men are the agents who see and desire—and women, eternal objects, who can only be seen and be desired. Donning the mask of altruism, which camouflages his selfish desire to possess and impose his own will on Jambique, the serviteur even goes so far as to persuade himself that his lady—notwithstanding her words to the contrary—actually wants what he wants and secretly hopes he will unmask her. In this classic male rewriting of female discourse, the serviteur tritely convinces himself that Jambique’s “no” means “yes”;134 and while it would be wrong to consider the serviteur’s manipulation of the truth a justification for all of Jambique’s transgressions, which include lying and having her lover disgraced and banished from the court,135 it is nevertheless difficult to believe that Marguerite did not intend us to scrutinize the gentleman’s behavior as well as his lady’s, by directing our attention to his bad faith or self-deception. Unwittingly, the serviteur himself directs our gaze to the polyvalent sign of his own duplicity: for his androcentric rewriting of female desire, symbolized by the chalk mark he inscribes on Jambique’s gown, both allows him to recognize his lady in public and reveals his own betrayal of her trust. In addition to serving as a type of “scarlet letter,” which identifies his lady—albeit to him alone—as an adulteress, the chalk inscription symbolically reduces Jambique to a “passive feminine blank page” upon whom the male, in traditional phallogocentric fashion, feels authorized to inscribe his claim.136 Given Jambique’s proactive role as the aggressor, who both initiated and set the terms of their relationship, the serviteur’s pointedly authorial gesture in marking his lady’s sleeve, as well as his determination to rewrite the rules of their liaison, also suggests that he intends to right the skewed gender roles informing his love affair by establishing his own dominance. Yet the powdery stylus with its phallic echoes137 reflects back

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negatively on the serviteur himself, most likely leaving traces on his own hands—evidence of his broken promise and uncourtly behavior—that the male narrator, with his selective gaze, either fails to see or declines to mention. Indeed, if we disregard Geburon’s sympathetic portrayal of the serviteur and focus only on the latter’s actions and attitudes, it becomes clear that Jambique’s initial trust in his honor is misguided. When viewed dispassionately, her lover falls well short of courtly and feminist ideals; and Jambique, for her part, allows her judgment to be clouded with lust, which she confuses with love.138 In addition to being motivated by sheer “fantaisye” (298) or self-serving “curiosity” (394), the serviteur obtains counsel from a fool—and not a wise one. In an almost comical lapse of judgment, the gentleman seeks his lady’s identity on the advice of a “stupid preacher” (394)139 who sensationalizes his parishioner’s moral dilemma by suggesting his masked lady may be the devil: [He] began to think she might be some kind of evil spirit, having heard some stupid preacher say that nobody would love the Devil if he ever saw his face uncovered! To dispel his doubts he decided to find out once and for all who this woman was who was regaling him with such favors (394).140 In view of the storyteller’s sympathy for his protagonist, it seems unlikely that he would intentionally impugn the gentleman’s intelligence for heeding such a foolish spiritual guide. Rather, Geburon is likely seeking to distance the serviteur’s “good” actions from their dubious source, while entertaining his audience with shared mockery of “stupid preachers” and landing an antifeminist jibe that recalls Eve’s collusion with the devil.141 For fastidious readers, however, it is difficult to separate the gentleman’s breach of faith from its cause or from his sudden fear that Jambique is the devil in disguise, which even Geburon admits is preposterous. On a diegetic level, however, the pretext is a useful one, for it provides the serviteur a religious excuse for satisfying his curiosity. Theologically speaking, the “stupid preacher’s” advice helps legitimize the gentleman’s breach of faith with this lady—if not in Jambique’s eyes, then in the eyes of those who judge his and her morality after the fact—by authorizing him to unmask his lady and allowing him to mask his own ignoble motives with religious trappings. While the gentleman’s casuistry is completely transparent, it nevertheless succeeds in misleading the devisants, who ultimately conflate the “stupid preacher’s” advice with the will of God. Ignoring both the clergyman’s shortcomings and Jambique’s own attempts to justify her adultery in religious terms (“advisa … qu’il n’y eust que Dieu seul qui congneut son cueur,” 297), Oisille unhesitatingly opines that the lady “stands accused by God” for her transgressions; and in a patriarchal conflation of self-serving males, addled preachers, and their creator, Geburon attributes the matron’s unmasking not to the flawed serviteur or his “stupid” pastor, but rather to “God alone” (396).142

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Notwithstanding the lover’s deceit and breach of courtly protocols, not a single devisant raises any arguments in Jambique’s defense, in part because banishing her lover for his mendacity is a punishment grotesquely disproportional to the crime; and in part because the “villainess,” who pretends to be “the most sensible and virtuous lady of her day” (392),143 is a hypocrite. Had she behaved stupidly but honestly by succumbing to an ill-advised “amour naifve,” Geburon tells us, her lapse of chastity would have been defensible: “We all ought to have pity on her” (396).144 Instead, “her wickedness [is] inexcusable,” Oisille opines; “how could anyone defend her, when she stands accused by God, by honour, and even by love?” (396).145 If no one suggests an alternative perspective, either to exculpate Jambique or to soften the harsh edges of her portrait, Marguerite nevertheless reminds us that her crime is by no means gender specific by sliding artfully from the subject of female hypocrisy to a discussion of male Cordeliers. In this way, the simple authorial gesture of changing topics and of setting the stage for a new story provides us with what the female devisantes’ comments did not: a reminder that there are at least as many male hypocrites as female ones and that many of the former wield more power and wound far more people—especially women—than Jambique did.146 In addition to analyzing nouvelle 43 as a companion text to adjoining stories, we can also tease out its blind spots by rereading it in the light of modern feminist criticism and against the backdrop of other narratives of female desire in the Heptaméron. Hope Glidden has done this briefly with nouvelle 20, noting that the mask Jambique wears to protect her identity recalls the disgraced widow’s gesture of covering her face with her hands in the earlier story, when her courtly admirer catches her in flagrante delicto with a stablehand.147 This rudimentary pattern allows us to see both women, who are reviled by the men who tell their stories, as “resisting subjects” who shield their eyes and sense of agency from the objectifying patriarchal gaze. Lest we miss the importance of these masked female faces, Marguerite develops the theme extradiegetically, pointedly observing that Parlamente, often considered her narrative alter ego, wears a “touret de nez” (156) at the end of nouvelle 20. By directing our gaze from inside to outside her nouvelle(s) in this way, and from her collection’s most reviled masked women to the high-ranking and virtuous Parlamente, the queen of Navarre creates a chain of associations that ultimately leads back to herself—a masked woman and “resisting subject” in her own right, with a stylus in hand and an agenda far more serious than writing romans jovials.148 Rather than whitewashing female— or, indeed, male—transgressions, she provides us the tools to unravel their complex etiology, mitigating blame with understanding and exploring the dynamics of gender relationships. She also urges us to read critically without losing sight of “les choses basses,” as we excavate hidden truths that lurk beneath the surface of the text.

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Respectability and its double: the underside of male power and piety The Cordelier featured in nouvelle 44, immediately following the discussion of Jambique’s hypocrisy, freely admits to fooling women with his veneer of sanctity. “If your hypocrisy becomes known,” Monseigneur de Sedan warns the visiting mendicant, who has come to collect his yearly alms from the gentleman’s wife, “you won’t any longer be able to get your hands on the bread of the children of the poor earned by the sweat of their fathers” (398).149 To this implication that his vows of poverty, like his piety, are expedient lies, designed to rob the poor of their livelihood, the affable Franciscan readily agrees: “We found our lives upon female foolishness, and so long as there exist foolish or stupid women in the world, we shall not die of hunger!” (398).150 Playing upon the rivalry between the sexes, the clergyman cleverly implies that Monseigneur de Sedan is astute for doubting his integrity, and Madame de Sedan, foolish for trusting in his holiness and his pious, altruistic rhetoric. In the frame discussion that follows, Ennasuite lends credence to the Cordelier’s assessment of women by ingenuously insisting that men who preach the Gospel and warn against sin must be holy: “But who … could prevent herself from believing in them, since they’re appointed by our prelates to preach the Gospel and admonish us for our sins?” (399).151 In contrast, Parlamente’s more discerning response cuts both ways: some friars preach “the doctrine of God,” she admits, but others, “the doctrine of the Devil” (399).152 As for which sex is more susceptible to judging the book by its cover, or, conversely, to uncovering clerical hypocrisy, the question is moot. Clearly a male, Monseigneur de Sedan, doubts his guest’s piety and altruism in the fictionalized reality of nouvelle 44, prompting the Franciscan’s mockery of “female foolishness”; but underneath the self-congratulatory male bonding and misogynistic humor that fuel the plot, it is Nomerfide who tells the story and Parlamente who drives home the moral, using female experience and acumen to contest the Cordelier’s sanctity. In this superficially innocuous story, the simultaneous price and emblem of the mendicant’s hypocrisy is a pig or pourceau, a mirror image of the friar’s own gluttony and avidity. Viewed by his female targets as a representative of God on earth, the Cordelier exploits this reflected and ersatz power to extract alms from Madame de Sedan, who is unlikely to refuse a man of the cloth, especially since his imprecations are conflated with those of God. Even if he is appropriating the ham to sate his own appetites, little harm incurs to the Sedan family. Unlike the “poor children” to whom the gentleman alludes, he and his wife can afford to contribute a pig to charity once a year: if this were not the case, the husband would not have offered the Cordelier a second ham for admitting his hypocrisy and mocking gullible women, which suggests that the gentleman may be as gullible as his wife, and the friar, more clever or at least more duplicitous

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than both of them. Whatever the case, the consequences of this abuse of power are relatively benign. Far more serious, from an evangelical perspective, is the danger of believing false “doctrine” disseminated by clerical hypocrites whose faith is mere window dressing, as well as a means of wielding power. Believing that “we were bound on pain of mortal sin to believe what they preach to us from the pulpit” (399),153 Ennasuite unwittingly runs a comparable risk in accepting the flawed theology of false prelates. “I can’t overlook the fact,” Parlamente counsels her, “that there have been some men of very bad faith among them” (400).154 Her own strategy is to refuse “to believe these preachers, unless what they say seems … to conform to the word of God” (400).155 Not only she, but Oisille as well, express skepticism toward the theology of “sainctz docteurs” and “grand[s] prescheur[s]” (303) who transpose their own dogma into a litmus test of faith. In contrast, Oisille introduces a lowly, humble model of piety based upon close and frequent readings of the Bible by individuals blessed with grace: “Whosoever reads the Scriptures often and with humility will never be deceived by human fabrications and inventions, for whosoever has his mind filled with truth can never be the victim of lies” (400).156 In this progression from the adjective “grand” to the substantive “humility,” both of which function as perspectival cues, Marguerite’s text draws our gaze downward—away from the raised pulpit (“chaire de verité”) and authoritative rhetoric of “grand[s] prescheur[s]” that so often blind and dazzle the faithful, and instead toward scripture readings undertaken with lowered eyes by the “humble and poor in spirit”—those the Gospel says shall “see God” (Matt. 5: 3–8). Notwithstanding the seriousness of Marguerite’s evangelical discourse and the specter of mortal sin that informs it, the most striking form of ecclesiastical hypocrisy in the Heptaméron is sexual aggression toward women by male clerics. Far more injurious to families than the yearly sacrifice of a pig, and more immediate and concrete than theological hairsplitting, the rapes and attempted assaults committed by clergymen, as well as other “respectable” males, often devastate the victims and their extended families and households. In nouvelle 31 the servants are murdered; a new mother, raped by a Cordelier, hangs herself and kills her child in story 23, while her brother slays her husband, believing him the culprit; and Floride (N. 10) disfigures her face and enters a convent to avoid Amadour’s aggression—and their love. If Patricia Cholakian is right, Marguerite is dissecting rape in these stories from an experiential standpoint, chronicling both the disbelief and outrage that victims feel, and their violent struggles or coping mechanisms, from myriad angles. Thus, even when her narratives elucidate the perpetrator’s desires, intentions, excuses, or pretexts, uncovering his villainy necessarily springs from below: through a glimpse of dead servants, lying prostrate in the courtyard (N. 31); from the perspective of a frightened young girl crouching under the bed (N. 2); in the lifeless body of a newborn infant, killed by the death throes of his mother’s flailing feet

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(N. 23); or through the eyes of a terrified victim, who sees her attacker for what he is.157 As Marguerite tells us in nouvelle 2, “les choses basses” are an unexpected source of revelation, not simply because they document the virtue and pathos of the lowliest members of society, or of women, children, and servants, but also because they unveil, through the privileged gaze of victims, the hidden vices of those who wield power and authority. In Lacanian terms, one might liken these vices and the unspeakable events they trigger to the order of the “Real,” so traumatic that it resists language and symbolization. Of the numerous rapes or attempted rapes that the author chronicles in the Heptaméron, only one is committed by a man of low rank or social standing: this exception is the valet who sexually assaults and kills the muletière in story 2, ostensibly because “the flames of passion smoldered secretly away” (79) in his heart.158 In Marguerite’s language, and in her use of the verb “aimer” to describe the valet’s violent aggression, we note the difficulty of articulating the difference between love, lust, seduction, violent passion, and outright rape in Renaissance France. As Patricia Cholakian observes, the crime was difficult to prosecute in the sixteenth century, in part because Middle French had no single, unambiguous, and officially recognized noun for the act.159 The valet believes he loves his mistress, and he hopes she will yield to his overtures: but when she does not, the servant “[takes] the poor defenceless creature by force” (80).160 Neither handsome nor noble nor particularly pious, the valet is an anomaly among rapists in the Heptaméron. Marguerite may well be using him to propose the comforting hypothesis that rapists are necessarily coarse ruffians: if so, this is a premise that she quickly rejects, as evidenced by the handsome young nobleman who assaults the fictionalized “lady of Flanders” in nouvelle 4. In fact, the ranks of actual and would-be rapists in the Heptaméron include clerics, well-born gentleman, and aristocrats, whose inner villainy is camouflaged by their outward respectability. Far from exhibiting the bestiality that drives their aggression in ways that are externally visible, Marguerite’s gentlemen rapists tend to be handsome, polite, and charming on the surface; and although we cannot always say the same of her friars, often figured as pot-bellied gluttons in medieval and early modern art, they also hide their lasciviousness under a deceptive façade. The Cordelier in nouvelle 23 gives the new father “une grande benediction” (188) intended to cover his own unholy “desir” (189), for example; and the lady of Flanders in nouvelle 4 forgives her admirer’s initial advances upon seeing how “good looking and well-bred” (90) he is.161 The author emphasizes this gap between outward holiness and inner rapacity, or between external courtliness and inward bestiality, in a variety of ways, many of which are ocular or perspectival. In nouvelle 4, as we saw, the lustful gentleman peers into a mirror following his struggle with the Flemish widow he attempted to rape, only to discover that his physical “beaulté” has been blemished by “bites and scratches” (92),162 markers of

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the “real,” which reflect his own violent tendencies. Using a somewhat different strategy in story 23, the author alerts us in advance to the Cordelier’s hypocrisy (“l’ypocrisye de ceulx qui s’estiment plus religieux que les autres,” 186), when Oisille cautions that Satan often “blinds” mortals with his holy appearance. In nouvelle 31, Marguerite again highlights this disjuncture between seeming and being in a trusted family confessor, whose pious mien, habit, and bearing are so convincing that the woman he later abducts initially dismisses his words of love, believing his aberrant display of lust is a mask he has assumed to test her own virtue.163 The men’s self-serving justifications for rape are as varied as the characters and stories themselves, although most stem from hegemonic standpoints.164 While the Cordelier in nouvelle 31 claims to love his victim, this passion is not present in most of Marguerite’s transgressive friars, who equate might with right: amoral, opportunistic, and perpetually lascivious, they take advantage of their authority and aura of sanctity without scruple. One friar slips into a bride’s bed on her wedding night, before her carousing husband leaves his friends (N. 48); another tells a new father to enter his wife’s bedchamber at two o’clock in the morning, leaving himself two hours to steal her favors (N. 23); and yet another waits carefully for the husband’s absence (N. 31), planning his crime for the wife’s most vulnerable moment. Empowered by their vocation and habits, Marguerite’s ecclesiastical sex offenders exhibit few moral qualms or guilt for their sins: like the ruthless friar in nouvelle 23, who flees in the dead of night, they focus instead on escaping apprehension. Perspectives of entitlement among sexual predators in the Heptaméron stem not only from authoritarian vocations such as those of the clergy, but also from high rank, vainglorious self-images, and the prerogatives of maleness.165 The narcissistic gentleman in story 4, for example, persuades himself that the laughing Flemish widow is as attracted to him as he is to her: by staging an encounter in the private space of her bedroom to his own advantage, far from the censorious eyes and malicious rumors of courtly society, he hopes that the woman’s natural urges will trump the culturally imposed inhibitions that inform her public behavior. His moral logic is similar to that of the monk who seduces a nun with his aura of piety in story 72, when he assures the reverent but gullible girl that transgressions committed in secret, beyond the reach of scandalmongers, are not really sins (425).166 Hircan himself flirts with this line of reasoning in nouvelle 7, when he argues that female honor is a public and social construct that is in no way compromised by private licentiousness: “If [my wife or lady] had done anything like that,” he argues, referring to a young girl’s secret affair with a merchant, “I wouldn’t think any the less of them for it—provided I knew nothing about it!” (106).167 In addition to holding a woman blameless if she takes a lover in private and avoids scandal, Hircan and Amadour in nouvelle 10 also suggest the converse: that it is reprehensible or, indeed, dishonorable for a woman to

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resist too much, or for her suitor not to prevail, especially if he has proven his mettle via the prescribed tests and rites of courtship and observed all the conventions designed to stroke his lady’s ego and protect her reputation. Should a woman fail to reward her admirer’s “work” with sexual favors that are implicitly owed to him within the economy of courtship, Amadour argues that rape is justified—especially when seduction fails: “I’m not going to have the just deserts of all my efforts frustrated by your scruples,” he tells the resistant Floride. “Seeing that all my love, all my patient waiting, all my begging and praying are useless, I shall use every ounce of strength in my body to get the one thing that will make my life worth living! Without it I shall die” (147).168 In part because he knows that Floride loves him, and in part because he is a military hero accustomed to overpowering the “enemy” (78), Amadour feels justified in refusing to respect her “scrupules” and her firm “no.” Allowing us to see him through Floride’s disillusioned eyes, however, Marguerite strips the handsome soldier of his outward “grace” and “beaulté,” revealing the brutality hidden underneath his courtly demeanor and good looks: “The fair complexion was flushed with fiery red,” she writes. “The kind, gentle face was contorted with a terrifying violence” (147).169 As Patricia Cholakian notes, the word viol may not appear in the Heptaméron,170 but Marguerite directs our gaze repeatedly to the act and its perpetrators, refiguring both through the eyes of its female victims.

The insides and outsides of patriarchy: beyond and beneath sexual difference and gender stereotypes While Marguerite frequently unmasks the violent tendencies of powerful men, not all the males in her panoply of characters are domineering, insensitive, or violent.171 Counterexamples include the husband who welcomes his wife home after her 15-year affair with another man (N. 61), the young nobleman so distraught over his lady love’s death that he mourns her for ten years (N. 26), or even the Platonizing discourse of Dagoucin, who reveres women and sings the merits of a chaste, “honneste amour.” The most striking of these counterexamples is the young man in nouvelle 9, who dies of a broken heart because he is too poor to marry the girl he loves. While the young woman and her mother are fond of the youth, a cursory reading suggests that his death results from their greed. But upon closer inspection, clearly the women’s own preference for virtue rather than wealth is nullified by the father’s family (“les parens du costé du pere,” 51), who refuse to entertain arguments extolling the youth’s character (“n’y vouloient entendre,” 51) that might contravene their patriarchal interests. Rather than condemning female cruelty or, conversely, the youth’s own faint-heartedness, the storyteller, Dagoucin, captures our gaze instead with his own Platonizing outlook; opens our eyes to a nonviolent type of male love and honor that is “deep,” “noble,” and chaste; and filters the youth’s poverty and low station through the eyes of his own social inferiority.

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Two important insights for the purposes of our discussion emerge from this nouvelle. First, women are not the only victims of patriarchy in the Heptaméron, as illustrated by the poor but virtuous youth’s inability to advance his suit with his lady’s paternal relatives. To this socioeconomic victimization experienced by low-ranking males, and, indeed, by all males whose matrimonial suits are rebuffed by family patriarchs, one might add the high risks of violence, in battle or elsewhere, affecting early modern men as a result of their patriarchal ethos: as Parlamente observes to her male companions after nouvelle 26, “All your pleasure is derived from dishonouring women, and your honour depends on killing other men in war” (305).172 The signifier “war” draws our attention to the unspoken “twin” of “killing other men in war,” or to the constant threat of being killed, a fate that befalls the Duke of Cardona in nouvelle 10. Second, nouvelle 9 and the discussion that follows it hinge upon differing concepts of virtue and honor, and on contrasting views of manliness and femininity, both of which coexist discursively in the Heptaméron. Notwithstanding the story’s internal focus on “vertu,” “honneur,” and “honnêteté,” as determined by Dagoucin’s own values, Hircan and Saffredent criticize the girl’s “sottise” or silliness in protecting her “virtue,” filtering their comments through the lens of male desire. By the same token, they also condemn the youth’s faint-heartedness in not taking her by force, in keeping with their own standards of male “honor” and “virtue,” both equated with rape and killing. With these shifting perspectives, de Navarre exposes the conflicting constructions of gender identity, as well as the competing discourses of love, virtue, and honor that informed them, in early modern society. In nouvelle 9 and throughout the Heptaméron, Marguerite foregrounds the double moral standard by which men and women are judged in the sixteenth century, while exploring contradictory behavioral codes— patriarchal, courtly, and naturalistic—from both male and female perspectives.173 Despite the etymological connections between manliness and “virtue,” which comes from the Latin vir or “man,” narratives and discussions in the Heptaméron refer more often to feminine virtue, or its antithesis, than to the vertu of men. The latter are more often distinguished by their “honor,” which, like virtue, has different connotations for men and women. From her own gendered perspective, Parlamente equates both feminine virtue and honor with chastity, like many of her contemporaries, while noting that males appear to view violence and lust as “something honourable” (396– 97).174 For example, Hircan contends that the would-be rapist in nouvelle 4, who allows himself to be deterred by an old woman, is lacking in heart, courage, and “honneur”: “If I’d gone that far,” he argues, “I’d consider my honour ruined if I didn’t go through with [the assault]!” (97).175 These differing, gendered views of honor are a point of contention between the sexes throughout the Heptaméron. In nouvelle 10, Amadour and Floride’s miscommunication hinges upon the word “honor” and their conflicting understandings of the term. No less strikingly, a young bourgeoise

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named Françoise rebuffs a virtuous prince’s advances in nouvelle 42 on the grounds that her “honneur” is more important than life itself to her. Yet because of the disparity in rank that separates them, the prince himself is honor-bound not to marry the girl, and neither he nor the male storytellers consider a discreet sexual liaison dishonorable, at least when mutual love and respect are involved. These differing notions of honor are clearly sociolinguistic in nature; but they are also perspectival, affecting both the formation of masculine and feminine identity and the way characters see others and themselves. Hinging upon gendered standpoints initially forged in childhood, through educational and socialization processes that differ for girls and boys, the split association of honor with aggression, courage, and conquest for males, and with chastity and modesty for women, is at its core a patriarchal construct that the text’s shifting perspectives deconstruct in the Heptaméron. In the discussion immediately following nouvelle 42, for example, Saffredent acknowledges that female honor is nothing more than a cultural construct that is human, rather than God-given, in origin: [I]n the beginning … love was so naturally open and so vigorous that there was no need at all for any kind of dissimulation … But then greed and sin came and took hold of [men’s hearts,] drove out both God and love, and in their place put love of self, hypocrisy, and deceit. Now, seeing that their hearts [lacked] the virtue of genuine love, and that the term “hypocrisy” incurred odium, women dubbed it “honour” instead. Then those who were incapable of true and honourable love said that it was “honour” which was forbidding them! And in fact they made it into such a harsh and rigid law that even women who are capable of perfect love dissemble, because they regard what is really virtue as a vice (389–90).176 Rather than deconstructing both male and female honor (Old Fr., onor), Saffredent only criticizes the latter, claiming it is a moral and linguistic perversion of the prelapsarian world’s “true” and “honorable” love (Old Fr., amor, sometimes misspelled as “anore,” similar to “onore”) that women alone, rather than patriarchy, have institutionalized. From a feminine perspective, the fallacies in Saffredent’s quasi-naturalistic discourse are glaring: his plea for artlessness and selflessness is both artful and self-serving; and his viewing position is that of the desiring male subject alone, rather than that of the resisting female object, whose desires he assimilates to his own. In a similarly primal vein, reminiscent of Jean de Meun, Simontaut argues in nouvelle 14 that everyone should follow his or her natural instincts (“suyve son naturel,” 115), discarding the cultural constructs that place a premium on female chastity; but like Saffredent, he fails to imagine the possibility that his lust, or “natural instincts,” may not be reciprocated by the woman he desires.

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With the exception of the Milanese widow’s sexual response to Bonnivet (N. 14), who slips uninvited into her bed,177 there is little in the short-story collection to suggest that sexual coercion is either welcome or morally acceptable from a female standpoint, despite Saffredent’s contention that “the greatest honour [a man] can do [to a woman] is to take her by force” (N. 18, 219).178 His androcentric defense of rape is based upon two paternalistic premises: first, that male desire necessarily serves the best interests of “[a woman from whom] a man desires that sort of thing” (219),179 whether she refuses her admirer’s advances or not; and second, that despite their facade of chastity, even those “sottes” who repress their own desires should be secretly grateful when an ardent suitor resorts to “every possible means of conquering her” (219).180 By implying that men understand feminine needs better than women do, Saffredent not only discredits female agency and autonomy, but also—half jestingly, perhaps—uses the language of androcentric protectionism to justify patriarchy’s violence against its own “protectees,” or against the wives, daughters, and sisters of men like himself. In combination with other masculinist attitudes toward female honor and dishonor in the Heptaméron, Saffredent’s comments undercut the putative transcendence of patriarchal morality by exposing its dependence on the male subject’s viewing position— or on whether he is the brother, father, husband, rapist, or frustrated suitor of the resisting woman—and reveal a generalized tendency in both sexes to co-opt moralizing signifiers such as “honor” for their own ends. Within the ludic context of the devisants’ querelle, Saffredent also claims for himself the masculinist prerogative to ascribe names to things and control the order of meaning, by determining that female “honor” is actually hypocrisy—from his own androcentric perspective. This contention is grounded not only in Saffredent’s naturalism, and in his viewing position as an unrequited serviteur, but also in medieval theories of female sexuality, which maintained that women were sexually insatiable. In labeling female “honor” hypocritical, however, Saffredent not only undercuts paternalistic moral codes constructed to hold women’s “ever-receptive” sexuality in check, but also draws our visual memory, by association, to other displays of hypocrisy in the Heptaméron, including the false piety and celibacy of lecherous clergymen. Notwithstanding the pivotal nature of “honor” and “hypocrisy” in Marguerite’s discourses of rape, seduction, adultery, and resistance, then, the text’s perspectival shifts reveal that the signifiers are “hinge words” that men and women use and understand differently, according to their gendered standpoints, desires, and viewing positions. If we read their debate “horizontally,” as a continuum of competing, but more or less egalitarian, interpretations of the era’s sexual politics, it may initially appear that male and female understandings of these hinge words, and even of rape, are weighted equally and that occasionally the men’s sophistry prevails. For example, Saffredent deftly implies that women’s ersatz “honor,” or the “hypocrisy” that causes them to rebuff sexual overtures, is a graver wrong to men than rape is to women. Yet his rhetoric

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of violence, including the locution “take her by force” (219), which he uses to dominate the devisantes verbally, draws our gaze from his words to the reality they trivialize, or to the bloody, mutilated body of the muletière, whom the valet also took “by force” in nouvelle 2. Even more than discursive echoes such as this one, the graphic violence of Marguerite’s assault narratives lingers, almost iconographically, in our visual memories, giving the lie to Saffredent’s blithe nullification of female pathos, and exposing the dark underpinnings of his casuistry. Given the inadequacies of patriarchy, which the Heptaméron repeatedly exposes with its shifting lens, it is no surprise to find alternative social structures and models of male–female relations in the text. One of these is the evangelical community of storytellers, an experiment in egalitarianism; and a second is the provisional gynocracy portrayed in Marguerite’s courtly narratives, where women dominate men—at least up to a point.181 Dating from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, amour courtois took root in an era when marriages, like most of those in the Renaissance, were “arranged”; and when noble ladies, in the absence of their crusading husbands, ruled supreme over courtly life. What emerged from this reversal of the balance of power between the sexes, at least rhetorically, was a rarefied extramarital love between inferior male supplicants and the highborn ladies to whom they swore fealty, much as a vassal obeyed his patriarchal lord. The institution drew its justification from two major premises: first, that true love could only grow outside of marriage, and second, that love for a woman was a spiritually ennobling experience for her admirer. The tradition is also visual in nature, in its celebration of love that is born of a glance. The hybrid vestiges of this courtly mindset, value system, and ritualized code of conduct remain present in the sixteenth century and in Marguerite’s Heptaméron, in the form of serviteurs, the tests or “épreuves” that they brave for their lady, the stylized, Platonizing rhetoric they adopt to woo her, and the elaborate subterfuges they invent to ensure her privacy and protect her honor. While facets of the tradition are embedded in many of the short stories, the most striking evocations of courtly love appear in nouvelles 24 and 43, where female hegemony proves to be no gentler or egalitarian than patriarchal rule—in part because we see it through patriarchal eyes, and in part because the courtly code of behavior is distorted in each story. Rather than reveling in his fealty, the exasperated serviteur Elisor (N. 24) abandons his courtly vows and decides in unchivalrous fashion that the queen of Castile is too cruel to merit his affection, in an early modern deconstruction of a bygone trope that has lost its cultural relevance.182 In the second example, the courtly paradigm is so twisted, its patterns of female dominance, so exaggerated, and its serviteur, so casual about breaching his promises that the tradition is barely recognizable.183 When her serviteur breaks his vow of secrecy, Jambique falsely accuses him of telling a “mensonge ... villaine” (300), or a “vicious … lie” (395), drawing upon romance-flavored rhetoric to paint him as an ignoble vassal, which, arguably, he is, not for

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lying about their relationship but for breaking his word and betraying her trust. Yet in a clash of courtly, patriarchal, and evangelical perspectives, Geburon focuses upon Jambique’s own lies and hypocrisy; and Oisille, co-opting the lady’s own terminology, accuses her of base behavior or “vilenye” (301) in the eyes of God. In this polyvalent Renaissance text, all semblance of a courtly consensus has been shattered: initially, by Jambique herself, who first deviated from the rules of courtoisie that she seeks to invoke; and later, by her lover and the devisants who judge them, without reference to, or reverence for, the fast-eroding “courtly pact.” Here and elsewhere in the Heptaméron, the interplay of disparate perspectives, incompatible social codes, utterances that may or may not be true, and differing constructions of right and wrong draws our attention to the complex interface between language, culture, and truth in sixteenthcentury France—especially within the context of gender relations. With its shifting viewpoints, which scrutinize énoncés from multiple angles, the text hones our awareness of gaps between discursive and perspectival “truths” in the Heptaméron, which vary according to the speaker’s and destinataire’s angle of vision. Neither gender is exempt from this communicative disconnect or from the mendacity that often pits one sex against the other. While males in the Heptaméron unabashedly seduce women by means of subterfuge, Dagoucin complains that men also fall prey to vacuous feminine rhetoric: “The love of valiant men,” he contends, “is such that through believing too much in the truth of ladies they are often deceived” (463).184 One key to male–female misunderstandings in the Heptaméron is the opacity of language, and particularly courtly discourse, which may be sincere, mendacious, or simply ludic in nature—depending upon the context and the intent of the speaker.185 Far from being transparent, words just as often impede understanding or clear-sightedness. On the one hand, Longarine contends 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” (186).186 Yet on the other hand, Saffredent argues that social conventions and feminine expectations require men to lie and posture shamelessly—if they hope to win their lady’s favor: When our ladies are holding court and sit in state like judges, then we men bend our knees before them, we timidly invite them to dance, we serve them so devotedly that we anticipate their every wish. Indeed, we have the appearance of being so terrified of offending them, so anxious to serve their every whim, that anybody else observing us would think we must be either out of our minds, or struck dumb, so idiotic is our animal-like devotion … However, in private it is quite another matter. Then Love is the only judge of the way we behave, and we soon find out that they are just women, and we are just men (N. 10, 153).187

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In exchanges such as these, Marguerite directs our attention to the welloiled choreography of flirtation, whose exaggerated, stylized nature is both a requirement for amorous success and a game with gender-specific rules and roles, which most participants are assumed—sometimes erroneously— to understand. As Saffredent explains it, aristocratic ladies effectively “hold court” like judges, demanding romantic words and behavior from their admirers, who in turn pretend to worship their ladies to advance their suit. Notwithstanding the courtly or romantic currency it involves, the transaction is ultimately an economic one: the serviteur honors his lady in public with his rhetoric and service, while she honors him in private with special marks of attention, including her sexual favors if he is fortunate. Within this ludic world-upside-down that reverses patriarchal hierarchies, however, the notion that “women rule” may be an illusion as well. By concluding that “elles sont femmes, et nous hommes” (84) in the above passage, Saffredent implies that both gender and social hierarchies vanish when two people make love, perhaps because divine love transforms us. Yet his closing salvo also lends itself to a less idealized interpretation—suggesting that a couple’s love-making in private, in contrast to their public behavior, effectively “rights” the skewed gender roles of courtly etiquette by reaffirming that he, rather than she, is the “boss.” The moral ambivalence of the serviteur’s posturing and “white lies” does not appear to trouble Saffredent, who implies that the end (sexual fulfillment) justifies the means (feigned male subservience), at least for men. While this premise informs military and political strategies in The Prince, it may seem oddly placed in a discussion of “honnête amour,” which typically romanticizes desire. Yet Machiavelli himself applies this consequentialist philosophy to love and courtship in La Mandragola or The Mandrake Root, a brilliant comedy in which “lust conquers all.” In medieval poetry and in nouvelle 10, moreover, amorous pursuits are often described in military terms, reminding us that courtship, like its polar opposite, war, is often focused more on conquest than romance. Early in their relationship, for instance, Amadour plies Floride with courtly words of love, but ultimately his suit devolves into a “fight” against an “enemy.” Similarly, the lascivious gentleman in nouvelle 4 politely promises the Flemish widow he is pursuing that he will respect her wishes and abandon his verbal campaign to seduce her; but this expedient pledge does not alter his determination to “acquerir” or win her sexual favors, by force if necessary. By drawing our attention to gaps between courtly words and the intentions underlying them, Marguerite exposes the lascivious, and oftentimes dishonest, side of “honnête amour” that the rhetoric of flirtation masks. From a masculine perspective, Dagoucin’s observation that women routinely lie (359) solidifies Saffredent’s conviction that a serviteur’s mendacity is morally acceptable and a part of his culture’s common currency. The assumption that both sexes understand, and participate equally in, this dance of dissimulation is not always borne out textually, however. While

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Amadour believes he and Floride are playing the same game by the same rules and using a rhetorical code they both understand, ultimately this supposition proves to be false. In their case, neither character actually lies; but their gendered understandings or “views” of key courtly terms, including “honor” and “love,” are radically different, blinding each to the other’s standpoint. True, Saffredent implies that a courtly serviteur’s obsequious rhetoric and posturing, more ludic than deceptive in intent, are too preposterous to be taken seriously. Yet Simontaut belies this assumption by dreaming of a credulous lady who will believe, and be ensnared by, his amorous lies: “If all women were of your opinion,” he says to the skeptical Parlamente, “we men might as well pack away our fine speeches and humble supplications. But whatever you and those who are like you say, we shall never believe that women are as unbelieving as they are beautiful” (46364).188 Far from being idle banter, white lies and more serious forms of mendacity are a part of the suitor’s arsenal of weapons, which he uses to dazzle and to enhance his own power. As we see with Jambique, this practice is not limited to male characters. Out of traditional female concern for her reputation, the matron conceals her extramarital affair; but she also lies to preserve her own power, a ploy more often identified with men.189 In addition to exploring the difficulty of communication and uncovering both ritualized patterns of mendacity and perspectival differences between the sexes, Marguerite broaches the question of trust—or the lack thereof— as it affects gender relations. If all men lie, asks Ennasuite, what is the point of listening to them? “So … as soon as a man starts to open his mouth,” she wonders, “you ought to turn him down without even knowing what he’s going to say?” (187).190 This communicative impasse, fueled by the dearth of mutual trust and understanding between men and women, lies at the heart of Elisor’s story (N. 24). Unable to believe her suitor’s gestures or trite words, the queen of Castile demands that Elisor prove his love with seven years of hardship; but by the end of his exile, the serviteur in turn has ceased to trust or care about his lady’s promises, which he rejects for a more transparent communicative mode, or communion with God. Given the mistrust of language and the collapse of fealty that drive the plot, however, one might venture that the vitriolic accusations Elisor hurls at the queen of Castile—not bravely and directly, but through the double mediacy of a handwritten epistle and a clerical messenger—clash with the divine agape he espouses, perpetuating the divide between words and truth, faith and love, that eroded his courtly relationship.191 Ambiguous signifiers, empty rhetoric, mendacious posturing, and deliberate lies—these are only a few of the impediments to communication and trust between the sexes that the queen of Navarre examines, by means of perspectival shifts, in her Heptaméron.192 Despite the author’s “cover” of writing superficial, frivolous bagatelles, she in fact joins other Renaissance humanists in exploring the truth value and communicative limitations of language. One is reminded of Rabelais, and, to a lesser degree, of Castiglione,

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who sound out the polyvalent, sometimes meaningless nature of words, as well as their utilization for flattery, dissimulation, and oppression.193 However, the metonymic context of Marguerite’s linguistic investigation, unlike that of her peers, is gender relations and the language of love. This “womanly” framework, together with her own gender and the greater weight she places on case histories than learned theories, has made Marguerite’s contributions to the Renaissance debate on language and communication easy to overlook.

Re-viewing marriage and infidelity: coping with an “estate of long duration” The perspectival differences that thwart mutual understanding between the sexes in courtly interactions also figure in Marguerite’s portrayals of marriage. Much like Pantagruel in the Tiers livre, who observes that good marriages provide a glimpse of “les joyes du paradis” (chapter 10),194 Oisille opines in nouvelle 37 that “provided one does not abuse it, marriage is, I believe, the finest and surest state in this world” (361).195 However, the majority of marriages portrayed in the Heptaméron fall short of this ideal, prompting Parlamante to note that couples “find at least as much pain as pleasure” (N. 40, 371) 196 in the institution, no matter how wisely they marry. While references to love permeate the Heptaméron, by and large Marguerite’s representation of marriage and gender relations is profoundly unidealistic, in keeping with the “truth project” she espouses in the prologue. As we follow her mobile gaze behind closed doors, and peer into the bedchambers, closets, and hallways of respectable homes, what meets our eyes, more often than not, is the tarnished underside of love, marriage, and fidelity. In addition to depicting a world in which communication between men and women, husbands and wives, seems irretrievably broken, and in which gender-related trickery, betrayal, and violence abound, de Navarre also unveils the power struggles, thwarted dreams, outright boredom, festering resentments, and differing expectations that threatened earlymodern marital unions from within. On the one hand, we may well ask what these differing expectations were, given the patriarchal model’s dominance and the clarity of its operational principles and internal hierarchies. For an overview of the institution, we need only look at Leon Battista Alberti’s I libri della famiglia (Book of the Family, ca. 1433–1440), considered by many to be the definitive description of patriarchal-style marriages in early modern Europe. There, young brides, chosen for socioeconomic purposes and their childbearing potential, figure as commodities of exchange in marital alliances between households, often irrespective of their own personal wishes in the matter. This, at least, is the loveless model of marriage that we typically associate with the Renaissance, which may suggest that spousal partners during that era expected nothing more of their unions than healthy offspring, financial

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stability, a reasonably harmonious working relationship, and public respectability. Yet on the other hand, recent criticism focusing on Alberti’s multiperspectivism has drawn our attention to the importance he attaches to marital companionship and spousal love,197 an expectation that figures in the Heptaméron as well, often in competition or conflict with other views and types of marriage. As Edward Benson puts it, “In Marguerite’s lifetime, an ideal of marriage based on mutual attraction and affection grew to trouble the traditional aristocratic model of marriage arranged by parents to protect and perpetuate family property.”198 From a practical standpoint, love matches do not fare particularly well in the Heptaméron. Rolandine’s beloved first husband, whom she marries clandestinely when her father (Count Jossebelin) and the queen oppose the relationship, betrays her with another woman, and the Count goes so far as to murder his sister’s low-ranking husband, with whom she is “deeply and perfectly in love” (368-69; “[avoient] la plus grande et parfaicte amityé,” 275), because she defied his authority and married a man of her own choosing. As we have already seen, moreover, the gentil homme in nouvelle 32 “love[s] [his wife] more than any man ever could” (332; “[l’a] plus aymée que jamais homme pourroit aymer femme,” 234) and marries her “against her parents’ wishes” (332), convinced that she reciprocates his affection; but she cuckolds him with a household retainer. While patriarchal or familial opposition to these love matches—and to the filial or feminine rebellion they represent—is a factor in each of these stories, only in the second example, nouvelle 40, is it the immediate cause of the marriage’s collapse. Even so, there is dissension among the devisants about who is to blame. From a patriarchal perspective, which privileges social stability and authoritarianism over personal desire, Parlamente condemns the bereaved widow for marrying for “her own pleasure” without “the consent of those to whom [she owes] obedience” (370–71; “sans le consentement de ceulx à qui on doibt porter obeissance,” 277). Yet Nomerfide defends the love match with youthful zeal, emphasizing its “glory” and conformity to divine law: “There is nothing [in the union] to offend God” (372; “Dieu n’y est poinct offensé,” 278 ), she insists, in an apologia of perfect love that she roots “in God’s commandments” (372; “joinct au commandement de Dieu,” 279) rather than in the secular concerns of earthly fathers. Without contesting patriarchy’s purview over marriage, Nomerfide refigures both practices in spiritual, rather than institutional, terms that posit God the Father, rather than parents or heads of household, as the ultimate authority in matters of conscience, including matrimony. If love matches described in the Heptaméron have minimal success, either because of patriarchal impediments or because the passion is feigned, onesided, or does not endure, the same may be said of more conventional marriages as well. In early modern society, neither the absence of romantic love between husband and wife nor the infidelity of a spouse would necessarily have compromised such unions, as long as household or courtly

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activities ran smoothly and familial goals and responsibilities were fulfilled. This, at least, is the public face of patriarchal-style marriages, which offered the prospect of mutual respect, as well as deep friendship and even love if they were fortunate, to compatible partners. With its shifting perspectives, however, the Heptaméron draws our gaze repeatedly to private sorrows and disappointments, individual rather than institutional, that strain outwardly functional marriages from within. While dramatic or resourceful spousal responses to conjugal infidelity abound in the text, as they do in other popular narratives of the era, even more interesting are the quickly suppressed signs of marital displeasure, often on the part of unhappy wives, that crop up within the narratives. Although Floride’s relationship with her husband, the Duke of Cardona, is not a central component of nouvelle 10’s plot, the narrator’s offhand acknowledgment that the duke is repugnant to his young bride (“she would gladly have exchanged [him] for death,” 137; “Florida had had a horror of being with her husband,” 150) offers readers important insights into the uneasy intersection of patriarchal interests, female experience, and romantic love in the early modern world. To be sure, some parents sought or listened to their daughters’ input regarding prospective marriage partners: Marguerite herself balked at the idea of marrying Henry VII of England, for example, and the young wife in nouvelle 15 indicates that she thwarted her parents’ attempts—unwisely, in retrospect—to wed her to a rich and noble man. Yet Floride’s mother, pressed by the king to accept the Duke of Cardona’s request for her daughter’s hand, offers her child no such option: “She was sure that her daughter, still so young in years, could have no other will than that of her mother” (137; “estimant que en sa fille, qui estoit si jeune, n’y avoit volunté que la sienne,” 69), writes Marguerite. That Floride grows closer to her unwanted husband over time, “refus[ing] to move from his side” (150), might even appear to support her mother’s patriarchal perspective and the truism that affection can take root in arranged marriages, were it not for the fact that Floride is using her husband as a screen to deflect her mother’s hostility—and to escape her love for Amadour. Instead of viewing Floride’s arranged marriage to the duke from a single perspective, we see it through the young woman’s eyes—through the lens of romantic, individualistic otherness—as well as her mother’s, who assimilates the girl’s gaze and will to her own. When read against the backdrop of similar texts, such as canto 44 of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso or Garnier’s Bradamante, Floride’s mute acquiescence to her mother’s directives may appear to reflect a sense of filial honor, patriarchally inculcated, that would make her an “outsider within” the societal order that oppresses her. In fact, Avanturade notes that Floride is a “good and wise girl” who “would never confess to anything that was not in accordance with the wishes of her mother” (126; “elle ne confesseroit avoir autre volunté que celle de sa mere,” 58 )—a well-schooled noblewoman whose own submission to the king is replicated in her daughter’s deference to parental authority. Drawing our

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attention away from the girl’s outward, and seemingly dutiful, compliance, however, the author directs our gaze instead to the girl’s unspoken realization that patriarchy’s power dynamics have disempowered her, making further resistance on her part “useless” (137; “en une chose faicte ne falloit poinct de conseil,” 69). Rather than voicing her objections, Marguerite tells us, Floride “repressed her feelings [so hard] that her tears, having been held back in her heart by force, caused violent bleeding from the nose that threatened her life” (137; “feirent sortir le sang par le nez,” 69). A second problem in Floride’s marriage, in addition to her distaste for the husband foisted upon her, is her love for another man, or, indeed, other men: the son of the Infante of Fortune, whom she would have preferred to marry, and the military hero Amadour, her serviteur. That the teenager sees no conflict between the “noble love” (132) Amadour offers her and the conjugal love she dreams of sharing with the Infante’s son is on one level a mark of her youth and naïveté. Like Amadour, who envisions a “happy end” (123; “heureuse fin,” 56) to his suit , Floride imagines a blissful future, a hope rooted not only in her childish optimism, but also in her likely sense that love, so rarely evident in her mother’s “stern treatment” and “harsh” (137) countenance, cannot be too abundant, especially when it is “honourable and good” (133). Not only does she expect her family to wed her to the man she loves, in an improbable conflation of patriarchal interests and her own desires, but she also appears to believe that Amadour’s attentions will enrich, rather than disrupt, both her life and her husband’s. That this amorous triangle’s “happy end” (123) does not materialize is a foregone conclusion, brought about by Marguerite’s predilection for “truthful” (68) stories; by patriarchal practices that rarely, if ever, accommodated love matches; and by the biological underpinnings of Amadour’s ostensibly “noble” (123) love which ignite Floride’s own desire but clash with Christian prohibitions against adultery. By drawing our attention to Floride’s nonhegemonic perspective, and to the inner conflict she experiences as a result of her arranged, but loveless, marriage, the author illuminates a drawback of patriarchal marital practices from a woman’s experiential standpoint. If Floride’s eventual marriage falls short of her childish dreams because of patriarchal strictures, which join her with a man she loathes while separating her from the men she desires, Amadour’s wife, conversely, cares too deeply for her faithless husband, who, like knights of old, seeks romance outside, rather than inside, of marriage. Unattractive, but rich, Avanturade is described as being “much in love with Amadour” (125; “aymoit Amadour plus que tous les hommes du monde,” 58), who marries her for her virtuous reputation, her respectable dowry of 3,000 ducats, and her close relationship to Floride. While the wife’s pathos is peripheral to the main storyline, which focuses upon her husband’s pursuit of Floride, the text’s shifting angles of vision briefly illuminate Avanturade’s eagerness to please her “handsome” spouse (“she could keep nothing from him,” 125; “ne luy voulut rien celer,” 58); her suppressed “jealousy” (133) of Paulina (Poline), with whom

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Amadour strikes up a flirtation to cover his love for Floride; her increasingly fragile health and premature death, coincidental with Amadour’s departures for war or business; and the latter’s self-serving grief over the loss of her use value to him, as a cover or pretext for his visits with Floride. While court observers pay scant attention to Avanturade, instead pitying Amadour “for having married such an ugly wife” (129; “une femme si laide,” 61), Marguerite’s perspectival shifts redirect our sympathies to the margins of the plot, where an unattractive spouse, used and neglected by her husband, suffers in silence. If questioned about his deficiencies as a husband, Amadour would doubtless be taken aback: her marriage to a national hero enhances Avanturade’s prestige, after all, and he, in turn, is “conscientious in writing to his wife” (if only to send messages to Floride, 128), discreet in his relationships with other women, honorable in his service to king and country, and respectful toward Avanturade. As a husband, he behaves as many of his peers do, and better than most. Like many other couples in the Heptaméron, however, Avanturade and Amadour operate at cross purposes. To reprise Benson’s argument, she hopes for a marriage “based on mutual attraction and affection,” while Amadour, after making overtures to Avanturade and winning her support for his suit, approaches the union as a socially advantageous alliance of patriarchal families, secured through the good offices of his brother and the king, and agreed upon by Avanturade’s “miserly old father” (127; “le pere, vieulx et avaritieux,” 59). Dwelling upon his wife’s angst, or worrying about the ethics of his adulterous obsession with Floride, are not a part of his world view. Ultimately, the differing perspectives and expectations that couples bring to their unions in the Heptaméron are no less problematic than their infidelities. A case in point is story 15, where an arranged marriage made possible by the impoverished groom’s high-placed connections unites an indifferent, patriarchal-style husband with a young bride who is infatuated with him and believes in love: “How could it be possible, she asked herself, that he [did not] love her, when she loved him so dearly?” (190; “il estoit impossible qu’il l’aymast, veu la grande amour qu’elle luy portoit, sinon qu’il eut quelque autre fantaisie,” 117). Recounted by Longarine, who loved her own dead husband, the narrative draws our gaze and our sympathies to the plight and viewpoint of the neglected and cuckolded wife, whose unrequited desires and vain efforts to capture her husband’s attention eventually prompt her to take a lover. While Longarine stops short of applauding the young woman’s behavior, which she and the other devisants dutifully criticize, the tale’s recurring focus on the despairing wife’s nonhegemonic standpoint offers rare insights into the “other,” or uxorial, side of patriarchal-style marriages: there, we discover the little-discussed problematics of female desire in asexual marriages, the conflict between cultural taboos and biological imperatives that women in such unions faced, gender-based disparities governing extramarital dalliances, and radically

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different views of what matrimony is and should entail on the part of both husband and wife. Ocularity, or how and what we see, lies at the heart of Marguerite’s anatomy of marriage: and if the differing ways in which marital partners view and experience marriage account for some of the difficulties in their unions, how and if they see each other as individuals also affects their relationships. While the gentil homme in nouvelle 15, much like Amadour, appreciates his wife’s wealth, we have seen that she, like many other wives under patriarchy, is little more than an institutionally sanctioned use object to him. Because he views her as his possession, her infidelities elicit his ire; but her needs, desires, interests, and beliefs—indeed, her personhood— remain invisible to him. Other standpoints within the narrative contest the husband’s myopia, however: the narrator Longarine tells us that the gentil homme is “insufferable to the girl,” and even his mistress warns him, from the vantage of feminine experience, that his “rich, beautiful, and [wellborn]” wife will eventually tire of “put[ting] up with” her mistreatment (189: “j’ai peur [qu’elle] face ce que, estant de vous bien traitée, n’oseroit jamais penser,” 117). As the text’s multiperspectivism reveals, the husband’s egocentric vantage is not exclusive to either marriage or males. Instead, self-interest, or the drive to dominate and use the other, lies camouflaged beneath amorous masks, the flowery rhetoric of courtship, and the marriage pact in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron. Anticipating La Rochefoucauld, Geburon warns his female companions in the discussion following nouvelle 14 that males do not pursue ladies, whom he objectifies as “merchandise” (“marchandises,” 114), out of romantic longing but rather for reasons of self-love and their own pleasure (“pour l’amour d’eulx et de leur plaisir,” 115).199 As for female love, Hircan contends that it is equally self-interested: “You only love your husbands for your own sakes,” he tells the ladies. “If they’re the way you want them, you love them well enough, and if they commit the slightest error, it’s like losing a week’s pay just because you fail to work on Saturday. You always want to be in command” (N. 37, 361).200 With this sally, Hircan draws our gaze to the archetypal domineering woman, a staple of medieval iconography, who contests male dominance with her shrewish temper and burlesque physicality; but more importantly, his bantering allusion to henpecked husbands, and to marital squabbles and idiosyncratic negotiations of power within the household, affords us a glimpse of the varying patterns of dominance that existed in early modern, and nominally patriarchal, homes.201 That adultery abounds in the marriages Marguerite portrays is unsurprising, given her penchant for social and biological realism, the selfinterest that drives many of her characters, and the incompatible values and expectations that men and women bring to their unions. For early modern women, Frelick hypothesizes that infidelity offered an escape from uncaring marriages and a means of resistance to patriarchal control;202 and for men, adulterous liaisons were both a manifestation of male hegemony and a

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common byproduct of arranged marriages, which commodified wives and offered husbands an affective rationale for seeking sexual fulfillment elsewhere. Not even love matches or companionable unions in the Heptaméron are immune to infidelity, however, as Rolandine’s experience with her “bâtard” illustrates. Either because of their enforced separation, or because he is too “enamoured of a [very wealthy] German lady” (251) to remain faithful—or simply because he is a money-grubbing miscreant—“the bastard’s love diminishe[s]” (252; “l’amour se diminuoit,” 173) and eventually dissipates altogether.203 Officially, virtually all early modern marriages lasted until one partner died; but as Marguerite’s mobile gaze reveals, all relationships are subject to change, at times because of sheer boredom. For instance, Bonnivet’s extramarital affair with a Milanese widow (N. 14) lasts no longer than the “flowers of the field in their beauty endure” (186; “l’amityé dura … comme la beaulté des fleurs des champs,” 114), and Bornet’s (N. 8) commitment to monogamy within marriage is similar. Since Bornet holds his wife’s “honour and reputation very dear, … he want[s] her to be faithful to him”; but he has little interest in “having the rule applied to them both equally” (108; “si ne vouloit-il pas que la loy fust esgalle à tous deux,” 43). On one level, Bornet’s plan to bed the chambermaid, unbeknownst to his wife, is conditioned by his culture’s permissive attitude toward male infidelity; but he is also seeking “la diversité des viandes” (43) to which he feels entitled, or a new sexual partner who does not bore him as his wife does. Female standpoints challenge his perspective, however. At the outset, Longarine identifies the husband as “Bornet,” a homophone of borné, meaning “narrow-minded or “limited”; focuses on his failure to recognize his wife during intercourse, simply because he believes she is the chambermaid; and reveals his bumbling orchestration of his own cuckolding, when he shares the “chambermaid” with a friend. That Bornet views his quest for sexual “diversité” as a masculine, rather than feminine, prerogative seems clear: yet stories of female infidelity in the Heptaméron belie his assumption that wives are immune to the same boredom with their partners that he associates with his manhood. From her own uxorial perspective, honed by longsuffering faithfulness to a transgressive husband, Parlamente counters the tired argument that infidelity stems from the dissipation of marital love with the observation that it more frequently causes this erosion: It seems to me that in marriage [infidelity] must lead to ill-feeling. The reason is that if one suffers because of one’s partner, one is obliged to separate oneself from him or her as far as possible, and this estrangement gives rise to contempt for the one who has been unfaithful, and contempt leads in turn to diminution of love (360).204 While Parlamente phrases her retort in non-gender-specific terms, in fact she is scrutinizing husbandly adultery from a female perspective within the context

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of nouvelle 37. At first the cuckolded wife in that story falls into a deep depression that wreaks havoc on her headless household, which her oversight alone had been saving from ruin as a result of her husband’s profligacy. On the advice of a well-meaning relative, however, who exhorts her not to neglect her “poor children,” the wife overcomes her despair and works tirelessly to mend her husband’s ways: first, by showering him with displays of affection, and, second, by frightening him with a burning pile of straw. In her commentary on the story, Parlamente not only rejects androcentric arguments that blame “boring” women for their spouses’ infidelities, but also questions the bachelor Dagoucin’s authoritative pronouncements about a relationship he has never experienced: “Wives should not despair until [they] have tried all possible means of bringing [their errant spouses] back” (360), he blithely opines, placing the entire burden for restoring order within their families, and for correcting their mates’ profligacy, on the longsuffering, cuckolded wives. Yet from an experiential perspective that differs radically from Dagoucin’s theoretical view of marriage, Parlamente notes that rekindling one’s love for a man one cannot respect, as the matron in nouvelle 37 appears to do, is easier said than done. “Anyone who cares to may follow that example,” she says, “but as far as I’m concerned, it would be impossible to be so patient” (360).205 With this observation, the devisante shifts our gaze in two directions: first, from the institution of marriage to the individuals that comprise it, and upon whose right conduct and mutual respect it depends; and second, from the normative male perspective, which constructs the wife as a use object whose feelings are irrelevant, to a female point of view that posits the wife as a sentient subject, and the wayward husband, as the object of her contempt. What emerges from Marguerite’s “French Decameron” is not simply a protofeminist contribution to the querelle des femmes or a female rewriting of male discourse, but a multiscopic inquest into patriarchy and gender relations within androcentric households and marriages, testimonials about rape and adultery, tales of courtly love gone awry, histoires tragiques, portraits of “women on top,” and a host of other narrative subgenres. In these texts, the myriad viewing positions of Marguerite’s storytellers and discussants, male and female characters, and “outsiders within” force us to see gender-related matters differently: not only through the narrow-angle, essentializing lens of patriarchy, but also through the subversive eyes of otherness, from the standpoint of female as well as male experience, and from vantages beneath and atop the social pyramid. Together, these shifting perspectives erode patriarchal constructions of female exemplarity with the complexity of real life; uncover patterns of violence and victimization beneath the orderly façade of androcentric culture; and draw our attention to linguistic and social barriers to male–female communication, abuses of patriarchal authority, and infringements of both the marital pact and the laws of honnête amour. As a woman writer in a deeply patriarchal culture, finally, Marguerite founds her authorship upon the excavation of women’s

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suppressed perspectives and experiences, a gesture that finds corollaries in her treatment of social class and in the exploration of the servant’s “privileged” vantage as an “outsider within,” which we will examine in the next chapter.

Notes 1 2 3

4 5

6

7 8

9 10

11 12 13 14 15

Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. J. M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955), 195; Œuvres complètes, ed. Jacques Boulenger (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), 205. Mathieu-Castellani, La quenouille et la lyre (Paris: José Corti, 1998), 39–51.  See Gabriel Henri Gaillard, Histoire de François Ier, Roi de France (Paris: Saillant & Nyon, 1769), 6: 443: “Une femme quittoit sa quenouille & son fuseau pour un livre d’Evangile traduit en François … Des pédans insensés & cruels eux-mêmes croyoient avoir peint bien fidèlement cette Reine charmante.” Parkin, The Humor of Marguerite de Navarre in the “Heptaméron”: A Feminist Author before Her Time (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008); and Putnam, Marguerite of Navarre (New York: Coward McCann, Inc., 1935). As António De Ridder-Vignone notes, in his “Incoherent Texts? Storytelling, Preaching, and the Cent nouvelles nouvelles in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron 21” (RenQ 68 [Summer 2015]: 465–95), even the female devisantes exhibit a “simultaneously feminist and patriarchal stance” (479). Myriad scholars have addressed the relationship between Boccaccio and Marguerite de Navarre, including Delègue, “Autour de deux prologues,” 23–37; Donald Stone, “Boccaccio’s Decameron and the Heptaméron,” in From Tales to Truths: Essays on French Fiction in the Sixteenth Century (Frankfurt-am-M.: Klostermann, 1973), 21–28; Tetel, “Au seuil de l’Heptaméron et du Décaméron,” in Prose et prosateurs de la Renaissance: mélanges offerts à Robert Aulotte ( Paris: Sedes, 1988), 135–42; P. D. Diffley, “From Translation to Imitation and Beyond: A Reassessment of Boccaccio’s Role in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron,” MLR 90 (Apr. 1995): 345–62. Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. G.H. McWilliam (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972). See also Umberto Bosco and Domenico Consoli, eds., Decameron (Basiano: Bietti, 1972), 18. See, for example, Cholakian and Cholakian’s description of Marguerite’s upbringing: “Thus, while her vigorous brother was outside with his comrades hunting, jousting, and playing at making war, Marguerite remained indoors reading or busying herself with more womanly activities” (17). See Bosco and Consoli, 29: “Gli uomini sono delle femine capo.” Mihoko Suzuki’s view of Ghismonda as a victim of familial and authorial patriarchy is somewhat different from my own. See her “Gender, Power, and the Female Reader: Boccaccio’s Decameron and Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron,” CLS 30, no. 3 (1993): 231–52. Cf. Bosco and Consoli, 211: “Savia più che a donna per avventura non si richieda.” See De Ridder-Vignone, “Incoherent Texts,” 475–78 for a comparison of Rolandine’s speech to both “the pardon request and the martyr’s tale” (466). Cf. Bauschatz, “Rabelais and Marguerite de Navarre on Sixteenth-Century Views of Clandestine Marriage,” SCJ 34 (Summer 2003): 395–408. “Elle vesquit sainctement et honnorablement” (174). Even as she survives, many would argue that Rolandine’s resistant voice is silenced and recuperated into the dominant (male) discourse at the end of the nouvelle. See Marc André Wiesmann, “Rolandine’s lict de reseul: An

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18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27

28 29 30

31 32 33 34

Gender and patriarchy: a many-sided view Arachnological Reading of a Tale by Marguerite de Navarre,” SCJ 31 (Summer 2000): 448–49; and Lyons, “The Heptaméron and the Foundation of Critical Narrative,” YFS 70 (1986): 150–63. “Ma fille, vous estes plus juste que moy” (173). In her “Writing the Body: Androgynous Strategies in the Heptameron” (Critical Tales, 232–40), Sommers stresses the androgynous atmosphere of this community, which derives in part from its organization according to Christian principles of caritas, and in part because of Marguerite’s subversion of the sexual typologies borrowed from the querelle des femmes that she introduces in the prologue (235). “Au jeu nous sommes tous esgaulx” (10). Bradley indicates that there are 454 commentaries by female devisantes, in comparison to 407 by their male companions (241). John C. Lapp, “Pontus de Tyard and the Querelle des Femmes,” MLN 64 (Jan. 1949): 331–33. “That the debates often moved from orality to textuality is clear as both male and female writers bring salon and academic discourse into their written arguments” (8), notes Campbell. Bull, 31; Preti, 3–4. Bull, 242; Preti, 296. Bull, 244, 252; Preti, 299, 309. Bull, 260; Preti, 321. See his pamphlet, Gratulatio ad venerabilem presbyterum dominum Gabrielum de Saconay Praecentorem Ecclesiae Lugdunensis, de pulchra et eleganti praefatione quam libro Regis Angliae inscripsit (Geneva: Conrad Badius, 1561), 7. Freccero, “Archives in the Fiction,” 86. The quotation is from Calvin’s sermon on Deuteronomy, in Joannis Calvini Opera quae supersunt omnia, ed. Johann Wilhelm Baum et al., 59 vols. (Braunschweig: C.A. Schwetschke, 1863–1900), 2: 677; cited in A. Biéler, L’homme et la femme dans la morale calviniste (Geneva: Droz, 1963), 99. Reid, King’s Sister, 1: 302. “Archives in the Fiction,” 86. Indeed, Brenda Dunn-Lardeau identifies Oisille as one of the iconic wise old women who crop up anew in Renaissance literature, following a spate of medieval and early sixteenth-century texts that mocked and debased “la vieille,” such as “Jeu de la feuillée” by Adam de la Halle and even “Blason du laid tétin” by Marot. See “La vieille femme chez Marguerite de Navarre,” BHR 61, no. 2 (1999): 375–98. McWilliam, 824; Bosco and Consolo, 546. McWilliam, 827; Bosco and Consolo, 548. See, for example, Carolyn Muessig, The Faces of Women in the Sermons of Jacques de Vitry (Toronto: Peregrina Publishing Co., 1999). For instance, Saint Eulalia “prays to Christ” and ascends to heaven like a dove after she is thrown into the flames (where her purity prevents her from burning), as Maximian’s men prepare to behead her: “Volt lo seule lazsier, si ruovet Krist” (“She wants to leave the world; she prays to Christ”). See “La cantilène de Sainte-Eulalie,” http://w3.restena.lu/cul/BABEL/T_CANTILENE.html. See also Andrea Pearson, Envisioning Gender in Burgundian Devotional Art, 1350–1530 (Hampshire, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 55; Daniel Russell, Emblematic Structures in French Renaissance Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995); and Russell, “Some Ways of Structuring Character in the Heptameron” (Critical Tales, 203–17).

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Cf. Bosco and Consoli, 546: “Assai le donne, chi d’una parte et chi d’altra tirando, chi biasimando una cosa e chi un’altra intorno ad essa lodandone, n’avevan favellato.” For more on the female destinataires, the differing male and female reactions to the nouvelles, and the moralistic “Voylà, mes dames” that opens so many short stories, see Bauschatz, “Voylà, mes dames,” 104–22. “Parquoy se fault humillier, car les graces de Dieu ne se donnent poinct aux hommes pour leurs noblesses et richesses” (21). “Celles que le monde estime haultes et honorables” (21). quotations from the Bible are taken from the New International Version (NIV), https://www.biblegateway.com. For a discussion of similar implications in Boccaccio’s treatment of Griselda, see N.S. Thompson, “Man’s Flesh and Woman’s Spirit in the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales,” in The Body and Soul in the Medieval World, ed. Piero Boitani and Anna Torti (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999), 27–28. Lena reflects in Act 2, scene 2, about her husband’s encouragement of her prostitution to pay their debts: “Moglie …sarà la nostra ventura,” he tells her early in their marriage; “sapendoti governar seco, tutti i nostri debiti ci pagarà” (lines 424–27). Ludovico Ariosto, Commedie, ed. Michele Catalano (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1933), 2: 210. “Cause de tout son mal” (17). Since Cepparello, who appears in the first novella of the Decameron, is typically considered the “worst man in the world” (see, for example, N. S. Thompson, “Man’s Flesh,” 27–28), structural parallels between Boccaccio’s work and the Heptaméron suggest that Saint-Aignan’s wife is intended to be the Italian scoundrel’s female equivalent, or the “worst woman in the world.” “Se delibererent tous deux la prandre par force, ou si elle se plaingnoit, la jecter dans la riviere” (35). Female cunning and trickery do not always serve such virtuous purposes: clearly Saint-Aignan’s wife, who lies to her husband about her relationship to du Mesnil and the nature of her grievance, uses her wits to cover her own adultery, as does the matron in nouvelle 6 who covers her husband’s one good eye as her lover sneaks out the door. In his The Iconography of Power, David LaGuardia contends that late-medieval and Renaissance tale collections used an “‘iconographic’ mode of representation” (29) that “invite[s] readers to interpret” significant images (39) according to their details, which identify characters as social prototypes. At times, however, de Navarre appears to challenge both these social prototypes, and the identificational function of iconography referring to them, by including visual details that draw our gaze to more than one social type. See, for example, the early fourteenth-century illustration of a woman beating a man with her distaff in marginalia of the Luttrell Psalter (http://www.bl.uk/ onlinegallery/sacredtexts/ttpbooks.html; the fifteenth-century “Plate with Wife Beating Husband,” of Neerlandish provenance, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/64.101.1499); or the sixteenth-century carving of a wife hitting her husband under the wooden choir stalls at Tunstal’s Chapel in Durham, UK. While this iconography most often seems related to the world-upside-down motif in Renaissance art, Joan DeJean links images of bellicose females to violence against women in seventeenthcentury art in her “Violent Women and Violence against Women: Representing the ‘Strong’ Woman in Early Modern France,” Signs 29 (Autumn 2003): 117–47. See also De la violence et des femmes, ed. Cécile Dauphin and Arlette Farge (Paris: Albin Michel, 1997). Clearly, this connection between violence by women and violence against women in also present in Marguerite de Navarre’s

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49 50 51 52 53

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Gender and patriarchy: a many-sided view second nouvelle. Within this context, one might also cite the sexually hybrid figure of the virago, a strong, proactive, and occasionally shrewish female archetype whose “virtue” is both manly (cf. vir, L. “man”) and chaste (cf. virgo, L. “virgin”). See Madeline H. Caviness, Visualizing Women in the Middle Ages: Sight, Spectacle, and Scopic Economy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 89. In invoking the popular iconography of fishwives, shrews, and viragos, my goal is not to suggest that the muletière’s portrayal is comical or that Marguerite is condemning her protagonist for engaging in behavior typically gendered as male. As Parkin notes in The Humor of Marguerite de Navarre, of course, “Surely one laughs as one chooses” (151). While Marguerite gives us no indication that any of the male devisants find nouvelle 2 humorous, we cannot exclude this possibility given Hircan’s ribald response to the attempted rape chronicled in nouvelle 4. More importantly, though, we see in the hybrid nature of the muletière’s characterization an example of the polyvalent sources of inspiration and range of associations, not all of them literary, which inform Marguerite’s prose and our divergent responses to it. This effect is most evident in her multifaceted characters and iconographically striking scenes, particularly in nouvelles 2, 20, 23, 31, and 32, where our interpretation depends on, and indeed shifts according to, both the vantage from which we view the episode and the associations that condition our responses. “[Sa] grandeur, beaulté et bonne grace passoit celle de tous ses compaignons” (28). “Le voyant tant beau et honneste comme il estoit, elle luy pardonna aisement sa grande audace. Et monstroit bien qu’elle ne prenoit point desplaisir, quant il parloit à elle, en luy disant souvent qu’il ne tinst plus de telz propos” (28). “[Il pensa], en soy mirant, qu’il n’y avoit dame en ce monde qui sceut refuser sa beaulté” (29). “Elle, qui estoit forte, … se meit à le fraper, mordre et esgratiner” (30). “Ces pauvres freres, voyans venir si grande compaignye, se cachoient … comme Adan quand il se veid nud,” 36. The majority of allusions in this monograph to seeing oneself “being seen” refer to the ethical unmasking that Sartre sees as a crucial component of littérature engagée rather than to the Foucauldian sense of being constantly under surveillance, or in a “state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan [New York: Vintage, 1979], 201; originally published as Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). See Jean-Paul Sartre, Qu’est-ce que la littérature? (1948; repr., Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 104: “Si la société se voit et surtout si elle se voit vue, il y a, par le fait même contestation des valeurs établies et du régime.” Clearly, however, we find both senses of “seeing oneself being seen” in the Heptaméron. Orlando furioso, 8.42, in Opere, ed. Adriano Seroni (Milan: Mursia, 1961), 130. “Aussy vous, ma dame, cuydant augmenter vostre honneur, le pourriez bien diminuer; et, si vous en faictes la plaincte, vous ferez sçavoir ce que nul ne sçait; car, de son costé, vous estes asseurée que jamays il n’en sera rien revelé. Et quant Monseigneur vostre frere en feroit la justice que en demandez, et que le pauvre gentil homme en vint à mourir, si courra le bruict partout qu’il aura faict de vous à sa volunté; et la plus part diront qu’il a esté bien difficille que ung gentil homme ayt faict une telle entreprinse, si la dame ne luy en donne grande occasion” (32).

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Here, we approach the sense of “seeing oneself being seen” that is present in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, insofar as the widow comes to view herself as the object of an omnipresent societal gaze that requires her conformity. “Les hommes ont tant accoustumé de mentir en pareil cas, que, avant que de s’y fier si fort (si fier il s’y fault), on n’en peult faire trop longue preuve” (201). “Il ne sceut que luy respondre, sinon que l’honneur d’un homme et d’une femme n’estoient pas semblables” (124). “Si vous sçaviez 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, vous excuseriez ceste pauvre veuve” (155). Indeed, Wiesmann interprets the bower where the matron cavorts with her groom as a carefully woven Arachnean space, or a locus of feminine resistance, designed to dissimulate female desire from the male gaze (437–38). “Si elle estoit contraincte de faire quelque chose pour ung gentil homme” (153). No one praises this effort at discretion on the part of the widow, perhaps because the focus is less on the affair itself than the fact that she chooses an ugly, dirty muleteer as her lover. After story 25, for example, when a young prince’s regular visits to church camouflage his trysts with a married woman, Oisille is quick to praise the youth’s discretion, urging other young men to follow the prince’s example and try to avoid scandal (207). On a related note, Nancy Frelick (“Female Infidelity: Ideology, Subversion, and Feminist Practice in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron,” DFS 56 [Fall 2001]: 17–26) analyzes the way the adulterous foreign noblewoman in nouvelle 49 rebuffs the condemnatory gaze of her would-be suitors once they discover she has promised her favors to all of them: “The Lady appears to take on a specular function: like a mirror whose surface reflects rather than absorbs light, her refusal to absorb the servile image the men project on her means that the shame destined for her ultimately reflects back on them” (21). In nouvelle 20, the mechanism of this process is somewhat different; but this is largely because we see the widow in the earlier nouvelle primarily through her rebuffed suitor’s eyes, rather than through the lens of her own “plaisir” or desire that becomes the focal point of nouvelle 49. “Celluy qui la voyoit trop clairement” (154). In her “Gender, Essence, and the Feminine” (Critical Tales, 25–40), Hope Glidden notes parallels between the mask Jambique wears during her trysts in nouvelle 43, in part to subvert the objectifying gaze of patriarchy “in its claims to know the feminine” (36), and attempts by the widow in nouvelle 20 to mask her face with her hand when her admirer catches her in flagrante delicto and condemns her with his self-righteous stare. Glidden further notes that Parlamente, who says nothing to defend the widow in nouvelle 20, nevertheless wears a mask that is likely intended to subvert male domination visually and “to assert the female subjectivity” (36) in the frame discussion following the story. As Walter points out, we the readers also figure as spectators; and as such, we help (re)define the adulteress with our own gazes and discourse, which differ from those of the avenging husband, the witness Bernage, the storyteller Oisille, and the other devisants who weigh in after the narration. See her “Constructing Readers,” 35–39. On the one hand, we are “free to interpret the stories as [we see] fit” (36), relating the narratives to our own “lived experience.” On the other hand, and more importantly, our real-world responses reinterpret and reinsert the “frozen, generically bound” (40) story of female transgression and patriarchal revenge within the realm of history. In this, we follow the lead of Bernage, the “inscribed listener” within the tale, who, in his function as

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Gender and patriarchy: a many-sided view mediator, “invites the reader to consider how to respond in historical terms to aesthetic and fictional forms” (37). “Se retiroit pour prandre ses plus grandes delices” (243). “Comme chose pretieuse” (244). “Me monstroit tant de signes d’amour” (243). “Elle avoit preferé [son] amityé à la myenne” (244). I am not suggesting that Boccaccio’s story is a direct “source” of nouvelle 32, which Walter identifies as exemplum 54 of the Gesta Romanorum, translated into French under the title Violier des histoires romaines (ed. Geoffroy Hope [Geneva: Droz, 2002]) in the sixteenth century. In his “Un episode du ‘Protheselaus’ et le conte du mari trompé” (Romania 72 [1955]: 477–518), Félix Lecoy also notes a variety of tales in which ladies must contemplate their lovers’ skulls, including stories by Ser Giovanni (Pecorone, 2.1, 7.1), Bandello (Novelle, 2.12), Hans Sachs (Historia von dem riter aus Frankreich, den ein Kauffman selig nennt), and Hue de Rotelande (Protheselaus). My point, instead, is that Boccaccio’s 4.9 is an intertext that Marguerite would have known and expected her readers to know. In addition to being one among many instances of gendered violence (see Walter, 37) that help inform our response to nouvelle 32, the Boccaccian narrator’s implicit condemnation of the murderous husband, and sympathy for the adulterous wife, help inspire an alternative reading of Marguerite’s novella. While Walter does not specifically cite the analogy with Boccaccio, she does suggest that the fictional and historical tales of gendered violence against which Marguerite inscribes her tale invite the reader to take an active role in interpreting it (37). Rigolot views Marguerite’s use of the lover’s skull as a drinking vessel in nouvelle 32 as a “staged perversion of relic worship,” while arguing that there are insufficient New Testament parallels to “justify an allegorical reading” as defined by Church Fathers (71). See his “Magdalen’s Skull: Allegory and Iconography in Heptameron 32,” RenQ 47 (Spring 1994): 57–73. In his “The Heptameron and the ‘Magdalen Controversy’: Dialogue and Humanist Hermeneutics,” Critical Tales, 218–31, Rigolot notes the popularity of the cult of Mary Magdalene in the Middle Ages and her continued veneration by the French royal family in the early 1500s, as well as debates among sixteenthcentury theologians about the saint’s historical identity and her place in the “hierarchical order of moral exemplarity” (222). In his view, the queen of Navarre echoes both sides of this debate in her text, torn between “devotion for a popular saint and her intellectual support for a critique of this worship by her humanist friends” (228). “ Je vous prye, …dictes-moy si la Magdelaine n’a pas plus d’honneur entre les hommes maintenant, que sa sœur qui estoit vierge?” (246). “La grande amour qu’elle a portée a Jesus Christ” (246). In her poem “La bella donna, a cui dolente preme” (“Seized in her sadness by that great desire”), Vittoria Colonna invokes Mary Magdalene as an exemplar of courage and fidelity that outstrips those of the male disciples. See Joseph Gibaldi, “Vittoria Colonna,” in Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Katharina M. Wilson (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 42. For more on the relationship and correspondence between Vittoria Colonna and Marguerite de Navarre, see Constance Furey, “Intellects Inflamed in Christ: Women and Spiritualized Scholarship in Renaissance Christianity,” The Journal of Religion 84 (Jan. 2004): 1–22. “Je ne me soulcie ... quel nom les hommes me donnent, mais que Dieu me pardonne et mon mary aussy” (246). By choosing the gender-specific noun “men” or “hommes” in this passage, rather than a more generic “on” or “les gens,” Ennasuite redirects our focus from female to male transgressions: first,

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by virtue of the distinction she draws between divine judgment and its flawed simulacrum, the male gaze; and second, by her equivocal hope that “Dieu me pardonne et mon mary aussy,” which lends itself to a standard and nonstandard interpretation—either “that God and my husband will forgive me,” or, alternatively, “that “God will forgive me and my husband.” On the one hand, Marguerite is consistent in her preference for “pardonner à quelqu’un” rather than the rare “pardonner quelqu’un” in the Heptaméron, suggesting that “mon mary” or “my husband” is a syntactically displaced subject, and not a direct object, of the verb “pardonner” in the preceding quotation. Yet on the other hand, Chilton’s translation (“that God pardons me and my husband”) draws our attention to the statement’s ambivalence, suspending readers between a normative androcentric interpretation of the text, which conflates the husband with God while positing women as objects of male blame or pardon, and a subversive counter reading that casts the husband as a sinner who is syntactically and morally distant from God (“Dieu me pardonne et mon mary aussy”) and no less fallible or reliant on divine mercy than his wife. The exact statement that the gentil homme makes in this regard, of course, is that the youth died “par son péché” (244; “by her own sin,” 333) rather than “pour son péché,” or “for her sin.” Nevertheless, it is clear from his discourse that the husband places all of the blame for the youth’s death upon his wife; in this sense, the gentil homme arguably constructs the young man as a sacrificial victim who dies for her sin, in Christological fashion. Any suggestion that the lover, a transgressor in his own right, is a Christ figure seems far-fetched at first glance: we have no indication that he saves his lady from her sins or dies so that she “may have life” (John 10: 10) in the manner of Jesus. To borrow Rigolot’s terminology, what Marguerite offers us is not a straightforward, tightly constructed allegory of Holy Communion, but rather a “staged perversion” (71) of both relic worship and the Eucharist. Initially, this distorted staging of ecclesiastical practices appears to function primarily as a gruesome contrapasso, which intensifies the matron’s vilification and the gravity of her transgressions by translating them into the vocabulary of religious iconography. Assimilating himself to God through their shared patriarchal function, the husband reconstructs his wife’s adultery as a betrayal of her creator and of Christ: within this iconographic scheme, the perverted Eucharist and adoration of false relics emphasize her misplaced adoration of the flesh rather than the spirit, and of a counterfeit lover rather than the true bridegroom of the New Testament (for example, Matt. 9: 15, Mark 2: 19–20, Luke 5: 34–35, John 3: 29). Yet when we consider equivocal elements in the husband’s own characterization, together with the reformers’ objections to both the cult of relics and Eucharistic practices, what emerges is a rift in the superficial analogy between the gentil homme and God, in a gesture that provisionally figures the husband as a false priest; and the lover, as his martyred victim. Consequently, the episode vacillates unsteadily between two opposing interpretive grids, the one contemptuous of the matron, and the other more critical of her husband. Whether Marguerite intends us to view the gentil homme negatively, as we “resurrect” the lover as a martyr, is of course uncertain; but at the very least, it seems fair to speculate that the queen of Navarre, like other Renaissance writers, constructs metaphors and allegories that are “shape shifters”: rather than being textbook examples of biblical allegory, they evolve as the story develops, fade in and out of focus, and offer alternative meanings dependent upon the angle from which we examine them. In his “L’oubli de dieu et l’honneur des hommes: Fonctions et usages de l’oubli dans L’Heptaméron de Marguerite de Navarre” (SN 70, no. 2 [1998]:

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Gender and patriarchy: a many-sided view 221–29), Gilles Banderier emphasizes the multiple levels of remembrance and forgetting that structure nouvelle 32. In his comments on nouvelle 30, for instance, Hircan refers to human morality as a battle between the “enemy,” who is clearly Satan, and “le vray Amy,” or Christ: “Le meilleur seroit, congnoissant sa foiblesse, ne jouster poinct contre tel ennemy, et se retirer au vray Amy” (233; “Better were it to recognize one’s weakness, better not to try to do battle with such an enemy, but [turn] to the one true lover,” 321). See also Rosemary Woolf, “The Theme of Christ the Lover-Knight in Medieval English Literature,” The Review of English Studies, New Series 13 (Feb. 1962): 1–16; Mary Frances Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The “Viaticum” and Its Commentaries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990); Dennis Rygiel, “The Allegory of Christ the Lover-Knight in ‘Ancrenne Wisse’: An Experiment in Stylistic Analysis,” Studies in Philology 73 (Fall 1976): 343–64; Steven T. Katz, “Mysticism and Ethics in Western Mystical Traditions,” Religious Studies 28 (Sept. 1992): 411–12. “Tenduz comme chose pretieuse en ung cabinet” (244). Martin Luther, “The German Mass and Order of Divine Service (1526): The Preface of Martin Luther,” trans. B.J. Kidd, in Documents Illustrative of the Continental Reformation, ed. B.J. Kidd (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911), 202. Luther, 201. “Pour la pitié qu’il eut de sa femme” (245). “Si toutes celles à qui pareil cas est advenu beuvoient en telz vaisseaulx, j’aurois grand paour que beaucoup de coupes dorées seroient converties en testes de morts” (245). “Mais, en lieu de se humillier et recongnoistre l’impossibilité de nostre chair, qui sans l’ayde de Dieu ne peult faire que peché, voulant par elle-mesmes et par ses larmes satisfaire au passé et par sa prudence eviter le mal de l’advenir, donnant tousjours l’excuse de son peché à l’occasion et non à la malice, à laquelle n’y a remede que la grace de Dieu” (231). “Jeunes et disciplines” (232). In Middle French, the word “damoiselle,” sometimes synonymous with “demoiselle,” is multireferential and may be used to refer to a (young) lady of high rank or a serving girl. See “Damoiselle,” DMF: Dictionnaire du Moyen Français (Lorraine: ATILF – CNRS & Université de Lorraine, 2012), http:// www.atilf.fr/dmf/. In this monograph, the term’s connotations for any given story or passage will be evident from the context. Rathering than standardizing the spelling, I have also used both “demoiselle” and “damoiselle” in my discussions, according to the orthography present in individual nouvelles in the François edition. Freccero, “Queer Nation, Female Nation,” 37–42. See also Freccero, “Practicing Queer Philology with Marguerite de Navarre.” “Voylà, mes dames, comme il en prent à celles qui cuydent par leurs forces et vertu vaincre amour et nature avecq toutes les puissances que Dieu y a mises. Mais le meilleur seroit, congnoissant sa foiblesse, ne jouster poinct contre tel ennemy, et se retirer au vray Amy et luy dire avecq le Psalmiste: ‘Seigneur, je souffre force, respondez pour moy!’” (233). “Tout homme et femme doibt icy baisser la teste soubz la craincte de Dieu” (233). The story itself is very similar to nouvelle 9 in the Cent nouvelles nouvelles. Oisille observes that the family’s over-trust in outward displays of piety has left the wife bereft of faith, which should have trumped her sense of personal honor and reminded her that Christ already died for her sins and those of others: “She had remained ignorant of the grace given by our good God through the merit

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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” (271). From this viewing angle, the matron’s suicide and cries for revenge figure as gestures of faithlessness. Instead of kneeling in prayer to ask for divine guidance, the woman begs her husband on bended knee to avenge her “grande injure” with violence, in a posture that reminds us pictorially of its godly antithesis. “La plus vertueuse de toute la chrestienté”; “la plus belle et parfaicte dame du monde” (194). “Les saiges philosophes tiennent que le moindre homme de tous vault myeulx que la plus grande et vertueuse femme qui soyt” (280). For more on the story of Rolandine, which will be discussed at length in this chapter, see Suzuki, “Gender, Power, and the Female Reader.” “Par ainsy, voulez-vous estre maistresses” (N. 37, 269). “C’est raison … que l’homme nous gouverne comme nostre chef, mais non pas qu’il nous habandonne ou traicte mal” (269). In fact, “the image of spousal compliance [presented by Hircan and Parlamente] seems to be in perfect accord with the dominant ideology,” writes Frelick. “Indeed, the Heptaméron, which portrays the unequal relationship between men and women, can be said to reproduce the discourses of patriarchy and hence help to preserve the status quo. Yet, there are stories in the work in which female characters appear to subvert the system. If one looks at those stories, the sixteenth-century text can seem quite revolutionary” (18). To borrow Jonathan Culler’s terminology, Marguerite makes inequities and injustices of the dominant paradigm “visible” and thus offers the option of not taking patriarchy for granted: “Literature represents, for example, in a potentially intense and affecting way, the narrow range of options historically offered to women, and, in making this visible, raises the possibility of not taking it for granted. Both claims are thoroughly plausible: that literature is the vehicle of ideology and that literature is an instrument for its undoing (39). See Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). That he does express a masculine, patriarchal perspective reflects the fundamentally egalitarian, realistic nature of Marguerite’s “truth project.” Suzuki notes that even female interlocutors tend to “take the point of view of the male protagonists” (231) in Boccaccio’s Decameron, which subsumes “female voices under male, patriarchal ones” (247). While Suzuki’s point may be overstated, in the sense that Boccaccio’s narratives are occasionally more sympathetic to female challenges to patriarchy than she acknowledges, clearly Marguerite de Navarre has not reversed Boccaccio’s practice by giving her male interlocutors female perspectives. While she may occasionally overstate patriarchal positions to make them patently outrageous, deftly eliciting both laughter and a critical response to patriarchal abuses from her readers, her volume-long commitment to “tell the truth” extends not only to the content of her nouvelles, but also to the real-world—and thus gendered—biases of her devisants’ voices. See her Rape and Writing, 218: “When women are narrators, rape is stripped of its fictional disguises and revealed as violence, even murder.” See, for example, Robert Cottrell, “Inmost Cravings. The Logic of Desire in the Heptameron,” in Critical Tales, 7; and Defaux, “Marguerite de Navarre et la guerre des sexes: Heptaméron, première Journée,” FF 24 (May 1999): 146. See Introduction, n. 51. Sartre, 104.

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103 See entries for these terms in Dictionnaire du Moyen Français, 2012 ed. (Nancy: ATILF-CNRS and University of Lorraine, 2012), http://www.atilf.fr/dmf. 104 One is reminded of Machiavelli’s contention in The Prince that Fortune is a woman whom the ruler or husband must “beat” and “keep … down.” See Bondanella and Musa, 162. 105 See Claude de Seyssel, The Monarchy of France, trans. J. H. Hexter (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981). 106 See Barbara Hochstetler Meyer, “Marguerite de Navarre and the Androgynous Portrait of François Ier,” RenQ 48 (Summer 1995): 287–325. 107 “Thomas Guérin, who was a professional assassin … had been hired for the occasion” (74); “Thomas Guerin, qui faisoit mestier d’estre meurtrier, …pour faire ceste execution estoit loué du procureur” (14). 108 “Quelque deffence qu’il peust faire, ne se peut garder qu’il ne tombast mort entre leurs mains” (14). 109 See, for example, Bryan S. Turner, The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore: SAGE, 2008), 121. 110 “La mauvaise femme, en l’absence de son mary, continua son peché plus que jamais” (17). 111 “Je vous suplie, mes dames, regardez quel mal il vient d’une meschante femme et combien de maulx se feirent pour le peché de ceste cy. Vous trouverez que depuis que Eve feit pecher Adan toutes les femmes ont prins possession de tormenter, tuer et danner les hommes. Quant est de moy, j’en ay tant experimenté la cruaulté, que je ne pense jamais mourir ni estre danné que par le desespoir en quoy une m’a mys. Et suis encore si fol, qu’il faut que je confesse que cest enfer là m’est plus plaisant venant de sa main que le paradis donné de celle d’une autre” (18). 112 “[Se] venger d’amour et de celle qui [lui] est si cruelle” (11). 113 “Puisque l’enfer est aussy plaisant que vous dictes, vous ne debvez craindre le diable qui vous y a mis” (18). 114 Cf. McWilliam, 316: “Rustico, what is that thing I see sticking out in front of you, which I do not possess?” asks Alibech, to which Rustico replies, “Oh, my daughter, … this is the devil I was telling you about.” 115 “You have something … that I haven’t,” says Rustico to Alibech. “You have Hell … And I honestly believe that God has sent you here for the salvation of my soul, because if this devil continues to plague the life out of me, and if you are prepared to take sufficient pity upon me to let me put him back into Hell, you will be giving me marvelous relief” (McWilliam, 316). 116 “Par ce moien se vangea de son ennemy et saulva l’honneur de sa maison” (263). In fact, murder to avenge the adultery of one’s wife was “readily pardonable” according to the jurist Jean Papon, Trias iudiciel du second notaire (Lyon: Jean de Tournes, 1575), 466–71; cited by Davis, 12. 117 “Les hommes et les femmes sont commungs aux vices et vertuz” (263). 118 “Si est-ce que ceste pauvre femme-là porta la peyne que plusieurs meritent. Et croy que le mary, puisqu’il s’en voloit venger, se gouverna avecq une merveilleuse prudence et sapience” (264). 119 “Dieu ne conscience devant les oeilz” (264). 120 “Les premiers mouvemens ne sont pas en la puissance de l’homme: parquoy il en eust peu avoir grace” (264). 121 “Les theologiens estiment ces pechez-là facilles a pardonner, [et] je suis de leur oppinion” (264). Cf. Davis, 12; and Papon, 466–71. 122 “Et que eussiez-vous doncq voulu qu’il eust faict … pour se venger de la plus grande injure que la femme peut faire a l’homme?” (264).

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123 “Il faict bon regarder à ses parolles … devant gens si dangereux que vous; mais ce que j’ay dict se doibt entendre quant la passion est si forte, que soubdainement elle occupe tant les sens, que la raison n’y peut avoir lieu” (264). 124 Davis, 12; Papon, 466–71. 125 See Joyce G. Bromfield, De Lorenzino de Médicis à Lorenzaccio: Etude d’un thème historique (Paris: Librairie Marcel Didier, 1972). 126 See John Brackett, “Race and Rulership: Alessandro de’ Medici, First Duke of Florence, 1529–1537,” 303–25, in Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, ed. K. J. P. Lowe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Alessandro’s reputation, based on behavior that differed little from that of other Renaissance princes, was likely affected by resentment at his mother’s lowly origins (Brackett argues that she was not only a servant, but also a freed African slave) and to the sense among many Florentines that the duke was a “royal impostor” (304). 127 “Une des plus femmes de bien qui fust en toute l’Itallie” (92). 128 “Les princes trouvent souvent mauvais ceulx qui ne louent ce qu’ilz ayment” (381). 129 “Si vous aymez ma vie, aussi feray-je la vostre” (91). 130 “Sans en parler a sa seur, ny a creature du monde” (92). 131 “Gender, Essence, and the Feminine,” in Critical Tales, 31. For more on the importance of sight and seeing in nouvelle 43, see Sommers, “Vision and Voyeurism in the Heptaméron: Re-reading the 43rd Novella,” MLS 22 (Winter 1992): 88–95. 132 Glidden, 29. 133 “Il ne pensoit poinct qu’il y eut femme au monde, qui ne voullut estre vue et aymée” (298). 134 Even today, it is more difficult to prosecute the rapists of women who have said “yes” in the past, on the premise that these women have forfeited any future right to say “no” to their partners or other aggressors. True, Jambique is not (at least initially) saying “no” to sex—she simply insists on masking her identity. However, her serviteur, who is far less invested in and knowledgeable about courtly protocols than she is, may see her not as a figure of romance, imprisoned in a loveless marriage and seeking “pure” love with a worthy admirer, but rather as a “loose” woman who willingly breaches social taboos: for if she says “yes” to adulterous sex, allowing him to “know” her carnally, on what grounds—and by what right—could she object to a lesser indiscretion, or to his knowing her identity? As Glidden suggests (25), there is much in this story that points to a clash of two opposing moral systems: courtly love, on the one hand, which romanticizes adulterous relationships, and patriarchal Christianity, on the other hand, which condemns them and labels the participating women “whores.” 135 Glidden interprets these aggressive lies as a type of defensive counterwriting on Jambique’s part: “Jambique can only banish her lover/writer with a daring lie, or dissimulation, that undoes the mark he has written upon her” (37). 136 Glidden, 29. This process of inscription, effected with erasable chalk that serves as a stylus and has phallic connotations, is triply gendered as male in this nouvelle. In addition to the lover who “brands” Jambique, it is a male devisant, Geburon, who recounts the story from an androcentric perspective, and a male editor, Adrien de Thou, who provides us a prefatory summary that both echoes Geburon’s simplistic moral and “works to exclude in a subtle way other strategies of reading” (Glidden, 26). Rather than providing a neutral précis of the action, de Thou condemns Jambique from the outset, conditioning readers to judge her as he does and censure her preference for “earthly glory” over the moral dictates of her conscience: “Jambique, preferant la gloire du monde à sa conscience,” says de Thou, “se voulut faire devant les hommes autre qu’elle

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Gender and patriarchy: a many-sided view n’estoit; mais son amy et serviteur, descouvrant son hypocrisye par le moyen d’un petit trait de craye, revela à un chascun la malice qu’elle mectoit si grand peine de cacher” (296). By the same token, de Thou implicitly praises the serviteur who revealed Jambique’s hidden vices to the world, despite his own vow to honor her wish for anonymity, and despite the code of secrecy that traditionally governed courtly relationships. As Glidden notes, however, the sixteenth century was a “time of class realignments, gender redefinition, and confusion as to sexual protocols, one root of which was the decline of courtly love as a social institution” (25). Rather than simply failing to follow the dictates of her conscience, Jambique may well be caught between two radically different sets of sexual protocols: one, to which she pays lip service, that prizes chastity in women at all costs, and another, courtly in nature, that values secrecy over chastity. Clearly chalk, which was used for inscriptional and artistic purposes even in prehistoric times, often takes a phallic form when employed for making marks or writing, and not exclusively in modern Western culture. “Nzu,” the so-called “phallic chalk,” is used for multiple purposes in some African societies; and we see examples of erotic chalk figurines, as well as outlines in chalk of phallic images, in early modern Northern European culture, especially in England. The practice of marking people and buildings in chalk, to indicate that they are either blessed or cursed, or targeted for or exempted from violence, is also an age-old practice that continues today. We see this in both the ancient ritual of “chalking the door” during Epiphany, and in the graffiti placed on homes in advance of robberies by modern thieves, to signal the dwelling’s vulnerability. Given the wide-ranging connotations of chalk marks, Marguerite’s intentions remain elusive. Is there significance in the fact that the chalk is powdery, erasable, and ephemeral, for example? Or that the color is white? Or that the serviteur glimpses the chalk on his lady’s shoulder but is blind to its residue on his own hands—a powdery stain signifying his guilt and the death of their relationship? Parallels between this text and the myriad examples of chalk signage in art, literature, and religious rituals merit further investigation. Here, it is difficult to resist the parallels and contrasts with Boccaccio’s tale of Ghismonda (4.1). Like Ghismonda, Jambique carefully chooses her lover after observing him at court; but whereas the Italian author emphasizes the rationality of his heroine’s thought processes, Marguerite focuses far more on the intensity of Jambique’s “love” and “passion” for her serviteur, which ultimately clouds her judgment. “Sot prescheur” (298). “Et [le gentil homme] se doubta que ce fust quelque maling esperit, ayant oy dire à quelque sot prescheur que qui auroit veu le diable au visaige, l’on ne aymeroit jamais. En ceste doubte-là, se delibera de sçavoir qui estoit ceste-là qui luy faisoit si bonne cher” (298). Parkin would label the first of these functions “value-based satire,” in that it appeals to values shared by the entire audience; and the second, “clan-based” satire, in that it is gendered and elicits male laughter at the expense of women (i). “Celluy qui ne donne poinct sa gloire à aultruy” (301). “La plus saige et vertueuse damoiselle qui fut poinct de son temps” (296). “Chascun doibt avoir pitié” (301). “Voylà … une vilenye inexcusable; car qui peut parler pour celle, quant Dieu, l’honneur et mesmes l’amour l’accusent?” (301). Readers will also note echoes of nouvelle 20 in this story, which open our eyes to alternative ways of reading Jambique’s tale. As Hope Glidden points out (36), the female characters in both narratives act on their desires in secret, and

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in ways that their patriarchal culture finds reprehensible. The two novellas are part of what Glidden calls “Marguerite’s ‘outing’ of feminine desire” (27), which was officially suppressed or deemed deviant and “masculine,” in aristocratic society of the era. In each story, moreover, the woman’s covered face may well represent her resistance to the objectifying force of her lover’s gaze, which attempts to define and control her “resistant subject[ivity]” (32). Reading nouvelle 43 within the context of this “twin” feminist story allows us to counterbalance in some measure de Thou’s reductive, moralizing summary. “Gender, Essence, and the Feminine,” 36. Citing Judith Butler (Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity [New York and London: Routledge, 1990], 51), Glidden argues that “[Parlamente] is the narcissistic double who allows Marguerite to ‘take the place of the Father in public discourse as a speaker.’” Glidden adds that “she is Marguerite’s assertion of the privilege to displace the male corpus by inserting her own writing, so that rather than being written upon, as Jambicque was, she produces her own new body of texts. Marguerite is positioned somewhere between flirtation and manliness, both of which are available to women only in the role-playing of masquerade” (37). “Une fois vostre ypocrisie est descouverte, vous n’aurez plus le pain des pauvres enfans, acquis par la sueur des peres” (302). “Nous sommes fondez sur la follye des femmes; et, tant qu’il y aura en ce monde de femme folle ou sotte, ne morrons poinct de faim” (302). “Mais qui se garderait de croire a eulx, … veu qu’ils sont ordonnez de noz prelatz pour nous prescher l’Evangille et pour nous reprendre de noz vices? [..] Penserez-vous bien que ces gens-la osassent prescher une mauvaise doctrine?” (303). “La doctrine de Dieu [ou] celle du diable” (303). “Nous fussions tenuz, sur peyne de peché mortel, de croire tout ce qu’ilz nous dient en chaire de verité” (303). “Je ne puis ignorer, qu’il n’y en ait entre eulx de très mauvaise foy” (303). “Ne vouluz croire en parolle de prescheur, si je ne la trouve conforme à celle de Dieu” (304). “Ceux qui humblement et souvent …lisent [la parole de Dieu], ne seront jamais trompez par fictions ny inventions humaines; car qui a l’esperit remply de verité ne peut recevoir mensonge” (304). In his “Inmost Cravings,” Cottrell contends that these humiliated, mortified bodies in The Heptaméron—like the body of the text itself—represent sacramental rather than patriarchal violence (11), with woman in particular figuring the human body and human love, which must be annihilated (10) before Christian restoration and renewal can take place. “L’aymoit si desesperement … garda ce feu couvert en son cueur” (19). See Cholakian, Rape and Writing, 13–15; and Stéphanie Gaudillat Cautela, “Questions de mot. Le ‘viol’ au XVIe siècle, un crime contre les femmes?” Clio. Histoire‚ femmes et sociétés, 24 (2006): 1–10, http://clio.revues.org/3932#text. Kathryn Gravdal’s comments on the absence of a term for rape in medieval French, and on the various euphemisms used instead, are also of interest, given the similar linguistic strategies that we see in Middle French: “Medieval culture apparently makes no effort to forge a term to denote forced coitus. The Old French language favors periphrasis, metaphor, and slippery lexematic exchanges, as opposed to an unambiguous signifier of sexual assault. Such periphrastic expressions include … esforcier (to force a woman), faire sa volonte (to do one’s will), faire son plaisir (to take one’s pleasure), or faire son buen (to do as one sees fit)” (564). “Chrétien de Troyes, Gratian, and the Medieval Romance of Sexual Violence,” Signs 17 (Spring 1992): 558–85.

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Gender and patriarchy: a many-sided view “Print par force celle qui n’avoit plus de deffense en elle” (20). “Le voyant tant beau et honneste comme il estoit” (28). “Esgratineures et morsures” (30). “Mon pere, je croy que si j’avois une volunté si malheureuse, que me vouldriez lapider le permier” (238). At first glance, this seems not to be the case for the valet in nouvelle 2, who is a servant of the muletière; but in raping his mistress, he is arguably asserting his gender-based hegemony over her superior status within the household. Marguerite portrays no female rapists, unless one counts the countess in nouvelle 49 in this category. Turning the tables on three males who wish to seduce her, she imprisons each of them in succession as her sex slave. Cf. Molière, Tartuffe, trans. Curtis Hidden Page (1909–14; repr., New York: Bartleby.com, 2001), Act 4, scene 5: “Secret sinning is not sin at all.” http:// www.bartleby.com/26/4/45.html “Si [ma femme] avoit faict un pareil cas, et que je n’en eusse rien sceu, je ne l’en estimerois pas moins” (42). “Le fruict de mon labeur ne me sera poinct osté par vos scrupules, car, puis que amour, patience et humble priere ne servent de riens, je n’espargneray poinct ma force pour acquerir le bien qui, sans l’avoir, me la feroit perdre” (78). “Floride veit son visaige et ses oeilz tant alterez que le plus beau tainct du monde estoit rouge comme feu, et le plus doulx et plaisant regard si orrible et furieux” (78). Cholakian, Rape and Writing, 15. Donald Stone notes that Marguerite’s male and female characters do not always adhere to their gender stereotypes, with men on occasion advocating affection and wisdom in love and courtship, and women—for whom he cites the example of Diana in Marguerite’s “L’histoire des satyres et nymphes de Diane,” published in the 1547 Suyte des Marguerites de la Marguerite des Princesses”—advocating “conquest.” See “La malice des hommes,” 60. “Noz tentations ne sont pareilles aux vostres, et si nous pechons par orgueil, nul tiers n’en a dommage ... Mais vostre plaisir gist à deshonorer les femmes, et vostre honneur à tuer les hommes en guerre” (221). Cazauran notes these conflicting codes in nouvelle 10, for example. On this topic, see also André Berthiaume, 5: “Deux codes, deux systèmes de valeurs s’affrontent, celui de l’honneur et celui de la ‘grande amour’, du désir, de son invincible puissance. Vertus masculine et féminine s’opposent ici comme dans maintes histoires.” “Celles qui sont vaincues en plaisir ne se doibvent plus nommer femmes, mais hommes, desquelz la fureur et la concupiscence augmente leur honneur” (N. 43, 301). “Si j’en estois jusques là, je me tiendrois pour deshonoré si je ne venois à fin de mon intention” (34). “Entendez d’où est venu ce terme d’honneur quant aux femmes, car ... celles qui en parlent tant, ne sçavent pas l’invention de ce nom. Sçachez que, au commencement que la malice n’estoit trop grande entre les hommes, l’amour y estoit si naifve et forte que nulle dissimullation n’y avoit lieu. Et estoit plus loué celluy qui plus parfaictement aymoit. Mais, quant l’avarice et le peché vindrent saisir le cueur et l’honneur, ilz en chasserent dehors Dieu et l’amour; et, en leur lieu, prindrent amour d’eulx-mesmes, hypocrisie et fiction. Et, voiant les dames nourrir en leur cueur ceste vertu de vraye amour et que le nom d’ypocrysie estoit tant odieux entre les hommes, luy donnerent le surnom d’honneur, [tellement] que ce les qui ne povoient avoir en elles ceste honorable amour, disoient que l’honneur le leur deffendoit, et en ont faict une si cruelle loy, que

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mesmes ce les qui ayment parfaictement, dissimullent, estimant vertu estre vice” (N. 42, 294–95). Simontaut is not an objective or entirely trustworthy storyteller. Instead, he narrates nouvelle 14 to promote his own naturalistic view of male-female relationships, a fact that likely explains his emphasis on the widow’s sexual receptiveness to her assailant. “L’on ne sçauroit faire plus d’honneur à une femme ... que de la prendre par force” (142). “Une femme de qui l’on desire telles choses” (142). “Tous les moyens que l’on peult pour en avoir la victoire” (142). As a third example one might cite the eccentric countess or dominatrix in nouvelle 49, who is sufficiently powerful and clever to do as she pleases without fear of patriarchal reprisals or harmful gossip. While these qualities enable her to use men as she sees fit, her power stems from her patriarchal lineage and connections, and not from a matriarchal or egalitarian social system. In fact, her resourcefulness is an aristocratic variation on the batelière’s wiliness in nouvelle 5, which allows her to navigate patriarchal threats and constraints on her own terms, and develop her own identity without challenging the social order as a whole. Arguably, this is what most of the devisantes and female characters in the Heptaméron ultimately do—making the best of a flawed institution, but not quite as licentiously as the resourceful countess. For more on the psychological resonances of this episode and of Elisor’s evolution, see Mary J. Baker, “Aspects of the Psychology of Love in the Heptaméron,” SCJ 19 (Spring 1988): 81–87. Jambique’s relationship with her lover is born of her gaze and desire, not his, for example; and she pursues him, rather than vice versa. It is also she who dicates the ground rules of their liaison, trusting him to respect the terms of their agreement rather than subjecting him to protracted trials; and in lieu of courtoisie’s standard vows of secrecy, she requires her lover himself to remain ignorant of her identity, in a bizarre twist on the courtly paradigm. While Jambique’s transformation of courtly secrecy into an exaggerated parody of its original form reminds us of mannerist art, with its elongated necks, stylized poses, and skewed proportions, it is also reminiscent of theories proposed by Johan Huizinga in his Homo Ludens and Waning of the Middle Ages, whereby outmoded rituals persist in society as empty and distorted play elements, long after the demise of their ideological or sociological underpinnings. In her “Didacticism and the Heptaméron: The Misinterpretation of the Tenth Tale as an Exemplum” (FR Special Issue, Medieval and Renaissance Studies [Autumn, 1971]: 84–90), Baker notes a similar phenomenon in nouvelle 10: “What the tenth tale portrays, in an unusually perceptive and fascinating way, is the failure of courtly love” (89). “L’amour des hommes vertueux est telle, que, par trop croyre de verité aux dames, sont souvent trompez” (359). André Tournon discusses this topic, as well as the courtly postures and language of the devisants themselves, in his “Rules of the Game,” Critical Tales, 188–200. “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” (115). “Quant noz maistresses tiennent leur ranc en chambres ou en salles, assises à leur ayse comme noz juges, nous sommes à genoulx devant elles; nous les menons dancer en craincte; nous les servons si diligemment, que nous prevenons leurs demandes; nous semblons estre tant crainctifs de les offenser et tant desirans de les servir, que ceulx qui nous voient ont pitié de nous, et bien

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Gender and patriarchy: a many-sided view souvent nous estiment plus sotz que bestes ... Mais, quant nous sommes à part, où amour seul est juge de noz contenances, nous sçavons très bien qu’elles sont femmes et nous hommes” (83–84). “Si toutes [les femmes] estoient de vostre opinion, les gentilz hommes pourroient bien mectre leurs oraisons dedans leurs coffres; mais que vous ne voz semblables en sceussent dire, nous ne croyrons jamais que les femmes soient aussy incredules comme elles sont belles” (359). See Donald Stone, “‘La malice des hommes,’” 60; and n. 171, this chapter. “Il fauldroit doncques que, dès que ung homme ouvre la bouche, on le refusast sans sçavoir qu’il veult dire?” (115). See also Tournon’s comments on the tension between suspicion and trust in the Heptaméron and the drawbacks of both approaches to courtly interactions (188–200). In her “Aspects of the Psychology of Love,” Baker notes that “Marguerite’s narrative betrays some ambivalence towards [Elisor’s] move to religion” (85); and she adds that “an ambivalence towards the sincerity and the virtue of the conversion is expressed” in nouvelle 19 as well (85). See Wiesmann, 442: “Each sex deploys a stratagem one could aptly name a dissimulative ‘pre-text’ which actually annuls the possibility of an honest exchange or view.” In his “Humanist Polemics, Christian Morals: A Hypothesis on Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron and the Problem of Self-Love” (MLN 120 [Jan. 2005]: S181–95), Jacob Vance also notes that “gender becomes a source of division, making the figure of the veil a master trope, and dislodging the proper foundations and signification of words” (S194). In addition to examining the potential and shortcomings of language throughout their texts, both Rabelais (bk. 4, chapter 56) and Castiglione (bk. 2) refurbish Calcagnini’s allegory of the Frozen Words, partly plundered from Plutarch, in their writings. While Marguerite could not have known Rabelais’s Fourth Book, published after her death, she would have been familiar with Castiglione’s version of the allegory, which tells of Russian fur traders whose shouted words—intended to convey the asking price of their sables to a Tuscan merchant across the river in Poland—freeze, unheard, in the air until they are heated by resourceful Poles, ostensibly their enemies. One moral of the richly polysemic parable is that language, and the truths it conveys, can best be understood when warmed and thawed, either by love, maturity, or intellectual commerce. The “Frozen Words” allegory is not present in the Heptaméron, of course, where earthly love more often obscures than “thaws” the truth; but we would be mistaken to assume that Marguerite’s persistent focus on flawed énoncés (i.e., falsehoods and empty rhetoric) excludes an equally important, but more subtle, emphasis on deciphering truthful signs and utterances. Boulenger, 13. “Si l’on n’en abbuse, je tiens mariage le plus beau et le plus seur estat qui soit au monde” (269). “Mariage est ung estat de si longue durée, qu’il ne doibt estre commencé legierement … Encores ne le peult-on si bien faire, qu’il n’y ayt pour le moins autant de peyne que de plaisir” (277). See, for example, Amyrose J. McCue Gill, “Rereading I libri della famiglia: Leon Battista Alberti on Marriage, Amicizia and Conjugal Friendship,” California Italian Studies Journal 2, no. 2 (2011), http://escholarship.org/uc/ item/9t3049v8. “Marriage Ancestral and Conjugal in the Heptaméron,” JMRS 9 (1979): 264–75; cited by Gary Ferguson and McKinley, “The Heptaméron: Word, Spirit, World,” in A Companion to Marguerite de Navarre, ed. Ferguson and McKinley (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 349.

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199 Two stories later, he rearticulates his insight into male desire with a hunting metaphor, telling the ladies that “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!” (208; “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,” 133). 200 “Ad ce que je voys, … vous n’aymez vos maris, que pour vous. S’ilz vous sont selon vostre desir, vous les aymez bien, et, s’ils vous font la moindre faulte du monde, ilz ont perdu le labeur de leur sepmaine pour ung sabmedy” (269).  201 In what passes for a joke, Hircan also implies he has no objections to matriarchal rule in his own household, but that other husbands should have the prerogative of agreeing (or, presumably, disagreeing) with this state of affairs: “Par ainsy, voulez-vous estre maistresses; dont, quant à moy, j’en suis d’oppinion, mais que tous les mariz s’y accordent” (269; “You always want to be in command, and this I accept for my part, but let other husbands agree to it!” [361]). At this point, as noted earlier, Parlamente lightly agrees to male rule except when it is abusive (269). On the one hand, the half-bantering, half-bickering quality of this marital exchange is remarkably realistic from a psychological perspective, as Marguerite captures the dynamics of household power struggles between men and women, suggesting that public and private truths (i.e., official patriarchy vs. matriarchal households) may not always be identical. If Parlamente and Hircan indeed represent Marguerite and Henri d’Albret, moreover, Hircan’s allusion to having a wife who wishes to command may reflect the reality of Henri’s own marriage to a powerful, strong-minded woman who was also older than he was, and no doubt hesitant on occasion to follow his lead. Finally, the facetious hint that matriarchy is unobjectionable as long as husbands agree to it (“s’y accordent”) implicitly foregrounds the concept of mutual consent, in essence pointing toward a model of marriage that is neither matriarchal nor patriarchal, but based upon shared governance and agreed-upon patterns of dominance and subordination for specific tasks, in keeping with the culture of each household. 202 “Female Infidelity,” 17–26. 203 In his “Incoherent Texts,” 470–75, De Ridder-Vignone suggests that the bâtard’s faithlessness is entirely predictable given his prior characterization within the text. 204 “J’ay oppinion que en mariage [la patience] admene enfin inimitié, pour ce que, en souffrant injure de son semblable, on est contrainct de s’en separer le plus que l’on peult, et, de ceste estrangetté-là, vient ung despris de la faulte du desloyal; et, en ce despris, peu à peu l’amour diminue” (268). 205 “Il prandra cest exemple, qui vouldra, dist Parlamente; mais, quant à moy, il ne me seroit possible d’avoir si longue patience” (268).

4

Upstairs, downstairs The dynamics of class and rank in the Heptaméron

Despite Hircan’s concession in the prologue that “au jeu nous sommes tous égaulx” (10)1 or that within the parameters of their game nobles and serviteurs are equal, in reality it is not equality, but rather disparities in class, rank, gender, and power that appear to dominate and define the Heptaméron. As we have seen, Oisille, the oldest and most conservative devisante, argues that wives are subordinate to their husbands, whom women are bound to “love, serve, and obey” (N. 54, 446) much as the Church follows Christ.2 Yet through the dissenting voice of Parlamente, who notes that few husbands are sufficiently Christ-like to command this degree of fealty (“So it follows, Ladies, ... that our husbands should be toward us as Christ is toward his Church,” 556),3 Marguerite undermines this patriarchal paradigm from below, using a woman’s “inferior” perspective to challenge gender-specific biases and the androcentric assumption that men should be dominant in her culture. This contestational approach to gender, which revisits patriarchal norms and “his-story” through the eyes of female experience and from alternative viewing positions, offers readers a template for understanding the text’s discourses on, and representation of, social class as well. Rooted in patriarchal inequities that disempower both women and servants, Marguerite’s perspectivally similar treatment of gender and class is reinforced linguistically by Hircan’s use of the adjective égaulx (equal), which draws our gaze to equality’s real-world scarcity and to disparities between serviteurs and seigneurs; and by Oisille’s contention that wives must “serve” their husbands, much like valets serve their masters. Functioning as twin cornerstones of patriarchal culture, these class- and sex-based “chains of being” affirm the fundamental and presumably God-given superiority of men over women in matters of gender in sixteenth-century France, as well as the general ascendancy of masters over servants, rulers over their subjects, the rich over the poor, and the gently born over tradesmen and peasants in terms of rank.4 The social organization of the Heptaméron’s true stories, like that of the life world they mirror, is hierarchical, extending vertically downward from kings to the lowliest servants. What distinguishes Marguerite’s treatment of rank is not simply the fact that she represents all

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classes, however, but rather the narrative and perspectival tools she uses both to explore disparities among them and to expand the scope of her “truth project,” which scrutinizes “les choses basses” from the vantage of the empowered, and vice versa. These tools include inferior viewing positions that expose abuses of power and privilege that might otherwise remain masked; visual and linguistic cues that draw our gaze to the plight and insights of the disadvantaged, who at times function as “outsiders within”; shifting perspectives that train us to see nonhegemonically, and echoes of scriptural passages privileging the poor. It is these tools and processes that we will examine in this chapter.

A view from the top: looking down at the lower classes Despite our rose-colored image of the Renaissance, based on contemporary accounts of extravagant ceremonies and banquets, luxurious clothing, and lavish architectural projects, sixteenth-century France was riddled with disease and poverty. In his fiction, Rabelais provides us glimpses of this penury and rampant illness, not only in the figure of Panurge, who is a sometime thief afflicted with “faute d’argent” (a lack of money) and the pox, but also in the cabbage planter in Pantagruel, chapter 32, or “The World in Pantagruel’s Mouth” episode, who asserts that “we can’t all be rich”5 as he works the earth painstakingly and takes his produce to market, much like the bakers and grape harvesters in Gargantua; and in the plague victims who “die so fast … that the cart’s always running about the streets.”6 Ironically the poor laborers’ mortal illnesses in Rabelais’s fanciful account of class disparities stem from Pantagruel’s indigestion, illustrating how the rich and powerful, oblivious to the “trickle-down” effects of their actions throughout society, so often harm their social inferiors unwittingly with their own excesses. As the gatekeepers who monitor Alcofrybas’s entry into this gastro-world so astutely note, “One half of the world doesn’t know how the other half lives.”7 This is certainly true of many aristocratic characters in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron, who at times express indifference to the plight of nameless servants who die for their employers (prol.), while blaming the “simple folk” for the desperation that leads some of them to petty theft (N. 29), criticizing the dirtiness of their clothing and living quarters (N. 20), marveling that their “vulgar hearts” can aspire to “so noble a passion” as love (N. 29), and discrediting the validity of their eyewitness testimony (N. 1).8 At first glance, Marguerite de Navarre appears to be a party to this classbased blindness, as one might expect from a woman of her background. Sitting at or near the top of her intratextual social pyramid are kings, dukes, an emperor, and princes, followed by lords and ladies, gentlemen, and serviteurs of gentle birth, all drawn from the privileged world into which the historical writer herself was born.9 Without question, she focuses primarily on the nobility; and while she does venture outside her own milieu to portray

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lawyers, merchants, and artisans from the bourgeoisie, chambermaids, valets, and grooms from the lower classes, and the omnipresent clergy, often her allusions to the lower classes are generic rather than detailed. While we learn that Saint-Aignan’s wife is beautiful but not entirely virtuous (“plus belle que vertueuse,” 11), for example, all Marguerite tells us of the servants who witness the crime she engineers is that one is old and the other is “a girl of fifteen” (75) whose eyewitness testimony against her master is suppressed and discredited. Literally, this suppression of the serving girl’s voice and perspective in nouvelle 1 appears to be an isolated case of “servant nullification,” which stems from the particular atrocities she has witnessed and the legal danger her knowledge poses to Saint-Aignan. Yet on another level, the gesture emblematizes the systematic erasure of voices of otherness, and views from below, from the era’s noncomedic discourses of domination, and the frequent invisibility of underlings from hegemonic perspectival positions. Discursively, the Heptaméron itself rehearses this erasure up to a point: for notwithstanding their honesty and moral superiority to their mistress, the shadowy supernumeraries in nouvelle 1 merit little attention. Mentioned only in passing, they are defined by their lowly births, by their subordinate positions in the household, by their use value, and by the threats they pose to those they serve—and not by their beauty, their personalities, their families, their names, or their intellects. Despite the short and nondescript depictions of servants in the Heptaméron, however, there is far more to Marguerite’s treatment of social class and position than initially meets the eye. Already in the prologue, she polarizes and problematizes questions of rank, setting the stage for the crucial role of servants and social class in many of the stories to come. While at first glance the characters in her liminary text seem homogeneous and aristocratic, all drawn from the same privileged echelon of society, the queen in fact portrays two types of serviteurs in her opening disaster narrative: first, the courtly admirers of Parlamente and Longarine, later identified as Saffredent and Dagoucin, who are of lesser rank than the ladies but nonetheless gently born; and second, the anonymous, virtually invisible retainers of base origins who accompany and serve the nobles during their journey. The author’s pointed juxtaposition of these noble and lowborn “servants,” who elicit radically different responses from their fellow travelers, serves as a fulcrum for the queen’s multifaceted exploration of class. On the one hand, Saffredent and Dagoucin risk their lives to defend the women and their husbands from brigands; and while Longarine’s spouse dies in the fray, the other nobles invite the courageous serviteurs to join their entourage—which eventually gives them a voice in the group’s decisions and discussions. On the other hand, the prologue is filled with low-ranking and seemingly underappreciated retainers who die while aiding and defending their aristocratic masters: some are lost in the fight with brigands (“aians perdu desja grande partie de leurs serviteurs,” 3), others are killed by a bear (“l’ours avoit tué tous leurs serviteurs,” 4), and yet another group drowns

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while helping Simontaut ford the river (“avoit mis tous ses serviteurs à l’entour de luy pour rompre l’eaue,” 5). Moreover, it is a simple shepherd who takes the bedraggled Simontaut into his “pauvre maison” (5) or “humble abode” (64) and dries him with “petites buchettes” (small sticks of kindling), effectively saving the nobleman with Christ-like humility. Lest we miss the religious connotations of this literal, socioeconomic, and visual descent, Marguerite begins the scene with Simontaut’s immersion in cleansing floodwaters and concludes with the serendipitous arrival of a priest sent by God to “luy enseign[er] le chemyn” (5)—or show him the way to Notre Dame de Serrance. Thus, the analogy that Marguerite draws between “les choses basses” and Christ is present from the beginning of her Heptaméron. While Simontaut, who is himself a gently born serviteur paying court to Parlamente, mourns his dead servants (“non moins triste de ses gens qu’il avoit veu perdre devant luy,” 5), his reaction is anomalous among the noble responses and standpoints that Marguerite shares with us. Instead, the other travelers praise God for taking only the servants and sparing the masters and their ladies: “[The aristocrats] were overjoyed beyond description. They praised their Creator that He had been satisfied to take the servants and save their masters and mistresses” (64).10 As insensitive as this reaction may appear to modern readers, whose class consciousness and religious perspective differ from those of Renaissance aristocrats, one might argue that the travelers’ seeming lack of empathy for their servants is, instead, a display of trust in God’s will. Nevertheless, the nobles’ jubilant response to their own safety and, conversely, to the adversity of others, recalls “superiority” theories of cruel humor dating back to Plato, as well as Bergson’s focus on the absence of sympathy in comedy and Bakhtin’s view of laughter as a regenerative life force.11 Most egregiously, Ennasuite laughs outright at the low ratio of aristocrats to retainers among the fatalities, observing that no traveler but Longarine, newly widowed, has cause to be sad: “Not everyone’s lost a husband, like you,” she tells the widow. “And as for losing servants, no need to despair about that—there are plenty of men ready to do service!” (66).12 From her privileged, classist standpoint, servants are an expendable commodity. Exactly why Marguerite penned these seemingly insensitive words and orchestrated the demise of most lowborn characters in her prologue remains unclear. On one level, Ennasuite’s laughing contention that the servants can be replaced recalls Gargantua’s ambivalent reaction to his wife’s death in childbirth: shortly after shedding tears over her demise, the Utopian king considers “finding [himself] another wife” as he abandons his grief and revels in the birth of his son.13 Typically we interpret the giant’s decision to laugh rather than cry not only as a mark of his faith in God’s judgment (“elle est en paradis”), but also as an expression of his own joie de vivre and hope for the future.14 Certainly this is a plausible interpretation of Ennasuite’s comments as well, but the class biases that she exhibits while saying “yes”

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to life and laughter are no less troubling than the misogynistic overtones of Gargantua’s speech, which have long fueled the hypothesis that Rabelais was antifeminist. Alternatively, Ennasuite may be echoing Christ’s defense of Mary Magdalene in Mark 14:7, after the apostles criticize her for washing Jesus’ feet rather than ministering to the poor: “The poor you will always have with you,” he admonishes the disciples, “and you can help them any time you want. But you will not always have me.” Given the devisants’ penchant for citing scripture out of context to support their views, even when the latter are transgressive, this biblical explanation of Ennasuite’s apparent indifference to the poor is also plausible: rather than worrying about the dead serviteurs, whom she cannot help anyway, the youthful narrator may well be heeding Christ’s teachings as she reminds her companions to value what they have rather than mourn what they have lost, and to minister to their traumatized friends rather than wallowing in grief. To a modern ear, however, Ennasuite’s words remain abrasive, not simply for the class bias and lack of compassion implicit in her statement, but also for the ease with which she rhetorically dismisses, marginalizes, and dehumanizes the anonymous servants. To be sure, there is a danger in imposing anachronistic expectations of political correctness on a sixteenthcentury aristocrat who is young and occasionally frivolous. In view of the era’s high mortality rate and the social chasm that separates nobles and peasants one might argue that hers is a plausible and even normal reaction under the circumstances. Given her penchant for banter and the presence of gently born male “servants” among the devisants, her allusion to disposable serviteurs may indeed include a double entendre that playfully targets the men in the group—by referring not only to dead retainers, but also to the interchangeable and occasionally tiresome bevy of young men who pay court to her. That the other devisants do not criticize Ennasuite’s classist discourse moreover suggests that the bias is not hers alone: rather than chastising their young companion for speaking irreverently of the dead, the male storytellers instead express their agreement with her sentiments and those of Longarine (“tous les gentilz hommes s’accorderent à leur avis,” 7), who worries that the group will become morbid if they dwell exclusively upon their “tristesse.” Although no fellow traveler either disagrees with Ennasuite or expresses sympathy for the dead serviteurs, as one might expect given their key role in the Heptaméron and the author’s self-construction as a servant of God in her poetry, Marguerite directs our attention to these lowborn characters in other ways.15 The rhetorical effect of Ennasuite’s comment, for example, is diametrically opposed to its content: for instead of shifting our focus away from the servants, as it purports to do on a literal level, the devisante’s insistence upon “burying” Marguerite’s supernumeraries is so strident that it has the opposite effect—encouraging us to direct our eyes downward and revisit the ancillary characters who lurk anonymously in the background of

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the text. Although these lowborn figures say little, other than pointing out to the stingy Cordeliers that the washed-out bridges will take ten or twelve days to rebuild (6), what they do and see is significant. As we have seen, it is serviteurs who give up their lives fighting bandits for Hircan’s band of travelers, protecting Ennasuite and Nomerfide from a bear, and fording the river for Simontaut. While the aristocratic travelers blithely tell stories, moreover, nameless “ouvriers” (6) or workers toil to rebuild the bridge that will allow them to return home; and just as “seeing” his servants drown moves Simontaut to pity, the shepherd who rescues him understands the nobleman’s plight by seeing him rather than listening to his discourse (“entendoit myeulx sa necessité tant en le voiant que en escoutant sa parolle,” 5; my italics). Rather than marginalizing this revelatory (in)sight, or limiting it to the (in)sides of her text, Marguerite appeals to her narratees as well in visual terms: “Voylà, mes dames,” she implores her audience repeatedly, using an exclamation of sight (vois là) that invites readers to look beyond and beneath official discourse to uncover the unspoken truths that lie below and outside its purview. Moreover, it is to Simontaut, who has seen and understood the servants’ sacrifice, that Hircan entrusts the first narration, lending his imprimatur for the duration of their “game” to the leveling of class distinctions, often associated with death, pestilence, and floods.16 While the determination of which devisant speaks first in the Heptaméron is relatively egalitarian, suggesting that Marguerite is creating a utopian community at Notre Dame de Serrance similar to Rabelais’s Abbaye de Thélème, there is little equality within the stories themselves. Rather, the queen’s treatment of social class and servants appears at first glance to echo Ennasuite’s dismissive attitude toward the underclasses in the prologue. Although most of the protagonists and antagonists in the nouvelles belong to the nobility, the clergy, or the bourgeoisie, those characters of humble birth who appear in the short stories tend to be nameless, shadowy figures who rarely emerge from the background. Marguerite’s well-born devisants rarely describe these menus gens in detail, relying instead upon generic epithets such as “un valet” or “une chambrière”; and their role in the plot— while crucial on occasion—is usually of short duration. Rather than foregrounding servants in the comic style of Molière or even Machiavelli, what Marguerite gives us most often is a view of the underclasses through the eyes of her aristocratic storytellers, in a top-to-bottom look that vilifies, minimizes, and objectifies the lower classes. Although the servants in the background of Simontaut’s opening narrative play an important role in the plot, the first household retainer whom Marguerite actually foregrounds is the valet in nouvelle 2, a profoundly negative example of his class who rapes and kills a muletière (mule-driver’s wife) for rebuffing his advances. The narrator Oisille concedes that the “varlet” loves the woman desperately (“l’aymoit si desesperement,” 19), a somewhat surprising admission given the oft-repeated insistence by medieval and courtly poets that love and a base heart are mutually exclusive.17 Far

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from being an ennobling passion, however, the valet’s “love” is not only more bestial than human, but also more bestial than the behavior of barnyard animals themselves—a fact that Oisille emphasizes with a descending array of negative comparisons: “His love was no more than animal lust,” she tells us, “and he would have understood the language his mules spoke better than he understood the virtuous appeals to reason that [the muletière] now made. Indeed, what he did next proved him even more bestial than the animals with whom he had spent so much of his life” (79–80).18 Were it not for Oisille’s closing moral, where she invokes the muletière’s chastity as an example of God’s tendency to bury superlative qualities in “les choses basses,” one might argue that the valet’s low birth and social rank are predictors of his vile behavior, his bestial love, and his inferior position in Pico della Mirandola’s idiosyncratic version of the Great Chain of Being, where some men “descend to the lower, brutish forms of life.”19 Neither Pico nor Oisille would agree that social rank and the circumstances of one’s birth determine who one becomes, however: whereas the Italian philosopher contends that our intellect gives each of us, and the species in general, the potential to overcome our baser nature, progress upwards in the Great Chain of Being, and fashion ourselves as we choose (“With free choice and dignity, you may fashion yourself into whatever form you choose”),20 the pious devisante instead attributes the enabling force behind human virtue and progress not to individuals but to God, who bestows his grace on les élus or the elect irrespective of their class origins. While we typically interpret Oisille’s commentary on “les choses basses” as a tribute to the muletière, moreover, it necessarily reflects on the valet who raped her as well—but in a problematic way: for if God, who “eslit ce qu’il veult” (21), or “elects whom He will” (81), has visited his grace on the muleteer’s wife according to what pleases “his own goodness” (“selon qu’il plaist à sa bonté,” 21), it is equally clear that he has not “chosen” the hapless valet, who seems powerless to resist his bestiality. Despite our initial impressions, then, which suggest that Oisille is equating inferior social rank with coarse and inhumane behavior, class does not appear to be a determining factor in either figure’s character or conduct. By attributing all causality to God, the aging devisante effectively divorces both the muletière’s virtue and the valet’s villainy or vice from their humble origins. In addition to exploring the relationship between poverty or low birth and vice, Marguerite’s storytellers on three occasions (N. 20, 154; N. 27, 222; N. 28, 225) indicate that the male servants or lowborn masculine characters in their narratives are ugly, an attribute which, in its literal sense, is visually determined. Given the small number of examples, one might argue that the queen’s association of homeliness with base rank is too infrequent to be significant. After all, she provides us no physical description at all of most servants and underlings; and clearly, the correlation between ugliness and class does not apply to female servants, since both male heads of household and their gently reared sons routinely find their chambrières

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attractive, as we note in story 30 where the adolescent boy “began … to desire the things that seemed to him full of beauty,” including “a young lady who slept in his mother’s room” (317).21 That the devisants never describe a nobleman as “laid” or ugly is a striking omission, however: indeed, many are characterized as beaux notwithstanding their transgressions, which may themselves be labeled ordes or infames; and while Marguerite does use the adjective “ugly” or laid for the lascivious old cleric who attempts to rape Marie Héroët (N. 22), in general it is a term that her storytellers reserve for vices (“lying and deceit [are] the most ugly and the most squalid of all vices,” 284)22 and for lowborn males. Two examples of this phenomenon appear in nouvelles 27 and 28, where both of the conniving secretaries who receive their comeuppance are characterized as “ugly.” In the second instance, which involves a “serviteur” (224) of the king and queen of Navarre, the secretary attempts to blackmail a merchant named Bernard du Ha for the indiscretion of teaching the chambermaids to dance; and while the plot revolves around Bernard’s comic response to the ill-conceived extortion attempt, the narrator Simontaut emphasizes the ugliness and large size of the serviteur’s mouth (“il eust la bouche parfaictement laide et grande,” 225), which reflects his greed or cupidity. More strikingly, Ennasuite elaborates on the otherness of the ugly secretary who makes advances to a “femme de bien” who baits and entraps him in Amboise, equating his physical and class-based alterity with that of a non-European or a nonbeliever: “This secretary was so ugly, that to look at him, you’d have thought he was king of the cannibals rather than a Christian!” (307).23 While Ennasuite reserves the adjective “laid” for the male servant, moreover, she makes it clear that the 50-year-old woman he attempts to bed is herself far from pretty: not only does she have no likable qualities except for her chastity (“n’avoit en elle chose aimable que le contraire de la volupté,” 222), but Ennasuite also tells us that the matron, whose husband himself serves a princess, “was not exactly beautiful” (307).24 Were it not for the woman’s marriage, one might even venture that the ugly and lowborn couple are well matched: for Ennasuite compresses the matron, her husband, and the secretary into a single social category that is both other than and inferior to her own, describing the male protagonist and antagonist in undifferentiated terms as “two men in the service of a certain princess” (306).25 While Oisille agrees that the story is “pleasing,” moreover, primarily because it celebrates the triumph of chastity, Ennasuite is the only devisant who laughs openly at the anecdote, finding it so entertaining that she forgets “the tragic and melancholy tale [she] had intended to tell” (306).26 Exactly why she laughs is unclear—for unlike the next novella, where Bernard du Ha mischievously substitutes a wooden clog for a fine “jambon de Pacques” or Easter ham, Ennasuite’s story is not simply a classic farce about the trompeur trompé or “tricked trickster.” Whereas our amusement in nouvelle 28 stems irrepressibly from the secretary’s trickery and richly deserved comeuppance, arguably Ennasuite

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laughs in story 27 at a different type of comic inversion, known also as the humor of incongruity and cruelty. In part, her amusement is triggered by the servant’s own hilarity, which is of short duration: laughing like a “performing monkey” (“riant avecq une doulceur de visaige semblable à ung grand magot,” 222), the repulsive secretary is overjoyed to hear that the old, homely matron returns his passion, despite his own low status and monstrous appearance. While the matron’s words of love are false, intended only to entrap him, it is arguably the incongruity between the secretary’s base appearance and his sublime hopes—between his amorous expectations and the devastating humiliation he actually suffers, and between his initial burst of joyous laughter and the eventual tears of mortification he sheds—that causes Ennasuite to laugh. Much like the capricious gods who look down and tease mortals “for their very sport” in Erasmus’s Encomium moriae (Praise of Folly), the youngest and occasionally cruel devisante finds cause for merriment in her social inferior’s abject misery and in his improbable and unfounded hope that someone—or indeed, anyone—might love him. Despite this additional manifestation of class bias on Ennasuite’s part and her sense that it is both ridiculous and risible for a homely man of base origins to dream of love or pay court to a woman, one ugly servant whom Marguerite describes in the Heptaméron seems to do just that—not with a chambermaid or serving girl, moreover, but with a noblewoman who chooses him as her lover over a fellow aristocrat. As we have already seen in chapter 3, the seigneur de Riant in nouvelle 20 loves and serves a gently born widow who staves off his advances while engaging in a liaison with her groom or palefrenier, whom Saffredent describes as “as dirty, common and ugly as de Riant was handsome, gallant and refined” (232).27 Far from describing the servant either objectively or favorably, through the eyes of feminine desire, the narrator filters the palefrenier’s image through the lens of his own class bias and that of the widow’s rebuffed suitor, who predictably labels his lowborn rival “ugly,” “dirty,” and “infamous”—without ever seeing the man’s face or hearing him speak. While the groom’s affinity for horses recalls the centaurs and Hippolytus on a mythic and iconographic level, reinforcing his allegorical association with passion, masculinity, and the sin of lust, on a purely human level he represents the negative other of de Riant’s wealth, rank, comeliness, and civility.28 In addition to offending and wounding the nobleman, the widow’s preference for this ugly and lowborn servant is a puzzle to narrators and narratees alike: for if love is born of a gaze, which passes from the eyes to the heart in courtly love, how do we explain the matron’s infatuation with a man who is visually repulsive? Clearly, one answer is that the widow’s liaison springs up outside the courtly paradigm, figuring both as an escape from the stylized conventions of “honneste amour” and as an honest expression of her own inner desires. As Nomerfide points out in nouvelle 40, the pleasure of loving outside one’s rank is “rare—and all the greater, since it runs counter to the views expressed by all wise men” (372).29 If we

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systematically reread this novella in the light of reflections on love, class, and ugliness inscribed elsewhere in the Heptaméron, at least two alternative possibilities emerge. First, Oisille tells us in the prologue that “a person who knows God will find all things beautiful in Him, and without Him all things will seem ugly” (67);30 and while nothing in this statement suggests that we should excuse “ugly” vices, applying Oisille’s insight to nouvelle 20 does prompt us to reexamine the suitor’s own mindset when he labels the servant “laid.” As the pious devisante’s logic suggests, one might speculate that the ugliness he attributes to the palefrenier (stablehand or groom) is instead a projection of his own jealousy, his own class biases, and his own carnal desires. In response to our question about how or why the widow might love her groom, moreover, Saffredent observes that “the rules of true love, according to which prince and pauper are equal” (N. 42, 390),31 effectively abolish class differences between lovers.32 Indirectly, then, Marguerite herself provides us the tools, based on the conflicting moral and aesthetic codes of aristocratic romances, on the one hand, and Christian egalitarianism, on the other hand, to deflect and invert the suitor’s disparagement of the lower classes, embedding within her text a variety of alternative perspectives that turn the gentil homme’s disdainful gaze back toward himself, at least provisionally. Given the almost symmetrical similarities and contrasts between them, one might even venture that the widow’s courtly and lowborn serviteurs, rivals for her love, are at once mirror opposites and mirror images of one another. Although we know nothing about the palefrenier’s character, the contrast that Marguerite draws between him and the gentil homme provisionally recalls Guido Guinizelli’s iconic distinction, almost three centuries earlier, between nobility of birth and a noble heart in his “Al cor gentil”: Love takes its place in the noble heart As its rightful dwelling Like the diamond in a vein of ore. Sun strikes the mud all day long: It remains base, nor does the sun lose heat. A proud man says, “I am made noble by birth.” I liken him to the mud and noble worth to the sun. No man should believe That nobility exists outside the heart, By right of lineage, Unless he has a noble heart disposed to virtue.33 After noting that love takes root only in a “gentle” or “noble heart,” the thirteenth-century poet pointedly differentiates between this true and inward nobility, on the one hand, and the advantages of rank or high birth, on the other hand. Boccaccio moreover reprises this distinction in his first story of

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the Fourth Day of the Decameron, when Ghismonda defends her choice of Guiscardo—“a man of exceedingly humble birth but noble in character and bearing”—as a lover to her father, Prince Tancredi: “Fortune,” says the princess, “frequently raises the unworthy to positions of eminence and leaves the worthiest in low estate … Consider each of your nobles in turn, compare their lives, their customs and manners with those of Guiscardo, and … you will conclude that he alone is a patrician.”34 While Boccaccio portrays Guiscardo from two perspectives, supplementing the father’s shallow patriarchal assessment of his servant’s merits with the more discerning insights of Ghismonda’s “œil intérieur,” we initially see the palefrenier in nouvelle 20 through his rival’s eyes and those of the male storyteller, Saffredent, alone.35 Yet Marguerite fleshes out and contests this narrow viewing angle by planting the seeds of an alternative reading within her text—if we are willing to follow her subversive gaze. While Marguerite focuses ingeniously in nouvelle 20 on the amorous rivalry between two types of serviteurs, the one courtly and the other of humble birth, their direct confrontation is the only one of its kind in her work. More often, the queen explores the tribulations of gently born “servants,” or suitors, who aspire to romantic relationships or even marriage with women of even higher rank. Despite Saffredent’s contention that even the lowliest males are superior to the highest ranking women, deficiencies of wealth and birth clearly loom as impediments to men wishing to marry the ladies they love or admire—not so much because the women themselves object, but rather because their parents are loathe to contract a financially or socially disadvantageous match that does not serve their familial interests. Through the voice of Dagoucin, a proponent of “honneste amitié,” Marguerite herself points out the gap between a worthy young suitor’s modest means and his sterling character in nouvelle 9, observing that he is “better endowed with virtue, good looks and good breeding than he [is] with material possessions” (115).36 While the “damoyselle” (49) he loves seems to return his affection, her affluent and well-born relatives, who “are of exalted lineage” (115),37 choose a richer bridegroom for her, causing the virtuous young man to fall ill and eventually die of grief. Throughout the story, the author’s contrast between the youth’s low rank (“se voiant de si bas lieu au pris d’elle,” 49; my italics), lack of hope (“nul espoir,” 49), and limited tangible resources on the one hand, and his great love for the girl (“l’amour qu’il luy portoit estoit si grande,” 49) on the other hand, sets up an extended cost-benefit analysis that both reverses the narrowly materialistic perspective of the young woman’s family and showcases the paradoxical value of “les choses basses.” Although the girl’s mother and relatives initially favor the other gentleman because he is rich (“pour ce que l’autre estoit beaucoup plus riche,” 50), the mother gradually realizes that the poor suitor’s “honnesteté” is preferable to “tous les biens de l’autre” (51), or all the wealth of the other man. Given the continuing opposition of “les parens du costé du pere” (51), or the girl’s relatives on the

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father’s side of the family, the youth himself wins nothing beyond the good opinion of the two women—and arguably he loses everything else, at least on a material level, including his appetite, the ability to sleep, his health, and ultimately his life itself (“perdit le boire et le manger, le dormir et le repos,” 50). What troubles the impoverished young man about his loss, however, is not his own death but rather the realization that his lady will suffer, too: “It is not my happiness alone that concerns me,” he confides to the mother, “because I know that with no one else could she ever be so deeply loved or so lovingly cared for. Now she is to lose a friend, the best and most loving friend she has, and that she should lose such a blessing is more painful to me than death itself” (117).38 According to this logic of the heart, the youth’s life is worthless to him if he cannot share it with his lady: “While I lived, I lived for her alone. But now my life can be of no more service to her, so I lay it down, and losing little, gain much” (117).39 For her part, however, the girl will be impoverished beyond measure by the loss of a “bien” far greater than the material wealth, or “tous les biens,” that his rival offers. By looking beneath surface appearances, the mother and daughter come to appreciate the poor suitor’s high worth despite his “bas lieu” or low standing, recognizing that no other man—no matter how rich he may be—will offer her as much joy as he did. Far from limiting herself to a single example of the impoverished but virtuous serviteur, Marguerite offers readers numerous variations on the theme including stories about a brilliant younger son who has no share in his family’s patrimony (N. 10), a beloved retainer who is killed by his master for marrying the latter’s sister (N. 40), and a pair of lovers who take religious vows to avoid being married to the highest bidders (N. 19). In the first of these nouvelles, the queen tells us that Amadour comes from a “rich and distinguished family, but he was the youngest son, and possessed little in the way of inheritance” (124).40 Emphasizing the immense contrast between his lack (“riens”) of social standing and wealth on the one hand, and his abundant beauty, grace, and courage on the other hand, the queen observes that “Love and Fortune, seeing him ill-provided for by his parents, and resolving to make him their paragon, bestowed upon him through the gift of virtue and valour that which the laws of the land denied him” (124).41 Unlike nouvelle 9, however, this long and complicated story does not conclude with the simple revelation that the suitor’s character is superior to his fortune and social status. Instead, the text draws our gaze downward through layer after layer of appearances, to reveal a poor but gifted man who uses his talents, rhetorical skills, and grace to compensate for his poverty. On one level, Amadour is a proverbial self-made man who wins both the reader’s sympathies and those of Floride, the woman he loves, despite his birth order and relative penury; but Marguerite also takes pains to uncover the negative side of his brilliance and accomplishments. For in addition to manipulating his wife, friends, and patrons to gain access to Floride, Amadour also attempts to rape her when she rebuffs his advances, arguing that he has earned her

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sexual favors. In this story, the author challenges the relationship between seeming and being in not one, but at least two, areas: on the one hand, she shows us that poor serviteurs can be brighter, more courageous, and more articulate than those they serve; but on the other hand, Marguerite declines to idealize Amadour simply because the laws of primogeniture refuse him the wealth and status that he arguably merits, but chooses instead to reveal the manipulative underside as well as the obverse of his social grace and military genius. Floride’s interactions with him moreover constitute a journey of discovery and self-discovery that is articulated in terms of sight and insight, as first she sees beyond his modest rank and learns to admire his wit and charm—and then sees (“elle veit son visaige et ses oeilz tant alterez,” 78; my italics) beyond his charm and discovers his base, predatory nature. Ultimately this descent into the depths of carnality, despair, betrayal, and temptation affords Floride a sublime new understanding of herself and of love, as she “entered the Convent of Jesus [and] took Him as Lover and as spouse who had delivered her from the violent love of Amador and from the misery of her life with her earthly husband. All her affections henceforth were bent on the perfect love of God” (152).42 Far from being an isolated progression, this reascent toward spiritual or divine love following a downward epiphany or the unveiling of an underling’s inner nobility or true worth occurs on several occasions in the Heptaméron. In nouvelle 40, Rolandine’s aunt, the sister of Count de Jossebelin, falls in love with a “jeune et beau gentil homme” (275) or a “handsome young gentleman” (368) who has been reared in their household. Because the count esteems the gentleman so highly, remarking that if only the man’s rank were equal to that of his sister, he would be an ideal brother-in-law (“There was … nobody he would rather have as a brother-in-law,” 368),43 she mistakenly believes her brother will quickly forgive them (“on leur pardonneroit aisement,” 275) if they marry clandestinely. Instead, the count rashly murders the worthy gentleman “as a bad servant and as one who has deceived [him]!” (369)44—an act he regrets upon hearing his sister’s eloquent defense of her actions, which she bases upon her own majority and legal right to marry and upon her choice of the man he loved best in the world (“l’homme du monde que vous avez le mieulx aymé,” 276) as her husband. Rolandine’s aunt refuses her brother’s offers to find her a second husband and lives out her life in a solitary castle that the count builds for her, immersing herself in divine love and hoping that God will avenge her martyred bridegroom.45 Even more strikingly, Poline in story 19 loves “a gentleman in the service of the Marquis” (220)46 whom her protectors will not allow her to wed: rather, they want him to look for “quelque femme riche” (143) or “a lady of means” (220) and her to marry “plus richement” (143). Defying his patron’s warnings that if they marry, he and Poline will be poor, the gentil homme considers Poline his “tresor,” and argues that “true riches are to be found in happiness alone” (221).47 Because he is unable to marry her,

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however, the serviteur becomes a Cordelier and Poline enters a convent, sublimating their mortal love in devotion to God. While the couple’s spiritual ascent stems in part from patriarchal constraints and their limited financial resources, readers rarely interpret the transformation of their desire into divine agape as a component of Marguerite’s discourse on social class. Instead, we most often view Poline and her lover’s decision as both a reflection of de Navarre’s own piety and as a function of her Platonizing meditation on love. Despite Hircan’s criticism of the couple’s retreat from secular life in nouvelle 19, for example, Parlamente points out that within the economy of parfaicte amour “no man will ever perfectly love God, unless he has perfectly loved some creature in this world” (228),48 implying that Poline’s romantic relationship with her suitor represents a necessary step in the individual’s ascending journey toward spirituality and devotion to God. Notwithstanding Parlamente’s Platonizing discourse, however, we cannot ignore the real-world, socioeconomic resonances of the couple’s decision to lead a cloistered life. In addition to having a sincere religious vocation, bowing to parental pressure, or coveting ecclesiastical power, the young people who entered monasteries and convents in early modern France often did so because their families were unable to contract suitable marriages for them, typically for financial or class-based reasons. While taking religious vows was nominally a religious choice, then, in the vast majority of such cases socioeconomic factors weighed heavily in the family’s decision. From this perspective, Poline’s story relates to the theme of the serviteur and social class on two levels. First, the couple’s predicament and their decision to enter the cloister stem from the sociological reality of their culture, with its disparities of rank and wealth, its patriarchal constraints on the ability of individuals to act freely, and its systematic privileging of status over merit. In this sense, nouvelle 19 takes its place among other stories in the Heptaméron that map out the narrow array of options available to young people whose love transgresses their society’s patriarchal, class-based protocols.49 Second, Marguerite’s juxtaposition of the couple’s inferior social status with their spiritual ascent in nouvelle 19 has Christological resonances far too striking to be coincidental, reminding readers to look beyond the trappings of material poverty or wealth, to prize inner rather than outward nobility, to recall Christ’s own poverty and humility, and to remember that “the last shall be first, and the last first” (Matt. 20: 16). These insights, in turn, cast the story’s beginning in a new light: for if the couple’s patrons and families encourage them to marry “richly” rather than marrying for love, Christ teaches instead that “it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Matt. 19: 24). And while it is difficult to credit Ennasuite, the sometimes shallow narrator, with the text’s lexical intricacy, the story articulates as clearly as any in the Heptaméron the reversal of earthly values inherent in New Testament theology, which Marguerite illuminates with her shifting gaze.

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Cruel masters and abuses of high rank This scopic reversal of earthly values, which prompts readers to recognize the high moral caliber of many poor and low-ranking characters, also draws our gaze to the base character of many high-placed officials. For notwithstanding the positive correlation one might expect to see between power and character in the Heptaméron, not all the rich and mighty men— and women—in Marguerite’s Heptaméron are benevolent figures. In addition to depicting Franciscan monks who use their position and influence to mistreat women, and handsome lords who assume that sexual favors are theirs for the taking, the author provides numerous illustrations of evil masters and rulers whose high rank and power enable them to abuse their underlings with impunity. In some instances, this mistreatment falls well short of rape, physical torture, and murder. For example, the cruelty of noble ladies like the queen of Castile toward their courtly serviteurs is primarily psychological; and while Marguerite occasionally shows female— and male—members of the royal family in a positive light, as protectors, intercessors, and judicial arbiters, the queen in nouvelle 21 capriciously wreaks havoc on Rolandine’s life, first by discouraging politically ambitious suitors with her clear dislike of the girl (“Her mistress … was so ill-disposed towards her that no one who wanted to win the Queen’s favor would ever ask for Rolandine’s hand in marriage,” 236; “sa maitresse ... luy portoit si peu de faveur, qu’elle n’estoit pas demandée de ceulx qui se vouloient advancer en la bonne grace de la Royne,” 158), and then by barring her from seeing the bâtard she loves even after they are married, on the grounds that she has brought shame to her father’s house and to her mistress (167). Without being psychologically broken by her patron’s abusiveness, Rolandine responds with a blend of stoic submission to her father and the queen on the outside, and a quiet inward determination to follow God, her conscience, and her own judgment in matters of the heart: “I am not afraid that any mortal creature should hear how I have conducted myself in the affair with which I am charged, since I know that there has been no offence either to God or to my honour” (248).50 While the queen does not abuse Rolandine physically, Marguerite draws our attention to masters and rulers willing to execute underlings who fail to please them. One of the most egregious exemplars of monarchical malfeasance is the duke of Urbino in nouvelle 51, whose young son falls in love with “a girl from a good and noble family” (429).51 Because he does not have “the freedom to speak to her as he would have liked [because of] local custom” (429),52 the youth charges a young damoiselle in his mother’s service to carry messages to his lady love. While the maid’s motives are innocent and honorable (“n’y pensoit en nul mal, prenant plaisir à luy faire service,” 329), the duke becomes enraged when he learns of his son’s romance and the serving girl’s role as his emissary, fearing that his son’s potentially indiscreet messages will entrap him in a marriage that is neither

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socially nor financially advantageous (“eut ... paour que les propos menassent son filz jusques au mariage,” 329). The maid, who already knows the duke has a malicious bent to his character (“congnoissant la malice du duc,” 329), learns of his wrath and seeks protection from the duchess, who extracts a promise from her husband that he will not punish the girl; but Oisille tells us that “ignoring all legal forms, God and the honour of his house” (430),53 he has the girl hanged anyway. As recounted by Oisille, nouvelle 51 illustrates the dangers of putting one’s trust in earthly princes, whose virtue is not necessarily commensurate with their high rank: “Trust not in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no salvation” (428),54 she says, in an echo of Psalms 146: 3.55 Throughout the narrative, moreover, the devisante consistently portrays the duke of Urbino as a dishonest, unjust, cruel, and immoral ruler, while taking pains to establish the serving girl’s innocence: “The poor young woman saw no wrong in acting as messenger,” Oisille continues, “and was glad to be of help, since she believed the young man’s intentions to be so good and noble that he could not possibly have desires which she could not honourably convey” (429).56 Indeed, the contrast that Marguerite draws between the lowborn damoiselle’s honor and the highborn duke’s base treachery is striking, echoing her earlier encomium of “les choses basses”: one might even venture that she is hypothesizing an inverse relationship between virtue and rank, if not for all characters in the novella, at least for the villain and the victim. Clearly, Oisille’s condemnation of the duke of Urbino does not necessarily apply to all masters or rulers in Renaissance Europe; but neither is it an isolated historical anecdote that reflects exclusively on the cruelty of Italian condottieri, or on the singular brutality of Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke of Urbino. On the contrary, wise and benevolent rulers are in short supply in the Heptaméron, despite the queen’s occasional references to her brother’s judiciousness; and in the phrasing of her opening and closing morals, Oisille emphasizes the universalizing value of her antimodel, which serves specifically as a warning against leaders (“les princes,” 329) corrupted by their absolute power (“la puissance,” 331), whom Ottaviano excoriates in Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier: “Princes become drunk with the power they wield [and] so corrupted in mind,” he charges, “that … they pass from ignorance to extreme conceit.”57 Anticipating Molière’s Sganarelle, who points out that “un grand seigneur méchant homme est une terrible chose” (Dom Juan, I, i), and Beaumarchais’s Figaro, who expresses similar sentiments in the Barbier de Séville,58 Oisille urges readers to consider “the effects of wickedness when combined with power” (431).59 The authority that a good man wields may be benign, she seems to suggest; but power in the hands of a malicious ruler is dangerous indeed. Not coincidentally, Marguerite provides two additional examples of transgressive Italian rulers in nouvelles 3 and 12, perhaps as an antiMachiavellian gesture, perhaps to emphasize French morality by disparaging

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its Italian counterparts, or perhaps to camouflage her admonitions to the French monarch under the veil of otherness. While the first of these stories, involving an adulterous affair between the king of Naples and his subject, includes neither sexual coercion nor the physical brutality we saw in nouvelle 51, the twelfth story centers upon Duke Alessandro de’ Medici’s claim to the sexual favors of his friend’s sister. While the historical record indicates that the “friend” is actually Alessandro’s distant cousin, Lorenzino, who likely used his widowed sister as a lure to entrap and assassinate the duke, Marguerite provides us none of these details: instead, she focuses upon the initial relationship of love and fealty between the two men, which Alessandro emphasizes (“qui suys vostre maistre,” 90; “I, as your master,” 158) and Lorenzino acknowledges (“Monsieur, je suis vostre creature,” 91; “My lord, I am your creature,” 159) when he agrees in principle to do his lord’s bidding no matter what the request. In the queen of Navarre’s version of the story, however, this call for Lorenzino to procure his own sister’s sexual favors for Alessandro generates an untenable conflict between the vassal’s duties to his lord and those to his family, since honoring the duke’s wishes would automatically dishonor his sister. Moreover, the request itself creates a breach in their relationship, by challenging the very premises on which it is founded. For while the duke purports to consider Lorenzino a “second luy-mesmes” (90) or second self, sharing his innermost secrets with the gentil homme and entrusting him with power and authority that mirror his own (“auquel il donnoit tant d’autorité en sa maison que sa parolle estoit obeye et craincte comme celle du duc,” 90), his manipulative plea to sleep with Lorenzino’s sister and his enraged (“tout enflambé d’un courroux importable,” 91) response to his friend’s refusal explode the illusion that they are of one mind and that their moral values and perspectives are identical. Because there is no room, on one hand, for dissent in Alessandro’s brand of friendship and style of government, he views Lorenzino’s unwillingness to honor his wishes as a repudiation of their amity that merits death: “Since you are not my friend, I know what I have to do” (159).60 From Lorenzino’s perspective, to which the duke is blind, on the other hand, discovering his ruler’s cruelty (“congnoissant [sa] cruaulté,” 91) and lack of respect for his own values not only destroys their friendship, but makes him reevaluate and break his bonds of fealty to Alessandro: On the one hand he was aware of the strength of the obligations he owed to his master for all the honours and material benefits he had received from him. On the other hand, there was the honour of his family name, the chastity of his sister. He knew that she would never consent to sink to such vice, unless she were somehow tricked into it or taken by force … He was convinced that if he did not remove the Duke, neither his own life nor the lives of those dear to him could be guaranteed (159–60).61

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While we will take up the political rationale and ramifications of Lorenzo’s decision in the next chapter, his reflections on the vassal-lord relationship, or that of masters and servants in general, is particularly noteworthy given the historical writer’s own high rank, which might logically predispose her to sympathize with oppressors rather than the oppressed. Yet she articulates Lorenzino’s moral quandary and perspectival evolution compassionately and persuasively, mapping his transformation from a loyal subject, fully cognizant of what he owes his master for the “biens” and “honneurs” he has received, to a rebellious vassal whose disobedience and treachery are driven by ethical imperatives, including his duty and right to protect his family against seigniorial abuse. Because his lord has proven to be malevolent, Lorenzino contends, he has no choice other than to assassinate Alessandro in the most expedient way possible—before the duke kills him and rapes his sister. Although the preceding examples focus on dramatic abuses of power in the uppermost echelons of society, masters of lesser rank also mistreat their servants on a regular basis in the Heptaméron, often without “seeing” or understanding their culpability. One need only look at Bornet in nouvelle 8, who attempts to bed a serving girl who “refused to have anything to do with him” (108).62 Clearly the chambermaid has said “no,” or at least rebuffed or eluded her master physically; but while Bornet grasps the fact that she is resisting him, he fails to see his sexual overtures through her eyes, visualizing the situation instead through the lens of his own status and desire. When the maid turns to her mistress in distress or “torment,” begging to return home to her parents, Bornet’s wife opts instead to trade places with her servant, in a ludic role reversal intended to protect the chambrière and trick her philandering husband: “But his wife, having abandoned her position of authority in order to serve in a more pleasurable one, had taken her maid’s place in the bed” (109),63 Marguerite tells us. In part, the wife is motivated by self-interest; but the girl’s willingness to confide in her mistress and the latter’s willingness to hear and act on the servant’s marginalized discourse suggest that the two women share a perspectival bond. In a sense, the wife not only sees through the maid’s eyes, but comes to “be” the servant, by abdicating her “position of authority” and lowering herself into the maid’s bed. Within the aforementioned passage, visual cues trigger an ocular shift in the reader as well, drawing our eyes vertically downward from the wife’s “position of authority” to the servant’s supine and powerless position on the bed—linked “horizontally” to other beds in Day 1 (N. 2, 4) where a male claims hegemony over a woman’s resistant body. While the wife “saves the chambermaid’s conscience” in this particular instance, unwittingly subjecting herself to the sexual and social exploitation that young female servants experience on a regular basis, Longarine observes that Bornet’s attempted dalliance with the chambrière is far from anomalous in sixteenth-century French culture, a fact that is borne out by the numerous affairs between serving girls and their masters in the Heptaméron: “If all the men who offend their wives like that got a punishment like that,” she says,

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“then Hircan and Saffredent ought to be feeling a bit nervous” (112).64 Although Longarine initially focuses upon the harm inflicted upon women of her own class by philandering husbands, she also directs her gaze downward and addresses the plight of the lowborn serving girls themselves, whose sexual vulnerability has economic implications that well-to-do matrons rarely face: “If the ladies in question were to tell us the facts,” Longarine points out, “then you’d soon find plenty of maids who’d been dismissed before their pay-day!” (112).65 Situated near the bottom of France’s pyramidal social structure, female servants in particular are convenient scapegoats for their employers’ transgressions: not only do they have little leverage for saying “no” to their masters’ advances, but, as Longarine suggests, they risk being dismissed (“donné congé avant son quartier,” 47) or losing their jobs and their livelihood irrespective of whether they refuse or acquiesce. While lascivious masters in the sixteenth century doubtless forced their attentions routinely on unwilling chambrières, threatening to discharge or inflict bodily harm on serving girls who resisted their advances, we may also deduce from Longarine’s comments that even more compliant female servants faced dismissal in instances where news of their indiscretions reached the ears of their mistress or proved embarrassing to masters bent on “damage control.” Interestingly enough, and notwithstanding the widowed devisante’s allusion to fired chambermaids, Marguerite rarely documents the actual or threatened seduction, dismissal, or unfair punishment of a servant in her narratives without drawing our attention to provisions for the endangered or discharged retainer’s well-being. While the duke of Urbino ultimately murders the serving girl who served as a go-between in the youth’s romance, for example, Marguerite devotes more than a page to the maid’s appeal to her mistress for protection and to the duchess’s good-faith efforts to shield the girl from her husband and persuade him to deal mercifully with her. Through female bonding that crosses class lines, Bornet’s wife in nouvelle 8 manages to save her chambermaid from the unwanted attentions of her husband by unwittingly sacrificing her own chastity; and when the disgruntled husband in nouvelle 59 tells his wife to dismiss a serving girl (“la pria de chasser ceste fille,” 364) whose sexual favors he has sought, the matron contracts a good marriage and provides a dowry for the servant (“la mariant très bien et honnestement, aux despens toutes fois de son mary,” 364) rather than discharging her summarily—partly for humanitarian reasons, and in part because she herself has orchestrated the flirtation to gain leverage over her husband. The serving girl’s own responses to the husband’s overtures provide important insights into her moral and economic dilemma. Initially she resists her master, confiding to her mistress that “not a day had gone by since she had been in the house without her master making amorous overtures. But, she would sooner die … than do anything to offend God and her honour” (465–66).66 Fearful of being raped or killed, the girl agrees to encourage the

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husband’s advances only when the wife reassures her that her honor and her life will be safe (“estant asseurée par sa maistresse de sa vie et de son honneur,” 361); yet far from nullifying the young woman’s concerns, this promise of protection instead acknowledges and foregrounds the vulnerability of female servants in patriarchal households. As she flirts with her master, in keeping with the role her mistress has scripted for her, the serving girl explains her reservations about consummating the relationship not only in terms of her own moral scruples, but also as a function of financial and familial considerations: “She … had learnt her part off by heart, and pointed out to him that she was very poor, and that if she obeyed him, she would be dismissed by her mistress, with whose help she had expected to acquire a good husband” (466).67 While these responses are staged, the economic concerns that the servant invokes are at once plausible and grounded in historical fact: under different circumstances, and if her mistress were not orchestrating her flirtation, obeying her master’s demand for sexual favors would almost certainly garner her lady’s disfavor if the liaison became public, jeopardizing both her job (“perdroit le service de sa maistresse,” 361) and her matrimonial prospects (“auquel elle s’attendoit bien de gaingner ung bon mary,” 361). Although the husband promises that their affair will remain secret (“il conduirait son affaire si secretement, que nul n’en pourroit parler,” 362), moreover, and that he himself will find her a husband far richer than the one his wife would have procured for her (“il la marieroit mieulx et plus richement que sa maistresse ne sçauroit faire,” 361), other stories in the Heptaméron remind us that the upper classes do not always have the lower classes’ best interests in mind—especially when their own interests are at stake. True, the adulterous bourgeois husband in nouvelle 38 follows his generous wife’s example, providing his impoverished lover enough money to “vivre en femme de bien” (271) when he leaves her. In story 36, moreover, the master who fires an old retainer for besmirching his wife’s name gives the vieil serviteur a generous amount of severance pay, consisting of what he owes him (“ce que je te doibz,” 262) and more: “The President gave him five or six years’ wages in advance, and knowing how loyal he was, … hoped to reward him further” (354).68 Given the veracity of the elderly retainer’s testimony, however, and his longstanding record of loyal service (“l’avoit bien servy trente ans,” 261) to his master, one might argue that five or six payments for the years to come are inadequate compensation for the economic and emotional harm inflicted on him, including false accusations, the loss of his domicile, and professional as well as personal disgrace. Although Marguerite does not often showcase her servants’ emotions, she takes pains to tell us that “the servant went off in tears” (354), or “le serviteur s’en fut allé pleurant” (263), drawing our gaze momentarily away from the President’s mendacious discourse of domination to expose the old retainer’s pathos. Despite Ennasuite’s seeming indifference to the death of numerous servants in the prologue, we see that sympathy for, or at least a visual

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attentiveness to, the underclasses is woven throughout much of the Heptaméron. True, there are only a few instances where the pathos of servants causes highborn characters to identify with them, at least overtly, but Marguerite directs our gaze to the plight of the poor and the disempowered repeatedly. While disturbing allusions to social and economic hardship are often embedded within tales of cruel masters, they also fuel the text’s anticlerical satire. As she explores the hypocritical gap between the Cordeliers’ vows of poverty and their self-indulgent lifestyle, the queen also examines collateral damage within the community they purport to serve that stems from their material appetites. In stories 41 and 44, the queen targets the Cordeliers specifically for their exploitation of those who are weak and for their diversion of alms intended for the poor to their own coffers. The earlier of these two nouvelles shows a monk attempting to abuse the young daughter of a lady-in-waiting to Marguerite d’Aiguemont, whose vulnerability stems not from poverty, but rather from her gender, her age (“elle estoit si jeune,” 284), and her mother’s misplaced faith in the Cordelier’s integrity. Ultimately the girl refuses the penitence that the Cordelier imposes upon her, which consists of stripping off all her clothing and allowing him to beat her “chair toute nue” (284) or naked flesh with his monacal, yet phallic, “corde.” Upon learning of the attempted abuse, the young woman’s mother complains to her patroness, who uses her influence to have the miscreant beaten (“le feit prendre et battre en sa cuisine,” 284), tied up (“pieds et mains lyez,” 285), and ignominiously returned to his gardien or Father Superior. While the girl emerges unscathed and the Cordelier receives his comeuppance in this instance, Saffredent asks us to imagine—or to visualize—how this scene would have unfolded in an impoverished household, whose residents have neither the power nor the temerity to challenge the friar’s authority and risk being labeled heretics: “[If] even in a household as exalted as this one these men aren’t afraid of giving vent to their passions[,] [j]ust imagine what they are capable of in the more humble places where they go asking for offerings, and where so many opportunities present themselves that it’s a miracle they ever get away without causing a scandal” (379).69 Even more pointedly in nouvelle 44, Monseigneur de Sedan chastises the Cordelier who comes to their door to collect his yearly ham, accusing the cleric of appropriating for himself “the bread of the children of the poor earned by the sweat of their fathers” (398).70 In modern French, the placement of the adjective “pauvre” before rather than after the noun “enfans” might suggest that Marguerite is referring to “unfortunate” children rather than those who are economically deprived. The grammar, syntax, and vocabulary of middle French were both varied and fluid in the sixteenth century, however; and because the sentence finishes with a pointed allusion to “the sweat of their fathers,” which evokes the toil of manual labor, there can be little doubt that “pauvre” refers at least in part to financial or even nutritional hardship. Fueled in part by Marguerite’s evangelical leanings, of course, these comments may be explained historically

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as a function of the anticlerical tradition of the Middle Ages and Renaissance; and, biblically, as a “raising up” of the poor, the hungry, and the oppressed whom Christ champions so often in the New Testament. Yet given the author’s focus on disparities of rank, power, and wealth elsewhere in the Heptaméron, it seems clear that her allusions to the Church’s exploitation of the poor are neither rote borrowings from anticlerical tradition nor purely Christological in nature. Rather, Marguerite seems to be underscoring the particularly deleterious effect of clerical abuses of power on both women and the lower classes, by directing our gaze downward to small “children,” the “poor,” and the “sweat” of those who till the soil, or labor as artisans and servants. One of the most egregious examples of a Cordelier’s mistreatment of servants occurs in nouvelle 31, which we will analyze for its political implications in the next chapter. The friar in this short story is the beloved confessor of a wealthy gentil homme, who entrusts his wife and his entire household to the monk’s care when he himself must be absent. During one of the gentleman’s business trips, the Cordelier murders the man’s household staff, disguises and abducts his wife with the goal of making her his sex slave, and slays a valet who attempts to save the matron. It is only after the last atrocity that the trusting gentleman, returning home in the company of his manservant, opens his eyes to the friar’s perfidy, rescues his wife, and overpowers the cleric. On the surface, the ill-fated servants seem dispensable to the storyline and thus subordinate to the major actors in the nouvelle: for the lascivious monk, the virtuous matron he desires, and the credulous gentleman whose trust he betrays form a preadulterous triangle that drives the plot. Yet a closer look suggests that the servants, none of whom survive, are crucial to Marguerite’s version of this tale, which in many ways resembles a fabliau of Rutebeuf entitled “Frère Denise.” Prior to the matron’s abduction, the two chambermaids who inquire about the friar’s business with their mistress have their throats slit “en ung coing” (238) or in a corner of the courtyard, in a vignette that highlights the monk’s cold-blooded indifference toward the lower classes. Marguerite’s repetition of the word “coing” emphasizes the cloak of secrecy that camouflages the Cordelier’s transgressions, as he pulls a hidden dagger from his sleeve and murders the two females in an out-of-the-way (“la tira à part,” 238) spot that is the antipode of a confessional: by stabbing them in “la gorge” or throat, the symbolic locus of speech, the confessor does not listen to, but rather silences the disempowered voices that question his authority, along with the eyewitness testimony they could provide to shatter his veneer of respectability. Of the two other servants who are killed, the first is a valet whom the Cordelier stabs from behind, again “en la gorge,” while embracing him in a hypocritical posture of Christian love; and the second, a manservant accompanying the husband on his journey home, has his throat cut after he recognizes his mistress from afar and attempts to rescue her.

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That the gentil homme fails to identify his wife in this episode, waiting to “see” (“actendist au chemyn veoir,” 240) what his manservant discovers before taking action, also alerts us to Marguerite’s frequent association of servants with truth. Unable to believe the Cordelier’s claim that he loves her, the matron has no inkling of the friar’s perfidy until she glimpses her dead retainers in the courtyard (“elle veid ses deux chamberieres et son varlet mortz,” 238) and figuratively sees beneath the habit of the monk. Later in the story, when he encounters his confessor and a companion on the road, the matron’s husband blithely accepts the Cordelier’s assurances that he has just left “Mademoiselle,” and that she is waiting for him at home, without realizing that “le petit Cordelier” standing just a few feet away is actually his wife. His valet, on the other hand, crosses the highway to look at the cloaked figure’s face (“pour le veoir au visaige,” 239) and sees that the small monk is not Frère Jehan, with whom he is well acquainted, but rather a woman with tearful eyes and a “piteux regard” (239) or pitiful look. While the husband wears blinders where his trusted confessor is concerned, allowing the monk’s mendacious discourse to shape his impressions, his wife and the valet communicate with a shared glance that bypasses the stylized conventions of speech and class, and cuts across gender lines as well: “The lady signalled to him with her eyes,” Marguerite tells us, “which were full of tears” (328).71 That the valet can so easily understand the gentlewoman’s beleaguered eyes and unspoken plea, while her own husband fails to see beyond the veil of his own expectations, may be provisionally explained as a function of their shared experiences of marginalization, subordination, and oppression— the one by virtue of his inferior birth and class, and the other, as a result of her gender. It is only after waiting to see (“veoir”) what his valet discovers, and after seeing (“de loing veit tresbucher son varlet,” 240; my italics) the servant stumble when the Cordelier attacks him, that the gentil homme realizes something is amiss and joins the fray. Much like his wife, whose own enlightenment is triggered by the dead servants’ body language, the husband is alerted to the monk’s villainy by the insight and perceptiveness of his valet.

Excavating the underside of power and privilege: “les choses basses” as vehicles of revelation Far from being anomalous in the Heptaméron, this connection between servants, secrets, truth, and revelation permeates Marguerite’s short-story collection, beginning with the very first nouvelle where three retainers provide testimony leading to Saint-Aignan’s conviction for murdering du Mesnil, his wife’s lover.72 Convinced that “du Mesnil’s servants would not be regarded as credible witnesses” (74–75),73 initially the perpetrator discounts the servants’ credibility, believing that no one of importance witnessed his crime: “No one in his own household had seen the deed, apart

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from an elderly chambermaid and a girl of fifteen” (75).74 Upon reflection he tries in vain to apprehend the old chambermaid, who flees the house immediately and takes refuge with the Jacobins; but he is more successful in discrediting the young girl, whom one of his henchman lures from her hiding place and deposits in a house of ill fame, “so that no one would take her seriously as a witness” (75).75 To further lessen his risk of discovery, the wily murderer burns his victim’s body and inters the remaining bones deep within the mortar at his house, at once reducing his wife’s gently born serviteur to ashes and concealing the evidence of his own crime underneath a complex edifice of exculpatory lies. Despite Saint-Aignan’s extravagant attempts to suppress the truth, however, it emerges from the bottom up, as du Mesnil’s “unreliable” servants tell their story to the youth’s father, who in turn lodges a complaint against his son’s assassin with the duke and duchess of Alençon. In the ensuing trial, which is both literally and figuratively an excavation of the truth, the old chambermaid adds her testimony to that of du Mesnil’s two servants; and the youth’s disinterred bones paradoxically “speak” for the victim, bearing witness to his ordeal. This pattern of using servants as vehicles of truth figures again in subsequent stories, and particularly in those that immediately follow SaintAignan’s tale. Unnoticed by the attacker above her, a serving girl hides under the muletière’s bed in nouvelle 2, hearing everything that transpires during the valet’s assault on her mistress, and cries out for help and to tell her-story to the neighbors after the rapist flees. More insidiously, a gentleman publicly cuckolded by the king of Naples in story 3 exacts his revenge in private by discreetly engaging in a long-term love affair with the queen. In what appears to be either a gesture of self-deprecating humor, or a completely guileless allusion to his own hunting interests, the wronged husband hangs the horned head of a stag or cerf in his home, a symbol of masculine prowess that by virtue of its “corna” (horns) doubles as an emblem of cuckoldry. While the man’s wife and King Alfonso burst out laughing at the stag’s head, finding it “bien sceante” (26) or particularly appropriate under the circumstances, they fail to realize that the joke is on them as well as the gentleman. In addition to making himself a target of ridicule, the husband capitalizes on the icon’s visual properties to mock his cuckolded monarch as well, while seizing upon the homophonic identity of cerf and serf to explore hidden truths about the master-servant relationship. Upping the ante, the husband inscribes an enigmatic motto above the stag’s antler that provides a clue to the emblem’s significance for him: “I wear horns, as everyone sees, but someone else wears them without realizing it.”76 Only when the gentleman decodes the polysemic icon and accompanying aphorism for us, pointing out that cerf also signifies serf, do we realize that the emblem has sociopolitical, as well as personal, implications. “If the King doesn’t tell his secrets to his subjects,” observes the gentleman, “then there’s no reason why his subjects should tell their secrets to the King” (88).77 In fact, the “king’s secret” in this instance is not hidden from the wily “serf,” who has had ample opportunity

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to observe and understand his monarch; but the subject’s secrets and insights indeed remain a mystery to his ruler, either because Alfonso is indifferent to, or insulated from, “les choses basses” as a result of his high rank. Throughout much of the Heptaméron, it is these deeply buried truths that the author excavates with her shifting archaeological gaze, which draws our attention to the private experiences and insights of women, servants, and the disempowered. While we cannot be certain to what degree this perspectival technique, which uses “les choses basses” as vehicles of revelation, is intentional on the part of the historical writer, it is all the more striking given her noble birth and privileged background. In view of her familiarity with the classics, and her acquaintance with leading theologians, governmental leaders, and literati of her era, one might reasonably expect Marguerite to posit enlightenment as an ascending journey toward divine clarity, and to construct kings and scholars, rather than chambermaids and valets, as repositories of wisdom and truth. Up to a point, moreover, this is exactly what she does: as the devisants’ daily prayers and Bible readings illustrate, they themselves look for knowledge and understanding on high; and in secular matters, kings, queens, and duchesses of Marguerite’s own acquaintance often appear en abyme as wise and impartial arbiters of civil and criminal disputes. Arguably, then, the author’s alternative focus on insights “from the bottom up” offered by the lower classes, and on their role as vehicles of revelation, stems in part from both a characteristically Renaissance penchant for exploring multiple epistemological paths, from discursive practices of the era, and from the author’s own sense that the view “from below” is an important complement to that of the upper classes. On one level, Marguerite’s interest in marginalized voices of truth and unofficial sources of knowledge recalls Pantagruel’s contention, in Rabelais’s Tiers livre, that one should never dismiss the testimony of underlings simply because of its otherness: “What harm is there in gaining knowledge every single day, even from a sot, a pot, a fool, a stool, or an old slipper?”78 Even more importantly, Marguerite’s descending gaze, association of servants with truth, and focus on “les choses basses” are consistent with a longstanding literary, folkloric, and philosophical tradition that links descent, and, to a lesser degree, self-abnegation and socioeconomic marginality, with enlightenment and truth.79 One need only look at iconic sages such as sibyls and hermits, isolated from society; at court jesters and “wise” fools, whose presumed idiocy allows them to tell the truth with relative impunity; at the witty servants of Roman comedy and their early modern descendants,80 often smarter and more observant than their masters; and at traditional initiation stories ranging from the biblical tale of Jonah to the Aeneid, in which the hero’s descent into the underworld, or into the belly of a monster, leads to revelation or purification. Finally, the New Testament portrayal of Christ as a lowly carpenter’s son, who affirms the dignity of the poor and the merits of humility, almost certainly fuels Marguerite’s fascination with servants and their alternative window on the truth.

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Perhaps to emphasize her servants’ epistemological importance, Marguerite slyly portrays two chambermaids in nouvelle 54 holding candles, symbolically linked with enlightenment, for a husband and wife who enjoy reading in their respective beds before they fall asleep. Although it takes shape initially as an iconic portrait of intellectual illumination and marital bliss, this symmetrical representation of a man and woman reading companionably rapidly mutates into a portrait of male infidelity. Ironically, the candlelight that originally illuminated the man’s book projects an image of him kissing the chambermaid onto the white wall (“estoit d’une muraille blanche où reluisoit la clairté de la chandelle,” 343), alerting his wife on the other side of the room to their flirtation: “On this wall were clearly cast the shadows of the faces of her husband and the maid, and the wife could distinguish quite plainly what the two were doing—whether they were moving apart, getting closer together, or laughing” (445).81 In this ingenious play of light and shadow, the husband’s pretense of intellectual enlightenment thus figures as a cover for his lust, as the symbolic light of learning lends outward respectability to the actual flame of physical passion. Yet in a paradoxical twist on the light’s original function, the servant’s candle not only covers, but also uncovers, “la verité … dessoubz” (343) or the truth beneath the husband’s bookish pose, casting shadows that expose his charade and enlighten his quick-witted wife. In addition to being linked symbolically to truth, secrecy, and illumination, as we have seen in the preceding example, many servants in Marguerite’s Heptaméron also hold insights into the inner workings of their employers’ households and extensive knowledge about their masters’ private lives and psychological makeup. In instances where the servant is malevolent, such as the valet who rapes the muletière in nouvelle 2, the retainer’s intimate familiarity with the layout of the house and the family members’ schedules provides him a powerful weapon. Aware that his master is out of town (“son maistre estoit allé dehors,” 19) and that his mistress is at vespers far from home (“loing de leur maison,” 19), the valet takes advantage of his solitude in the house (“estant demoré seul,” 19) to create a secret passageway between his own room and that of the muletière. Once his mistress returns home and falls asleep, the retainer enters her bedroom and rapes her, capitalizing on the knowledge and opportunity that his position in the household affords him. In a lighter, almost farcical vein, a chambermaid in nouvelle 39 uses her wits and knowledge of human psychology to frighten her mistress during the master’s two-year absence. By knocking over furniture in the dark, slapping her sleeping employer, and eerily murmuring the names of dead people, the servant convinces her superstitious mistress that the house is haunted. As a result, the troubled noblewoman vacates her home and moves to a different estate, effectively giving the chambermaid and her lover the run of the house until their master returns, and allowing them to “make merry all on their own together” (366).82

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In a majority of instances, however, Marguerite’s retainers use their knowledge, insights, and skills to serve their masters, the community, or the interests of justice and morality. Only the servants know of their employers’ illicit affairs in numerous short stories in the Heptaméron, including nouvelles 5, 15, 26, 36, and 43; and in general, the retainers serve their masters and mistresses faithfully not only during these liaisons, but in virtually all other facets of their lives, with compassion and discretion. Indeed, the secrecy of their dealings with and for their employers, as well as their loyalty to those they serve, at times recalls the behavioral code binding a courtly serviteur to his lady: even after he has ended his relationship with Saint-Aignan’s wife, du Mesnil refrains from speaking of their liaison except with the lady herself (N. 1, 13); and one of the conditions that Jambique imposes upon her serviteur is “de jamais n’en parler à personne” (297) or “never tell a soul” (393) what he has seen. Granted, in a different context Geburon argues that the poor and lowborn are more malicious than nobles, pointing out that virtually all murderers, thieves, sorcerers, and counterfeiters are “pauvres gens et mecanicques” (N. 29, 228), or “poor people and artisans” (315). Surprisingly, Parlamente concurs with this classist worldview. From a pragmatic perspective, she marvels that the poor find time amid their labors to fall in love (“que l’amour les tormente parmi le travail qu’ilz ont,” 228); and from a philosophical standpoint, she expresses astonishment that passion can even take root in “ung cueur villain” (228) or a lower-class heart, implicitly echoing Guinizelli’s contention that “al cor gentil rimpaira sempre amore.” On one level, this disparaging attitude toward the lower classes, their character, and any claim they might have to “nobler” sentiments appears radically at odds with the positive traits of servants and underlings portrayed in the Heptaméron: while their characters are rarely fleshed out in detail, or with enough psychological development to provide us insight into their motives, the loyalty, discretion, integrity, and propensity for self-sacrifice these commoners display under duress seem to mirror aristocratic “honor,” reminding us that Guinizelli’s “cor gentil” was not always coterminous with noble birth.83 Not only does the bourgeoise Françoise resist the advances of the prince with uncommon dignity and humanity in nouvelle 42, notwithstanding her love for him, but on a far smaller scale, we see loyal retainers serving as extra “eyes” and “ears” for their employers, alerting them to fomenting problems and sexual intrigues within the household (N. 7, 20), protecting them against attackers (N. 4), and saving their lives in times of scourge and duress (prol., 3, 5). Following Geburon’s line of reasoning, one might argue that these apparent gestures of fidelity toward the master or mistress are actually motivated by self-interest and the lure of personal gain, in contrast to the disinterested spirit of noblesse oblige that in theory prompted knights, at least in literature, to help those in distress. While we cannot discount the possibility that underlings tell on others to curry favor with their employers,

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however, or that their displays of courage are calculated to earn them promotions and rewards from their masters, in fact their show of good faith often entails significant risks. When the damoiselle in nouvelle 30 alerts her mistress to the sexual precocity of her teenage son, for example, the dubious mother threatens to punish the girl if she is lying (“si vous luy mectez assus a ung tel cas et il ne soit vray, vous en porterez la peyne,” 230); and, as we saw earlier, the faithful old retainer who informs the President in nouvelle 36 of his wife’s trysts with her lover, ostensibly to shield his master from shame and protect the honor of the household, loses his job as a result of his honesty and sense of duty. Many of the servants in the prologue indeed sacrifice their lives while serving their masters, both when they battle a group of bandits alongside Hircan and Longarine’s husband and when they rashly ford a river at Simontaut’s behest (“s’estoit deliberé de la forcer,” 5), but with mounts far inferior to his own which succumb to the current: for while Simontaut trusts in “la bonté de son cheval” (5) or in his “excellent horse” (64), Marguerite tells us that “all the men on weaker mounts had been swept off down the stream” (64).84 Unlike Ennasuite, Simontaut is far from sanguine at the loss of his servants in the preceding example; yet overall, Geburon and Parlamente’s disparaging comments about the lower classes in nouvelle 42, along with the retainers’ flat characterizations, their occasional villainy, and the generally dismissive attitude of other characters toward them, might suggest that the apparent association between servants and truth in the Heptaméron is purely accidental—and that the historical writer never intended her servants to function as vehicles of revelation. In nouvelle 19, however, Saffredent’s response to Geburon and Parlamente provides a possible key to the author’s rationale in constructing her underlings as voices of truth: True, poor folk don’t have the wealth or the same marks of distinction that we do, but they do have freer access to the commodities of Nature. Their food may not be quite so delicate, but they have better appetites, and they get more nourishment on coarse bread than we do on our delicate diets. They don’t have fine beds and linens like we do, but they have better sleep and deeper rest than we. They don’t have fine ladies with their make-up and elegant clothes like the ones we idolize, but they have their pleasure more often than we do, and they don’t need to worry about wagging tongues, expect perhaps for the birds and animals who happen to see them. [In short], everything that we have, they lack, and everything we lack, they have in abundance (315-16).85 Although no explicit references to knowledge or truth figure in this passage, Saffredent’s portrayal of the poor as being closer to nature than rich people, who cultivate art and artifice, has important implications for their function as revelational devices: for while they may lack wealth, honors, and culinary delicacies, their lives are also devoid of “painted ladies” and worries about

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the fine nuances of artful language (“craincte de parolles,” 228), which Marguerite pointedly eschews in the prologue. Promising to tell “veritable[s] histoire[s],” she specifically excludes “those who studied and were men of letters” (69)86 from her truth project: “Monseigneur the Dauphin didn’t want their art brought in,” she tells us, “and he was afraid that rhetorical ornament would in part falsify the truth of the account” (69).87 Arguably the servants are not only well positioned, on a literal level, to see the underbelly of their society and the clandestine intrigues in their household more clearly than their masters, but according to the logic of Saffredent and the Dauphin, their artless testimony is more likely to be accurate. Despite appearances, then, servants and the theme of serving play a key role in the Heptaméron. By virtue of their low social status, serviteurs provide windows to hidden and alternative truths that subtend public and official discourse; and their recurring presence in her short-story collection invites readers to excavate beneath the surface of Marguerite’s text and culture to “see themselves being seen,”88 and to experience the underside of power and propriety. In this sense, the servants signal a strategy of reading akin to Rabelais’s metaphor of the marrow bone: it is by looking downward and digging that we decipher Marguerite’s allegories, which, like those of Alcofrybas, pertain to politics, the economy, and religion. Through the eyes of servants we discover the poverty, oppression, and abuse that accompany the most abject forms of servitude; and the evangelical overtones of Marguerite’s narrative encourage us to rethink and experimentally reverse traditional hierarchies, on the premise that God values the poor as much as the powerful, that a “lowering” of oneself is necessary for salvation, and that all people, even masters, have an obligation to “serve.” Conversely, the author appears to recognize, at least provisionally, that the servant’s equality in God’s eyes instills in him or her an intrinsic freedom, including the right to question clergymen, disobey immoral directives, and say “no” to abusive masters. While this alternative reading of Marguerite’s masterpiece jars with what we know or think we know of the historical writer’s relationship with her brother, it is completely consistent with her religious beliefs and political activities, which led her to endure censorship, flee the court upon occasion, and provide asylum for religious and political fugitives. Despite her own high rank, in fact, the queen of Navarre—by virtue of her gender and convictions—is arguably herself a “servant with secrets,” and it is by excavating her coded and richly polyvalent text that we achieve greater insight into the complexity, pathos, and contradictions of her world.

Notes 1 2

“Simontaut commença à dire: ‘Qui sera celluy de nous qui aura commencement sur les autres?’ Hircan luy respondit: ‘Puisque vous avez commencé la parolle, c’est raison que nous commandez; car au jeu nous sommes tous esgaulx’” (10). “Toutes femmes de bien deussent avoir la moictié du bien, du mal, de la joye et de la tristesse de son mary, et l’aymer, servir et obeyr comme l’Eglise à

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Jesus-Christ” (343); “Thus should all women share equally in the good and the bad, the joy and the sorrow that befalls their husbands, and love, serve, and obey him, even as the Church serves and obeys Jesus Christ” (446). “Il fauldroit doncques … que noz mariz fussent envers nous, comme Christ et son Eglise” (344). As tempting as it is to articulate these rules of precedence in terms of the Three Estates of the Ancien Régime, I have refrained from doing so because of the fluid definitions of each estate in sixteenth-century writings. Traditionally, the First Estate was made up of the clergy; the Second Estate, of the nobility (divided into noblesse d’épée and noblesse de robe); and the Third Estate, of everyone else. Since the clergy as well as noblemen, gentlemen, and wealthy tradesmen perpetrate most of the abuses against women, servants, and poor people in the Heptaméron, this traditional paradigm is most useful for our purposes. Yet Claude de Seyssel in his La Monarchie de France (1518) excludes the clergy from his Three Estates and refigures the social pyramid as follows: First Estate (nobility); Second Estate (the middle class including wealthy bankers, lawyers, and officers of justice); the Third Estate (peasants and lowerlevel tradesmen). Because de Seyssel presented his treatise, which was likely known to Marguerite de Navarre, to François I in1518, and because of its proximity in time to her own writings, one might argue that there is ample justification for using de Seyssel’s classification system as a framework for our discussion. Marguerite herself, however, does not refer to the dynamics of power and abuse in terms of the Estate system. For this reason, I have opted to view de Seyssel’s refiguring of the Estate system not only as a function of his Italian heritage, but also as a reflection of the changing, and occasionally flexible, social hierarchies in sixteenth-century France. Cohen, 273; Boulenger, 306: “Nous ne pouvons estre tous riches.” Cohen, 274; Boulenger, 307: “L’on se meurt icy auprès tant que le charriot court par les rues.” Cohen, 275; Boulenger, 308: “La moitié du monde ne sçay comment l’aultre vit.” Geburon goes so far as to argue that “simple folk of low station in life are [no] more exempt from vile intent than the rest of us … On the contrary, they’re a good deal worse. Just look at the thieves, murderers, sorcerers, counterfeiters and people of that kind. Their criminal minds never have a moment’s rest. And they’re all poor people and artisans” (315); “N’estimez pas, dist Geburon, que les gens simples et de bas estat soient exemps de malice non plus que nous; mais en ont bien davantaige, car regardez-moy larrons, meurdriers, sorciers, faux monoyers, … desquelz l’esperit n’a jamais repos; ce sont tous pauvres gens et mecanicques” (228). For instance, the king of France figures or is mentioned in the prologue (François I) and François I is also mentioned in nouvelles 1, 4, 10, 13, 15, 17, 20–23, 28 41, 45, 46, 53, 58, 60, 61; in nouvelles 63, 67 and 69 the king is unidentified, but is probably François I. Louis XII appears in nouvelle 26, Charles VIII in 32; in nouvelle 49 there is a purposely unidentified Charles. Louis XI is in nouvelle 57, and Louis XII features in 60. Marguerite also mentions the king of Naples (Alfonso) in nouvelle 3; the king of England in nouvelles 1 and 57; an unidentified king in nouvelle 4; the kings of Spain, Tunis, and Grenada in nouvelle 10; the king of Castile in nouvelle 24; and the king of Navarre in nouvelles 26 and 66. Most often, the king’s name simply appears in passing to identify the time and place in which a given story takes place. As for queens, we find references to these female royals in stories 2, 3, 10, 21, 22, 24, 28, 30, 39, 60, 66, 68, 71, and 72; allusions to dukes in stories 1, 6, 10, 12, 19, 45, 51–53, and 70; and mentions of duchesses in nouvelles 1,

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Upstairs, downstairs 6, 10, 12, 19, 34, 39, 51, 58, 70, and 72. Marguerite alludes to counts or “comtes” in stories 10, 16, 17, 33, 40, 46, and 49, and to countesses in stories 10, 41, 46, and 49, while including references to “gentlemen” in the prologue and in nouvelles 3, 4, 6, 9–20, 23–25, 29–33, 35, 36, 38–40, 42, 43, 47–56, 58, 59, 62–64, 66, and 70. Princes are mentioned in nouvelles 2, 4, 10, 12, 15, 21, 22, 24–26, 28, 32, 33, 42, 48, 51, 53, 56, 57, 60, 63, 65, and 70; and Marguerite alludes to princesses in nouvelles 3, 4, 12, 15, 21, 22, 24, 27, 28, 42, 43, 53, 58, 61, 62, 66, 70, and 72. Clearly, the world of the Heptaméron, whether fictional or factual, is teeming with aristocrats. “Eurent une joye inestimable, louans le Createur qui, en se contentant des serviteurs, avoit saulvé les maistres et maistresses” (5). Reflecting on this troubling quotation, Marcel Tetel remarks that “on the surface, it would appear that Marguerite, queen of Navarre and sister of François I, advocates by virtue of her position a supremacy of noble class” (152). Yet Tetel goes on to note the problems, and indeed the underside, of this interpretation: “Taken out of context, the statement … could indeed substantiate an anti-lower-class attitude, but the ambivalence arising from the two different uses of serviteur definitely weakens [this] feeling of class superiority … If God satisfies himself with servants to let their masters live and thereby allows Parlamente to have her own servant, Symontaut, it should not be forgotten that Symontaut also serves both his lady and God. In the final analysis, the masters are the real serviteurs” (152). See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1993), 1–58, 66; Henri Bergson, “Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic,” trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell, The Project Gutenberg EBook of Laughter, http://www. gutenberg.org/files/4352/4352-h/4352-h.htm; Daniel Ménager, La Renaissance et le rire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995), 6; and Parkin, The Humor of Marguerite de Navarre. “Chascune n’a pas perdu son mary comme vous, et pour perte des serviteurs ne se fault desesperer, car l’on en recouvre assez” (7). “Il me fault penser d’en trouver une aultre” (Pantagruel, chap. 3, 182). There is also a touch of levity and even an offhand, dismissive tone in Gargantua’s words, however, as he convinces himself that tears are a waste of energy: “Je ne la resusciteray pas par mes pleurs: elle est bien, elle est en paradis pour le moins, si mieulx ne est” (182). Since the king’s religion envisions no place “better” than paradise, his “si mieulx ne est” at once acknowledges Badebec’s goodness, albeit vaguely and hastily, and reveals his disinclination to linger on the topic as he moves forward to happier thoughts. Marguerite’s poetry and theater abound with variations on the words “servir” and “servant,” most often within the context of serving God, or, conversely, of failing in that duty. In her Miroir de l’âme pécheresse, for example, the poet laments that in her pride she has forgotten to serve her lord (“si peu de servir j’ai pensé,” l. 42), or “mal servy” (l. 74) her master, who endowed her with a body and a soul whose primary duty is to serve him (“tous deux n’[ont] aultre exercice / Que de penser à vous faire service,” l. 211–12) from her lowly position (“je suis trop moins que riens,” l. 45). See Cholakian and Skemp, Selecting Writings, 78–81, 86. Similarly, La Sage or the Wise Woman in La comédie de Saint-Marsan contends one must “suyvre son commandement, … le servant de cueur et d’euvre” (ll. 371–72, p. 326). On a sociopolitical level, moreover, the queen of Navarre also constructs herself as a “subject” and “servant” in her correspondence with Kings François I and Henri II, respectively. See, for example, Lettres de Marguerite d’Angoulême, sœur de François Ier, Reine de Navarre, ed. F. Génin (Paris: Jules Renouard, 1841), 334, 389.

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In the Decameron, we see that plague is no respecter of either gender or social class, for example, with “most houses … becom[ing] public property” (Boccaccio, 52). See also Victoria Aarons, “Carol Ascher,” in Holocaust Literature: Agosin to Lentin, ed. S. Lillian Kremer (New York: Routledge, 2003), 76–78: “The flood, both literal and figurative, becomes the great equalizer in its potential to destroy everyone, black or white, Christian or Jew” (77). The reference is to Ascher’s The Flood (Berkeley, CA: The Crossing Press, 1987). See, most notably, Guido Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil,” where the poet contends “love takes its place in true nobility” (st. 1, v. 8: “prende amore in gentilezza loco”) and that “a baser nature opposes love just as water quenches burning fire with its coldness” (st. 3, v. 5–6: “Così prava natura recontra amor como fa l’aigua il foco caldo, per la freddura”). See “Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore,” in The Poetry of Guido Guinizelli, ed. and trans. Robert R. Edwards (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1987), 20–21. “Et luy, qui n’avoit amour que bestialle, qui eut mieulx entendu le langaige des mulletz que ses honnestes raisons, se montra plus bestial que les bestes avecq lesquelles il avoit esté longtemps” (19). “Poteris in inferiora quae sunt bruta degenerare; poteris in superiora quae sunt divina ex tui animi sententia regenerari.” Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oratio de hominis dignitate, http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_ Studies/pico/oratio.html. Trans. Cosma Shalizi, “Oration on the Dignity of Man” (1994), http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Mirandola/. “Nec te celestem neque terrenum, neque mortalem neque immortalem fecimus, ut tui ipsius quasi arbitrarius honorariusque plastes et fictor, in quam malueris tute formam effingas.” Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oratio de hominis dignitate. See also “Pico della Mirandola: Oration on the Dignity of Man,” trans. Richard Hooker, 1994, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/med/oration. asp: “We have made you neither of heavenly nor of earthly stuff, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with free choice and dignity, you may fashion yourself into whatever form you choose.” “Commencea à ... desirer les choses qu’il trouvoit belles; entre autres, une damoiselle qui couchoit en la chambre de sa mere” (230). “[La] dissimulation ... est ung vice laid et infame” (202). “Le dict secretaire estoit si laid qu’il sembloit mieulx ung roy de canniballes que chrestien” (N. 27, 222). While not every story in the Heptaméron “fits” Timothy Hampton’s hypothesis about the stresses on Christian harmony and community that crop up on the “edges” of French culture during this era of nation building, the ugly secretary’s comparison to a “Cannibal King” relates intriguingly to Hampton’s paradigm, by virtue of its equation of class differences with foreign national origins. In other words, a French underling is just as different from a French aristocrat as a New World savage would be. “Elle n’estoit des belles” (222). “Deux serviteurs d’une princesse” (221). “L’on m’a faict ung compte … si plaisant, que, de force de rire, il m’a faict oblyer la melencolye” (221). “Aussy laid, ord et infame, que de Riant estoit beau, fort, honneste, et aimable” (154). In the case of Hippolytus, of course, the lust is not his, but rather his stepmother Phaedra’s in classical myth and the play by Euripides. “Le plaisir …est nouveau et d’autant plus grand qu’il a pour son contraire l’oppinion de tous les saiges hommes” (278).  “Qui congnoist Dieu veoit toutes choses belles en luy et sans luy tout laid” (8). “La reigle de vraye amityé ... esgalle le prince et le pauvre” (295).

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Upstairs, downstairs In the François edition, the speaker here initially appears to be Longarine, who begins by praising Françoise’s virtue in nouvelle 42, but then seems to contradict herself by arguing that the prince is even more worthy than Françoise for behaving “honestly” rather than using his immense power to force her into submission. Upon closer inspection, however, this seeming contradiction cannot easily be ascribed to Longarine, both because of the apparent change in voice, gender, and perspective signaled by “Puisque vous estimez” (295); and because of the passage’s chauvinistic tone and content, which resembles the contradictory male réplique to the type of profeminist pronouncement that one would expect in the querelle des femmes. Certainly the female devisantes condemn rape, but nowhere (else) do they suggest that the converse—or not committing rape—is especially praiseworthy: it is simply the desired and expected state of affairs. In his translation, accordingly, Chilton attributes the words of praise for the prince to Saffredent, as does Walter K. Kelly, correctly surmising that the second half of the discourse expresses views more in keeping with the male devisants’ attitudes than with those of the women. See The Heptameron of Margaret, Queen of Navarre, trans. Walter Kelly (London: Published for the Trade, n.d.), http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/navarre/ heptameron/heptameron.html. Edwards, 21. See also the original Italian: Amore in gentil cor prende rivera per suo consimel loco, com’ adamàs del ferro in la minera. Fere lo sol lo fango tutto ‘l giorno: vile reman, nè ‘l sol perde calore; dis’ omo alter, “Gentil per sclatta torno”; lui semblo al fango, al sol gentil valore: chè non dé dare om fede che gentilezza sia fòr di coraggio in dignità di rede, sed a vertute non ha gentil core (Edwards, 20). McWilliam, 338–39. Taken in combination with his putative contention (see note 31, this chapter) in nouvelle 42 that princes and paupers are equal according to the rules of love, Saffredent’s outwardly classist attitude toward the palefrenier in nouvelle 20 is initially puzzling. Yet as a serviteur and nobleman, his identification with both the poor (“le pauvre,” 295) and their masters (the rejected gentil homme in nouvelle 20) is possessed of a certain logic, especially when viewed through the lens of multiple standpoint theory. As a member of the lower nobility, Saffredent looks down upon those beneath him, including—perhaps—the palefrenier; but as an underling, with the inferior viewing position of a servant and an “outsider within,” he also recognizes the merits of the poor and the deficiencies of their masters. In this regard, Regine Reynolds points out that “Saffredent semble comprendre le petit people infiniment mieux que les autres devisants ne le font” (68), admiring their lack of affectation and viewing them “sans mépris” (Les devisants de “l’Heptaméron,” 69). No less importantly, the marked contrast between Saffredent’s high-minded espousal of equality for both “princes and paupers” in matters of love, and his ungenerous disparagement of the dirty palefrenier in nouvelle 20, may signal authorial irony. For if Saffredent is indeed the speaker who invokes the equality of “prince and pauper” in nouvelle 42, this key facet of his characterization weakens our assumption that he shares the gentil homme’s views in story 20 and strengthens our “counter reading” of the episode, by introducing the possibility that the narrator himself is systematically undermining the gentil homme’s hegemonic gaze.

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“Beaucoup plus riche de vertu, beaulté et honnesteté que d’autres biens” (49). “Sont venuz de bonnes et grandes maisons” (49). “Je sçay que avecq nul autre ne sera jamais si bien traictée ne tant aymée qu’elle eust esté avecq moi. Le bien que je voys qu’elle pert du meilleur et plus affectionné amy qu’elle ayt en ce monde, me faict plus de mal que la perte de ma vie” (51). “Pour elle seule je voulois conserver [ma vie]; toutefois, puis qu’elle ne luy peult de rien servir, ce n’est grand gaing de la perdre” (51). “Il fust … d’une maison riche et honnorable; mais, à cause qu’il estoit puisné, n’avoit riens de son patrimoyne” (56). “Amour et Fortune, le voyans delaissé de ses parens, delibererent de y faire leur chef d’euvre, et luy donnerent, par le moyen de la vertu, ce que les loys du païs luy refusoient” (56–57). “S’en alla randre religieuse au monastere de Jesus, prenant pour mary et amy Celuy qui l’avoit delivrée d’une amour si vehemente que celle d’Amadour … Ainsy tourna toutes ses affections à aymer Dieu … parfaictement” (83). “Il n’avoit jamais veu homme qu’il aymast tant pour son beau frere, que luy” (275). “Comme un meschant serviteur qui m’a trompé” (276). “In spite of being unable in her weakness to avenge herself, she placed her hope in Him who was the true judge, who left no evil unpunished and in whose love she wished to abide in the lonely castle that was now her hermitage” (370). “Nonobstant qu’elle fust foible et impuissante pour s’en venger, qu’elle esperoit en Celluy qui estoit vray juge et qui ne laisse mal aucun impugny, avecq l’amour duquel seul elle vouloit user le demorant de sa vie en son hermitaige” (177). “Un gentil homme serviteur du marquis [de Mantoue]” (143). “La vraye richesse gist au contentement” (144). “Jamais homme n’aymera parfaictement Dieu, qu’il n’ait parfaictement aymé quelque creature en ce monde” (151). These include marrying other people (N. 10), engaging in an illict liaison (N. 15), entering into a clandestine marriage (N. 21, 40), or dying of lovesickness (N. 9, 26), as well as Poline and her lover’s choice to reaffirm their love and their oneness of spirit, if not body, through their joint adoration of God. “Je ne crainctz que creature mortelle entende comme je me suis conduicte en l’affaire dont l’on me charge, puisque je sais que Dieu et mon honneur n’y sont en riens offensez” (169-170). “Une fille d’une bonne et honneste maison” (329). “Il n’avoit pas la liberté de parler à elle comme il vouloit, selon la coustume du pays” (329). “Sans forme de justice, obliant Dieu et l’honneur de sa maison” (331). “Ne vous confiez poinct aux princes, ne aux filz des hommes, auxquelz n’est nostre salut” (329). ”Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.” (ASV) “La pauvre fille n’y pensoit en nul mal, prenant plaisir à luy faire service, estimant sa volunté si bonne et honneste, qu’il n’avoit intention dont elle ne peut avecq honneur faire le message” (329). Bull, 286; Preti, 356. See also Bull, 288: “Nowadays rulers are … corrupted by evil living, by ignorance and false conceit” (“ I principi son tanto corrotti dale male consuetudini e dalla ignoranzia e falsa persuasion di se stessi” [Preti, 359]). “A great man is doing you pretty well if he’s doing you no harm” (“un Grand nous fait assez de bien quand il ne nous fait pas de mal”), says the servant Figaro in Act 1, scene 2. Beaumarchais, The Barber of Seville and The Marriage

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62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

70 71 72

Upstairs, downstairs of Figaro, trans. John Wood (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), 42. See also Beaumarchais, Le Barbier de Séville, http://razorland55.free.fr/le_barbier_de_ seville_de_beaumarchais.html. “Les effectz de la malice quant elle est joincte à la puissance” (331). “Puisque je ne treuve en vous nulle amityé, je sçay que j’ay à faire” (91). “D’un costé, luy venoit au devant l’obligation qu’il devoit à son maistre ... ; de l’autre costé, l’honneur de sa maison, l’honnesteté et chasteté de sa seur, qu’il sçavoit bien jamais ne se consentir à telle meschanceté, si par sa tromperie elle n’estoit prinse ou par force ....Car il tenoit tout asseuré que, sans faire mourir le duc, la vie de luy et des siens n’estoit pas asseurée” (91–92). “Ne s’y voulut consentir” (44). “Mais sa femme, qui avoit renoncé à l’auctorité de commander, pour le plaisir de servir, s’estoit mise en la place de sa chambriere” (44). “Si tous ceulx qui ont faict de pareilles offences à leurs femmes estoient pugniz de pareille pugnition, Hircan et Saffredent devroient avoir belle paour” (47). “Si celles à qui il touche ... vouloient dire la verité, l’on trouveroit bien chamberiere à qui l’on a donné congé avant son quartier” (47). “Il n’estoit jour que son maistre ne la sollicitast de l’aymer; mais qu’elle aymeroit mieulx mourir que de faire rien contre Dieu et son honneur” (361).  “Elle, qui sçavoit son roolle par cueur, lui remonstra sa pauvreté, et que, en luy obeissant, perdroit le service de sa maistresse, auquel elle s’attendoit bien de gaingner ung bon mary” (361). “Le President luy donna cinq ou six paiemens des années à advenir, et, sçachant qu’il estoit loyal, esperoit luy faire autre bien” (263). “Si en une maison si honorable ilz n’ont poinct de paour de declairer leurs follies, qu’ilz peuvent faire aux pauvres lieux où ordinairement ilz vont faire leurs questes, où les occasions leur sont presentées si facilles, que c’est miracle quant ilz eschappent sans scandalle” (285). “Le pain des pauvres enfans, acquis par la sueur des peres” (302). “La damoiselle luy feit signe de l’œil, qu’elle avoit tout plain de larmes” (239). Indeed, this association of servants, secrets, and truth predates the Heptaméron and figures in Marguerite’s theater as well. See, for example, Reynolds-Cornell, “Silence.” Walking with his servant, she tells us, the title character of L’Inquisiteur, a farce by Marguerite dating from 1536, “notices that children playing in the snow look snug in their thin clothes. ‘Children are closer to God than you are, and your cold comes from within,’ ventures the servant, who is at once called a fool and beaten into silence. He threatens to leave his master but is told that he may not leave because he is too good at keeping secrets. His reply, ‘Then stop calling me a fool which I am not since I am discreet,’ is a not-too subtle hint that he could indeed say a great deal more than his master would care to have revealed. The mood has abruptly changed: the silence brutally imposed by the master has caused the servant to stress that his silence is selective, and temporarily he has the upper hand. It is the master’s turn to become silent. The two unlikely companions are bound to one another in a web of silence” (21). Interestingly enough, Marguerite’s association of truth with the small and lowly even extends to inferior realms of the animal kingdom, as we see in nouvelle 70, the tale of the Châtelaine de Vergy, where the welcoming bark of a small dog belonging to the chatelaine—rather than the potentially untruthful testimony of humans—constitutes irrefutable proof for a Burgundian duke that the gentleman his wife loves is engaged in a relationship of “honnête amitié” with the chatelaine, and not with his own duchess. See Nancy Virtue, “‘Le Sainct Esperit... parlast par sa bouche’: Marguerite de Navarre’s Evangelical Revision of the Chastelaine de Vergi, SCJ 28 (Autumn 1997): 811–24.

Upstairs, downstairs 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

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“Les serviteurs du mort ne debvoient poinct estre creuz” (15). “Nul en sa maison n’avoit veu le faict, sinon les meurdriers, une vielle chamberiere et une jeune fille de quinze ans” (15). “Affin qu’elle ne fust plus creue en tesmoignage” (15). “Io porto le corna, ciascun lo vede; ma tal le porta, che no lo crede” (26). The translation is Kelly’s; Chilton does not translate the Italian passage into English. “Si le secret du Roy est caché au serf, ce n’est pas raison que celluy du serf soit declaré au Roy” (26). Cohen, 331; Boulenger, 384. To the list of ways in which Marguerite links “les choses basses” to revelation, one might add her scatological references. These include nouvelle 11, the tale of Madame de Roncex who dirties herself while using a monastery privy; and nouvelle 52, the story of a sugar-coated piece of excrement disguised as spice bread. For more on the rich revelatory resonances of these episodes, which are at once humorous and evangelical in nature, see Yvan Loskoutoff, “Un étron dans la cornucopie: la valeur évangélique de la scatologie dans l’œuvre de Rabelais et de Marguerite de Navarre,” RHLF 95 (Nov.–Dec. 1995): 906–32. Here, let us invoke the example of the outspoken servant Dorine in Molière’s Tartuffe, a play that very nearly replicates the plot of Marguerite’s nouvelle 31, but in comic trappings. Like Orgon’s brother-in-law Cléante, Dorine is a raisonneur who sees through the title character’s hypocrisy and decries the head of household’s folly in abdicating his patriarchal authority to a faux dévot bent on seducing his wife, marrying his daughter, and appropriating his earthly possessions. Unlike Marguerite’s servants in nouvelle 31, however, Dorine tells the truth with the impunity of a court jester, rather than bearing the mark of the usurper’s dagger as her sixteenth-century counterparts do, in the grisly evidence of their slit throats, suppressed voices, and prostrate corpses. “[Elle] voyoit très bien le pourtraict du visaige de son mary et de celluy de sa chamberiere, s’ilz s’esloignoient, s’ilz s’approchoient, ou s’ilz ryoient, elle en avoit bonne congnoissance, comme si elle les eust veu” (343). “Faire grande chere . . . quant ilz estoient tous seulz” (273). Cf. notes 17 and 33, this chapter. “Ceulx qui estoient le plus mal montez furent emportez” (5). “Tout ainsy que les pauvres gens n’ont les biens et les honneurs, aussy ont-ilz leurz commoditez de nature plus à leur ayse que nous n’avons. Leurs viandes ne sont si friandes, mais ilz ont meilleur appetit, et se nourrissent myeulx de gros pain que nous de restorans. Ils n’ont pas les lictz si beaulx ne si bien faictz que les nostres, mais ilz ont le sommeil meilleur que nous et le repos plus grand. Ilz n’ont point les dames painctes et parées dont nous ydolastrons, mais ilz ont la joissance de leurs plaisirs plus souvent que nous et sans craincte de parolles, sinon des bestes et des oiseaulx qui les veoyent” (228). “Ceulx qui avoient estudié et estoient gens de lettres” (9). “Monseigneur le Daulphin ne voulloit que leur art y fut meslé [ou que] la beaulté de la rethoricque feit tort en quelque partye à la verité de l’histoire” (9). Sartre, 104.

5

Power, politics, and modes of governance in the Heptaméron

In his prologue to Gargantua, Rabelais urges readers to look beyond the frivolous exterior of his mock epic, which he likens to a Silenus box with grotesque figures on the outside (“pinctes au-dessus de figures joyeuses et frivoles”),1 and to extract instead its sustantificque mouelle. This marrow, he contends, is the allegorical content of his work which holds horrific secrets about his country’s religion and political life: “Here you will find an individual savour and abstruse teaching which will initiate you into certain very high sacraments and dread mysteries, concerning not only our religion, but also our public and private life.”2 Whether one takes Rabelais seriously or not, clearly Marguerite de Navarre makes no such claims about her Heptaméron: not only is her masterwork devoid of an authorial preface that might explain her intention, but, as we have seen, Jeanne d’Albret goes out of her way to stress the work’s apolitical nature in her correspondence, referring to the nouvelles as romans jovials or amusing stories.3 Using a strategy diametrically opposed to that of Alcofrybas, who emphasizes his seemingly burlesque text’s allegorical content, the queen’s daughter directs our gaze to the outside rather than the inside of Marguerite’s short stories.4 If we credit Jeanne’s account, the nouvelles are frivolous bagatelles purposely lacking in political and theological content out of deference to the queen’s husband and brother, who found de Navarre’s gift for attracting controversy tiresome. Indeed, we do not normally consider the Heptaméron a political text.5 Sartre, of course, argues that writers are always “en situation,” responding in one way or another to the political and ethical exigencies of their culture, while Fredric Jameson contends that all literature is political, whether consciously so or not. 6 In recognition of this fact, scholars in recent years have become more attentive to the political influence that Marguerite de Navarre exerted in her lifetime, particularly as a leader of France’s evangelical movement, and to the political dimensions of her Heptaméron. Notwithstanding her brother’s and husband’s exhortations, and her daughter’s a posteriori attempts to make the Heptaméron less controversial, Marguerite does not exclude political references or reflections from her text.7 Instead, she offers us a text in which political elements are downplayed, encased in banter about the battle of the sexes, camouflaged within familial

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allegories, and subsumed into household dramas deemed more suitable for a female writer. This chapter will examine representations of, and allusions to, government, justice, and politics in the Heptaméron; the visual or discursive cues that draw our attention to them; and the perspectival operations that accompany the exercise of power in Marguerite’s stories. Moving from the literal to the figurative, we will look first at the positive models of governance and community that Marguerite embeds within her text, and at the different modes of seeing that inform them; second, at her portrayals of evil rulers who figure as antimodels whose practices she implicitly urges Renaissance princes to eschew; and third, at her use of political allegory and metonymy to reflect on the unstable balance of power between Church and State in sixteenth-century France.

The education of a Christian prince: positive models of governance and community While nouvelle 1 figures on one level as an exemplum of the worst woman in the world, on a par with Boccaccio’s liminary tale of Ser Cepparello, the portrait of the French judiciary and monarchy that Marguerite embeds within the story is quite positive. In the Decameron, Cepparello, a confirmed liar and thief, persuades his confessor on his deathbed that he is the best man in the world, an elaborate lie that results in his near-beatification by parishioners who revere his remains and attribute posthumous miracles to him. Because Cepparello succeeded in deceiving both secular and ecclesiastical authorities with his facade of piety, the only justice that Boccaccio envisions for his wily miscreant is in the afterlife, either in the form of “perdizione” at the hands of Satan (“nelle mani del diavolo”), or, if he repented just prior to death, through the miracle of salvation emanating from God’s mysterious grace (“grazia”).8 Notwithstanding her reputation for other-worldly piety, however, de Navarre focuses on the processes of secular rather than divine justice in nouvelle 1, which offers glimpses of François I’s role in the disposition of du Mesnil’s murder case, and chronicles the historical Marguerite’s involvement in its aftermath. Initially, all the perpetrators of the crime escape apprehension: Saint-Aignan, who hired an assassin at the behest of his wife, warns the hired killer that there is a warrant for his arrest and gives the man “ten écus to get out of the country” (75),9 while the nobleman and his wife flee to England after trying unsuccessfully both to camouflage the crime and sue for a pardon.10 In France, they are tried in absentia, convicted, stripped of all their property, and condemned to die. Through friends and family connections, however, Saint-Aignan is able to persuade the king of England to petition the French monarch for his pardon: and while François I initially demurs, arguing that the crime is too heinous and that only the Duke of Alençon can pardon it, eventually the villainous couple prevail and return to

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France. Far from counting himself fortunate, though, Saint-Aignan seeks both to rid himself of his wife, whom he blames for his woes, and to “avoid paying the fifteen hundred écus to the deceased man’s father” (76).11 To this end, he engages a sorcerer to cast spells on those who wish him ill, including his wife, the elder du Mesnil, and Marguerite herself, who is a friend of the slain young man’s family. When the wife overhears her spouse plotting her demise, she in turn contacts her uncle who is a friend of the Duke d’Alençon, Marguerite’s husband. As a result, Saint-Aignan is again condemned to death, this time for his attempt to kill the king’s sister: “But the King held his sister’s life as dear as his own,” writes the author, “and ordered them [Saint-Aignan and the sorcerer] to be sentenced as if they had made an attempt on his own person” (77).12 Significantly, Marguerite—who by then was likely “duke” of Alençon following her husband’s demise—has their death sentence commuted to corporal punishment on the galleys of Marseilles. As for the wife, we learn only that she continued her immoral life and died a miserable death (“continua son peché plus que jamais et mourut miserablement,” 17). At first glance, one might argue that royal justice as portrayed in nouvelle 1 is flawed indeed. Not only are pardons for murder obtained through a combination of family connections and personal favors, as evidenced by the king of England’s intervention on behalf of Saint-Aignan to the French authorities, the eventual granting of the pardon despite François’s objections, and the wife’s appeal through her uncle to Marguerite’s family, but the conviction and sentence the nobleman ultimately receives do not extend to his wife, who instigated du Mesnil’s murder in the first place. Nevertheless, the text offers positive (or perhaps hortatory) glimpses of the French judiciary and Crown that are heightened by their contrast to English protocols. Most notably, the socioeconomic disparity between the low-ranking eyewitnesses who testify against Saint-Aignan and his wife in France, and the “eminent noblemen” (76; “grands seigneurs,” 16) who lobby for the couple’s pardon in England, without having seen their crimes, at once constructs the French justice system as one that is impartial, evidence-based, and responsive to the people, and alerts us to perspectival differences between the two monarchs. In his initial resistance to the English king’s request, for example, François emphasizes the ocular nature of the evidence against Saint-Aignan, which he asks Henry VIII to examine visually: to this end, he sends the English king “the details of the trial” so that he may “see for himself whether a pardon [is] warranted” (76; “le priant de regarder si c’estoit cas qui meritast grace,” 16). The author also draws a contrast between François’s respect for the orderly judicial process that convicted the couple—which hinged upon eyewitness testimony, skeletal evidence, and a pretrial review of the case by both the chancellor and the Duke and Duchess of Alençon—and Henry’s casual acceptance of his noblemen’s hearsay testimony. While Marguerite refrains from describing her brother’s royal gaze directly, moreover, its shifting foci contribute to the perspectival

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modeling of the French king, who weighs and balances conflicting views of the case from different angles: he is appalled by the crime, attentive to the trial’s minutiae and procedural details, sensitive to Alençon’s claims to regional autonomy, and yet amenable, in the long term, to considering Henry VIII’s alternative viewpoint, most likely for strategic reasons. That Marguerite herself has Saint-Aignan’s death sentence commuted to hard labor (“peyne cruelle,” N. 1, 17) further offers us an example of princely compassion, which may double as a simulacrum of divine grace given the culprit’s eventual recognition of his “sins”: for during their long captivity, he and the sorcerer had “time to reflect on the seriousness of their crimes” (77).13 Here, as in Boccaccio’s first novella, the author leaves open the possibility that Saint-Aignan, a hardened criminal far more evil than Cepparello, ultimately repented and was “saulv[é]” (17) just prior to his death. As Boccaccio notes, “Nor would I deny that it is possible that he is of the number of the blessed in the presence of God, seeing that … he might in his last moments have made so complete an act of contrition that perchance God had mercy on him and received him into His kingdom.”14 By having Saint-Aignan’s sentence commuted and begging her brother to save the reprobate’s life (“le supplia que la vie fut saulvée,” 17), Marguerite affords the procurator time to seek divine pardon; invokes New Testament ethics that reserve judgment and revenge for God alone (Rom. 12: 19); offers readers, as well as her brother, a subtle lesson about the merits of judicial clemency; and crafts an allegory of divine grace that hinges upon the implicit analogy between God’s mercy and that of the “most Christian king.”15 In this liminary nouvelle, the author also highlights the French monarch’s putative respect for the sole authority of the Duke d’Alençon to grant pardons within his territory (“le duc d’Allençon avoit seul ce previlleige en son roiaulme de donner grace en sa duché,” 16). In so doing, Marguerite credits her ambitious, acquisitive brother with a surprising degree of sensitivity toward the protocols and autonomy of France’s regional territories. On the one hand, François’s self-effacing claim that he has no jurisdiction in Alençon, at least when it comes to pardoning local criminals, is legally accurate but out of character for the Renaissance monarch. Given the vast expansion and centralization of the Crown’s powers that took place under his watch, there is little in the king’s biography to suggest he was overly fastidious about respecting local rule in French appanages such as Alençon, which he sought to assimilate to the royal domain. Yet on the other hand, we should bear in mind that the incident dates from relatively early—and a time of crisis—in François’s reign, when he was still focused on foreign conquest and had barely begun to consolidate France’s feudal structure and centralize the French state. In the mid-1520s, when the historical events informing the story most plausibly took place, the king had far more serious matters on his mind—including the release of his sons from captivity, quelling civil unrest, and reasserting his own hegemony following Louise de Savoie’s weak regency—than the fate of two homesick fugitives.

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By all indications, nouvelle 1 begins during the lifetime of Charles d’Alençon (“du vivant du duc Charles,” 11), who died on April 11, 1525; and the action extends at least into 1526, when, according to archival documents discovered by Le Roux de Lincy, the king formally signed a letter of pardon for a certain Michel de Saint-Aignan.16 This suggests that the “duc d’Allençon” whose authority François hesitates to subvert is in fact his sister Marguerite, who succeeded her husband as ruler of the duchy. While the duchess’s relationship to her subjects and husband’s family was not acrimonious during the duke’s lifetime, her accession over Charles’s sister Françoise, his natural heir, to the duke’s powers and privileges did not find favor in all quarters: many locals feared that Marguerite, whose succession had been orchestrated by her brother, would become a de facto puppet of the Crown. From François’s perspective, moreover, the timing for asserting his monarchical powers over a semiautonomous region that was likely to protest his meddling could scarcely have been worse. Newly released from his captivity in Spain following his defeat at Pavia (1525) and faced with religious turmoil at home, François would have been reluctant to foment controversy in Alençon, or to undermine his sister’s rule, by pardoning two convicted murderers and infringing on the regional court’s jurisdiction; and while his interest in currying favor with Henry VIII, who favored the pardon, ultimately trumped any compunction he may have had about breaching the duchy’s right to judicial autonomy, Marguerite’s allusion to his philosophical respect for ducal sovereignty achieves a number of goals. First, the statement is not politically disinterested: instead, it serves to explain and justify François’s abrogation of Alençon’s right to try, convict, sentence, or pardon its own criminals, while implicitly defending Marguerite’s failure to protect the duchy from royal encroachment. Second, Marguerite’s inclusion of the reference, whether accurate or not, in her first nouvelle cannily constructs François as an exemplary monarch from the outset of the Heptaméron, both in his concern for justice and in his ability to delegate authority, respect the feudal traditions of his country, work cooperatively with other peers, refuse requests for political favors on moral grounds, and temper harsh punishment with compassion when appropriate. Third, this idealized modeling of the king’s youthful approach to governance contrasts markedly with political actions he took, and policies he enacted, in later years. Notably, François infringed upon Marguerite’s own prerogatives as ruler of Alençon during the heated religious upheavals of the 1530s. While the author never mentions these incidents explicitly in the Heptaméron, her choice to emphasize the king’s respect for local rule in a story about Alençon, a duchy whose judicial autonomy he would later violate, does not seem coincidental. Instead, Marguerite’s written affirmation that her brother recognizes and respects Alençon’s internal protocols, particularly in legal matters confined to the duchy, implicitly points to its unwritten double, which lurks like an overwritten palimpsest in the background: namely, the well-publicized fact, known to most of Marguerite’s readers, that François

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would abrogate these principles less than a decade later by extending the Crown’s jurisdiction to Alençon and by seizing control of judicial cases in the duchy involving charges of heresy. While these events do not figure literally or explicitly in the Heptaméron, they would have been inscribed in Marguerite’s memory and that of her intended readers, ready to resurface at the slightest mention of royal versus ducal prerogatives in Alençon. The king’s intervention in the duchy’s internal judicial proceedings during the 1530s are best understood as a response to a variety of stimuli, including mounting pressures from the Faculty of Theology to eradicate dissent, heightened civil unrest, religious conflict that threatened the body politic, and François’s own state-building ambitions. In an effort to codify the French legal system and exercise greater control over the confessional ferment that permeated his country, the king sought to remand all heresy cases from local tribunals to his own Grand Council in the early 1530s.17 As a part of this project, he sent royal councilors to Alençon in 1533 following the smashing of two statues in the Chapel of Saint-Blaise, presumably believing that local “judges were not competent to deal with heresy cases.”18 This monarchical intervention in ducal matters was repeated in 1537, when royal commissioners accused local officers of mishandling a second heresy case.19 Barbara Stephenson tells us that while Marguerite “agreed that François should augment his jurisdiction over the semiautonomous territories within France, she was concerned with maintaining her own traditional rights and authorities as the ruler of a prosperous duchy” (96). Marguerite moreover faced opposition from irate subjects, many of them already angered by her accession to power in Alençon, who “suspected her of complicity in the king’s bid to extend royal control into” their duchy.20 Torn between loyalty to her brother and her responsibilities as duke, Marguerite went so far as to reprimand François for interfering with her authority and exacerbating political tensions in Alençon, by turning a localized act of religious vandalism into a crime against the State and against God: “What makes me write to you is that I beg you not to permit such things without giving me prior warning … Truly, if you had warned me, all could have been done more honourably.”21 In view of these uncharacteristically reproving words to her brother, Marguerite’s praise in nouvelle 1 of his deference to ducal authority in Alençon must be read against the backdrop of these later violations of the duchy’s jurisdictional integrity. Upon revisiting nouvelle 1 in this new light, what we discover is not simply an encomium of François’s superlative monarchical skills, but also a reminder of his shortcomings; in this sense, Marguerite’s fictionalized portrait of her brother is not so much a mimetic representation of his political philosophy and practices, as a hortatory model for “now and future kings” to remember, reflect on, and try to emulate. That Saint-Aignan’s wife escapes judicial punishment, while using the royal patronage system to denounce her husband, also casts a shadow on Marguerite’s positive portrait of monarchical justice. Yet the specific

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machinations that exempt the woman from imprisonment and execution provide useful insights into the French judiciary system, which, despite its flaws and loopholes, appears to operate according to orderly procedures rather than capricious edicts. Because she and her husband have been pardoned for the murder of du Mesnil, through nefarious channels that Marguerite chooses not to belabor or elucidate, the wife is free and is not tried or condemned a second time for her initial malfeasance. As an intended target of, rather than party to, her husband’s later crime, moreover, she remains exempt from prosecution despite her seminal role in Saint-Aignan’s transgressions—for unlike her spouse, she has committed no new infractions that would justify revoking her pardon. Indeed, her immunity from legal reprisals following her return to France arguably reflects positively on a government which honors its official pardons, including those granted reluctantly, and which rewards citizens for foiling plots against the State, even when their motives are self-serving. To say that she goes unpunished would of course be an overstatement: for while the husband’s sentence for public crimes against the Crown is legally sanctioned and officially enforced, his wife’s private transgressions (“she led a more immoral life than ever,” 77; “continua son peché plus que jamais,” 17) against natural laws do not excuse her from retribution, but rather result in unofficial, naturally occurring reprisals perfectly tailored to her offenses, as the misery she inflicts on others informs her own death (“[she] died a most miserable death,” 77; “mourut miserablement,” 17). More importantly, the punishment François visits on Saint-Aignan at once confirms the latter’s own responsibility for the devastation he has wrought and the king’s discernment in holding him accountable. For although Simontaut uses nouvelle 1 to illustrate the wickedness of women, SaintAignan is arguably complicit in his wife’s sexual indiscretions from the very beginning: not only does he encourage her friendship with the bishop for financial and social reasons, but as the head of household, a position laden with allegorical significance in virtually all of Marguerite’s tales, SaintAignan abdicates his responsibility to manage his own family judiciously, serving as a countermodel of household governance who stands in marked contrast to François’s own constructed exemplarity. That the Heptaméron is a social text intended to educate French monarchs, a theory proposed by Margaret Ferguson and rearticulated by Freccero,22 is an intriguing possibility given scenarios like the preceding one, which at once flatter the reigning king and his family by portraying or modeling their judicious governance and provide antimodels of management styles that a prince should avoid. The technique allows the sovereign to see himself objectively, or to “see himself being seen” by an “outsider within.” For example, King François I figures as a temperate ruler in nouvelle 23, where a man who precipitously and mistakenly killed his brother-in-law appeals to the monarch for a pardon: “In order that justice might be satisfied,” Marguerite tells us, “[the brother-in-law was advised] to go and seek pardon

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from King Francis” (273).23 The man’s appeal is granted “through the good offices of François Olivier, who was the Chancellor of Alençon” (273),24 a local official whom François esteems so highly that he later names him chancelier of France. In this troubling account of family governance gone awry, we see not only the inner workings of royal justice, founded upon a hierarchical system of clientage and patronage that allows cases from the lowest echelons of society to be reviewed by the monarchy, but also a king who is moved by the dictates of common sense and compassion to pardon a man who is neither a danger to society nor a hardened criminal. Implicitly, the text also contrasts the weak husband’s flawed governance of his household with his monarch’s judicious management of the res publica, while drawing our gaze “horizontally” to pardons, and to the language of pardon and forgiveness, elsewhere in the Heptaméron and within the broader context of early modern French society. While the initial pardon granted to Saint-Aignan in nouvelle 1 at Henry VIII’s behest is clearly unwarranted, for example, Marguerite’s later request that the procurator’s capital sentence be commuted, as well as the religious context of the pardon in nouvelle 23, which occurs on Good Friday, subtly reminds readers, including the king, that divine grace and forgiveness are a cornerstone of their faith. On a lexical level, to be sure, the words pardon (F. pardon, forgiveness) and pardonner (F. to pardon or forgive) in the Heptaméron are more often associated with manipulation and deceit than they are with heart-felt repentance or forgiveness; but when these conditions obtain, as they do in nouvelles 21, 32, and 38, benefits accrue not only to the forgiven, but also to those who pardon them. Taken as a whole, Marguerite’s multiperspectival ruminations on pardons and forgiveness converge unexpectedly with Machiavelli’s suggestion (The Prince, chapter 17) that clemency and mercy, when practiced discerningly, can solidify the prince’s rule. Her tutorial on the topic, whether intended or not, is a timely one in Reformation-era France, where civil unrest and widespread arrests for heresy made royal clemency and internecine forgiveness a rare commodity. Of all the stories where Marguerite de Navarre refers to or appears to portray François, one of the most developed characterizations is found in nouvelle 42, a fictionalized account of a young prince’s love for a commoner who resists his attempts at seduction on moral grounds.25 While the youth’s name is never mentioned, most scholars believe that the queen is describing her brother, not simply because his love interest’s name is Françoise, but also because of his own superlative attributes: “I shall say nothing of the perfections, of the grace and beauty of this young prince, except that in his day there was no one equal to him” (381).26 This portrait is also strikingly similar to that of the young prince in nouvelle 25, described as “the most handsome and most elegant man there ever was in this realm, or ever will be” (286).27 Not only does this earlier character have a sister who is very pious (“Ce prince avoit une seur, qui frequentoit fort ceste religion,” 206),

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much like Marguerite, but his liaison with a lawyer’s wife is virtually identical to an affair ascribed to François in a sixteenth-century version of Le journal d’un bourgeois de Paris (Journal of a Parisian Bourgeois), which documents the prince’s affair with the attorney Jacques Disome’s wife.28 On the basis of these parallels, it seems likely that the prince in nouvelle 42 is a fictionalized representation of François d’Angoulême; but even if this were not the case, the story offers abundant wisdom about class and gender relations, honor, power, and desire from which a prince or monarch could profit. While at first glance these lessons seem purely personal and domestic, a closer reading reveals that they also have political implications. As a handsome, charming, and good-natured youth, privy to all the advantages that wealth and rank can provide, the prince in nouvelle 42 is not accustomed to having his commands rebuffed, or his desires unfulfilled. In this regard, he is much like the young François, who was reputedly bright and personable, but somewhat spoiled. In her forty-second novella, Marguerite pits the prince’s expectation of sexual fulfillment, and his utter confidence that his wishes will be granted, against an obstacle whose strength he initially underestimates: the honor, chastity, and inward resolve of the girl he loves, who is as attracted to him as he is to her. If the young couple were both aristocrats, with families willing to accommodate their passion, marriage would be a happy solution to their dilemma; but Françoise, whom the prince knew as a child and rediscovered in church, is a bourgeoise whose illegitimate sister is married to the prince’s butler. As a result, Françoise rightly assumes the prince is not interested in marrying her (“Dieu ne m’a faict princesse pour vous espouser, ne d’estat pour estre tenue à maistresse et amye,” 290; “God has not made me a princess who could marry you, nor even of a rank where I could be your beloved mistress,” 385) and steadfastly resists the lure of his splendor, which she describes in visual terms: I am neither so blind, nor am I so foolish, that I cannot see that God has endowed you with grace and beauty, and that the woman who shall possess the body and love of such a prince will be the happiest woman in the world. But of what good is all that to me? It’s not for me, nor for anyone of my station in life. It would be madness even to long for it (384–85; my italics).29 The prince’s infatuation with Françoise, like that of his courtly predecessors, is also visual in nature, but he lacks the insight that the girl possesses: “When he was in church, he caught sight of [her],” Marguerite writes; “[and] he saw that for a girl with light brown hair she was rather attractive, … and he took a long look at her... [He] derived such pleasure from the sight of her that he [fell] in love with her” (381; my italics). While the prince is fixated on Françoise’s “image” (382) in church, and exercises his horses in front of the butler’s house where she is staying “so that she could see” (383; my italics) his spectacularity, she in turn tries to “avoid being seen by him”

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(382; my italics), understanding both his gaze of male dominance and its implications for a woman of her class. While his gaze is unidimensional, rooted in the moment, and focused on the outward surfaces of Françoise’s beauty, as dictated by the lens of his own desire, her standpoint is that of the enlightened outsider within, whose rich perspectivism offers the prince a much-needed tutorial in foresight, and in “seeing through the eyes of otherness.” During the course of the novella, the lessons that Françoise teaches her prince are numerous and important; and her resistance to his charm and power on the grounds of personal conscience, which the privileged youth attempts to refute intellectually and emotionally, is only one facet of the education she provides him. Understanding that the prince views her as easy prey, given her youth, inexperience, and modest birth, Françoise is articulate in distinguishing herself from the “unfortunates” of her class and gender, or from the undifferentiated commoners with whom she believes he has grouped her: If you really wish to amuse yourself with women of my station, then you will find plenty in this town who are far more attractive than I, and who won’t put you to the trouble of all these entreaties. Be satisfied with those women who will only be too glad to have you buy their honour, and don’t go on tormenting the one person who loves you more than she loves herself (385).30 Far from being intellectually simple, the young woman can also “read and write very well” (382),31 a fact that distinguishes her from the masses; and the prince grudgingly acknowledges that she is too intelligent to believe his counterfactual rhetoric. “He did everything he could,” writes Marguerite, “to convince her that he would never love anyone else. But she had too much sense for anything so unreasonable to take hold in her mind” (386).32 Demonstrating a command of logic and rhetoric that is equal to his own, she deftly rebuffs his claim to desire nothing but her “honneur et advantaige” (289; “honour and advancement,” 384), asking instead that he honor her with his “bonne grace” (291).33 As for the prince, a fundamentally good person whose privileged upbringing has left him ignorant of how the “other half” lives, he is repeatedly surprised and thwarted by the young bourgeoise’s strength of character and inner resolve, which loom as unaccustomed obstacles in his quest to win her favor. “The young prince did not find this answer to his liking” (382),34 Marguerite observes early in the narrative, drawing our attention to both the girl’s refusal and the prince’s chagrin at such an unexpected response to his overtures. Confident of her assent, the prince does not declare his love for Françoise in person during his initial wooing, but rather sends an emissary to organize the terms of their affair: “As he knew she was of poor family and of low birth, [the prince] expected to get

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what he wanted without any difficulty. Having no way of speaking to her personally, he sent one of the gentlemen of his chamber to make the necessary approaches” (381-82).35 Not only does Françoise refuse the offer, but she can scarcely believe the prince is sincere. For his part, the youth is energized by the unaccustomed setback (“When love meets resistance it becomes all the more persistent,” 382),36 as he and his emissaries follow their botched proposition with an entire arsenal of persuasive tactics, including monetary incentives (“He managed to raise the sum of five hundred écus. This he instructed his gentleman to take to the girl,” 386),37 face-to-face cajolery, demonstrations of piety, a glimpse of seductive flesh, and even a show of force on the part of an enterprising servant (“The gentleman began to think that the only way to possess her would be to employ intimidation, so he resorted to threatening her,” 386).38 Despite her love for him, Françoise rebuffs all of the prince’s overtures, not just to safeguard her own chastity, but to protect his conscience as well: “I care too well for my conscience and for yours” (385), she tells him.39 And while he rues her refusals, the prince grows to love and respect Françoise all the more for her virtue and strength of character, eventually arranging for her marriage to one of his domestics. If the prince grows on a personal level in this short story, learning to distinguish between rank and virtue and discovering that some people cannot be bought, the lessons that emerge from the novella on a political level are no less significant. While the conflation of divine and secular love is a time-honored tradition in Romance literature dating back to Dante and Petrarch, the young prince’s use of the Church as a vehicle for satisfying his own lust strikes an intriguing note from the very beginning of nouvelle 42: not only does the boy initially glimpse Françoise at church, but he “never failed to have his seat set up in the church where she was accustomed to go to hear mass” (382),40 following her from chapel to chapel and using worship as a pretext for gratifying his desires and as a weapon for targeting his prey. While Marguerite alludes allegorically to Church interference in matters of state on a number of occasions, her implication here may well be the converse, as she portrays a prince who uses religion almost intuitively as a steppingstone for the acquisition of power, a tactic of which François himself was certainly guilty on occasion. Rather than condemning the boy, the author chronicles the sublimation of his baser instincts through the tutelage of a donna angelicata who, like Beatrice and Laura, guides the prince toward self-abnegation (“He decided to press her no further,” 388)41 and compassion toward others (“The young prince bestowed great benefits upon her,” 388),42 two important qualities in a non-Machiavellian ruler.43 Other political lessons that emerge from nouvelle 42 are a better understanding of the lower classes, not simply as an undifferentiated and stereotypical mass, but as individuals with strong values; a heightened appreciation for the strength of personal conscience and conviction, which Françoise, like many evangelicals and dissidents in sixteenth-century France,

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considers more important than life itself; and the importance of wise advisors, who, unlike the “gentleman” portrayed in this tale, will guide the prince in his decisions and carry out his wishes with discernment, rather than resorting to heavy-handed tactics to enhance their own status on the premise that the ends justify the means. While Françoise carefully describes her suitor as wise and virtuous (“si saige et si vertueux,” 292), imputing his most egregious missteps to overzealous aides rather than to the nobleman himself, nouvelle 42 is nevertheless the portrait of a “prince in progress” who hones his judgment through a process of trial and error. By way of contrast, the seventeenth story focuses on François I at a later stage of his development, when his courage, wit, and discernment are more fully formed. In this short tale of betrayal, courtly espionage, and monarchical forbearance, the king’s mother and advisors alert him to the apparent treachery of a German count named Guillaume whom François has befriended: the Saxon nobleman “was so well received by the King that not only was he accepted in the royal service, but was actually appointed to attend the King personally in his chamber” (210).44 Upon learning from the Seigneur de la Tremouille, Governor of Burgundy, that Guillaume is planning to assassinate him, François does not react precipitously but rather bides his time, “maintaining that a man as gallant, noble and honourable as Count Wilhelm could not possibly embark on such a crime” (210).45 Particularly if we read nouvelle 17 as a type of bildungsroman similar to story 42, it may appear that François is guilty of confusing seeming with being, or external gallantry with inner virtue, in yet another youthful misapprehension that only time, new evidence, additional advice from his counselors, and first-hand experience will set right. Far from naïvely equating appearances with truth, however, the king seems instead to be weighing and balancing his own observations against the intelligence report of a spy, who is potentially less trustworthy than Guillaume himself, and against advice from his overprotective mother to “dismiss the man at once” (210)46 without waiting to confirm that he is guilty. Once a second dispatch arrives and substantiates the initial testimony against Guillaume, François opts to test his serviteur himself in a nonconfrontational way, by vaunting his own prowess and the sharpness of his sword, and impugning the courage of any would-be assassin who declines who meet him one-onone in an honorable battle. Without accusing or insulting Guillaume explicitly, François at once communicates his suspicions to the Saxon, impugns the other man’s honor for plotting to kill a friend in secret rather than “man to man,” and announces his own preparedness and intention to defend himself with all the power at his disposal. In addition to including these self-referential allusions to the French monarchy and royal family in her Heptaméron, Marguerite de Navarre includes a smattering of references to other rulers, frequently from neighboring states, in her masterwork. Often she begins her stories with a geographical or political lead-in, as we see in stories 31 and 32. In the first of these, the queen

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situates her cautionary tale of clerical malfeasance in the “lands subject to the Emperor Maximilian of Austria” (326),47 whose court officers eventually try and condemn a lecherous Cordelier who, along with his cohorts, has kidnapped local ladies and girls (“gentilz femmes et autres belles filles,” 240) for prurient purposes, transforming the ostensibly holy space of the monastery into a den of iniquity. While Marguerite does not focus at length on either the emperor or the specific protocols of imperial law, what she does emphasize is the restoration of justice to the disempowered through the proper functioning of a centralized, responsive, and efficient court and government, which punish the perpetrators and rescue their victims. Similarly, Marguerite begins nouvelle 32 by referring to a monarch who figures so marginally in the action that it is easy to overlook his role in the outcome. Indeed, one might argue that the inclusion of his name is a narrative device serving primarily to introduce the novella and situate it temporally and geographically, thereby adding local color and historical realism to what might otherwise resemble an abstract exemplum or parable: “King Charles VIII sent to Germany a gentleman by the name of Bernage, Seigneur of Sivray, near Amboise” (331),48 Marguerite tells us in her opening sentence, before moving to the real substance of her story—a description not of Bernage’s mission in Germany, but rather, of a dysfunctional household he discovers during his journey, when he seeks lodging for the night. What greets him, as we have already seen, is a cuckolded husband who has slain his wife’s lover in righteous anger, and a tonsured matron forced to drink from her serviteur’s skull and share her bedchamber with his skeleton. Upon observing the household dynamics, hearing both his-story and her-story, and reflecting upon what he has seen and heard, the king’s emissary suggests a more compassionate and pragmatic modus operandi to his vengeful host: Monsieur, the affection I bear you and the honours and kindness which you have shown me in your own house oblige me to say to you that as your poor wife’s remorse is so deep, it is my belief that you should show some compassion towards her. Moreover, you are young and you have no children. It would be a great shame to let so fine a house as yours slip from your hands and permit it to be inherited by people who may be far from being your friends (333–34).49 On one level, this casually offered piece of advice seems unrelated to either the king or questions of politics and governance in general. Speaking man-to-man rather than as an emissary of Charles VIII, Bernage appears to be offering his own personal opinion, which is neither official nor a binding directive. Yet the king’s own subsequent interest in the tragedy imbues the tale with political significance, at least on a figurative level: not only does Charles make “inquiries” into the violent affair, ascertaining that Bernage’s account is true, but he also commissions a portrait of the beautiful penitent from Jean de Paris, implicitly honoring and memorializing her pathos and atonement with

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a visual tribute. That the king favors compassion and forgiveness toward the matron, much like his emissary Bernage, seems clear: just as the latter attempts to sway the vengeful husband with courteous advice, employing persuasive methods that are consubstantial with his message of conciliation, Charles himself leads by example rather than force, rehabilitating the penitent with a monarchical imitatio of divine grace, and transforming her into an icon of piety and atonement. Moved by Bernage’s temperate advice, and by the king’s compassionate model of governance, the vengeful husband in turn abandons his iron rule in favor of forgiveness and reconciliation: “Because of the compassion he felt for his wife in her humble submission to her penance, [he] took her back, and subsequently had many fine children by her” (334),50 writes Marguerite, as she subtly plays upon the analogy between head of state and head of household, each confronted with a choice between harsh and humane methods of wielding authority. In mid-sixteenth-century France, with its backdrop of religious and political persecution, torture, and executions, the message is both timely and important.

“When malice is joined with power”: evil leaders, abuses of authority, and ethical dilemmas Marguerite depicts not only positive models of monarchical behavior and wise governance in the Heptaméron, but also antimodels of harsh and abusive princes. Both the exempla and counterexempla, or good and bad rulers, may be explained on one level as a function of the truth project the author announces in her prologue. Given the abundance of tyrants in the Renaissance, France’s long history of seigniorial despotism, and Machiavelli’s recent contention that fearsome rulers are more effective than weaklings who inspire love, one might even argue that the queen of Navarre, in both her negative and positive representations of governance, is merely portraying her era realistically, without intentionally criticizing the misdeeds of her own class. Yet there is abundant evidence that simple realism is not her only goal. Instead, Marguerite purposely draws our attention to royal, ducal, and governmental malfeasance, not simply by including numerous examples of transgressive leaders within the Heptaméron, but also by foregrounding their cruelty, emphasizing the pathos of their victims, legitimizing the arguments of their opponents within the narratives, and developing critical reflections on their misdeeds in the frame discussions. Perhaps to maintain her “cover” as a circumspect matron with downturned eyes, however, the queen of Navarre does not maximize, but instead downplays, the political import of these stories about the res publica by passing them off as smallscale family dramas—the stuff of which female gossip is made. Marguerite de Navarre’s counterbalancing of just and unjust leaders begins very early in the Heptaméron: not just in the juxtaposition of the kings of England and France in nouvelle 1, where the former urges the latter to pardon a murderer, but in the superficially lightweight third story about

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King Alfonso of Naples.51 Far from being noted for his wisdom, fairness, generosity, or sense of justice, the monarch as he is depicted by Marguerite has one remarkable quality: “[His] well-known lasciviousness was … the very sceptre by which he ruled” (83),52 she tells us in the very first line of her narrative. In Dantean terms, however, Alfonso compounds this relatively minor sin of sexual incontinence, to which François I also falls prey, with an array of secondary transgressions including deceit, adultery, the betrayal of a friend, the corruption of those around him, and the seduction of a loyal subject’s wife. As soon as he enters the loving couple’s (“l’amitié fut grande entre eulx deux,” 22) home and sets eyes on the woman, who is remarkable for her beauty and engaging qualities (“beaulté et bonne grace,” 22), Alfonso is smitten with jealousy and lust: “The King took less delight in contemplating the gentle harmony that existed between the lady and her husband, than he did in speculating as to how he might go about spoiling it” (83).53 Rather than invoking the droit du seigneur directly, the monarch uses his intelligence, power, and cunning not for the greater good, but instead to earn the couple’s trust, manipulate them, and satisfy his own illicit desires. After attending a carnival celebration at their house, the king invites the couple to a series of banquets for local lords and ladies, sends the husband to Rome for a lengthy business trip, and offers succor and solace to the man’s wife: The King took the opportunity to console her as often as possible, showering blandishments and gifts of all kinds upon her, with the result that in the end she felt not only consoled, but even content in her husband’s absence. Before the three weeks were up she had fallen so much in love with the King that she was every bit as upset about her husband’s imminent return as she had been about his departure (84). 54 In addition to drawing our attention to the king’s lasciviousness in the very first line of the story, where one might expect an affirmation of his justice and mercy, Marguerite also characterizes Alfonso as a dissimulator from the outset: she portrays him “en masque” (22), or wearing a carnival mask, when he first meets the couple and emphasizes the pains he takes to disguise his desire (“he kept his passion hidden and as secret as he could,” 83)55 while he plots his strategy. Indeed, the theatrical acumen with which Alfonso stages the seduction prompted Walter K. Kelly, in his translation of the Heptaméron, to render “de sorte qu’elle fut …. consolée” (23) as “[the king] played his part so well that she … was consoled.”56 As a result of his stellar performance, arguably a sine qua non of monarchical pageantry, the king’s sweet words and presents masquerade publicly as tokens of good will and comfort; but the author discloses their deeper, veiled function as vehicles of dissimulation and instruments of seduction and betrayal. The queen of Navarre does not focus on the king’s deceit alone, but shifts her focus to the cuckolded husband’s perspective, delving into his chagrin (“fascherie,” 23) and persuading readers to identify with the victim rather

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than his monarch. In addition to lingering at length on the nobleman’s revenge against the king, to which she devotes the bulk of her narrative, Marguerite constructs the husband’s response as a perfect contrapasso, which exactly mirrors Alfonso’s own transgression: for much as the king seduced his own wife, the cuckolded gentleman begins a liaison with the queen. “If I may say so, Madame,” he asserts, “if the King didn’t have a crown on his head, he wouldn’t have the slightest advantage over me as far as giving pleasure to ladies is concerned” (85).57 All questions of hubris and daring aside, what strikes us here is the comparison between monarch and subject that Marguerite foregrounds in this sentence and the superiority of the latter to the former. Not only more skilled than the king in pleasing a woman, at least by his own account, the nobleman fares as well as or better than Alfonso in a host of different categories that Marguerite encourages us to compare point by point: and if the gentleman is at least the king’s equal in intelligence, cunning, and planning as he sets the stage for the queen’s seduction, one might argue that his powers of persuasion are greater, given the deftness with which he parries the highborn lady’s subtle arguments and resolute objections to an adulterous affair with him. Most impressively, however, in this contest of transgressors, the gentleman clearly outperforms his monarch when it comes to discretion: for while he is able, through diligent observation, to uncover his wife’s adultery with the king, Alfonso remains oblivious to his own consort’s liaison with the gentleman he has dishonored. “[The king] never suspected that the gentleman was having an affair with his wife” (88),58 Marguerite writes. While the jest reflects badly on Alfonso, the author uses this specific incident to draw a more sweeping conclusion about kings in general: “If the King doesn’t tell his secrets to his subjects, then there’s no reason why his subjects should tell their secrets to the King” (88).59 The statement not only advocates a greater degree of reciprocity between monarchs and their subjects, perhaps in keeping with medieval oaths of fealty, but it also suggests that kings, far from being allknowing, are often blind to fundamental truths about their people. An even more striking example of malfeasance by a ruler, camouflaged once more as a family drama, occurs in nouvelle 12, which is devoted to the alleged lasciviousness of another Italian, Duke Alexander of Florence.60 Marguerite’s penchant for situating tyrants in Italy may reflect either the anti-Machiavellian sentiments of French humanists or the queen’s antipathy for the land of her brother’s worst military defeat, at the battle of Pavia (1525). While he shares the same appetites, excesses, and self-absorption as King Alfonso, the fictionalized character of Alessandro differs from his Neapolitan counterpart in the degree of his cruelty and his willingness to use force where cajolery fails. After begging his friend and retainer Lorenzino to procure the sexual favors of the latter’s sister for him and being refused repeatedly for moral reasons, Alessandro becomes so enraged (“enflambé d’un courroux importable, … luy respondit par une grande fureur,” 91) that his mask of friendship falls away to unveil his fundamental depravity: “Since

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you are not my friend, I know what I have to do!” (159).61 While the duke’s words may appear cryptic when taken at face value, Marguerite clarifies the enigmatic threat by noting that Lorenzino “congnoiss[oi]t la cruaulté de son maistre” (91), or knew and understood “what a ruthless man his master was” (159). Given the option of pandering to the duke’s sexual appetites, and thereby sacrificing his own sister’s honor, or defying the despot and braving his murderous wrath, Lorenzino opts for a third choice—to ambush and kill Alessandro, even at the risk of his own life: He came to the conclusion that he would die rather than submit his sister, one of the most virtuous women in all Italy, to anything so vile, and that his duty was to rid his homeland of this tyrant who was bent on forcing disgrace upon his family name. He was convinced that if he did not remove the Duke, neither his own life nor the lives of those dear to him could be guaranteed (160).62 As noted earlier, the male storytellers excoriate Lorenzino rather than the duke in this tale on the grounds that he betrayed his lord: “The ladies said [the assassin] was a good brother and a virtuous citizen; the men, taking the contrary view, insisted that he was a traitor and a bad servant” (163).63 Clearly the queen’s portrait of Lorenzino is ambivalent: for if she portrays him on one hand as a loyal brother and would-be liberator of his country, she in no way romanticizes his unchivalrous attack on an unarmed man or his Machiavellian wish to slay “cinq ou six de ceulx qui estoient les prochains du duc” (93), or five or six of Alexander’s close friends or relatives.64 One might argue that Lorenzino, his back against a figurative wall, is simply being pragmatic. Notwithstanding the rhetoric of honor and morality he uses to justify his crime, his determination to kill the duke by any means at his disposal clearly trumps his desire to fight honorably: as a fledgling but well-prepared assassin, he understands that facing his opponent man-toman, or challenging him to a duel according to protocols of courtly etiquette, would minimize his chances of success and likely doom his coup d’état from the outset. In this sense, the seigniorial code that Lorenzo transgresses, and the grounds upon which Marguerite’s male devisants condemn him, are anachronistic: far from being an old-style lord, bound by the ethics of reciprocity and by the motto “noblesse oblige,” Alessandro himself is a Machiavellian despot to whom Lorenzino responds in kind, by assassinating the duke before the latter kills him, and by threatening the latter’s family much as Alessandro threatened his own sister. From a political perspective, Lorenzino understands that allowing the duke’s heirs to survive will thwart his public goal, or the eradication of tyranny in Florence. While Marguerite likely heard this rationale expressed by Lorenzino himself, who sought the protection of Catherine de’ Medici in France following his coup, the concept is also Machiavellian. Repeatedly in The Prince, the author stresses the importance of “exterminating” or “extinguishing” the usurped ruler’s

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family, not for moral reasons but rather for pure expediency.65 While the Florentine writer advocates this strategy primarily for sitting rulers who have annexed or conquered foreign principalities, Marguerite appropriates Machiavelli’s consequentialist political views without condoning them, and demonstrates their relevance for usurpers as well as princes. To be sure, Lorenzino is dissuaded from killing his duke’s close friends or relatives by his servant, who argues that he would do better to think of saving his own life than of killing others (“vous ferez mieulx de penser à saulver vostre vie, que de la vouloir oster à aultres,” 93), given the time constraints that result from his unexpectedly long struggle with Alessandro. “If we took as long to get rid of them as we did to get rid of the Duke,” the retainer points out, “daylight would be upon us” (161–62).66 While the storyteller, Dagoucin, reflects equivocally on the servant’s lack of boldness (93), perhaps suggesting that Lorenzino might have succeeded in his political objectives had he heeded Machiavelli’s counsel and assassinated powerful members of the duke’s (and his own) family, the devisant also draws our attention to the assassin’s guilty conscience (“la mauvaise conscience,” 93), which persuades him to take his servant’s common-sense advice.67 In the end, Lorenzino may have liberated Florence from a tyrant, but he dirties his own hands in the process. In addition to being vilified as an assassin, which is a far cry from his self-image as a liberator, he leaves both his sister and his city in the hands of a new despot, Cosimo de’ Medici, who subsequently eliminates the last vestiges of republicanism in Florence and arranges to have Lorenzino killed. To borrow again from Machiavelli, “Men gladly change their masters, thinking to better themselves, and this belief causes them to take arms against their ruler; but they fool themselves in this, since with experience they see that things have become worse.”68 What interests us, however, is not Lorenzino’s historical legacy or even the ongoing debates over his methods and his motives, but rather the connection between his story and Marguerite’s reflections on governance and kingship. Much like Alfonso of Naples, who seduces the matron in nouvelle 3 by “showering [her with] blandishments and gifts” (84),69 Alessandro is a master thespian who uses his charm, intelligence, and rhetorical skills as vehicles of seduction—not just in his advances toward women, but also in his deft manipulation of those around him. When he waxes poetic about his friendship with Lorenzino, his face bathed in tears, the duke’s cousin accedes automatically to the duke’s request for a favor: “Whatever is in my power to perform shall be performed” (159).70 Lorenzino responds with heartfelt pity, unaware that he has agreed to dishonor his sister by pandering to Alessandro’s lust. Only when Lorenzino balks at the duke’s request does he discover that the latter’s rhetoric was staged; and his protestations of friendship, hollow. More dramatically than King Alfonso, Alessandro corrupts those around him. When his own dissuasive efforts fail and his entreaties to the duke, urging the latter to spare his sister, fall on deaf ears, Lorenzino arguably has

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no choice but to act dishonorably. Certainly murdering Alessandro is shameful, but upon reflection, the same may be said of all his alternatives— which range from obeying his ruler and blithely ruining his own sister, to committing suicide, running away, endangering others by enlisting their support for his coup, and procuring a different female victim to sate his duke’s lust. Ultimately, Lorenzino’s ruthlessness mirrors that of his ruler, an eventuality whose seeds are planted at the very start of the novella. Not only is Lorenzino obeyed like the duke himself (“sa parolle estoit obeye et craincte comme celle du duc,” 90) because of their friendship, Dagoucin tells us, but the cousins are so close that one might be called the other’s second self (“l’on le pouvoit nommer le second luy-mesmes,” 90). As in novella 3, moreover, where the cuckolded gentleman replicates his king’s offenses, the parallels between Lorenzino and Alessandro seem far from gratuitous. Instead, it appears likely that the author is purposely excoriating monarchical cruelty through her portrayal of the duke, whom we see through the privileged eyes of his victim; and that she is showing us, secondly, to what degree power corrupts, as it radiates outward from iniquitous leaders to infect the culture as a whole. If novella 3 offers a jocular warning to complacent monarchs who have little or no inkling that “servants have secrets,” Dagoucin’s closing moral at the end of nouvelle 12 drives the point home in less cryptic terms: Princes, and all who have authority, should beware of offending those beneath them. For when God desires to take vengeance on the sinner, there is no man (so humble) that he cannot inflict hurt, and no man so high that he has all power to harm those who are in God’s charge (163).71 While Marguerite may or may not be warning her brother and his heirs about the dangers of harsh governance in this passage, it seems clear that she can envision, as some others in her class cannot, the potential threats to the French monarchy that may be fomenting in the lower strata of society as a response to corrupt leadership, religious oppression, strong-armed judiciary tactics, and economic hardship. The references to God moreover suggest an alliance between these “inferiors” and the “high” heavens, or a reversal of the upper and lower political strata, as the meek and lowly rise up and overthrow their misguided “betters” in a gesture of righteous outrage and deep-seated discontent, to which their out-of-touch rulers remain blind and indifferent. Given Jeanne d’Albret’s implication that these are romans jovials, as opposed to more serious reflections on religion or politics that might rile the Sorbonne censors, it is no surprise that Dagoucin deflects the topic from regicide to love, and the tone from cautionary to flirtatious, at the end of the passage: “Do not, I beg you, Ladies, enter into dispute over something that is now long past, but take heed lest your beauty cause suffering a thousand

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times more cruel than the death that I have just described” (163).72 This rapid shift from matters of state to trivial dalliances, and from ethics to aesthetics, mutes both the content and register of novella 12 so abruptly that Marguerite’s clear-sighted political warning, as serious and controversial as any in the Heptaméron, is effectively camouflaged. Lest we dismiss this rapid veiling of political discourse as unimportant, we should note that Marguerite employs the same strategy in nouvelle 3. Like King Alfonso, we “see” a cerf (stag) but hear about serfs (servants) in lightning-quick succession; and just as we begin to decipher the cryptic assertion, potentially subversive, that “servants have secrets,” Marguerite quickly shutters this fleeting glimpse of class conflict in favor of facetious comments about stag’s horns, cuckoldry, and virility: “Saffredent,” said Ennasuite, laughing, “I’m quite sure that if you were still such an ardent lover as you used to be, you wouldn’t mind putting up with horns as big as oaks, as long as you could give a pair back when the fancy took you. But you’re starting to go grey, you know, and it really is time you began to give your appetites a rest” (89).73 Once again, the queen of Navarre veils her sociopolitical discourse with comedy, frivolity, and banter. Like nouvelles 3 and 11, Marguerite’s most egregious example of cruel governance, story 51, is also set in Italy, this time in Urbino at the court of Duke Francesco Maria della Rovere. Already infamous for his “vengeance et cruaulté” (331), or vindictiveness and cruelty, two vices that Marguerite’s devisants attribute to Italian culture in general, the duke has an innocent serving girl executed in this story, despite promising his wife that he will not harm the “jeune damoiselle” (329). While Oisille’s narrative does not foreground verbs of seeing, it unfolds as both a contrast and an instructive bridge between different types of gazes. First, the “keen watch” (429; “grand guet,” 329) the duke secretly maintains over his son and household in order to control them is answered by the girl’s lucid but covert view of her master’s cruelty, fully visible to servants, and yet veiled to others by his benevolent “myne” (330) or mien. Second, the “pitiful sight” (428; “piteulx spectacle,” 329) of the girl’s hanging, which moves first-hand witnesses (“ceulx qui ont veu,” 329) to tears, is visually transmitted to listeners and readers in the closing moral, when Oisille implores us to “observe” (431; “Regardez, mes dames,” 331) what the witnesses saw and make their standpoint, rather than della Rovere’s, our own. From the duke’s hegemonic perspective, the young woman’s transgression is to have transmitted letters from his son to the Abbot of Farse’s sister, “a girl from a good and noble family” (429)74 whom the young man loves. “More concerned with furthering the interests of his family than with pure and noble love” (429),75 the duke fears that the correspondence will ensnare his son in a marriage that is neither politically nor socially advantageous.

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While the queen provides no details on the duke’s ambitions for his son Guidobaldo, clearly he intends to negotiate and contract the boy’s marriage himself by choosing a bride of equal or higher standing than his son. Handpicked from among the ruling houses in Europe to help cement old alliances or forge new ones, his prospective daughter-in-law’s sole function, in the duke’s eyes, would have been to enhance the power, prestige, and wealth of his own household and lineage.76 Given his autocratic personality and style of governance, the duke’s anger likely results in part from his son’s show of independence, which causes him to condemn the romance not only for its political inexpediency, but also for the way it has taken root and blossomed without his blessing, and outside his sphere of influence and control. Paradoxically, one danger of his son’s romantic relationship stems from the moderately high status and impeccable respectability of the girl he loves. If she herself were a servant, like the “jeune damoiselle” whom the duke has killed, the abbot’s sister would not pose a matrimonial threat to Guidobaldo, who would likely be free to conduct his dalliance without interference. With the abbot’s sister, however, young della Rovere runs the risk of either compromising the reputation of a gently born lady, with whom “he did not have the freedom to speak … as he would have liked, such was the local custom” (429),77 or of committing himself in writing to marriage. While her social status is too modest from the duke’s perspective to make her a suitable or politically attractive bride for his son, it is sufficiently high to force the boy into marriage if their chaste, but forbidden, indiscretions become public. In and of itself, the duke’s disapproval of his son’s romance and written documentation of the relationship is neither remarkable nor unexpected. Under the circumstances, most patriarchs of the era would probably have shared the duke’s sentiments and forced the boy to abandon the flirtation, perhaps by sending the youth away, placating the girl’s family with material or political favors, or even arranging a lucrative and attractive marriage for her. Where the duke deviates from both patriarchal norms and moral standards of his era, as objectionable as they may appear from a modern perspective, is in the way he expresses this disapproval: not by talking with his son, speaking with the young woman’s family, or simply banning the relationship, but instead by killing the messenger—the most innocent, marginally involved, and disempowered figure in the entire affair. Enlisted by her own love interest, a gentleman serving Guidobaldo, to carry the letters, the young female is motivated by intentions as pure and honorable as the duke’s are malicious, including a desire to help her friend, and a deepseated confidence in the propriety and “rightness” of her actions. As irrational as the duke’s anger against the serving girl may seem, moreover, there is a certain perverse logic in his persecution of the weakest person involved in the affair, which from his perspective is an act of treason. If his goal is to find a scapegoat and make a public example of those who flout his authority, even unwittingly, then the execution of a well-meaning damoiselle

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serves his purposes remarkably well: as a servant and a female, not only is she the most defenseless character in the household, and thus the easiest to kill and the least costly to replace, but her death bears dramatic witness to the danger of displeasing the duke, even in the smallest matters and with the best of intentions. His point is clear: eliminating his son, the abbot’s sister, or even his own wife—who tries to protect the serving girl—would be counterproductive; but the innocent “damoiselle” herself, within the amoral economy of his cost-efficiency ratio, is both dispensable and a useful scapegoat. On a purely affective level, Marguerite constructs the adversarial relationship between the duke and others as a contrast between malice, anger, and cruelty, on the one hand, and love on the other. Whereas the duke is driven by rage and malevolence, as demonstrated by the myriad occurrences of words such as “courroux” (329), “courroucé” (329), “malice” (329, 331), and “cruel” (331) throughout the nouvelle, the primary emotion of both his son and the latter’s manservant, at least before sadness overtakes them at the end of the story, is the love they feel for the abbot’s sister and the serving girl, respectively. Their positive emotions, which differ so radically from the duke’s hostility, find expression in a vocabulary of goodness, grace, and loving that is evident in words such as “amoureux” (329), “bonne et honneste” (329), “plaisir” (329), “affection” (329), “bonne grace” (330), and “honneste amityé” (329).78 Marguerite’s similar descriptions of the two young women moreover emphasize parallels between Guidobaldo and his manservant: the former is enamored of an upstanding young woman from a “bonne et honneste maison”; and the other, of a “jeune damoiselle … fort belle et honneste” (329). While we are not privy to the sentiments of the abbot’s sister, the author implies she reciprocates Guidobaldo’s affection, characterizing their relationship as one of “honneste amityé” (329). As for the serving girl, Marguerite emphasizes her “bonne et honneste” (329) motivation in carrying letters from her lover’s master to his beloved, and the sense of “honneur” that informs her actions, all a far cry from the duke’s own ethos and behavior. In direct contrast to her husband, the duchess moreover figures as an exceptionally loving and protective employer, whose servant “knew that the Duchess was very fond of her” (430).79 When she begs her husband to spare the girl’s life, Eleonora of Gonzaga appears at first glance to appeal to della Rovere’s love for family and his nobler sentiments: “Se mectant a genoulx devant luy, luy supplia que, pour l’amour de luy et de sa maison, il luy pleust ne faire ung tel acte” (330; “[She] threw herself on her knees in front of him. She besought him for the sake of his own honour and for the sake of his family not to do such a thing,” 430). Upon closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that she is referring to the duke’s own self-respect and self-love, or “amour de luy,” rather than to any affection he might feel for her or other people in his “maison”—for despite our inclination to misread the passage, no mention of “amour d’elle” or “amour de moy” is present.

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Understanding that her husband loves only himself and his power, the duchess warns that killing the serving girl may undermine not only their “maison,” or the ruling family, but also the duke’s own stature and selfesteem. From a Machiavellian perspective, the wife’s logic would of course be debatable: strong rulers, the Florentine writer suggests in The Prince, should strive to be feared rather than loved,80 and Marguerite emphasizes the dread that della Rovere inspires in his household. Upon hearing that the duke disapproves of her services to his son, the serving girl “eut une merveilleuse craincte” (329), or “was overcome with terror” (429); and the duchess, knowing the intimidating “complexion” of her husband, urges the girl to hide in a monastery “till the storm had passed” (429)81 and his anger has cooled. If by Machiavellian standards the Duke of Urbino’s ability to inspire fear augurs well for his political success, however, clearly Marguerite and her devisants disagree with his cruelty and mode of governance on moral grounds, using it to condemn Italian political practices in general, and—perhaps—selected theories of Machiavelli in particular: “There’s no need to be surprised by this act of cruelty we’ve just heard of,” says Simontaut in the frame discussion; “People who’ve travelled through Italy have seen the most incredible things, things which make this a mere peccadillo by comparison” (431).82 Although both Marguerite and Machiavelli claim to eschew artful rhetoric, then, and analyze patterns of governance and the exercise of power from “below” through the lens of “les choses basses,” the lessons that emerge from their political writings are at times very different. To be sure, the queen of Navarre blends the descriptive and the prescriptive in her stories and frame discussions, criticizing abuses of power not simply from a pragmatic standpoint, as Machiavelli purports to do, but from a moral perspective based on New Testament precepts; on feudal and courtly ideals of honor, reciprocity, and fair play; and on evangelical theology, with its focus on the individual conscience. In this sense Marguerite’s nouvelle 51, despite echoes of The Prince in the duke’s despotic mode of governance, is profoundly anti-Machiavellian in tenor. In addition to responding to her husband’s anger and malice with love and concern for others, much like her son and the family’s servants, the duchess reminds the duke and readers as well that arresting and executing the damoiselle will forever tarnish the family’s honor, by rendering their promises worthless. Not only has the ruler himself lied, persuading his wife to make the serving girl return by insisting that he bears her no ill will (“luy disant … que de sa part il ne luy vouloit poinct de mal,” 330), but his own mendacity and treachery compromise his consort’s word as well: for while the damoiselle, who knows the duke’s character, is reluctant to leave the monastery where she is hiding, the duchess “assured her that she would not come to any harm, and vouched for it on her life and honour” (430).83 This promise alone convinces the girl to emerge from her asylum, as she weighs the duchess’s pledge against the duke’s malevolence, and concludes that his respect for the feudal contract

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and familial honor will outweigh his personal hostility toward her: “She took her promise on trust, feeling, moreover, that the Duke would never go against a promise pledged on his wife’s life and honour” (430).84 The flaw in this reasoning, of course, is that seigniorial honor and binding oaths of fealty were idealized relics of a distant past even in France by the sixteenth century, and much more so in Italy, where a predominantly urban, mercantile economy flourished as early as the fourteenth century, especially in the central and northern regions, along with new-style, opportunistic rulers bound by no sense of “noblesse oblige.” In a desperate effort to revive even a vestige of feudal honor in her husband, the Duchess of Urbino reminds him that “sur sa parole l’avoit tirée hors de sa franchise” (330) or that she gave her “word” when she “pulled” the serving girl out of hiding. Through her choice of the term “parole,” the duchess refers to an inviolable code of integrity that no lord worthy of the name would publicly breach, in stark contrast to her mendacious and utilitarian husband, whose words—far from being his “bond”—are merely tools that he wields for personal gain and to exercise authority. Much as he himself gives his “word” whenever it is expedient, moreover, he fears that the Abbot of Farse will use his son’s love letters against him—not so much as signifiers of heartfelt affection, but rather as currency within the marketplace of power, to extract favors, wealth, or even marriage from della Rovere and his family. In addition to stressing the Duke of Urbino’s dishonorable character and mode of governance, the narrator, Oisille, draws our attention to legal irregularities in the serving girl’s arrest, conviction, and execution. Not only does the duke fail to respond to his wife’s defense of the damoiselle and her indictment of his own behavior, but he has the girl hanged as quickly as possible, without any investigation or trial: “Ignoring all legal forms, God and the honour of his house,” Marguerite tells us, “he had the girl cruelly put to death by hanging” (430).85 Far from abandoning her condemnation of the duke on legal grounds, Oisille emphasizes his cavalier disregard for the most fundamental natural law, and indeed, for the very cornerstone of social order, at the end of her narrative: “This innocent young woman was put to death by this cruel Duke, against all laws of honour and justice, and to the great sorrow of all who knew her” (431).86 By “honnesteté,” Oisille is referring not only to our modern understanding of the term, which means “honesty” or “truthfulness,” but also to the particular connotations it had in sixteenth-century France: at that time, “honnesteté” was synonymous with the freedom, fair play, common decency, and mutual respect that lovers expected in romantic relationships, and which friends practiced with their neighbors, or leaders with subordinates, no matter what their rank. From Oisille’s perspective, “honnesteté” is the basic premise or “glue” of any and every social contract, and the Duke of Urbino’s breach of this law has serious implications: for not only does he dispense with the consent of the people, basing his authority on fear rather than a mutually rewarding social contract, but he appears to rule godlessly and without conscience.

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From a certain theological perspective one might argue, to be sure, that della Rovere rules with the implicit approbation of God: for if God wished to remove the duke from power, or even to stay the damoiselle’s execution, would this not happen by means of divine intervention? In nouvelle 12, we have seen, Dagoucin introduces a variation on this argument to defend Lorenzino’s murder of his cousin, arguing that the assassin is actually an instrument of God who is punishing an iniquitous ruler for his sins. In that story, however, it is the revolutionary rather than his lord who is an instrument of God, a fact that renders the application of this analogy to the Duke of Urbino problematic. Alternatively, one might expect to find in nouvelle 51 either a defense of the duke or a consolation of the bereaved on the grounds that God’s will is inscrutable; and that subjects, notwithstanding their lord’s malfeasance, owe him the obedience due a representative of God on earth. In France the concept of a monarchy founded upon the divine right of kings is already emerging; and while an analogy between an Italian condottiere such as Francesco Maria della Rovere and France’s “roi très chrétien” may be far-fetched, at least in a narrative by the king’s own sister, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that Marguerite intends this nouvelle as a warning to her brother and his heirs. In a different context, to be sure, the duchess’s eventual acquiescence to her husband’s demands might make her an exemplar of wifely respect for authority and, by analogy, the epitome of a good subject’s obedience to her lord: for notwithstanding her fear that following della Rovere’s orders will place the serving girl in danger, she accedes to his will and restores the damoiselle to their household, opting to trust her husband and ruler in accordance with patriarchal law, rather than following her own conscience or intuition. Yet in the frame discussion that follows this nouvelle, it is very telling that not even one of the ten devisants advocates passive forbearance of this type in the face of seigniorial cruelty, or blind obedience and devotion to one’s ruler. While the wife is a sympathetic figure, no one praises her for her credulity or her fidelity to a monster. On the contrary, both Dagoucin and the frame discussants focus critically on the duke’s lack of conscience, reprising a key theme of Christian humanism and of evangelical theology. In Rabelais’s own “education of a Christian prince,” or the letter on learning (chap. 8) from Gargantua to his son in Pantagruel (1532), the Utopian king urges his heir apparent to become an “abyss of knowledge,” steeping himself in modern and classical languages, rhetoric, botany, and astronomy; but after outlining this ambitious, superlative curriculum, the father reminds his son that knowledge without morality, or “science sans conscience,” will lead to perdition.87 Similarly, in her own cautionary tale about the abuses of an Italian ruler, Marguerite painstakingly constructs her antagonist as a man with great power but no conscience. Indeed, the character most sensitive to the duke’s lack of morality from the outset is the young damoiselle, who, from her insightful position at the bottom of the household hierarchy, has first-hand knowledge of his malice, which she judges to be “as great as his conscience was small” (429).88

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By directing the reader’s gaze to “les choses basses,” or to the serving girl’s perspective on the other side of power and privilege, and on the receiving end of seigniorial abuses, Marguerite urges us to view patriarchal authority from below—where the view is paradoxically clearer. While she does not use the specific term “conscience” again in the nouvelle, the author not only tells us that della Rovere is slow to forgive (“il n’estoit pas si aisé à pardonner comme il en faisoit la myne,” 330), a distinctly un-Christian quality, but also that he “forgets God” (“obliant Dieu,” 331) when he puts the serving girl to death—in a manner reminiscent of Rabelais’s Picrochole, whom the author describes as “delaissé de Dieu” or forsaken by God. 89 The devisants develop this theological analysis of della Rovere and other tyrants more fully in the frame discussion, suggesting that they are so inebriated with their own power that they “fail to render to God the glory that is His due” (432);90 as a result, God “makes [them] more insensate than maddened beasts” (432),91 causing them to reveal their rage publicly (“leur faisant monstrer par oeuvres contre nature, qu’ilz sont en sens reprouvez,” 332), much as Picrochole does in Gargantua. While Marguerite’s portrayal of princely hubris is far more theological than Castiglione’s, moreover, the general outlines of her argument recall Ottaviano’s commentary on the moral bankruptcy of most rulers, or at least those who are left to their own counsel, in the Libro del cortegiano: Apart from never hearing the truth about anything, princes become drunk with the power they wield, and abandoned to pleasure-seeking and amusements they become so corrupted in mind that (seeing themselves always obeyed and almost adored, with so much reverence and praise and never a hint of censure or contradiction) they pass from ignorance to extreme conceit.92 Ottaviano’s provisional remedy for princely corruption, which he views as a naturally occurring by-product of privilege rather than as a spiritual defect, is sound advice from a good courtier, a role that Margaret Ferguson ascribes to Marguerite herself in the Heptaméron;93 but the queen of Navarre, in keeping with her evangelical beliefs, also attributes monarchical hubris and cruelty to the ruler’s lack of a well-functioning conscience, or of a pipeline to God that presumably stems from divine grace. Marguerite emphasizes the importance of the individual’s conscience elsewhere in her Heptaméron, not only in the context of rulers who have none, which is the underlying premise of nouvelle 51, but also in instances where subjects are torn between following their own conscience and obeying an immoral leader, or following directives that contravene their own sense of right and wrong.94 Rolandine, for example, who has exchanged marriage vows with the natural son of an aristocrat, defends her actions on the basis of her own judgment and conscience, notwithstanding the disapproval of her father and the king and queen: “I have offended neither God nor my

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conscience,” she contends. “Finally, in the light of my own reason with which I am endowed by God, realizing that I am old, and have no hope of finding a match worthy of my station, I have resolved to take a husband according to my own inclinations” (247).95 When the king and queen attempt to abrogate the union with the assistance of religious authorities and the Conseil du roi, who opine that the marriage can easily be dissolved, Rolandine once again stands her ground, refusing to obey a directive that she considers unconscionable: “She was ready to obey the King in all things,” Marguerite tells us, “provided there was no conflict with her conscience” (250).96 These same principles motivate Marie Héroët, a young nun in nouvelle 22, to resist the sexual overtures of a lascivious prior who plies her with promises of absolution and special favors if she yields, and threats of excommunication if she refuses. In the face of his lies and persecution, which result in her condemnation for prurient behavior, the protagonist insists that she answers to a higher father: “He who knows the heart of His servants,” she tells the prior, “will reward me with honour in His sight for the disgrace you threaten to bring upon me in the eyes of men … For I know that God is a righteous judge” (261–62).97 In addition to emphasizing the young nun’s strong conscience and her resolute faith in both God and her own judgment, Marguerite draws a contrast between the beleaguered woman’s unwavering sense of right and wrong and the prior’s lack of an internal moral compass: much like the Duke of Urbino, who is powerful but unnaturally cruel, the cleric is described as a man who “not only had … no longer any conscience, [but] was also completely deprived of his natural reason” (258).98 If Oisille stops short of advocating civil disobedience or of condoning regicide in nouvelle 51, resisting the homicidal fantasies that other devisantes flirted with in nouvelle 12, she nevertheless urges her companions to distrust princes and those in power: “Trust not in princes,” she cautions them, “nor in the son of man, in whom there is no salvation” (428).99 While the old storyteller’s axiomatic warning not to put our faith in princes, taken from Psalms 146: 3, ultimately extends to all humans, who are fallible and imperfect from a theological standpoint, this Judeo-Christian topos advocating trust in God alone camouflages an important admission: not only are princes just men, rather than divinely ordained rulers, but Oisille also implicitly acknowledges the extinction of fealty, or mutual trust, between rulers and those they govern. Although her statement is deceptively short and drawn from scriptural teachings that were constructed in and for a different political climate, it has potentially far-reaching implications. For by dissolving the medieval analogy between lord and vassal on the one hand, and God and humans on the other, and by divorcing terrestrial “princes” from any celestial archetype, the storyteller seems to suggest that Renaissance monarchies and principalities are primarily secular entities that are created by, ruled over, and eventually dismantled by men who may or may not be instruments of God. One might even argue that Marguerite, within the brief space of Oisille’s axiom, has replicated the dichotomy between God and

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Caesar that is a cornerstone of New Testament theology—either to tease her royal audience, remind them of their humanity, or warn them of the dangers of extreme pride. Indeed, excessive pride and a sense that they surpass others “in honour, wisdom and human reason” (432)100 is a vice that Marguerite’s devisants criticize in Italians and, by implication, in all those who are rich and powerful. By reminding us in the frame discussion following nouvelle 51 that power combined with malice is a dangerous admixture (“Regardez, mes dames, quelz sont les effectz de la malice quant elle est joincte a la puissance,” 331), Marguerite directs our gaze, on the one hand, to the dark underside of monarchical and ducal rule and to the drawbacks of a political system that depends entirely on its leader’s morality. Yet on the other hand, she also uses the Duke of Urbino’s malevolent superbia to caution rulers themselves against abuses of power, by invoking the fall from glory that is a mainspring of the tragic paradigm: “The Almighty, jealous of His honour” (432),101 often reduces vainglorious sages and leaders to the level of beasts, Parlamente warns. Far from depicting a unidirectional change of fortune, the queen of Navarre also evokes the popular two-way reversals of the Feast of Fools, which crowned “sotz” and dethroned kings, as well as the iconic figure of the trompeur trompé that was so prevalent in medieval farce and bourgeois prose. “‘I have never seen,’ says Geburon, ‘a mocker who was never mocked, nor a deceiver who was never himself deceived, nor arrogance that was never in the end humiliated’” (433).102 Perhaps in tribute to the humble serving girl who first “knew of” della Rovere’s perfidy, Marguerite extends her development of the world-upside-down motif not just to social hierarchies, but to her culture’s intellectual elite as well: People we usually think of as being the greatest and most subtle speakers are punished by being made more stupid than the beasts. So one must conclude that people like myself who are lowly, humble and of little ability are filled with the wisdom of the angels (432).103 Lest we dismiss the young devisante’s comment as mere banter, Marguerite legitimizes her “lowly” perspective by having Oisille, the oldest and perhaps the wisest female storyteller, agree with her: “I can assure you … that your view is not far removed from my own. For no one is more ignorant than the person who thinks he knows” (432–33).104

Reading between the lines: political allegory and metonymy in the Heptaméron If Rabelais teases us throughout his work with the promise of allegorical mysteries, the same is by no means true of Marguerite de Navarre in the Heptaméron. While her prologue is teeming with symbols and metaphors, ranging from the bears which attack the pilgrims in her prologue to the

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journey of life itself, she never tells us explicitly, or even cryptically like Rabelais, that her work has multiple senses, or that some of those senses are hidden and require deciphering.105 On the contrary, there is much to suggest that this is not the case, including Jeanne d’Albret’s effort to trivialize the tales as amusing bagatelles and Parlamente’s initial proposal of storytelling for recreational purposes, a project she represents as a light-hearted pastime or game (“passetemps ou jeu,” 9) in the style of Boccaccio. On the one hand, her insistence on the veracity (“se delibererent … de n’escripre nulle nouvelle qui ne soit veritable histoire,” 9) of the stories may appear to hint at a deeper meaning below the surface of the text: on the other hand, however, Parlamente’s determination to exclude the “art” of “gens de lettres” seems to nullify this interpretation, since her goal is to tell the truth plainly without elaborate rhetorical devices that obscure it—such as allegory.106 Even if Marguerite seems to eschew the buried meanings and multiple interpretive layers that her fellow humanists so enjoyed, there is much to suggest that her overt rejection of allegory is itself a smokescreen, designed in part to help her elude the scrutiny of Sorbonne censors and others bent on unearthing traces of dissidence within her text.107 With its prologue, frame discussions, and stories within stories, the Heptaméron is by its very structure a multilayered work; and given its telescopic configuration, similar to that of Russian dolls, any contention that the inner stories are devoid of deeper meaning rings hollow. Certainly there are autobiographical echoes, reflections on the rights and condition of women, evangelical overtones, discourses on the nature and vicissitudes of love, and a biting satire of clerical hypocrisy in the Heptaméron; but this rich array of themes and topics, despite being more serious and thought-provoking that the term romans jovials would suggest, is by no means hidden or even camouflaged. Despite being couched at times in laughter, these serious undercurrents are relatively transparent. At the same time, however, the queen’s penchant for highlighting “les choses basses” repeatedly directs our gaze downward, suggesting that there are hidden truths to be excavated in the interstices of her text.108 Given the New Testament echoes in Marguerite’s archaeological gaze, one might expect any veiled truths in her writing to be religious in nature. Not only is her discourse filled with evangelical rhetoric, after all, but her use of lowly victims and witnesses to unveil transgressions among “les grands” reminds us that the first shall be last, and the last first, in the new heaven outlined by Christ in the gospels. Most scholarship on Marguerite de Navarre’s use of allegory indeed concentrates on its theological and specifically evangelical implications—particularly in her poetry and theater. Without contesting the merit of these readings, which have enriched our understanding of Marguerite’s spirituality, let us look, however, at a different type of allegory—still evangelical, but also metonymic and political in nature—that appears not in the queen’s poetry but in her prose. While the examples of political allegory that follow are based on analogies between the body of the family and the body politic,109 which liken the head

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of household to the head of state, many novellas in the Heptaméron are polysemous, lending themselves to literal and figurative interpretations. On one level, they all function literally as purportedly “true” stories; but they are not completely devoid of the figurative dimensions (typological, moral or tropological, and anagogical) we associate with medieval allegory, as outlined by Dante in his letter to Can Grande della Scala. While not identical to the New Testament characterization of Mary Magdalene, for instance, nouvelle 32 draws its meaning from and helps elucidate its biblical intertext, and may be read both typologically and morally or tropologically. At a stretch, one might also view the couple’s reconciliation as an anagogical representation of the eternal harmony awaiting those who repent and are pardoned. Yet as Rigolot points out, even if we use St. Augustine’s simpler, binary definition of allegory (“a trope through which one understands one thing for another”) to guide our exegesis, the allegorical reading is “powerfully resisted by [Marguerite’s] text”: first, the allegorical parallels to Mary Magdalene’s story are not sustained; second, the tale’s historical realism dominates its figurative allure; third, only one devisante (Ennasuite) favors an allegorical reading based on the biblical intertext; and fourth, no metanarrative voice intrudes to resolve the other devisants’ “pluralité d’opinions” (prol., 8) or to authorize an allegorical reading of the text.110 Nevertheless, there is much that argues for the intermittent presence of allegory—or something akin to allegory—in the Heptaméron. First, the lack of sustained allegorical development in nouvelle 32 does not guarantee that no allegory is present in that story or in the volume as a whole. Renaissance allegory is often noncontinuous and metamorphic, as we see in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso—an allegorical “shape shifter.” Second, the downward spiral of Marguerite’s archaeological gaze in the Heptaméron, which directs our attention to hidden truths, together with her emphasis on “les choses basses,” her spoken and unspoken reminders that “l’habit ne fait pas le moine” (“you can’t judge a book by its cover”), and her propensity for enfolding political commentary in household dramas, suggests that there is much more afoot in her nouvelles, or at least some of her nouvelles, than initially meets the eye. Without suggesting that these novellas are complex, multitiered allegories of the type Dante describes, or even consistently developed binary allegories in which the literary narrative “means” something else, I am proposing in these final pages that at least some of Marguerite’s nouvelles either allegorize the political situation in sixteenthcentury France, or contain elements of political allegory.111 Because the “allegorical meaning coexists with the literal [meaning]” in these texts, we may also label it “metonymic allegory,” as theorized by Raymond J. Wilson.112 Marguerite’s most striking example of metonymic political allegory is nouvelle 31, a simple tale of clerical transgression and husbandly neglect that some scholars have compared to Rutebeuf’s “Frere Denise.”113 In the earlier work, one of many medieval stories about monastic transvestism, an

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iniquitous friar persuades an innocent girl that to become truly holy, she should become a monk like him and enter his monastery. 114 Accordingly, she cuts her hair, dons men’s clothing, and, without telling her parents, leaves home in secret to a pursue a life of spiritual contemplation. Much like the hermit in Boccaccio’s Decameron 3.10, who persuades Alibech that “putting the devil in hell,” or having sex, is a gesture of piety and devotion, Rutebeuf’s monk convinces his naïve victim that her sexual initiation is a form of religious instruction and that their ongoing carnal relationship is a way to serve God.115 Written more than two and a half centuries later, against a background of reformist ferment, Marguerite’s nouvelle 31 also involves an iniquitous friar who kidnaps a woman clothed in a monk’s habit, setting off for his monastery with her; but there the similarities end. In de Navarre’s later variation on the transvestite monk motif, the victim is not a willing participant in her own abduction, but a resisting subject, made vulnerable by her husband’s absence and the power he gives to his confessor. Nor is the Cordelier a charming but benign profligate, as Simon was in “Frère Denise”: instead, he forcibly cuts the matron’s hair, puts a monk’s habit on her, and threatens her with death if she dissents. To be sure, both Rutebeuf and Marguerite are exposing clerical lasciviousness and duplicity, but de Navarre’s tale differs from Rutebeuf’s, and from other legends of cross-dressing female monks, in its focus on the neglectful husband, who blithely yields his secular authority to a clergyman; in its depiction of a Cordelier who is not just hypocritical and lecherous, but a murderer; in its substitution of a wise and proactive matron for a naïve girl, through whose eyes we see much of the story; in its foregrounding of murdered servants, whose cut throats seem to figure ecclesiastical censorship; and in its use of the gaze, shared by two “outsiders within,” as a revelational tool. In place of protective parents, such as those of Rutebeuf’s Denise, nouvelle 31 features a strong but inattentive husband, visually limited by his hegemonic viewing position, who foreshadows Orgon in Molière’s Tartuffe. So great is his liking for the Cordeliers, whose outward holiness dazzles him, that the gentil homme not only shares his wealth with them, but also chooses one as his confessor and gives him the run of the household during his own absence: [Near the monastery] there lived a certain gentleman who had become so friendly with the friars that there was nothing he had which he would not gladly give them in order to be able to share in their good works, their fasts and their disciplines. Now one of the good brothers—a handsome strapping fellow he was—had been taken on by this gentleman as his confessor and had as much authority (“puissance de commander”) in the gentleman’s household as the gentleman himself (326).116 In addition to identifying the husband within the era’s confessional polemics as a devotee of Catholicism’s outward “works” (“biensfaicts, jeusnes et

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disciplines”) rather than the interiority of faith alone (sola fide), as advocated by Protestants such as Luther, the above passage foregrounds a transfer of authority within the household from the latter’s rightful and secular head, the gentil homme, to his confessor, in a skewed variation of the patrilineal, father-to-father succession of patriarchy.117 In and of itself, the phrase “puissance de commander” (literally, “power to command”) lends the nouvelle political significance, which is enhanced by the analogy between the head of household and the head of state in contemporary allegories of the body, and by the king’s identity as maritus republicae, or husband of the realm, in sixteenth-century France.118 That the husband yields his authority over the household to a Cordelier, here a metonymical figure of the Church and its abuses, rather than a kinsman, a trusted servant, or a relative of his wife, further enhances the cautionary tale’s political connotations by allegorizing and destabilizing the relationship between the “Two Kingdoms,” or between secular and ecclesiastical governance. This reading is supported by the husband and Cordelier’s symmetrical “houses,” the one (“la maison du … gentil homme,” 237) temporal and the other (“un couvent de Cordeliers,” 237; “le dit monastere,” 240) ostensibly spiritual; by the two men’s “twinned,” and seemingly synergistic, authority (“[the Franciscan] avoit telle puissance de commander … comme luy-mesmes,” 237), skewed by their claims to the same domain; and by inexact, but nevertheless significant, historical parallels between François I’s post-1534 relationship to the Church and that of the gentil homme to his confessor. Clearly, the French king’s position was far more complicated than Marguerite’s staged confrontation between Church and secular authority may suggest. For one thing, François was not simply a temporal leader as the nobleman in nouvelle 31 is: instead, by tradition and convention he was the “roi très chrétien,” who, in addition to ruling by “divine right” as God’s earthly representative, was also the nominal head of both the Gallican Church and the conservative religious factions in his own government that often opposed him. Rather than abdicating his temporal (or spiritual) authority to the Church, moreover, or being the trusting “dupe” of corrupt religious leaders, as the gentil homme is, the historical François was prone to manipulate and use them as much as much as they did him, and to make concessions only when he believed they would enhance or preserve his own power.119 Nevertheless, the increasing incursions into public policy by the Faculty of Theology in the late 1530s and 1540s, together with François’s waning protection of French citizens who questioned or deviated from orthodox Catholic directives, would have troubled his evangelical sister. If indeed the Heptaméron is a social text intended to instruct the king or prince, as Margaret Ferguson and Freccero have suggested, the cautionary allegory in nouvelle 31 about the balance of power between Church and State, and the dangers of upsetting this balance, is an important component of Marguerite’s political tutorial.

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The nouvelle is rooted in the confessional as well as political polemics of the era, as illustrated by the Cordelier’s extraordinary, almost manneristic, corruption, which extends far beyond the greed and lasciviousness typically attributed to Franciscan friars in standard anticlerical satire. Not only is he a “false bridegroom,” who plunders and ravages the household entrusted to him by the gentil homme rather than protecting it, but he is also an ungodly “holy man,” a predator rather than a pastor, whose habit cloaks his vices. While monastic corruption was excoriated by Catholics and reformers alike during Marguerite’s era, the Cordelier’s status as the gentil homme’s confessor in nouvelle 31, and his exploitation of this special relationship for prurient purposes and to enhance his own power, draws our attention to the controversial sacrament of confession, criticized by reformers on a number of grounds: these include its formalistic and obligatory nature, its monetization and links to indulgences, and its attribution of Christ-like (in persona Christi) intercessory power to priests. In this regard, the matron’s abduction, together with the revelation that the Cordelier’s monastic community is sequestering numerous other female sex slaves, echoes tales of both conventual abuses and confessional misconduct on the part of priests that circulated widely during the era.120 Reformers often referred to the “tyranny of confession,”121 accusing confessors of seeking to “reign … over the consciences of men,”122 and, more egregiously, of “[wielding] power … over the judgments of kings,”123 an observation that lends further support to the suggested, but unvoiced, analogy in nouvelle 31 between the gentil homme and the head of state. Among the evangelical or reformist resonances of nouvelle 31, the implication that Church incursions into temporal governance transgress the proper balance of the “Two Kingdoms,” the one secular and the other spiritual, is central. In contrast to Pope Boniface VIII, who, in his “Unam Sanctam” (1302) affirmed the Church’s superiority to secular authorities and its right to intervene in affairs of state, Martin Luther proposed instead that “authority in temporal affairs belongs exclusively to the jurisdiction of the state.”124 This view had already taken root in France, writes Henry Heller, where “royal legists admit[ted] the spiritual primacy of the Pope, [but]… insist[ed] on the full independence of the monarchy in temporal matters, [suggesting] that as protector of the faith the king had the duty to regulate ecclesiastical affairs when required by urgent circumstances.”125 In fact, Jean Thenaud, a royal panegyrist, goes so far as to contend, in his Le triomphe des vertus (The triumph of the virtues, ca. 1518–1519), that God has endowed the French king with “as much power on earth as He has in heaven.”126 While there is little in nouvelle 31 to support this hyperbolic view of the monarch’s power, reading the text as a political allegory, in which the head of household figures the head of state, yields a view of temporal governance and of Church– State relations that echoes those of Luther and François I’s royal legists. As for the wife in Marguerite’s cautionary tale, she is a far cry from both Rutebeuf’s Denise, who is easily seduced by Brother Simon’s aura of piety

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and persuasive rhetoric, and from her own gullible, unseeing husband. Marguerite’s Cordelier may believe he is in love (“devint si fort amoureux,” 237) with his patron’s devout but level-headed (“saige”) wife; but instead of gazing upon the cleric adoringly, in the manner of Denise and her spouse, she questions the friar’s odd behavior, the strange look on his face, and his presence in their home during her husband’s absence. “Go after the good father,” she tells one of the servants, “and find out what he wants, because it appears from the expression on his face that he is not at all happy” (326).127 While we have no indication that the vigilant matron suspects the Cordelier’s true motives as he plots her abduction and rape, certainly she is not seduced, as Denise was, by either his physical beauty or his rhetoric: instead, it is the gentil homme in nouvelle 31 who shares Denise’s gullibility and falls prey to the handsome (“grand et beau”) Cordelier’s charm. Despite Michel François’s contention that the story’s theme is identical to that of Rutebeuf’s fabliau,128 then, one might argue that this is not entirely the case given the bifurcation of Denise’s role and its division between two characters, one female but the other male, in the Heptaméron.129 While persuasive rhetoric and cunning are the only weapons Simon needs in Rutebeuf’s fabliau to convince Denise to leave home of her own accord, the violent Cordelier in Marguerite’s Heptaméron slits the throats of three servants before disguising the matron as a monk and abducting her at knife point. While the forcible cross-dressing is not an innovation on Marguerite’s part, the friar’s sartorial transformation of a woman into a smaller image of himself (“son petit Cordelier,” 239), or into “his little Franciscan” (327), strengthens the text’s criticism of the Church, which advocated universal conformity to its doctrine and practices.130 Far from merely advancing the plot, moreover, the servants’ murders are all very similar, suggesting that they are symbolically encoded. Two of the crimes immediately follow a question, and the other two are lexically linked to wondering and asking; moreover, each murder is committed with a dagger, and each thrust of the “poignart” targets the victim’s throat. With these near-identical details, Marguerite draws our gaze to the Cordelier’s unholy ritual again and again, emphasizing the parallels that link all four killings. Typically associated with illegitimate rather than legitimate power, the “poignart” is at once a phallic symbol reflecting the monk’s unlawful claim to secular patriarchal power; a stunted, dishonorable version of the traditional knightly blade, which the unmanned gentleman appears to have lost; and perhaps even a perversion of the sword that Luther believed secular authorities alone, rather than the Church, were entitled to use against non-Christian evildoers. Indeed, the friar’s violence against the servants or menus gens, ostensibly in support of his own “Christian” power, directly contravenes the teachings of Christ, who warns that whatever is done to “the least of these” is done to him (Matt. 25: 40, 45). Further, the murders of the chambermaids take place in “coing[s]” (238; “corner[s],” 326–27) reminiscent of the secluded corners where private confessions were often heard.131

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That the Cordelier stabs these servants in the throat, the locus of speech, rather than in anatomical areas that are less richly connotative, such as the side, chest, or stomach, also points allegorically to the life world beyond the literal narrative. As swift and effective as slitting the throat may be as a mode of assassination, the friar is not simply killing his victims: he is also suppressing their speech. Literally, his gesture prevents these eyewitnesses to his perfidy from revealing his villainy with their dying breaths; but allegorically, his erasure of their voices echoes the Sorbonne’s censorship of doctrinally nonconforming texts, as well as its more violent modes of silencing dissenting and questioning voices, including arrests and public executions. Quite pointedly, the friar in nouvelle 31 deprives the servants of speech as a direct response to their interrogation of him. In fact, a servant’s question precipitates the entire string of murders: “La chamberiere s’en vat à la court,” Marguerite tells us, “demand[ant] [au Cordelier] s’il voulloit riens . . . et, la tirant en ung coing, print ung poignart qu’il avoit en sa manche, et luy mist dans la gorge” (238; “The chambermaid went out into the courtyard to ask if he required anything…and dragging her into a corner, he took a dagger from his sleeve with which he proceeded to slit her throat,” 326). If slitting the servants’ throats camouflages the monk’s role in their deaths on an aural level, their corpses are nevertheless visual vehicles of revelation for the doubting matron, who finds an answer to her queries about the friar’s intentions in their bleak body language.132 Unwilling to believe that the friar’s unseemly declaration of love for her is true, the virtuous wife initially believes he must be testing her piety and refuses to obey him. To convince her that his threats are substantive, the friar himself directs her gaze to the bodies in the courtyard, a far cry from the open tomb of the risen Christ that informs his theology, so that the matron may “see” his perfidy and the deaths he has caused: “Go outside into the courtyard and you’ll see what I’ve done” (327; my italics), he tells her.133 Lest we miss her focus on seeing, Marguerite uses the verb again to describe the matron’s response: “When she saw her two maids and her servant lying dead, she was so terrified that she stood there like a statue, motionless and speechless” (327; my italics).134 In addition to serving the monk’s goals, the matron’s shocked silence, as well as the fear and paralysis she experiences upon “seeing” beyond his mantle of piety, mirrors the real-life reactions of many Europeans in the sixteenth-century to abuses perpetrated by the Church and those in power.135 When the Cordelier silences the servants’ voices, he also makes examples of them, effectively promising a similar fate to anyone else who might ask questions or thwart his will; and arguably the public hangings and burnings of suspected religious dissidents in France served much the same purpose, deterring those who might otherwise have spoken out or fought against the Sorbonne’s reign of terror in the 1530s and 1540s. That the Cordelier demands this same silence of the matron is clear. True, he plies her with superlative declarations of love, distortions of Christian charity, intended to reassure her: “Mademoiselle, do not be afraid,” the

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friar tells her; “you are in the hands of a man who loves you more than anyone in the world” (327).136 However, his threats effectively undermine his protestations of affection. In addition to promising that he will kill her if she refuses to don a monk’s habit (“Il [le] presenta à la damoiselle, en luy disant que, si elle ne le prenoit, il la mectroit au rang des trespassez,” 238), the friar ensures her silence by threatening to cut her throat if she makes a sound or communicates her distress to others in any other way: “If you make any sign to him,” he says upon seeing her husband from a distance, “my dagger will be in your [throat] before he can do a thing to save you” (327-28).137 Less docile and credulous than her thirteenth-century corollary, however, the matron in nouvelle 31 feigns cooperation with the friar (“delibera de faindre luy vouloir obeyr, tant pour saulver sa vye que pour gaingner le temps,” 238–39), weighs and balances her options, and eventually helps engineer her own rescue by communicating scopically with her husband’s servant (“luy feit signe de l’œil,” 239), who is returning home with his master. In addition to solidifying the nouvelle’s allegorical thrust, the rescue scene stages a confrontation of opposing standpoints—the one, hegemonic and undiscerning, and the other, nonhegemonic but insightful. When the valet and his master near the Cordelier and his companion, both en route to the monastery, the gentil homme alone initially approaches the friar(s), exchanges niceties with him, and then “[goes] on his way, without noticing his [own] wife” (328). In contrast, the gentleman’s valet calls out to the Cordelier’s companion, believing the smaller cleric is an acquaintance of his named Frère Jehan; but when the “petit moine” fails to answer, the servant crosses the road to greet him, and realizes his error upon seeing the matron’s tearful eyes. When the discerning servant reports his findings to his master, however, noting that the small monk resembles his wife (“ressemble tout a faict a Madamoiselle vostre femme,” 239), the gentil homme accuses the valet of imagining things (“luy dit qu’il resvoit,” 239) and pays no attention to his warning (“n’en tint compte,” 239). In a striking role reversal, it is the insightful servant—rather than his unobservant master—who insists upon approaching the two monks again, both to test his hypothesis and to rescue his mistress if she is there and in distress. Far from responding maliciously, the gentil homme humors his servant and agrees to wait by the road to “see” what the valet discovers (“veoir si c’estoit ce qu’il pensoit,” 240; my italics);138 but unlike his perceptive retainer, the husband is blinded by the “habit of the monk,” seeing only those surface appearances that conform to his uncritical worldview. The master’s trust in face value is so strong, in fact, that when the Cordelier strikes the valet with a “grand baston ferré” (240) or a “studded stick” (328), knocking him from his horse before slitting his throat, the gentil homme merely thinks the servant has fallen (“pensa[it] qu’il fust tumbé par quelque fortune,” 240). The Cordelier disabuses the husband of his illusions within a matter of seconds, however; for as the gentil homme runs toward his valet, hoping to assist him, the friar strikes his

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friend and patron as well with the iron club, knocking him to the ground and throwing himself on top of the gentleman. At this pivotal point in her narrative, Marguerite reprises the theme of power, which is twinned with the rhetoric of seeing in the rescue scene. For once the gentil homme finally “sees” what has happened, his superior force allows him to defeat the Cordelier easily: “The gentleman, who was wellbuilt and powerful, got his arms round the monk in such a way as to prevent him doing him any harm” (328),139 writes Marguerite. The adjective “puissant” that refers here to physical strength echoes an earlier reference to the gentleman’s “puissance,” or “power to command,” which he opted to share with his confessor in the nouvelle’s opening scene, effectively abdicating a part of his own authority. While the Cordelier is on one level a usurper, then, the gentleman’s own behavior, including his lapse of vigilance and willingness to share his power with the miscreant, facilitates the latter’s prise de pouvoir. If we read the nouvelle allegorically, drawing an analogy between the head of household and the head of state, the story’s political implications start to emerge: much like the husband in this story, Marguerite seems to suggest, the monarch must beware of allowing the Church to subvert the normal functions of the body politic, analogous to the body of the family, by usurping his own power and ruling in his stead. As head of the body of the family, moreover, the nobleman arguably wields an authority analogous to that of the king in the body politic.140 While Marguerite never specifically invokes this traditional analogy, as do more overtly political writers such as Budé, the comparison is relatively commonplace in the sixteenth century and finds support not only in the striking parallels between the nobleman’s shared governance of his household with the clergy and the French monarchy’s uneasy alliance with the Sorbonne and Church, but also in numerous references to the body in nouvelle 31: scattered throughout the text are allusions to the body (240), face (238, 239), throat (238, 239, 240), foot (238), head (239, 240), hair (239), hands (238, 239, 240), fists (240), eyes (238, 239), side (240), and heart (240). With the exception of the throat, Marguerite’s mentions of body parts appear at first glance to be casual descriptors rather than carefully chosen signifiers. Yet if one considers their fragmentation metaphorically, within the rhetorical tradition of the body politic, an analogy emerges between the linguistic dismemberment and scattering of body parts in nouvelle 31, punctuated by Marguerite’s textual or lexical separation of head from feet or of upper from lower bodily strata, and the dysfunctional nature of the household and state that they arguably figure. As Paul Archambault points out in his analysis of Erasmus’s corporal metaphors, “the head does not serve the same purpose as the feet” (49); and while the former is superior to and responsible for governing the latter, at least according to hierarchical governmental models of the pre-Revolutionary era, the loss or malfunction of either component is detrimental to the whole. For the well-being of the

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entire body politic, all parts must operate in tandem, with the head ruling but attentive to the other extremities, in such a way that “all institutions of the monarchy ... function together” (50). In marked contrast to this ideal, the linguistically fragmented organs and extremities in Geburon’s narrative, along with the mutilated corpses strewn across the matron’s courtyard and the head of household’s absence, offer us the fractured mosaic of a broken, crippled body.141 Far from being intentionally complicit in this violence, the gentil homme is pious, well meaning, courteous, generous, and strong—just as one would expect the queen of Navarre to portray the French king and princes if she wanted to influence their behavior or plant the seeds of reform in their heads. The husband’s oversights, in fact, stem primarily from his own virtues, including his faith in the Church and its clergy; his irenic insistence on seeing good rather than evil in others; his desire to improve his own moral fiber and draw closer to God; and his efforts to forge ties between different sectors of the community, sacred as well as secular, in a spirit of cooperation rather than conflict. True, the gentil homme is an absentee husband when his confessor stages his crime, which may appear to reflect negatively on his engagement in governance. Even his absence has positive as well as negative implications, however: for if, on the one hand, it serves as a literal echo of his figurative absenteeism, or abdication of authority, on the other hand it portrays him as a man like François I, or any other head of state, with many responsibilities that compete for his attention. While the gentil homme subdues the Cordelier easily as soon as he recognizes the monk’s malfeasance, suggesting that François, with his “puissance,” could control the Sorbonne if he chose to do so, Marguerite implies almost presciently that there is little time to spare: had the husband arrived a few minutes later or intervened any less vigorously, his wife would have been raped and lost to him forever. If within this allegory the matron represents the body of France, by analogy with Christ’s bride or the body of the Church, the warning to the French monarch is grim indeed: for without swift intervention to restore order, Marguerite seems to caution, the country may be ravaged beyond repair. While the gentleman’s strength and stature are sufficient to subdue the cleric, causing the dagger to fall from his hands, the matron herself retrieves the weapon and hands it to her husband, moreover, in a transfer of power that is richly symbolic. The dagger itself is a stunted and perverted version of the traditional sword, a figure of both virility and noble leadership that the gentil homme has declined to wield, and which his wife restores to him, in recognition of his rightful and lawful power to govern. If the matron indeed represents France or the res publica within Marguerite’s allegory, moreover, the fact that she herself—rather than her husband—quickly retrieves the fallen knife and presents it to him is significant.142 Not only does she participate proactively in her own defense, first by seizing the knife and then by holding the Cordelier down while her husband stabs him, but on a figurative level, her own agency in restoring

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power to the gentleman reflects her consent to be governed and a reminder that he is her lawful protector. On an allegorical level, her gesture figures the king’s bond with his people and the transitivity of their relationship, which confers upon him the legitimate right—and responsibility—to rule.143 Despite the “coups de poignart” that the husband inflicts on the monk, mostly to subdue him and persuade him to confess, the gentleman does not kill the miscreant. Instead, he asks his wife to summon “ses gens et quelque charrette” (240), or their servants and a wagon, so that the friar may be publicly reviled as a murderer and molester of young women. Subsequently, the husband “has [the Cordelier] led before the court of the Emperor in Flanders” (329; “le feit conduire en la justice de l’Empereur,” 240), and organizes an official “inquiry at the scene by special commissioners” (329; “fut faicte par commissaires,” 240), eschewing lethal force and personal revenge in favor of collective, officially sanctioned action against the Franciscan. To be sure, the gentleman’s extraordinarily temperate response to the abduction of his wife, the murder of his household staff, and the betrayal of his own trust may strike some readers as overly sanguine, particularly when we compare it to the volatile rush to judgment and penchant for personal vendettas exhibited by other characters in the Heptaméron. Yet far from using the husband’s recourse to official justice to condemn his restraint, and to portray it as a new abdication of responsibility symptomatic of his overall passivity, Marguerite instead emphasizes the strict legality of his decision, which repudiates the Cordelier’s unlawful behavior and the truism that “might makes right.” On a figurative level, the gentleman’s decision to have the friar judged and sentenced according to formal legal protocols, rather than executing him capriciously or without due process, holds a message for the monarchy as well: instead of seeking reprisals recklessly and capriciously against those accused of crimes, ranging from petty theft to sedition and high treason, Marguerite seems to be advocating a measured, evenhanded, and uniformly lawful system of justice in France, which the ruler both authorizes and defends. Rather than having the gentleman himself kill the Cordelier, in an isolated, unilateral act of revenge against an individual perpetrator, Marguerite concludes instead with a communal and officially sanctioned execution of not one, but an entire community of, friars. When the Cordelier reveals that a large number of ladies and girls (“ung grand nombre de gentilz femmes et autres belles filles,” 240) have been abducted and imprisoned in his monastery, authorities rescue the women before burning the cloister and all the monks inside it, in a conflagration which, as we saw earlier, conflates earthly and divine justice.144 Sanctioned by civil magistrates, the flames used to execute an entire community of monks not only anticipate the hell fire of eternal damnation, a fate that presumably awaits the iniquitous clerics, but also offer us a reversed image of death by fire in sixteenth-century France: rather than portraying innocent victims who are burned at the stake for “heresy,” on the basis of trumped-up charges by the clergy, Marguerite

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instead depicts Church authorities being incinerated by secular officials, not for “bad thoughts” but for crimes against nature and humanity. In contrast to the rogue justice practiced by other husbands, brothers, and fathers in the Heptaméron, often in the name of family honor, the gentil homme’s temperate response to the Cordelier’s crimes ultimately proves to be just, effective, and practical. Not only is his wife’s abductor and the assassin of their household servants punished, but a host of other victims are rescued; and dozens of other rapists, who would have kidnapped and violated additional victims without the first monk’s trial and confession, are executed. Like King Ferdinand in Corneille’s Le Cid, who condemns Don Gomez for flouting royal authority and “the public good” in the name of personal honor, Marguerite seems to suggest that the needs of the many necessarily outweigh those of the individual; and that victims and their families, rather than taking the law into their own hands, must follow orderly channels for airing their grievances, confident that their courts will be just. In nouvelle 31, of course, we see secular justice at its best: not a chambre ardente, the judiciary antimodel against which this story is inscribed, but, in its place, a well-oiled venue for responding swiftly to individual grievances, handing down impartial verdicts, and meting out fair punishments that reflect divine justice as well. In this somewhat idealized portrait of the judiciary system as it should be, Marguerite thus resolves her cautionary tale about a lascivious Cordelier—and her allegory about a Church that would be king—with a positive model of governance and justice designed to challenge the interpretive skills and integrity of her brother, his heirs, and others involved in governance; and while François I died too soon for her suggestions to alter his policies, in hindsight his sister’s insights seem extraordinarily wise. If the story’s conclusion seems to advocate looking “upward” for conflict resolution in high courts or through divine justice, the husband and wife in nouvelle 31 also look socially downward toward their servants for hidden truths that ultimately guide their own behavior and inform the court’s verdict. Although the gentil homme initially scoffs at his valet’s suspicions about the second or “small” monk, who is actually the matron in disguise, it is the servant’s persistence and his own willingness to “see” what the valet discovers that enable the husband to rescue his wife and subdue her captor. If class differences can be represented vertically as a ladder or hierarchical continuum, then, from a sociological perspective the master’s gaze “descends” as he studies his subordinate—not to criticize but to learn: “The gentleman agreed,” Marguerite writes, “and waited to see what his servant would find out” (328).145 Moreover, the pattern of sociological descent implicit in the husband’s gaze becomes literal when the Cordelier knocks the valet to the ground or “à terre.” As the gentleman follows his servant’s movements with his eyes, learning to look downward, he sees the valet stumble (“tresbucher,” 240) and believes he “has fallen” (“pensant qu’il fust tumbé par quelque fortune,” [my italics] 240) by accident. Because he observes from a distance that is both physical and sociological (“de loing

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veit … son varlet,” 240), however, the master fails to comprehend the full import of the scene until he experiences the monk’s violence himself: “When the friar saw him, he turned on him with his studded stick, just as he had turned on the servant, knocked him to the ground and leapt on top of him” (328).146 His own fall, which occurs as a result of his descending gaze and his increased attentiveness to the underside of power and privilege, effectively transforms the gentil homme’s perspective, allowing him to see what his servant sees and feel what his subordinate feels. In this literal and figurative staging of the world-upside-down motif, the gentleman finally learns that “l’habit ne fait pas le moine,” or that one cannot judge a book by its cover, when the Cordelier “se gecta sur luy” (240) or throws his considerable weight on top of him and allows him to see beneath the proverbial monk’s habit. By the same token, his wife’s epiphany about the friar’s true intentions occurs when she looks down at her servants’ dead bodies and discovers the corporeal evidence of his iniquity, previously masked by his ecclesiastical garb and façade of piety. As a metonymic allegory of France’s political landscape in the 1530s and 1540s and as a wake-up call to the monarch and judiciary, nouvelle 31 is ingeniously constructed and rich in detail, offering us what appears to be a powerful vision of the religious persecution, imbalance of power, and misguided monarchical policies that wrack the country. Despite its short length, the story contains such a wealth of sociopolitical references and signifiers, and lends itself so well to this type of allegorical reading, that it is difficult to imagine that the historical Marguerite, with her hybrid standpoints and her privileged vantage as an “outsider within,” did not intend it to serve as a cautionary tale to her brother and his successors. Her depiction of the gentil homme’s trust in and reliance upon his confessor, after all, is consistent with what we know of the historical relationship between François and the Sorbonne, and Church and State in general, during this period;147 and given the historical Marguerite’s own evangelical tendencies, her troubled relations with the Faculty of Theology, and her repeated criticism of clergy who abuse their power and privilege, the figurative reading sketched out provisionally above is both politically and theologically plausible. If the interpretation has drawbacks, they are primarily biographical and methodological. First, would the queen of Navarre have dared to criticize her beloved brother and his mode of governance? In their correspondence, her praise for the king is fulsome and even verges on sycophancy. Nevertheless, “gentle, but pointed corrections” of François’s hubris and judgment occasionally lurk beneath the surface of her letters, veiled in artful rhetoric that mitigates the sting of her criticism.148 Written privately for the enjoyment of friends and family, and outside the purview of Sorbonne censors, moreover, her nouvelles were not disseminated publicly until 1558 and 1559, well after the death of both siblings. Even if this were not the case, their meaning and intent are veiled: while we may speculate about

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nouvelle 31’s allegorical content, it contains no literal reference to François, and even its allusions to clerical abuse are metonymic, limited in scope to a single monastery that is Flemish rather than French. In this sense, the story is not a particularly dangerous one, since Marguerite’s political agenda—if she has one—is well hidden.149 Moreover, there is little in the nouvelle to wound or offend the king, even if he was privy to its composition and understood its allegorical content. Far from being heavy-handed in her criticism of the gentil homme, or of the monarch he arguably represents, Marguerite portrays him as an unwitting accomplice in the Cordelier’s malfeasance: he is blinded to the cleric’s hypocrisy not by his own vices or even stupidity, but instead by the depth of his piety and the limitations of his privileged world view. In addition to being deeply religious, the gentleman is a good and generous friend (“avoit prins telle amitié,” 237) to the Cordeliers and a benevolent and caring master, who readily grants his valet’s requests and runs to the servant’s aid when he falls. Once he glimpses the iniquity beneath the Cordelier’s mask of godliness, moreover, the gentleman’s behavior is impeccable: after overpowering the friar and stabbing the miscreant until he confesses, the noble husband successfully restrains his anger because “[he] had no desire to kill him” (329)150 and hands the miscreant over to the imperial court system so that justice and due process may be served. While Marguerite’s representation of the Cordeliers and the Church is unabashedly critical in nouvelle 31, then, her portrayal of the gentil homme and her allegory of governance both reaffirm the ruler’s right to govern and emphasize his power, his virtue, and his ability to prevail over adversity. If indeed this is an allegory of the monarchy, François I fares remarkably well. The second potential contraindication for an allegorical reading such as this, as compelling as it may be, is the fact that few of Marguerite’s nouvelles offer the strong and sustained allegorical development that we find in nouvelle 31. To be sure, many of the novellas exhibit allegorizing tendencies.151 Yet only one other tale of clerical abuse, nouvelle 23, offers political insights similar to those of nouvelle 31 when analyzed allegorically. In this morally problematic story, previously discussed in chapter 3, a young father asks his priest when he may resume sexual activity with his wife, who recently gave birth; and before the night is over, this ill-advised invitation for the cleric to enter the husband’s bedroom figuratively, through his application of canon law to conjugal relations, becomes a literal reality. After raping the young mother the Cordelier escapes: but the devastated wife hangs herself and accidentally kills her child, while her distraught brother slays the husband, assuming that he is responsible for his wife’s brutal death. In this nouvelle, Marguerite overtly criticizes clerical abuses as well as individual crimes of honor and passion: the brother’s rush to judgment and disregard for due process lead to the death of the wrong man; and like his sister’s suicide, during which she kicks and kills her infant, his rash act compounds the family tragedy.152

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In addition to exposing contemporary ecclesiastical abuses, de Navarre draws our attention to the husband’s abdication of his own counsel and patriarchal responsibilities in this story, and to his blind trust in the Church and its representatives, much as she did in nouvelle 31. Instead of consulting with his wife and together determining the best time to resume sexual relations after their son’s birth, the misguided but obsessively religious husband unaccountably requests an ecclesiastical ruling on “best practices” for managing the body of the family; but his confusion of outward devotion with inward piety, and of the Cordelier’s ecclesiastical rhetoric with the Word of God, ultimately results in three deaths and the utter ruin of his household. To be sure, consulting the Church on a biological matter such as this, which appears at first glance to have no spiritual implications, is obviously not without precedent or real-world corollaries: not only was the traditional “Churching” of women after childbirth still practiced in the sixteenth century, but Old Testament teachings required that a husband refrain from conjugal relations with his wife for 40 days after the birth of a son, and for 80 days following the delivery of a daughter.153 The Cordelier, admitting to himself that if he had been the husband, he would not have asked for advice before sleeping with the matron (“pensa bien en luy-mesmes que, s’il en estoit le mary, il ne demanderoit poinct conseil au beau pere de coucher avecq sa femme,” 187), initially cites the standard example of the Virgin Mary, who refrained from entering the temple until after her purification (“ne voulut entrer au temple jusques après les jours de sa puriffication,” 187), and expresses fear for the well-being of children conceived during this time. From the husband’s trusting, uncritical perspective, the Cordelier’s canonical advice appears reasonable and unimpeachable—and in similar circumstances, who would not believe the smooth-tongued friar? His measured and periodic rhetorical style, far more complex than the husband’s own straightforward discourse, resonates with learning, authority, and humanity, even when he utters inanities such as “There are women and women, even as there are men and men” (268).154 In addition to this aura of professional competence, the friar moreover radiates the warmth of human kindness, evident in the special pains he takes to accommodate the young father’s request; and far from being a stranger, he is the husband’s trusted confessor (“son père spirituel,” 187). Clearly, the reasons to trust him are numerous; yet from the very outset of the nouvelle, Marguerite inserts clues designed to awaken our suspicions, not just by casting doubt on the Cordelier’s true character with her introductory discourse, but also by drawing our attention to the husband’s obsessive displays of piety. Notably, Oisille’s evangelical emphasis on the gentil homme’s exaggerated practice of consulting the Franciscans for all his affairs, including the most insignificant household matters (“tous ses affaires, voire jusques aux moindres de son mesnage,” 186–87), together with the Cordelier’s own astonishment at the gentleman’s request for sexual advice, alerts readers from the outset that the

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young patriarch has surrendered his moral compass to the Church and his confessors. On the surface, to be sure, the transgressive Franciscan’s behavior is impeccable. Rather than holding the young couple to the letter of “rigorous” ecclesiastical law, which prohibits conjugal relations so shortly after the birth of a child, the Cordelier claims to have such “compassion” (188) for their “bonne amour” (188) that he exempts them from Church strictures against early postpartum sex. However, the little-known theological secret (“ung secret de nostre saincte theologie,” 188) upon which he bases this dispensation, which purportedly releases couples of exceptional moral (“ceulx qui sont de bonne conscience”) and physical (the wife must be “necte” or “free of the flux of blood”) purity from laws limiting their conjugal relations, proves to be nothing more than a persuasive cover for the friar’s own lasciviousness.155 As readers, we see through the pretext, which the credulous gentil homme trusts without question; but this is only because the queen of Navarre’s mobile gaze directs our attention to flaws in the husband’s reasoning, while offering us insights into the Cordelier’s prurient thoughts to which the gentil homme himself is not initially privy. Without these narrative clues, reinforced by the hermeneutics of doubt that Marguerite instills in us, our own perspectives might be equally unenlightened. In fact, the sharp contrast she draws between these radically different types of “seeing” serves as a linchpin of the queen’s anticlerical satire and political allegory. For in addition to drawing our gaze into the wife’s bedchamber and affording us glimpses of the abject female body that the holy man brutalizes, Marguerite grants us the twenty-twenty vision of hindsight by illuminating the tragic, long-term consequences of the gentil homme’s abdication of authority and misplaced trust in his confessor. On one level, then, the queen’s chilling portrait of clergy abuse, as well as her condemnation of its practitioners and enablers, conveys a strong message to religious leaders about the urgent need for monastic reform, a cause she has championed since her first marriage to Charles d’Alençon. Metonymically speaking, the reform-minded writer scrutinizes the Church as a whole through her exposé on its corrupt clergy; but her cautionary tale also has implicit political resonances as well, triggered by analogies between the body of the family and the body politic that also informed our analysis of nouvelle 31. Just as the head of household represents the head of state allegorically in story 31, male patriarchs in novella 23 figure as antimodels of both familial and (by association) national governance; and while the insights for current and future monarchs that emerge from this allegory differ slightly from one nouvelle to the next, the underlying warning against surrendering royal authority to censorious, antihumanistic factions within the Church is implicit in both stories. Nouvelle 23’s political content is not limited to this allegory, however, but also scrutinizes familial and seigniorial concepts of honor that hark back to feudal France, a bête noire in François’s nationbuilding efforts that anticipates Corneille’s Le Cid. Weighing in on the side

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of public justice rather than private revenge, the queen of Navarre pointedly contrasts the brother’s hot-headed slaying of his sister’s husband with the orderly and compassionate disposition of his own case in court, where his appeal to be pardoned for killing his brother-in-law is granted. In the first instance the two men rush headlong into battle after a cursory challenge by the brother, pausing to talk—and to ascertain the facts of their dispute— only after they have exchanged so many blows and lost so much blood that they cannot continue: They dealt one another so many blows in the course of the ensuing struggle that they were eventually obliged through loss of blood and fatigue to separate and rest. Once they had regained their breath, the husband turned to the other and said: “Brother, what has happened to turn our friendship, which in the past has always been so close, into this cruel battle?” (272).156 In this ludicrous reversal of the “world as it should be,” where violence is a solution of last resort, the brother discovers too late that his grievance against his sister’s husband is unfounded and that the duel itself, in which his opponent is mortally wounded, was neither necessary nor just. By way of contrast, the orderly protocols and discursive methods used to resolve the brother’s case eliminate the need for violence altogether. While he admits his culpability in his brother-in-law’s death (“dist et confessa … que luy-mesmes estoit cause de sa mort,” 192), friends and family advise him to “satisfaire à la justice” by petitioning King François for mercy. Rather than setting off immediately, as he did following his sister’s death, the gentleman takes the time to bury his relatives honorably before going to seek a pardon from the royal court (“pourchasser sa remission à la court,” 192) on Good Friday, a day of religious atonement and forgiveness commemorating Christ’s death and expiation of human sin.157 In a conflation of divine and earthly justice, the guilt-ridden brother presents his case to François Olivier, the Chancellor of Alençon, who in turn transmits the appeal to the king and secures the brother’s pardon. This measured and reflective approach to problemsolving, which Marguerite pointedly attributes to her brother, tempers justice with mercy in a corrected version of the earlier duel: as a result, the brother escapes the brutal punishment that he inflicted upon his relative without cause. Beyond the anticlerical satire and contrast between private revenge and public justice that permeate nouvelle 23, both Marguerite’s portrayal of a head of household who invites a Cordelier into his home and even his bedroom, and her depiction of a “headless” mother who unwittingly kills her child with her flailing feet, may be read allegorically from a political perspective. The young mother’s transition from victim to victimizer, and from a giver of life to an instrument of death, anticipates d’Aubigné’s personification of France in his Tragiques as an unnatural “mère, non

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mère,” who poisons rather than suckles her young.158 Given Marguerite’s use of allegory elsewhere in her works and the contrast between outer appearances (“l’œil exterieur, aveuglé par l’apparence de saincteté,” 186) and hidden truths that opens this particular novella, it is legitimate to speculate that the body of the family in story 23 refers allegorically to the body politic of France. Clearly France in the 1530s and 1540s was a far cry from the battle-scarred country depicted by d’Aubigné, where brothers turn against brothers in a full-blown civil war between Protestants and Catholics; but if our reading is accurate, Marguerite has perceptively honed in on an earlier stage of that conflict, using the broken bodies of her characters not just to signify the passion of Christ at the typological level, but also to weave a cautionary tale about the abusive relationship between Church and State, and the persecution of innocents, in her own troubled country. Within the framework of this fairly conventional allegory, what the queen seems to be unveiling is a body politic whose benevolent but deluded head (the husband) is asleep at the watch, figuratively leaving the door open for a corrupt Church (the Cordelier) to shame and violate its sovereignty, and lead its citizenry away from God with external displays of good works (“jeusnes et disciplines”) that contravene inward piety. Moreover, the ecclesiastical “corde” that strangles the mother takes on added meaning when we view her as a figure of France, effectively acephalous and dying.159 Bereft of common sense (“allienée du sens commung,” 191) and unmindful of God and herself (“hors de la congnoissance de Dieu et de soy-mesmes,” 191), the “mère, non mère” unwittingly destroys her own child with her out-ofcontrol lower bodily strata, suggesting that the “head” of France itself, locked in the stranglehold of the Sorbonne, is oblivious to the destructive effects of its repression on the French people and the future of the country. Much as Marguerite indicates in the muletière’s story, it is by looking downward at “les choses basses”—not simply beneath the Cordelier’s holy raiments, but also at the woman’s feet and her lowly child, a distorted echo of the Nativity—that we see past “l’apparence de saincteté et devotion” (186), or the appearance of saintliness and devotion, that blinds the “œil exterieur” to the monk’s inner perfidy. What we discover instead, if we follow Marguerite’s shifting, metamorphic gaze, is no longer a Madonna and child bringing hope to the world, but rather a moribund “re-presentation” of the Holy Family, symbolically defiled by Church corruption. Ultimately, whether Marguerite uses allegory, and in which stories and to what degree, is not the critical question for readers to weigh as they navigate her fiction. Allegorical or not, her romans jovials are certainly politically informed; and more often than not, their political content is camouflaged by the devisants’ banter, by the frivolous, gossipy tenor of the narratives, and by Marguerite’s propensity for depoliticizing her political discourse. Instead of foregrounding her reflections on royal governance, ducal malfeasance, the assassination of tyrants, and the balance of power between Church and State in Renaissance France, de Navarre downplays and veils political

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elements in her work. Most often, she does this by conflating the body politic with the body of the family, by weaving political situations and commentary deftly into small-scale household dramas, and by using visual and narratological cues to draw our gaze to politicized elements in the text. As we have seen, Marguerite offers present and future princes multiperspectival insights into monarchical rule, practical examples of good and bad governance, exercises in problem-solving, and cautionary tales about the pitfalls a wise king should avoid: these include cruelty toward one’s subjects; vanity, complacency, and self-absorption; unbridled greed or lasciviousness; the inability to identify with, or see through the eyes of, otherness; and the abdication of legitimate authority to corrupt factions or individuals. If we combine these insights, what emerges is the composite portrait of a king who is strong and attentive but never cruel—a monarch who is authoritative but not oppressive, just but not vindictive, ethical in private and in public, and compassionate when mercy is warranted.160 In addition to providing guidance for princes, Marguerite’s portrayals of community and of conflicts between personal conscience and monarchical directives in the Heptaméron scrutinize both kings and the institution of monarchy itself. Based upon New Testament tenets, which privilege the needs of the poor while promising that the “last shall be first,” the limited experiment in equality introduced in the prologue gives rise to shared decision-making responsibilities among the devisants; and to the right of all the storytellers, irrespective of gender or rank, to voice their opinions freely. From this perspective, it is no accident that the author dispenses with Boccaccio’s choice to have a temporary queen or king preside over each day’s narration in his Decameron: for much as Rabelais’s utopian society of Thélème figures as an antiabbey, Marguerite’s community of storytellers purposely eschews monarchical governance. Positive models of collective, as opposed to royal, justice and problem-solving also conclude several of her short stories: in nouvelle 3 most of the neighbors and townsfolk flock to the muletière’s house when the serving girl calls for help; in nouvelle 5 the batelière’s entire village joyously joins in the hunt for the malevolent Cordeliers who planned to rape her; and in nouvelle 11 it is communal laughter, shared by Madame de Roncex and all the men who come running to save her, that dissipates her embarrassment over being seen with her skirts up and “filth stuck to [her] behind” (156; “les fesses engluées [d’ordure],” 89). This does not mean that the historical Marguerite was an opponent of kingship or that her experiments in egalitarianism are republican, in the vein of Pietro Bembo’s arguments in the Book of the Courtier.161 True, de Navarre follows Castiglione’s lead and adds her voice to contemporary debates on the ethics of dissent, or the subject’s right to disobey evil rulers for moral reasons, as seen in nouvelles 12 and 21—numerals that are graphic inversions of one another. In these narratives, the protagonists affirm their right and, indeed, the moral imperative to follow their own consciences in defiance of their

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rulers’ unjust commands. The models of dissent they represent are polar opposites, however, a fact that signals the intellectual rigor and scopic inclusiveness of Marguerite’s political analyses. On the one hand, Rolandine (N. 21) opts for nonviolent civil disobedience, based upon the tenets of her conscience, in what passes for an apolitical family narrative focused upon love, marriage, and survival. No one is harmed by her gesture of defiance; and her clandestine marriage itself, never consummated, figures as a principled compromise between outright revolt against, and abject submission to, her queen’s inhumanity. In contrast, Lorenzino (N. 12) not only defies, but brutally slays Alessandro in the name of family honor and civic liberty, eradicating one life—that of a tyrant, he claims—for the greater good. To interpret these two radically different nouvelles together, as related essays in a sustained discourse on governance, goes against the grain of commonly held views of Marguerite de Navarre and her Heptaméron. It is far easier to explain Rolandine’s clandestine marriage and foregrounding of personal “conscience,” like the egalitarian community of storytellers in the prologue and frame discussions, as a function of the author’s evangelical views. Yet the volume is also a political text. Whether Marguerite has simply woven veiled reflections on the res publica throughout her masterwork, or, instead, embedded a systematically developed but unfinished discourse on politics into the Heptaméron is unclear; but the author is unmistakably a political thinker who writes for rulers and subjects alike. The social and political lessons that emerge from the volume include the value of selfless cooperation, community solidarity, and self-sacrifice for the greater good; and the importance, if one is the seigneur, not only of seeing but of seeing through the eyes of les menus gens, whose unique perspective from below is often a source of enlightenment. The text also yields insights into the positive potential, real-world failures, and fundamental flaws of monarchy as an institution. These include reminders of the immense good rulers can do if they are wise and benevolent, and examples of the evil they can do when they are negligent or malicious. While these reflections do not take the form of a traditional essay or treatise, they address many of the subjects we associate with Machiavelli and Castiglione; but they are filtered through the averted, downward gaze of a proper matron, who camouflages her political insights underneath the veil of frivolous romans jovials.

Notes 1 2 3 4

Boulenger, 3. Cohen, 38; Boulenger, 5. Roelker, 127. For a discussion of the “insides” and “outsides” of textuality, see Richard Regosin, “The In(sides) and Out(sides) of Reading: Plural Discourse and the Question of Interpretation in Rabelais,” in Rabelais’s Incomparable Book: Essays on His Art , ed. Raymond La Charité (Lexington: French Forum, 1988), 59–71.

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Power, politics, and modes of governance In addition to the previously cited studies by Freccero and Margaret Ferguson that contest this thesis, see Ian Morrison, “La nouvelle 12 de Marguerite de Navarre,” SN 67 (Jan. 1995): 61–66. Morrison disputes scholars’ traditional reluctance to view the queen as a “penseur politique” (61) by analyzing the political resonances of nouvelle 12. Outside the realm of literary studies, Stephenson discusses the political content of Marguerite’s correspondence in her The Power and Patronage; and Reid places Marguerite at the epicenter of religious dissidence and reformist activism in early modern France. See also Reid, “Marguerite de Navarre and Evangelical Reform,” in A Companion to Marguerite de Navarre, 29–58. The quotation by Fredric Jameson is from The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981; repr., Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2002), 17: “The political perspective …. is the absolute horizon of all reading and interpretation.” As for Sartre’s use of the term “en situation,” both the terminology and concept permeate his writings, particularly in L’Etre et le néant (Being and Nothingness), the first issue of Les temps modernes, and his ten-volume series (including Qu’est-ce que la littérature) entitled Situations (1947–1976). See, for example, “Le parleur est en situation” (19) and “L’auteur est en situation” (184), in Qu’est-ce que la littérature (Paris: Gallimard, 1948). An even stronger statement on being “en situation,” originally included in a preface to the first issue of Les temps modernes (Oct. 1945), reappears in Situations II: “Serions-nous muets et cois comme des cailloux, notre passivité meme serait une action. L’écrivain est en situation dans son époque; chaque parole a des retentissements, chaque silence aussi” (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), 13. (“Even if we were as deaf and dumb as pebbles, our very passivity would be an action. The abstention of whoever wanted to devote his life to writing about Hittites would in itself constitute taking a position.” See “Introducing Les Temps Modernes,” trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, in What Is Literature and Other Essays [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988], 252). Within this context, Stephenson notes that Marguerite’s political power and duties were far more significant than one might assume: “She was a royal noble, the duchess of two large duchies, and a queen by her second marriage. As one of the few women in French history to be made a peer of the realm, she was François’ peer—perhaps not an equal because he was king, but as a prince capétien she was not his inferior. As a duchess, she was his vassal and he was her overlord, but also as a duchess, she wielded a considerable amount of political power within her own territories” (9). Bosco and Consoli, 42. “Dix escuz pour s’en aller hors du royaume” (15). One irony of political import in this scenario is the fact that the procurator Saint-Aignan, who immediately requests a pardon for his crime on the mendacious grounds that du Mesnil had been stalking his wife and that he himself had been emotionally disturbed (“plus remply de collere que de raison,” 15) on the evening of the murder, is also the official charged with arresting and executing Thomas Guérin, the hired assassin. While I have focused in this analysis on questions of ducal versus royal jurisdiction in the matter of SaintAignan’s pardon, at least for his initial crime, clearly there is a second instance of delegated royal authority in nouvelle 1 in the king’s order for Saint-Aignan— who clearly had a conflict of interest in the matter—to arrest and execute Guérin. Marguerite does not emphasize this fact; but in and of itself, the queen’s reticence is not a sure indication that she is unaware of the irony and its political and judicial implications, given her penchant for camouflaging her commentaries on the res publica and encouraging her readers to dig for answers within the interstices of her text. If this is the case here as well, the author’s

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discussion of ducal versus royal authority may well be richer and more ambiguous in its connotations that a cursory reading might suggest: for in addition to drawing our attention to the Crown’s unwarranted intervention in local cases involving heresy a decade later, as hypothesized in the body of this chapter, de Navarre may also be reflecting on the dangers of delegating authority to corrupt officials such as Saint-Aignan. When analyzed in their entirety, references to the king in nouvelle 1 not only portray him as a judicious monarch, but they also draw our attention connotatively to the twin pitfalls of monarchical rule: intervening too much in regional affairs, on the one hand, and overtrusting local officials, on the other hand. “Esperant que par son art il seroit exempt de paier les quinze cens escuz au pere du trepassé” (16). “Mais le Roy, ayant la vie de sa seur aussy chere que la sienne, commanda que l’on donnast la sentence telle que s’ilz eussent attempté à sa personne propre” (17). “Eurent loisir de recongnoistre la gravité de leurs pechez” (17). McWilliam, 81; Bosco and Consoli, 42. In the context of nouvelle 33, Ulrich Langer notes that “in courtly civilization, … the King’s granting of favor mimics God’s unconditional power” (62). See his “A Reading of Heptaméron 33,” in Women in French Literature, ed. Michel Guggenheim, Stanford French and Italian Studies (Saratoga, CA: ANMA Libri, 1988), 57–64. In his notes to the Heptaméron, Michel François indicates that “M. Le Roux de Lincy a découvert aux Archives nationales (J 234, n. 191) et publié dans son édition de L’Heptaméron … la lettre de rémission que François Ier accorda en juillet 1526 à Michel de Saint-Aignan” (451, n. 75). (See Le Roux de Lincy and Anatole de Montaiglon, eds., L’Heptaméron des nouvelles de très haute et très illustre princesse Marguerite d’Angoulême, Reine de Navarre [Paris: Auguste Eudes, 1880], 4: 214–17). For François, this is an indication that Marguerite is “fidèle à sa promesse de ne dire que des histoires vraies,” but our analysis instead suggests that the author has modified certain of the historical events to showcase her political subtext. In this vein, see also Bernard, who in his “Realism and Closure” notes that Saint-Aignan’s letter of remission from the king, dating from the mid-1520s and reproduced by Le Roux de Lincy (1880), is extant. Unlike François, however, Bernard takes issue with the popular assumption that Marguerite is merely transcribing “true stories” in her nouvelles: “The ‘realism’ of Marguerite’s tales, as of her frame, has certainly been exaggerated by some naïve literalists in the first flush of discovering historical parallels to their plots” (307), he contends. Stephenson, 96. Stephenson, 126. Stephenson, 96. Stephenson, 96. “Ce qui me fait le vous escrypre, c’est que je vous supplie ne permettre plus telles choses sans m’en fere advertir … Vray est que qui m’en heust advertie, le tout heust esté fait plus honorablement.” Génin, Nouvelles lettres, 132–33. See Margaret Ferguson, “Recreating the Rules of the Game,” 178, 157, 172; and Freccero, “Archives in the Fiction,” 76. “Pour satisfaire à la justice fut conseillé le beau frère d’aller demander sa grace au Roy Françoys” (192). “Et la rapporta maistre Françoys Olivier, lequel l’obtint pour le pauvre beau frere, estant icelluy Olivier chancelier d’Alençon” (192). While I have chosen not to discuss nouvelle 42 in the section of this chapter devoted to allegory, Freccero notes the “national allegory at work in the tale”

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Power, politics, and modes of governance (75) in her “Archives in the Fiction,” 75. See also Freccero, “Unwriting Lucretia: ‘Heroic Virtue’ in the Heptaméron,” in Dora Polachek, ed., Heroic Virtue, Comic Infidelity: Reassessing Marguerite de Navarre’s “Heptaméron” (Amherst, Mass.: Hestia Press, 1993), 77–89. “Des perfections, grace, beaulté et grandes vertuz de ce jeune prince, ne vous en diray aultre chose, sinon que en son temps ne trouva jamays son pareil” (286). “Le plus beau et de la meilleure grace qui ayt esté devant” (203). See Le journal d’un bourgeois de Paris sous le règne de François Ier (1515– 1536), ed. V. L. Bourrilly (Paris: A. Picard, 1910), 15; and François, 472, n. 477. “Je ne suis poinct si sotte, Monseigneur, ne si aveuglée, que je ne voie et congnoisse bien la beaulté et graces que Dieu a mises en vous; et que je ne tienne la plus heureuse du monde celle qui possedera le corps et l’amour d’un tel prince. Mais de quoy me sert tout cela, puisque ce n’est pour moy ne pour femme de ma sorte, et que seullement le desirer seroit à moy parfaicte folye ?” (290). “Si pour vostre passe temps vous voulez des femmes de mon estat, vous en trouverez assez en ceste ville, de plus belles que moy sans comparaison, qui ne vous donneront la peyne de les prier tant. Arrestez-vous doncques à celles à qui vous ferez plaisir en acheptant leur honneur, et ne travaillez plus celle qui vous ayme plus que soy-mesmes” (290–91). “Sçavoit très bien lire et escripre” (288). “Il feyt ce qu’il luy fut possible, pour luy faire croire qu’il n’aymeroit jamais femme qu’elle; mais elle estoit si saige, que une chose si desraisonnable ne povoit entrer en son entendement” (291). “If it is your wish…, I shall remain in your good graces” (385). “Le jeune prince ne trouva pas ceste responce à son gré” (288). “Et, pour ce qu’il la congnoissoit de bas et pauvre lieu, espera recouvrer facillement ce qu’il en demandoit. Mais n’aiant moien de parler à elle, luy envoya ung gentil homme de sa chambre pour faire sa practique” (287). “Amour … se attache plus fort où plus il trouve de resistance” (287). “Se trouva la somme de cinq cents escuz qu’il envoia à ceste fille” (291). “Pensa qu’il la falloit avoir par cruaulté” (292). “C’est pour en avoir trop [d’amour] à vostre conscience et à la myenne” (291). “Ne faillyt de faire mectre tousjours son siege à l’eglise où elle alloit à la messe” (288). “Delibera de ne l’en prescher plus” (293). “Et luy a fait le jeune prince beaucoup de grands biens” (294). See, for example, the evolution of Rabelais’s giant prince in Gargantua, where the ebullient but selfish youngster gradually learns to balance the needs of others against his own desires. Cf. Zegura and Tetel, Rabelais Revisited (New York: Macmillan, 1993), 54–84. “Eut si bon recueil du Roy, que non seullement il le print à son service, mais le tint près de luy et de sa chambre” (134). “Il estoit impossible que ung si honneste gentil homme et tout homme de bien entreprinst une si grande meschanceté” (135). “Chasser [Guillaume] bien tost” (134). “Terres subjectes à l’empereur Maximilian d’Autriche” (237). “Le Roy Charles, huictiesme de ce nom, envoya en Allemaigne ung gentil homme, nommé Bernage, sieur de Sivray, près Amboise” (242). “Monsieur, l’amour que je vous porte et l’honneur et privaulté que vous m’avez faicte en vostre maison, me contraingnent à vous dire qu’il me semble, veu la grande repentance de vostre pauvre femme, que vous luy debvez user de misericode; et aussy, vous estes jeune, et n’avez nulz enfans; et seroit grand

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dommaige de perdre une si belle maison que la vostre, et que ceulx qui ne vous ayment peut-estre poinct, en fussent heritiers” (245). “Pour la pitié qu’il eut de sa femme, qui en si grande humilité recepvoit ceste penitence, il la reprint avecq soy, et en eut depuis beaucoup de beaulx enfans” (245). François speculates that the historical prototype of this fictional Neapolitan monarch is King Alfonso V of Sicily and Aragon, a ruler known for his “vie fort licencieuse” who reigned from 1443 to 1458. See 452, n. 96. “La lasciveté estoit le septre de son Royaulme” (22). “Le Roy, voiant tant de perfections en ung corps, ne print pas tant de plaisir au doux accord de son mary et d’elle, qu’il feit à penser comme il le pourroit rompre” (22). “Elle fut reconfortée par le Roy le plus souvent qu’il luy fut possible, par ses doulces persuasions, par presens et par dons; de sorte qu’elle fut non seulement consolée, mais comptante de l’absence de son mary. Et, avant les trois sepmaines qu’il devoit retourner, fut si amoreuse du Roy, qu’elle estoit aussy ennuyée du retour de son mary” (23). “Il porta en son cueur ceste passion la plus couverte qu’il lui fut possible” (22–23). See his The Heptameron of Margaret, Queen of Navarre. “Vous puis dire, ma dame, que si le Roy avoit mis sa couronne hors de dessus sa teste, qu’il n’auroit nul adventaige sur moy de contenter une dame” (24). In fact, once the gentleman discovers his wife’s infidelity, his careful dissimulation of this knowledge exactly parallels Alfonso’s secrecy at the beginning of the nouvelle, when he camouflaged his desire for the matron and staged her seduction: “Pour la craincte qu’il avoit que celluy qui luy faisoit injure luy fist pis, s’il en faisoit semblant, se delibera de le dissimuler” (23; “he decided to keep quiet about it, because he was afraid that if he let on that he knew, he might suffer even worse things at the hands of the King,” 84). Clearly, the two men’s motivations for dissimulating are quite different on one level. True, both want the strategic advantage of planning their seductions in secret, but the gentleman also fears the king’s power of life and death over him: “Il estimoit meilleur vivre avecq quelque fascherie, que de hazarder sa vye” (23; “he considered … that it was better to put up with the affront, than to risk his life,” 84). “Le Roy … jamais n’eut soupsonné l’amitié de la Royne et de luy” (27). “Si le secret du Roy est caché au serf, ce n’est pas raison que celluy du serf soit declaré au Roy” (26). See Alexandre Rally, “Commentaire de la 12e nouvelle de L’Heptaméron,” RSS 11, no. 3 (1924): 208–21; Morrison, 61–66; and references to nouvelle 12 in chapters 3 and 4 of this monograph. “Or bien, puisque je ne treuve en vous nulle amityé, je sçay que j’ay à faire” (91). “Print conclusion de ce different, qu’il aymoit mieulx mourir que de faire ung si meschant tour à sa seur, l’une des plus femmes de bien qui fust en toute l’Itallie; mais que plustost debvoit delivrer sa patrye d’un tel tyran, qui par force vouloit mettre une telle tache en sa maison; car il tenoit tout asseuré que, sans faire mourir le duc, la vie de luy et des siens n’estoit pas asseurée” (91–92). “Les dames disoient qu’il estoit bon frère et vertueux citoyen; les hommes, au contraire, qu’il estoit traistre et meschant serviteur” (95). In her “Mapping the Moral Domain in the Heptaméron” (Les visages et les voix, 9–18), Baker notes tendencies in both nouvelle 12 and the entire Heptaméron among males to make moral decisions based on official rights, justice, and hierarchy; and

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Power, politics, and modes of governance among women, to give opinions rooted in attachment, responsibility, and caring. Baker recognizes that there are exceptions to this general rule (13), such as Oisille’s frequent focus on “hierarchical terms” (11) which may be related to her advanced age; but the dichotomies that she observes between male and female devisants, while somewhat different from my own, are very useful. Chilton translates “cinq ou six prochains” in this passage as “the five or six men who had been close to the Duke” (161); but Walter Kelly prefers “five or six near relations.” Bondanella and Musa, 82; Bonfantini, 8. “Si nous demeurions autant à deffaire chascun d’eulx, que nous avons faict à deffaire le duc, le jour descouvriroit plustost nostre entreprinse” (93). Indeed, Dagoucin points out that the servant is neither bold nor mad (“n’estoit ne hardy ne fol,” 93), which draws our attention positively to the retainer’s good sense and, negatively, to his lack of daring. Bondanella and Musa, 80; Bonfantini, 6: “li uomini mutono volentieri signore credendo megliorare, e questa credenza gli fa pigliare l’arme contro a quello; di che e’ s’ingannono, perché veggono poi per esperienzia avere peggiorato.” “Par ses doulces persuasions, par presens et par dons” (23). “Ce qui sera en ma puissance est en vos mains” (91). “Doibvent bien craindre les princes et ceulx qui sont en auctorité, de faire desplaisir à moindres que eulx; car il n’y a nul qui ne puisse nuyre, quand Dieu se veult venger du pecheur, ne si grand qui sceust mal faire à celuy qui est en sa garde” (95). “Pour Dieu, mes dames, ne prenez poinct querelle d’une chose desja passée; mais gardez que voz beaultez ne facent poinct faire de plus cruels meurdres que celluy que j’ay compté” (95). “Ennasuite commencea à dire, en riant: ‘Saffredent, je suis toute asseurée que si vous aimez autant que autrefois vous avez faict, vous endureriez cornes aussi grandes que ung chesne, pour en randre une à vostre fantaisye; mais, maintenant que les cheveulx vous blanchissent, il est temps de donner treves à voz desirs’” (27). “Fille d’une bonne et honneste maison” (329). “Avoit plus de regard au proffict de sa maison que a toute honneste amityé” (329). In fact, Guidobaldo della Rovere’s first marriage was to Giulia Varano (1523– 1547), duchess and ruler of Camerino following her father’s death; his second marriage was to Vittoria Farnese (1519–1602), daughter of Duke Pier Luigi Farnese of Parma, who was himself the natural son of Alessandro Farnese, or Pope Paul III. “Il n’avoit pas la liberté de parler … comme il vouloit, selon la coustume du pays” (329). Despite its generally positive connotations, the term “bonne grace” is actually negative in this instance as a result of its absence: for the serving girl regrets not being in her master’s good graces. In this same paradoxical vein, Marguerite associates another signifier of positive emotions with the duke at the end of the narrative, when she tells us that his greatest “felicité” (331) comes from vindictive acts against those he hates. “Sçavoit bien que sa maistresse l’aymoit” (330). See Bondanella, 131: “It is much safer to be feared than to be loved when one of the two must be lacking”; and Bonfantini, 54: “E molto più sicuro essere temuto che amato, quando si abbia a mancare dell’uno de’ dua.” “Jusques ad ce que ceste tempeste fut passée” (330).

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82 “Ne vous esbahissez … de ceste cruaulté; car ceulx qui ont passé par Italie en ont vu de si très incroyables, que ceste-cy n’est au pris qu’un petit pecadille” (331). 83 “La duchesse l’asseura qu’elle n’auroit nul mal, et la print sur sa vie et son honneur” (330). 84 “Print sa fiance en sa promesse, estimant que le duc ne vouldroit jamais aller contre telle seureté où l’honneur de sa femme estoit engaigé” (330). 85 “Sans respondre à sa femme ung seul mot,” Marguerite tells us, “se retira incontinant le plus tost qu’il peut, et, sans forme de justice, … feit cruellement pendre ceste pauvre damoiselle” (331). 86 “Ainsy fut ceste damoiselle innocente mise à mort par ce cruel duc contre toute la loy d’honnesteté, au très grand regret de tous ceulx qui la congnoissoient” (331). 87 Cohen, 196; Boulenger, 206. 88 “Congnoiss[oi]t la malice du duc, qu’elle estimoit aussi grande que sa conscience petite” (329). 89 Boulenger, 95. 90 “Ilz ne rendent poinct à Dieu la gloire qui luy appartient” (332). 91 “[Les] rend plus insensez que les bestes enragées” (332). 92 Bull, 286; Preti, 357. 93 Margaret Ferguson, 178. 94 Rigolot cautions us not to interpret the term “liberté de conscience” as we do today, arguing that the concept as it appeared in reformist writings refers not to the liberty to believe what one chooses, but rather to the freedom from Catholic beliefs and devotional practices that evangelicals considered abusive, superstitious, or unnecessary. See his “Tolérance et condescendance dans la littérature française du XVIe siècle,” BHR 62, no. 1 (2000): 25–47. 95 “Je n’ay poinct offensé Dieu, ni ma conscience, car j’ai actendu jusques à l’aage de trente ans … Et, par le conseil de la raison que Dieu m’a donnée, me voyant vielle et hors d’espoir de trouver party selon ma maison, me suis deliberée d’en espouser ung a ma volunté” (168–69). 96 “En toutes choses elle estoit preste d’obeyr au Roy, sinon à contrevenir à sa conscience” (171). 97 “Celluy qui congnoist le cœur de ses serviteurs m’en rendra autant d’honneur devant luy, que vous me sçauriez faire de honte devant les hommes … car je sçay que Dieu est juste juge” (182). 98 “Ung homme furieux et non seullement hors de conscience, mais de raison naturelle” (179). 99 “Ne vous confiez poinct aux princes, ne aux filz des hommes auxquelz n’est nostre salut” (329). 100 “En honneur, prudence et raison humaine” (332). 101 “Le Tout Puissant, jaloux de son honneur” (332). 102 “Je n’ai jamais veu, dist Geburon, mocqueur qui ne fut mocqué, trompeur qui ne fut trompé, et glorieulx qui ne fut humillyé” (332). 103 “Puisque les esperitz que l’on estime les plus subgectz et grands discoureux ont telle pugnition de devenir plus sotz que les bestes, il faut doncques conclure que ceulx qui sont humbles et bas et de petite portée, comme le myen, sont rempliz de la sapience des anges” (332). 104 “‘Je vous asseure,’ dist Oisille, ‘que je ne suis pas loing de vostre opinion; car nul n’est plus ignorant que celluy qui cuyde sçavoir’” (332). 105 Recurring metaphors, although not necessarily extended ones, indeed permeate the Heptaméron. See, for example, Marcel Tetel, Marguerite de Navarre’s “Heptameron,” 26–63. Despite Rigolot’s understandable reluctance to ascribe allegorical motives to Marguerite in her magnum opus, moreover, on the

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Power, politics, and modes of governance grounds that it is too iconographically diffuse to permit “a figurative interpretation of the facts” (72), allegorical “teasers” are certainly present throughout the entire volume. When we combine this fact with Margaret Ferguson’s suggestion (“Recreating the Rules,” 159, 178), fleshed out by Freccero (“Archives in the Fiction,” 75–76), that the Heptaméron is in part a guidebook for French kings, and with P. D. Diffley’s contention that Marguerite transforms the style and moral resonances of the Decameron to develop “a national French prose style” (345), the plausibility of finding allegorical episodes with political implications for France increases significantly. For more on allegory, see Dowling, 108–13. Indeed, Michel Jeanneret notes that “the humanists were to destroy this [allegorical] system and, consequently, cause a deep-seeded change in reading habits. They were uneasy with the rigidity of allegory and rejected the notion that fiction should serve as mere example” (93). However, Jeanneret goes on to say that the “dismantling of the allegorical system did not lead the reader to give up the search for latent significance and hidden meanings” (94). On the contrary, readers “were given the means to undertake an interpretation for themselves,” as a “respect for difference” (94) emerged. See “Modular Narrative and the Crisis of Interpretation,” in Critical Tales, 94. This paradoxical veiling of the truth is a longstanding allegorical practice. If, on the one hand, allegory leads those who wish to learn “step by step to a more perfect knowledge,” notes Mary Jane Barnett, “on the other hand [it] can just as easily work to hide … meaning.” See Barnett’s “Erasmus and the Hermeneutics of Linguistic Praxis,” RenQ 49 (Autumn 1996): 550. In his Literature and Nation, Hampton notes that “moral allegory is central to humanist hermeneutics” (41), citing Erasmus’s De ratione studii (1516) as an exemplar of, and a manual for, this widespread rhetorical practice. See P. Archambault, “The Analogy of the Body in Renaissance Political Literature,” BHR 29, no. 1 (1967): 21–53. Also, Leah Middlebrook, in her “‘Tout Mon Office’: Body Politics and Family Dynamics in Marguerite de Navarre’s Verse Epîtres (RenQ 54 [Winter 2001]: 1108–41) notes Marguerite’s own corporal representation and self-representation in writing and iconography of the sixteenth century: “The most embodied member of the family group is Marguerite,” writes Middlebrook. “François’s words [in his verse épître 13] inscribe Marguerite’s body as the property and instrument of the family” (1125). Finally, Hanley, in her “The Monarchic State,” notes the “analogic equivalencies” (110) between king-state and husband-wife upon which French monarchic law in the early modern period is founded. Rigolot, “Magdalen’s Skull,” 71–72. The quotation of St. Augustine is from “Libri XV de Trinitate,” in Patrologiae cursus completus, Series latina, ed. J.-P. Migne (Paris: Imprimerie Catholique, 1845), 42: 819. Cited by Rigolot, “Magdalen’s Skull,” 70: “Quid est allegoria, nisi tropus ubi ex alio aliud intellegitur” (15, 9, 15). As Hampton and others have pointed out, Erasmus himself in his De ratione studii (1516) advocates reading every text four times—“once for its general sense; once with attention to grammar and vocabulary; once with an eye to its rhetorical figures; and finally, once to seek a moral example that might be applied to daily life” (41). Yet “what is never quite articulated in the Erasmian model of reading,” says Hampton, “is how the moral lessons that the reader is to draw from texts are to be applied to specific, contingent forms of action— most specifically to political action” (41). Indeed, political allegory per se does not figure among the four interpretive levels (the literal, typological, moral or tropological, and anagogical) most typically associated with medieval allegory, except as a subset of morality applied to daily life. Yet allegorical practices and

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definitions of the genre were already fluid in the Middle Ages, becoming even more “malleable” and “protean” (Barnett, 551) in the Renaissance, as artists and writers experimented increasingly with hermetic codes, veiled signifiers, and symbolic modes of representation—at times to intrigue the reader and enhance his or her interpretive journey, and at times to camouflage controversial ideas. Often, these allegories had political ramifications. We find political allegory, for instance, in Rabelais’s Fourth and Fifth Books, in Spenser’s Fairie Queen, in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Allegoria del buon e del cattivo governo, and even in Botticelli’s Primavera. In fact, M. H. Abrams, in his Glossary of Literary Terms (New York: Wadsworth/Cengage, 2009), lists political allegory as the very first, and most important, form of symbolic expression in his typology of the genre (7). Given Marguerite’s wide-ranging political activities, her use of sacred allegory in her poetry, her recurring focus on hidden truths, and her familiarity with contemporary allegories targeting the res publica, it would be surprising not to find political allegory in her secular prose masterwork. Raymond J. Wilson III, “Metaphoric and Metonymic Allegory: Ricœur, Jakobson, and the Poetry of W. B. Yeats,” in Allegory Old and New: In Literature, the Fine Arts, Music and Theatre, and Its Continuity in Culture. Analecta Husserliana, ed. Marlies Kronegger and Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (New York: Springer, 1994), 42: 225. See Rutebeuf, Œuvres complètes, ed. Edmond Faral and Julia Bastin (Paris: Editions A. et J. Picard, 1960), 2: 281–91. For an expanded discussion of this analysis of nouvelle 31, see Zegura, “What the Monk’s Habit Hides: Excavating the Silent Truths in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron 31,” Ren&Ref 38 (Spring 2015): 53–92. See Vern L. Bullough, “Transvestites in the Middle Ages,” American Journal of Sociology 79 (1974):1381–94; and Didier Lett, “L’habit ne fait pas le genre. Les travestissements dans Frère Denise 1262 de Rutebeuf, ” in Le désir et le goût. Une autre histoire (XIIIe–XVIIIe siècle), ed. Odile Redon, Line Sallmann and Sylvie Steinberg (Saint-Denis: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2005), 267–90. In a different way, the matron disguised as a monk in Marguerite’s nouvelle 31 recalls Boccaccio’s 2.3, where the king of England’s daughter disguises herself as an abbot to avoid an arranged marriage. Anthony Cassell notes parallels between Rutebeuf’s “Frère Denise” and Alibech in his “Pilgrim Wombs, Physicke and Bed-Tricks: Intellectual Brilliance, Attenuation and Elision in Decameron III: 9,” MLN 121 (Jan. 2006): 87, n.76. “Et avoit prins telle amitié aux religieux de leans, qu’il n’avoit bien qu’il ne leur donnast pour avoir part en leurs biensfaicts, jeusnes et disciplines. Et, entre autres, y avoit leans ung grand et beau Cordelier que le dict gentil homme avoit prins pour son confesseur, lequel avoit telle puissance de commander en la maison du dict gentil homme, comme luy-mesmes” (237). Marguerite provides no indication that the gentil homme himself is a father, a fact that may reinforce his characterization as an “unmanly” man. The absence of references to children in the household may simply be an omission, given the author’s primary focus on adults, and very rare allusions to their offspring, in her nouvelles. Significantly, however, the matron does refer to the Cordelier as a “beau pere” (238) or “good father” (326). See Archambault, 21–53, and Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (1957; repr., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997): “Charles de Grassaille, writing under Francis I, … styled the king the maritus republicae and talked about the matrimonium morale et politicum which the king contracted after the model of the prelate who wedded his church … On the accession of Henry II of France, in 1547, we find, for the first time in a French Coronation Order, the almost juristic rubric

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Power, politics, and modes of governance before the Bestowal of the Ring, saying that by this ring ‘the king solemnly married his realm’ (le roy espousa solemnellement le royaume). The rubrics of the Order of 1594 were more explicit. They said that the king, on the day of his consecration, married his kingdom in order to be inseparably bound to his subjects that they may love each other mutually like husband and wife” (221– 22). From Charles de Grassaille, Regalium Franciae libri duo, jura omnia et dignitates christianissimorum, I ius xx (Paris: Poncet Le Preux, 1545), 217; and Théodore Godefroy, Le Cérémonial de France (Paris: A. Pacard, 1619), 348, 661. A case in point is François I’s advocacy of the Concordat de Bologna (1516), which reversed the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges (1438) and reduced the Gallican Church’s administrative autonomy, while increasing the papacy’s and his own authority over French benefices and their revenues. Vehemently opposed by Parlement and the University of Paris, including the latter’s Faculty of Theology, this move on François’s part abrogated the Pragmatic Sanction’s conciliar assertions and its curtailment of the payment of annates to Rome, in return for the Holy See’s support for—or, at least, lack of opposition to—his own territorial expansion in Italy. While the Concordat restored some of the papacy’s authority over the Gallican Church, however, it did even more to enhance the king’s own power, in a scenario that differs significantly from the complete transfer of governance from a temporal to a spiritual leader in nouvelle 31. “The seduction of female penitents by their confessors, euphemistically known as solicitatio ad turpia or ‘solicitation,’” writes Henry Charles Lea, “ha[d] been a perennial source of trouble to the Church since the introduction of confession, more especially after the Lateran Council of 1216 rendered yearly confession to the parish priest obligatory.” See Lea’s A History of the Inquisition of Spain (New York: Macmillan, 1922), 4: 95–96. See Steven E. Ozment, The Reformation in the Cities: The Appeal of Protestantism to Sixteenth-Century Germany and Switzerland (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), 51. Ozment attributes this comparison of confession to tyranny to Martin Luther and to the church historian Johannes Oecolampadius, quoting from the latter’s Quod non sit onerosa Christianis confessio, paradoxon (Augsburg: Sigismund Grimm, 1521), or A Paradox: Christian Confession Is Not Onerous. Ozment, 52, quoting the Eisenach preacher and pamphleteer Jacob Strauss. Ozment, 53. Luther Hess Waring, The Political Theories of Martin Luther (1910; repr., Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1968), 234. Heller, “Reform and High Politics in France 1517–1525,” Canadian Catholic Historical Association Study Sessions 36 (1969), 68. From Pierre Imbart de la Tour, Les origines de la réforme (1914; repr., Geneva: Slatkine, 1978), 2: 75–77; and Victor Martin, Les origines du Gallicanisme (Paris: Bloud and Gay, 1939), 1: 309–10, 318, 320–21. Quoted by Heller, “Reform and High Politics,” 68, from Pt. II, BN MS. Fr. 144, cxvii v: “autant de puissance en terre qu’il en ha pour luy [au] ciel.” “Allez après le beau pere, et sçachez que c’est qu’il veult, car je luy trouve le visaige d’un homme qui n’est pas content” (238). See François, 476, n. 535: “Le thème de ce récit se retrouve identique dans le fabliau de Rutebeuf.” In his “Heptaméron 71 and Its Intertextuality: The Fabliau Art of Narrative Distance” (FF 19 [January 1994]: 5–16), Jerry Nash comments on Marguerite’s transformation of another fabliau, “De celle qui se fist foutre sur la fosse de son mari,” in nouvelle 71, where she replaces the female target of the earlier

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intertext’s satire with a man: “Given Marguerite’s feminist narrative preference for portraying men, rather than women, as butts of sexual intrigue and comic infidelity, it is not at all surprising that she would adapt and reverse the particulars of the age-old story” (5). In her “Gender, Power, and the Female Reader,” Suzuki also notes the “narcissism and incestuous tendencies that underlie patriarchy, where women are treated as extensions of fathers and brothers, to be exchanged or hoarded” (245). In this sense, one could also interpret the Cordelier’s disguise of the matron as a “petit moine,” or as a replica or mirror of himself, as a tacit condemnation of patriarchy as a whole, which either subsumes or excludes otherness. There is no scholarly consensus on exactly when the confessional or confessional box originated. Ozment repeatedly refers to structures he calls “confessionals” in early sixteenth-century Germany, while Lea proposes that they were invented in the middle of the century, based on an allusion to the confessional booth “in a memorial from Siliceo of Toledo to Charles V, in 1547” (96). In France, Jean Baptiste Etienne Pascal contends the confessional box and the French term (F. confessionnal) designating it do not appear until the late sixteenth century; but he notes that private confessions of women prior to this date were often held in chapel corners appointed with a stool or chair for the priest and a raised, partitioned space where the female parishioner would kneel and confess through a small opening or grill, with male confessions taking place in the sacristy. Concerns about the propriety of hearing the confessions of women in dark corners, out of public view, and the documented abuses of this practice were voiced in numerous medieval and early modern Church Councils, including those of Béziers (1246), Cologne (1280), and Aix (1585), the latter of which required “confessionnaux” or confessionals. See Pascal, Origines et raison de la liturgie catholique en forme de dictionnaire (Paris: J. P. Migne, 1859), 985–86. See also Lea, 95–96: “The intercourse between priest and penitent was especially dangerous because there had not yet been invented the device of the confessional.” First, she says to one chambermaid, “Allez après le beau père et sçachez que c’est qu’il veult” (238), meaning “Go after the good father and find out what he wants” (326). When that servant does not return, she asks a second maid to go look for her companion and find out why she has not reappeared: “Allez veoir à quoy il tient que vostre compaigne ne vient” (238), or “Go and see what is keeping your companion” (327). In fact, the inquisitive matron, her servants, and her husband’s valet all question the Cordelier about his irregular behavior. The only character who has no questions for the friar is the gentil homme. “Sortez en ceste court et vous verrez ce que j’ay faict” (238). “Quant elle veid ses deux chamberieres et son varlet mortz, elle fut si très effroyée de paour, qu’elle demeura comme une statue sans sonner mot” (238). The theme of seeing is far too complex in the Heptaméron, and even in this nouvelle, to develop the motif with the attention it merits. Our focus in this discussion is primarily on the importance of seeing as the Other does, or of seeing what the Other experiences, without blinders on—a skill that the gentil homme is slow to develop, and one at which the valet excels, as evidenced by his immediate recognition of the matron in her clerical disguise. In his “L’Intentionnalité,” however, Miernowski rightly explores the importance of “l’œil de la foi” and “l’œil du cueur” in evangelical judgment, insight, and decision making, which, according to evangelical theology, allow the faithful to see past the “habit of the monk” in ethical and theological matters (206–11). Within the context of nouvelle 31, Marguerite may be suggesting that the Cordelier, with his focus on outward works rather than inner faith, has

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Power, politics, and modes of governance managed to blind the gentil homme to evangelical truths—represented symbolically by the martyrdom and suffering of the humble servant who, in Christ-like fashion, dies so that the gentil homme may live. “Madamoiselle, n’ayez paour; vous estes entre les mains de l’homme du monde qui plus vous ayme” (238). “Si vous faictes un seul signe, j’auray plus tost mon poignart en vostre gorge, qu’il ne vous aura delivrée de mes mains” (239). Chilton’s very good translation of this phrase, which literally means “to see if it was what he thought,” is “to see if it was as he suspected” (328). The irony of the words, of course, is that the gentil homme himself is basing his judgment on expectations rather than empiric evidence, while the valet is suspicious on the basis of his concrete observations. Moreover, the gentleman delegates his “seeing” to the servant, rather than actively observing the odd couple and thinking critically about who they are and why they are together. “Le gentil homme, qui estoit fort et puissant, embrassa le Cordelier de telle sorte qu’il ne luy donna povoir de luy faire mal” (240). Archambault, “The Analogy of the Body,” 21–53. If, on a political level, the broken (the servants) and purloined (the matron) bodies in nouvelle 31 conjure up images of the body of sixteenth-century France, torn asunder by internecine quarrels, they have religious resonances as well, invoking the battered corporeal image of the crucified Christ, and the broken body of his Church in France, largely coterminous with the country’s body politic. That the matron herself retrieves the weapon when it falls from the cleric’s hand, and then hands it to her husband, is richly symbolic. For if the matron represents France within Marguerite’s allegory, which is plausible given the monarch’s identification as the maritus republicae, or husband of the realm, her own agency in restoring power to the gentleman not only reflects her consent to be governed, but also reminds us and him that he is her lawful protector. In her Power and Patronage, Stephenson notes that “the early sixteenth-century nobility insisted that sovereignty resided in the people (especially them) and not the king” (42). Whatever the class of the “people,” the argument that they are sovereign adds weight to a political reading of this nouvelle. “Et fut le dit monastere spolyé de ses larcins et des belles filles qui estoient dedans, et les moynes y enfermez dedans bruslerent avecq le dit monastere, pour perpetuelle memoire de ce cryme” (240). “Le gentil homme luy accorda et demeura, pour veoir que son varlet luy apporteroit” (240). “Si tost que le Cordelier le veit, il luy donna de son baston ferré, comme il avoit faict à son varlet, et le gecta par terre” (240). Some might argue that Church and State are consubstantial in early sixteenthcentury France, given the monarchy’s actual and theoretical authority over the Gallican Church, particularly following the Pragmatic Sanction’s revocation and the ratification of the Concordat de Bologna. For this reason, many scholars contend that François I had no need to follow Henry VIII’s example and sever his ties with Rome, given the control he already exerted over the Church in France. In this chapter, however, I am suggesting that conservative Catholic activists in Parlement and the Faculty of Theology operated as de facto arms of the Church throughout much of François’s reign, attempting to quell his tolerance for reform, minimize the influence of his sister on royal policy, and increase their own control over the monarchy—rather than vice versa. That reformers such as Martin Luther were themselves reflecting on the “Two Kingdoms,” the one spiritual and the other temporal, during this era

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increases the likelihood that Marguerite, from both a royalist and evangelical position, is staging a confrontation between Church and State in nouvelle 31. 148 Middlebrook, 1134. As for specific examples, Middlebrook notes one instance of sisterly admonitions dating from the 1520s, shortly after the king’s release from captivity and the concomitant imprisonment of his sons Henri and François. In response to Marguerite’s comparison of their mother to the goddess Ceres, whose tears desiccated the world following the abduction of her daughter, François refashions the maternal myth in patriarchal terms by likening his own suffering to that of Aeneas, who carried his father on his back (“portans les ans lesquelz t’avoient faicts naistre / Dessus ton col”) while desperately striving to protect his wife and child (“Dis-moy comment ne quel moyen trouvas / Qui dieux, et pere, femme et enfans saulvas?”) from the devastation of Troy. While the king laments, and thus acknowledges, his failure to protect his children in this refurbished allegory of familial distress, the selfserving overtones of his discourse do not escape his sister. By recasting his aging parent as a burden who is male (Anchises) rather than female (Louise), and whom he himself must support, François ungraciously erases his mother’s power and agency during her Regency and (re)claims it for himself. And in likening himself to Aeneas, who goes on to found Rome following the collapse of Troy, François constructs himself by association as an empire builder, whose heroics, forged in pain and suffering, overshadow the setbacks he endures. In response to this rhetorical sleight-of-hand, Middlebrook argues, Marguerite gently points out the flaws in her brother’s analogy and logic: not only was their mother’s steadfast rule (“seure constance”) the salvation of France (“de son pays fut la seulle deffence”) when François himself was incarcerated, but the king would be well advised to “reconsider the texts by which he fashions his worldview, and to trade Christian texts for Vergil’s dubious morals” (1135). In contrast to the exemplar of Aeneas fleeing Troy under the aegis of “false gods,” which François uses to dignify his unheroic exit from Spain and the ransom of his sons, Marguerite subtly proposes the corrective model of Christ, who “died for his own” (“est mort pour les siens”). 149 In the interest of streamlining my argument, I have glossed over potential biographical objections to my reading of nouvelle 31 rather quickly, focusing instead on the small number of epistolary comments Marguerite made that were critical of her brother. As any reader of her épîtres will know, however, de Navarre’s sycophantic expressions of adoration for François so far outnumber her carefully worded criticism that the latter is easily overlooked. That Marguerite was indeed capable of finding fault in her brother is a proposition that many scholars reject. Yet in her Power and Patronage, Barbara Stephenson argues that “the familial language common among the nobility cannot be taken at face value when the relationship between the correspondents was problematic” (68). See her entire chapter on Marguerite’s epistolary practices, titled “‘Vostre bonne cousine et mauvais mere’: Language and Fidelity in the Correspondence,” 45–77, in which she discusses both the queen’s artful dissimulation, and her mastery of the art of persuasion, in these superficially cordial letters. This thesis is moreover consistent with that of Reid in his King’s Sister, where he argues that Marguerite and fellow evangelicals wore a “protective cloak of dissimulation, which enabled them to survive and continue to act” (1: 355). Ironically, however, Marguerite’s fiction may provide the best response to any lingering doubts we may have about her willingness to criticize the monarchy: “Ceulx qui, soubz couleur d’une commission de Roy, font cruaultez et tirannyes,” says Hircan at the end of nouvelle 33, “sont puniz doublement pour ce qu’ilz couvrent leur injustice de la justice roialle” (249; “people who use royal authority as an excuse to commit acts of cruelty and

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Power, politics, and modes of governance oppression receive double punishment, because they’ve used the King’s justice as a cover for their own injustice,” 339). Like clerics who cover their hypocrisy with the “manteau de Dieu et de saincteté” (249; “a cloak of godliness,” 339), those who try to legitimize their own immorality with the impunity of kingship are doubly culpable. True, Hircan’s judgment specifically targets the henchmen who carry out commissions for the monarch (“soubz couleur d’une commission de Roy”), rather than the king himself; but his vision of a god who removes the mantle (“lieve le manteau”) of all humans in the afterworld and “les descouvre et les mect tous nudz” (249; “unmasks them and reveals them in all their nakedness,” 339) seems to apply to kings as well as clerics. Our transgressions are doubly reprehensible, he suggests, if our “couverture” is honorable. Like the gentil homme who finally “sees” his confessor’s iniquity, Marguerite arguably removes her own blinders in nouvelle 31, gently chiding her brother— together with the reactionary Catholic factions that motivate him and the executioners who do their collective bidding—through the rhetorical veil of allegory for the persecution she knows he has sanctioned. “Le gentil homme ne le voulut poinct tuer” (240). Other nouvelles either flirt intermittently with allegory (i.e., N. 32) or figure political insights in different ways. See, for instance, Freccero, “Queer Nation,” for a look at political allegory in nouvelle 42; and Hampton, Nation and State, for an elucidation of conflicts between aristocratic culture and modern nation building that figure in nouvelle 10. In nouvelle 49, moreover, a competition among King Charles’s noblemen for his foreign mistress’s favors appears at times to allegorize both the unruliness of France’s feudal lords and the risks and machinations of war. This figurative level of significance is achieved through the use of body metaphors, martial rhetoric and the word “prisonnier” in both erotic and political contexts, and the hybrid spectacle of men “dressed in black with … iron chains wound round their necks” (420; “habillés de noir, leurs chesnes de fer tournées à l’entour de leur col,” 321), which references both sexual bondage and actual wartime “experiences” (418; “leurs fortunes et prisons qu’ilz avoient eues durant les guerres,” 319). Set during an earlier era, the narrative offers visual and linguistic cues that conjure up images of François I’s military conflicts, shifting alliances, and imprisonment as well. Compellingly, the massive investment of time and energy the suitors expend to win the lady’s favors, the various rounds of negotiations needed to establish the terms of their alliance, their discovery of the countess’s identical promises to all her suitors, the realization that she is fickle, and the noblemen’s weakness upon emerging from the liaison together evoke the vagaries—and the expense—of diplomacy, foreign conquest, and international alliances. Somewhat differently, anticlerical narratives not discussed in this chapter, and particularly those focusing on familial or community-based complicity in the female victim’s degradation (N. 46, 48, 56), may also be interpreted much as I have read nouvelle 31; and one might even argue that nouvelles in which the clergyman’s advances are rebuffed (N. 5, 22) figure metaphorical strategies for righting the ship of state—with attentiveness, intelligence, resourcefulness, and discernment—that are camouflaged, but not allegorically. On the one hand, this family’s tragic defense of its worldly “honor” has political resonances, illustrating the merits of seeking justice through the royal court system rather than through hot-headed baronial revenge. Yet on the other hand, Vance notes the possible evangelical roots of Marguerite’s examination of honor as well by linking it to the self-love that reformers condemned. See his “Humanist Polemics, Christian Morals,” S181–S195. See Leviticus 12: 1–8; 15: 19–32. “Il y a femmes et femmes, comme aussy hommes et hommes” (188).

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155 The Cordelier contends that Church laws barring early postpartum intercourse are not intended to impede “ceulx qui sont de bonne conscience” (188; “men of good conscience,” 268) as long as the wife’s bleeding has stopped and she is “clean.” 156 “Et lors se donnerent tant de coups et à l’un et à l’autre, que le sang perdu et la lasseté les contraingnit de se seoir à terre, l’un d’un costé et l’autre de l’autre. Et, en reprenant leur allayne, le gentil homme luy demanda: ‘Quelle occasion, mon frere, a converty la grande amityé que nous nous sommes tousjours portez, en si cruelle bataille?’” (192). 157 See Davis, Fiction in the Archives, 10. Davis notes that the king is “a frame for all pardon tales,” which enhance his sovereignty (5). 158 “Les Misères,” in Les Tragiques, ed. Charles Read (Paris: Librairie des Bibliophiles, 1896), 1: 55, gallica.bnf.fr/Bibliothèque nationale de France. 159 In his Marguerite de Navarre’s “Heptameron,” Marcel Tetel discusses the metaphorical value of the Franciscan mendicants’ corde, particularly in its vulgar and erotic sense, in nouvelle 41, as well as the image of tying or “knotting” as a facetious euphemism for sex in nouvelle 5 (52–53). The term “Cordelier” of course holds echoes of the substantive “cord” (corde, F.) and the verb “to tie” (lier, f.), which enriches Marguerite’s narratives of clerical abuses on a number of levels: in a general sense, the name’s two components connote the strictures, interdictions, and restrictions upon personal and spiritual freedom that the Franciscan friars—and by extension, the Church— impose upon the faithful, whose lives they “tie up in knots” with their interfering, convoluted pronouncements; and on a more specific level, the monastic or patristic cord that served as a lifeline in Dante’s Inferno metamorphoses into an (un)holy instrument of punishment, alternatively ropelike and stick-like, in Marguerite’s Heptaméron. In its most perverted forms, the ecclesiastical cord figures as a vehicle of rape, torture, and death in her work, reminding us of the striking images of twisted ropes, vines, and bodies, often in texts decrying Church corruption, that permeate literature of the late Italian Renaissance. 160 Barbara Hochstetler Meyer hypothesizes that it was Marguerite who commissioned the androgynous miniature of François Ier (c. 1536) that is housed in the Cabinet d’Estampes of the Bibliothèque Nationale, combining and overlaying her own feminine traits with those of her brother as a token of her affection for him, and to symbolize the closeness of their bonds. If Marguerite did commission the portrait, however, it also seems likely that she was proposing an androgynous model of monarchical rule, reminiscent of Gargantua’s two-headed emblem (chap. 8, 29), in which the power of Mars is tempered with the wisdom of Minerva, the love and fecundity of Venus, and the purity of Diana. See Meyer, 287–325. 161 See Bull, 297; and Preti, 373.

Conclusion

In the dedicatory epistle to his Third Book, Rabelais describes the queen of Navarre as an “esprit abstraict” or a mystic; and for Regine ReynoldsCornell, more than five centuries later, she remains a “charming enigma.”1 Marguerite de Navarre has long piqued the interest of literary scholars and cultural historians, not only for her wide-ranging and often puzzling corpus of writings, which include poetry, plays, and many hundreds of letters in addition to the Heptaméron, but also because she was the sister of François I, a princess of France, a peer of the realm, and a protector of artists and religious dissidents. Historians including Jules Michelet in the nineteenth century already recognized her role as the “Mother of the Renaissance,”2 a distinction that reflects her position at the epicenter of early sixteenthcentury culture in her country: as we have seen, she was a brilliant hostess at the royal court, an important advisor to the king, a power broker whose favor was courted by French artists and foreign dignitaries, a key player in the introduction of Italianate art and literature into France, and an important voice in the Gallic evangelical movement. Her controversial public image in the Renaissance only adds to her allure. On the one hand, she figures in the historical record as a benign and proper matron who—apart from a few aberrations—meekly followed the king’s lead in matters of religion and politics, discreetly trying to reform the Church from within while penning spiritual poetry and unprepossessing household dramas on the side. On the other hand, however, religious conservatives portrayed her as a shrewish, unwomanly heretic bent on browbeating her brother into betraying his faith. Arguably the truth, which scholars are still unraveling, lies somewhere in between. Recent research suggests that Marguerite was far more deeply involved in the French reformist movement than previously thought: indeed, Reid contends that she was the central figure in what he calls the Navarrian network, which aimed at instituting widespread ecclesiastical reform in France by lobbying the king, cooperating with Protestants across Europe, and dissimulating their methods and goals for strategic purposes.3 While the queen of Navarre was not quite the enraged virago portrayed so infamously at the College of Navarre in 1533, then, neither was she a meek and docile matron who lived only to please her brother, with her gaze unwaveringly

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turned heavenward as some biographers suggest. That she wrote household dramas, of course, is undeniable; but what lies camouflaged beneath the surface of these romans jovials is far from innocuous—if only we are willing to following the queen of Navarre’s shifting gaze. Marguerite alerts readers to the multiperspectivism and perspectival alterity of her text from the outset: in rapid succession, she excludes the myopic testimony of learned people from her “truth project” (prol.), suspends class-based rules of precedence among the devisants (prol.), draws our attention downward to the bones buried in the mortar of Saint-Aignan’s home (N. 1), alerts us to the importance of “les choses basses” (N. 2), and reminds us that servants have secrets that their masters cannot fathom (N. 3). In addition to uncovering the vices of outwardly respectable people, including the clergy, with this subversive glance, she draws our attention to a host of counterperspectives in the areas of gender and social class, encouraging readers to identify provisionally with the other. In this sense, her Heptaméron is also a social text in the tradition of Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier,4 designed to hone both the reader’s critical faculties and the judgment of the “most Christian” prince by contesting the accuracy of surface appearances and by introducing alternative perspectives into the decision-making process. Inspired in part by Christ’s focus on the poor and by New Testament promises that “the first shall be last, and the last first,” the queen of Navarre’s emphasis on “les choses basses” moreover functions as an interpretive clue for the reader, signaling the possible existence of buried truths akin to Rabelais’s “substantial marrow” (Garg., prol.) that lurk beneath the unprepossessing exterior of her text. Marguerite’s inquest into gender, which she inscribes against the backdrop of the querelle des femmes, is a key component of her truth project. In addition to appropriating and modifying the gender dynamics of Boccaccio’s Decameron and restoring a feminine perspective to discussions informed by Castiglione’s dialogism, the queen of Navarre inscribes female narratees or destinataires within her text, explodes female stereotypes and icons, and foregrounds patriarchal abuses of power and male violence toward women in her society. With her descending gaze, she effects an archaeology of silence that allows victims of sexual assault and women in dysfunctional marriages to be heard and seen, often through their body language, across the centuries. By interrogating androcentric norms and practices, de Navarre subverts her storytellers’ narrowly drawn lessons for “mes dames” and unveils the transgressive underside of her era, especially as it affects women. While her portrayals of women are too varied to yield a “feminist consensus” avant la lettre, Marguerite’s shifting perspective restores real-world complexity to the feminine condition and encourages the reader to look critically at the patriarchal biases of early modern culture. Despite her recurrent focus on abuses of masculine power, the queen of Navarre refrains from vilifying all males, or the sex as a whole, in her Heptaméron. Instead, her representations of men are wide-ranging. Much

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more often than women, of course, male characters are perpetrators of violence and oppression in the nouvelles: literally, they reflect the sociological reality of Marguerite’s era, when violent crimes and acts of physical aggression by males far outnumbered those attributed to women, while serving figuratively as metonyms of androcentric abuses of power. Taken individually, however, the males that Marguerite portrays include victims as well as villains and men who are as compassionate, resourceful, godly, and long-suffering as their female counterparts. In her excavation of the misunderstandings and mutual distrust that undermine gender relations, moreover, de Navarre places no more blame on men as a whole than on women, instead exploring the biases, differing concepts of honor, objectification of the opposite sex, and essentialist concepts of gender identity that thwart communication between male and female characters. In addition to scrutinizing gender relations from multiple angles in the Heptaméron, at times by staging a conflict between patriarchy and the provisional gynocracy of amour courtois, Marguerite also appropriates and dissects the male gaze that so often dominates and objectifies women in patriarchal societies. By supplementing androcentric constructions of gender, truth, and morality with alternative perspectives, including the eyewitness testimony of women and servants, de Navarre unveils the blind spots and scopic limitations of the male gaze, restores women’s status as subjects, and encourages readers to see through the eyes of otherness. Marguerite’s exploration of the “other” is not limited to gender relations, but extends to her culture’s social hierarchy as well. On the surface, Marguerite’s most memorable treatment of social class may appear to occur in her courtly tales, where disparities of rank complicate the suitor’s love for his lady. Yet a closer look reveals that the queen’s scrutiny of social hierarchies extends beyond the privileged circles she herself frequented, encompassing the lower strata of society as well. With her mobile, descending gaze, de Navarre examines the violence and abuse that servants suffer, as masters seduce and rape them, discredit their testimony, and fire them with impunity. In addition to drawing our attention to this power differential between the privileged and lower classes, the queen also uses servants or “les choses basses” (N. 2, 21) in her text as vehicles of revelation and purveyors of truth. From their paradoxically privileged perspective at the bottom of the social hierarchy, these figures see beneath the “habit of the monk” and seigniorial veneers of respectability, uncovering suppressed truths to which the upper classes and learned people (“gens de lettres,” prol.) are often oblivious. While we do not normally think of Marguerite as a political writer, her shifting gaze and focus on “les choses basses” also direct our attention to her muted reflections on the res publica, which are scattered throughout the text. We find them embedded in the frame discussions, in background descriptions of the various locales in which the novellas unfold, in accounts of judicial proceedings and royal hearings that decide the fate of miscreants, and in innocuous-looking family dramas which double as political allegory.

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Because the nouvelles are disguised as romans jovials, Marguerite’s allusions to politics are easy to overlook; but once we are attuned to their presence, it becomes clear that she has included portrayals of good and bad governance as well as reflections on and representations of the body politic in the Heptaméron. As Margaret Ferguson and Carla Freccero have noted, the volume functions much like Ottaviano’s ideal courtier in Castiglione’s Libro del cortegiano, who wins the prince’s favor—in part with his charm and congenial appearance, which corresponds to the Heptaméron’s “jovial” exterior—in order to advise the ruler more effectively.5 In this sense, the queen of Navarre’s case studies in decision-making, portrayals of abusive and effective governance, and foregrounding of lowly perspectives all work strategically to expand the prince’s horizons and hone his judgment. One important component of this veiled advice is the political allegory, metonymic in nature, which Marguerite camouflages in key family dramas by exploiting the analogy between the body of the family and the body of the State. Particularly in nouvelles 31 and 23, where abusive friars and inattentive heads of household represent the Church and the king, respectively, we discover a subtle warning to the monarch not to abdicate his own authority over the body politic in the face of mounting pressure and encroachments on his jurisdiction by the Sorbonne. While Marguerite’s focus on “les choses basses” provides readers a crucial exegetical clue by prompting us to dig beneath the surface of her text for its “substantial marrow,” the allegorical development of the Heptaméron is admittedly far from consistent—and the same is true of the various attitudes toward gender, social class, and the body politic that the author explores over the course of her masterwork.6 In Marguerite, we find a political thinker who, through the contradictory voices of her devisants, criticizes tyrants as well as weak rulers, champions liberty of conscience while recognizing its limitations, and acknowledges androcentric authority while decrying its abuses. Some scholars, such as Jules Gelernt in the following passage, suggest that this inconsistency is a flaw: Lacking the imaginative force to create a myth, Marguerite could achieve no synthesis comparable to Dante’s; never the detached artist Boccaccio was, she could write no Decameron either. Hers is undoubtedly a minor work, but nonetheless a classic, for despite its imitative features it bears the stamp of an individualized sensibility which, by imposing a unified style on its material, recreates, however modestly, the world.7 Notwithstanding the premium that Gelernt places on conceptual unity, which for him as well as Jourda is a sine qua non of literary excellence, Marguerite’s “contradictory discursiveness” arguably reflects the tensions of her era and the historical writer’s own divided consciousness as a female aristocrat, who is simultaneously privileged and disempowered, far better than a Dantean synthesis would do. Far from aspiring to create myths, as

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Gelernt suggests that a writer of greater “imaginative force” might do, de Navarre explores and contests them; and rather than suppressing contradictions in the interests of aesthetic or thematic coherence, she uses her shifting gaze to restore doubt, dissent, voices of otherness, and the perspectives of women and servants to early modern discourse. No less importantly, Marguerite’s outwardly “modest” recreation of the world, disguised as romans jovials, dissimulates controversial insights about early modern France, its gender- and class-based injustices, and its political tensions and dysfunctional balance of power. Buried beneath the surface of the text, in her characters’ body language, the secrets of women and servants, and her forays into political allegory, Marguerite de Navarre’s glimpses into the underside of French Renaissance culture arguably compensate for the reassuring myths and comfortable syntheses that some readers might prefer. Despite the humor that counterbalances its pathos, the Heptaméron is not a comfortable text to read: it upends the reader’s assumptions, bombards us with real-world violence and injustice, challenges us to weigh and balance multiple perspectives, including those of the other, and prods us to seek out its veiled secrets and confront our own foibles. Although the text may be unfinished, it is beyond question a work of major importance; and the skill that de Navarre demonstrates in orchestrating its various registers and complex points of view, and in camouflaging the breadth and incisiveness of her inquest into patriarchal culture and the body politic, is nothing short of remarkable.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Boulenger, 316; Reynolds-Cornell, “Silence,” 20. Michelet, 359. Reid, 1: 13. Margaret Ferguson, 178. Margaret Ferguson, 178; Freccero, “Archives in the Fiction,” 175–76. Jourda (Marguerite d’Angoulême, 2: 1007) attributes Marguerite’s inconsistency to her gender or lack of “énergie masculine.” Gelernt, 167.

Selected Bibliography

Primary sources Works by Marguerite de Navarre La coche. Edited by Robert Marichal. Geneva: Droz, 1971. Correspondance de Marguerite d’Angoulême, Duchesse d’Alençon, Reine de Navarre. Edited by Pierre Jourda. Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1973. Dernières poésies de Marguerite de Navarre. Edited by Abel Lefranc. Paris: Armand Colin, 1896. Guillaume Briçonnet, Marguerite d’Angoulême. Correspondance, 1521–1524. Edited by Christine Martineau, Michel Veissière, and Henry Heller. THR 141. Geneva: Droz, 1975. Heptaméron. Edited by Renja Salminen. Geneva: Droz, 1999. L’Heptaméron. Edited by Michel François. Paris: Garnier, 1960. The Heptameron. Translated by P. A. Chilton. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984. The Heptameron of Margaret, Queen of Navarre. Translated by Walter Kelly. London: Published for the Trade, n.d. http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/ navarre/heptameron/heptameron.html. Les marguerites de la Marguerite des princesses. 2 vols. Lyon: Jean Tournes, 1547. Les marguerites de la Marguerite des princesses. Edited by Félix Frank. Paris: Librairie des Bibliophiles, 1973. Lettres de Marguerite d’Angoulême, sœur de François Ier, reine de Navarre, publiées d’après les manuscrits de la Bibliothèque du roi. Edited by François Génin. Paris: J. Renourade, 1841. Reprinted by the Société de l’Histoire de France, 1965. Le miroir de l’âme pécherresse. Alençon: Simon du Bois, 1531. Le miroir de treschrestienne princesse Marguerite de France. Paris: Antoine Augereau, 1533. Nouvelles lettres de la reine de Navarre, adressées au roi François Ier, son frère. Edited by François Génin. Paris: Crapelet, 1842. Selected Writings: A Bilingual Edition. Translated by Rouben Cholakian and Mary Skemp. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Théâtre profane. Edited by Verdun-Louis Saulnier. Geneva: Droz, 1963.

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Other Primary Works Anne de Beaujeu, Les enseignements d’Anne de France, duchesse de Bourbonnais et d’Auvergne, à sa fille Suzanne de Bourbon. Edited by A.-M. Chazaud. 1878. Reprint, Marseille: Lafitte, 1978. Ariosto, Ludovico. Commedie. Edited by Michele Catalano. Vol. 2. Bologna: Zanichelli, 1933. ——. Opere. Edited by Adriano Seroni. Milan: Mursia, 1961. Aubigné, Agrippa d’. “Les Misères.” In Les Tragiques. Edited by Charles Read. Paris: Librairie des Bibliophiles, 1896. gallica.bnf.fr/Bibliothèque nationale de France. Babelon, Jean. La bibliothèque française de Fernand Colomb. Paris: Honoré Champion, 1913. Boccaccio, Giovanni. Decameron. Edited by Umberto Bosco and Domenico Consoli. Basiano: Bietti, 1972. ——. The Decameron. Translated by G. H. McWilliam. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. Brantôme, Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de. Recueil des dames, poésies et tombeaux. Edited by Etienne Vaucheret. Paris: Gallimard, 1991. ——. Vies des dames illustres françoises et étrangères. Edited by Louis Moland. Paris: Garnier, 1870. Brantôme, Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de, and C.-A. Saint-Beuve. Illustrious Dames of the Court of the Valois Kings. Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley. New York: Lamb Publishing Company, 1912. Calvin, John. Gratulatio ad venerabilem presbyterum dominum Gabrielem de Saconay Praecentorem Ecclesiae Lugdunensis, de pulchra et eleganti praefatione quam libro Regis Angliae inscripsit. Geneva: Conrad Badius, 1561. ——. Joannis Calvini Opera quae supersunt omnia. Edited by Johann Wilhelm Baum and others. 59 vols. Braunschweig: C.A. Schwetschke, 1863–1900. Castiglione, Baldesar (Baldassare). The Book of the Courtier. Translated by George Bull. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967. ——. The Book of the Courtier by Count Baldesar Castiglione. Translated by Leonard E. Opdyke. New York: Scribner’s, 1903. ——. Il libro del cortegiano. Edited by Giulio Preti. Torino: Einaudi, 1965. Le journal d’un bourgeois de Paris sous le règne de François Ier (1515–1536). Edited by V. L. Bourrilly. Paris: A. Picard, 1910. Louise de Savoie. “Journal de Louise de Savoye.” In Nouvelle collection des mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de France depuis le XIIIe siècle jusqu’à la fin du XVIIIe: Histoire des choses mémorables advenues du reigne de Louis XII et François Ier. Edited by Joseph-François Michaud and Jean-Joseph-François Poujoulat. Series 1, vol. 5. Paris: Chez l’Editeur du Commentaire Analytique du Code Civil, 1838. Machiavelli, Niccolò. Il principe. In Opere. Edited by Mario Bonfantini. Milano: Ricciardi, 1954. ——. The Prince. In The Portable Machiavelli. Translated by Peter Bondanella and Mark Musa. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979. Manetti, Giannozzo. De dignitate et excellentia hominis (On the Dignity of Man). In Two Views of Man. Translated by Bernard Murchland. New York: Ungar, 1966.

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Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni. Oratio de hominis dignitate/Oration on the Dignity of Man. Translated by Elizabeth Livermore Forbes. Lexington, KY: Anvil Press, 1953. Rabelais, François. Gargantua and Pantagruel. Translated by J.M. Cohen. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955. ——. Œuvres complètes. Edited by Jacques Boulenger. Paris: Gallimard, 1955. Rutebeuf. Œuvres complètes. Edited by Edmond Faral and Julia Bastin. 2 vols. Paris: Editions A. et J. Picard, 1960. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Qu’est-ce que la littérature. Collection Idées. Paris: Gallimard, 1948. Seyssel, Claude de. The Monarchy of France. Translated by J. H. Hexter. Edited by Donald R. Kelley. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1981.

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Index

abuse 123, 208; clerical or religious 7–8, 56, 88, 98, 168–9, 215–16, 218, 224–7; patriarchal 130, 247–9; of power or rank 7, 14, 15, 16, 19, 99, 112, 149, 162, 165, 176, 197, 206, 211, 248; seigniorial 70, 165, 209; of women 15, 32, 73, 96; see also rape; violence Adam (biblical figure) 79, 100, 101 adultery: attitudes toward 102–3, 109, 126; female 85, 86, 90, 99, 133n45; frequency of 128; male 129; as theme 3, 8, 118, 130, 198–9; see also infidelity affaire des placards 15, 46–8 agency, female 36, 38, 49, 110, 118, 221, 242n142, 243n148 Agrippa, Heinrich Cornelius von Nettesheim 69 Alberti, Leon Battista 123, 124, 146n197 Albret, Henri d’ see Henri II, King of Navarre Albret, Jean d’ (Marguerite de Navarre’s son) 46 Albret, Jeanne d’ see Jeanne III, Queen of Navarre Alençon 38, 46, 54, 186–9 Alençon, Charles IV, Duke of (Marguerite de Navarre’s first husband) 20n2, 36–7, 40, 42, 186–8, 227 Alibech (character in Decameron 3.10) 140n114, 140n115, 214, 239n115; see also Boccaccio; Decameron

allegory 11, 35, 55, 57, 65, 95, 156, 176; definition(s) of 212–13, 238n110; evangelical 212; metonymic 213, 224, 239n112; political 184–5, 187, 190, 194, 211–31; traces of, in N. 32 87–9; tradition and practice of, in Renaissance 238n106, 238n107, 238n108 Amadour (character in Heptaméron, N. 10) 112, 114–16, 121–2, 125–8, 159–60, 181n42 ambiguity and ambivalence 3, 9, 11, 13, 17, 19, 90, 103, 122, 200; iconographical 91; in language of sexual assault 113, 143n159; moral 121; of political allegory 233n10; in Renaissance as a whole 3; of term serviteur 178; see also dialogism; multiperspectivism Amboise 35, 36, 47, 155, 196 androcentrism 98–9; abuses and fallacies of 100, 248; as interpretive assumption 137n76; perspectives and discourses of 65, 82, 84, 95, 107–8, 118, 130, 141n136, 148, 248; see also abuse; patriarchy; perspective(s) androgyny 24n31, 79, 99, 132n17, 140n106, 245n160 Angoulême 29 Angoulême, Charles d’, Count of (Marguerite de Navarre’s father) 20n2, 30, 36

262

Index

Angoulême, Jeanne and Madeleine 35 (Marguerite de Navarre’s half-sisters) Anne de Beaujeu see Beaujeu, Anne de Anne de Bretagne, Duchess of Brittany and Queen of France 36 Anne of France see Beaujeu, Anne de antifeminism 69, 81, 86, 96, 100, 109, 152; see also misogyny anti-Machiavellianism 163, 199, 206 Archambault, Paul 220, 238n109, 239n118, 242n140 Ariosto, Ludovico 30, 75, 79, 125, 133n41, 213 Aristotle 35 art(s) 43, 77, 113; of author’s writing style 8, 10, 19, 37, 110, 224; Marguerite’s knowledge and patronage of 2, 30, 34, 35, 40, 246; negatively associated with artifice 16, 18, 117, 175–6, 206, 212; in portraits and paintings 1–2, 29, 99, 196; in Renaissance 31, 33, 70–1; see also iconography; portraiture Augereau, Antoine 48 Augsburg Confession 48 Avanturade (character in Heptaméron, N. 10) 125–7 Bakhtin, Mikhail 151, 178n11 Bandello, Matteo 31, 58n9, 136n71 batelière (ferrywoman) 73, 76–81, 145n181, 230 Béarn 48, 52, 53 Beaujeu, Anne de 30, 36, 57n3, 60n32 Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron de 163, 181n58 beauty: of antagonist, in N. 4 78–80; cult of, in Renaissance 29; linked to social class 150, 155, 159; of Marguerite de Navarre 2, 20n6, 34; outward vs. inward 75, 95, 115, 150; seductive power of 78, 80, 155, 193, 198, 202, 217; vs. ugliness 157, 179n30 Beckett, Samuel 4 belle dame sans merci, la (beautiful lady without mercy) 94–5, 107 Bembo, Pietro 230

Benson, Edward 124, 127 Bergson, Henri 151, 178n11 Bernage, sieur de Sivray (character in Heptaméron, N. 32) 17, 85, 87, 89, 196–7 Berquin, Louis de 40–1 biography 59n19, 247; limitations and role of, in literary criticism 3–5, 14–15, 32, 38, 224; of Marguerite de Navarre 17, 29, 32, 33–57; possible traces of, in Heptaméron 17, 33, 38, 56, 77, 80, 121; see also Marguerite de Navarre Blois 35, 36, 45, 47 Bloom, Harold 18 Boccaccio, Giovanni 18, 43, 53, 249; multiperspectivism of 18; see also Decameron; De mulieribus claris body: allegory of 215, 220–1; broken, mutilated, or violated 79–80, 88, 100, 112, 119, 171, 220; of Church 221, 242n141; of the family 212, 98–9, 226–7, 229–30, 249; female 45, 108, 165, 227; of France 221, 242n141 body language 1, 78–80, 170, 218, 247, 250 body politic 15, 16, 38, 229, 250; allegory of 227; analogy with body of the family 98–9, 212, 220, 227, 230; and body of the Church 242n141; of France, threats to 189, 220; parts of 220–2; role of king in 249 Boistuau, Pierre, sieur de Launay 6 Bonnivet, seigneur de see Gouffier, Guillaume, seigneur de Bonnivet Bornet (character in Heptaméron, N. 8) 129 Bouchard, Amaury 69 Bourbon, Antoine de 54 Brantôme, Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de 4, 6, 9, 38, 41, 49 Briçonnet, Guillaume (bishop of Meaux) 7, 37, 39–40, 45 brigata, la (storytellers in Decameron) 68, 71 Bromilow, Pollie 12, 27n56, 72 Budé, Guillaume 45, 220

Index Burckhardt, Jacob 31 Burgundy 41–4, 195 Calvin, John 24n31, 47, 71, 132n27 Campbell, Julie 26n47, 69, 132n21 Canada, expedition to (in N. 67) 29 Capellanus, Andreas 97 Caracciolo, Marco 32, 33 Cardona, Duke of (character in Heptaméron, N. 10) 116, 125 Caroli, Pierre 48 Cartier, Jacques 29 Castiglione, Baldassare (Baldesar): description of female courtier 30, 58n5, 69–70; dialogism of 18, 247; political discourses of 11, 27n51, 163, 209, 230–1, 249; reflections on language 122–3, 146n193 Castile, Queen of (character in Heptaméron, N. 24) 81, 95, 119, 122, 162 Cazauran, Nicole 68, 21n16, 23n28, 25n39, 144n173 censorship 45, 214, 218, 224, 227; of Marguerite 5, 7, 47, 176; response to, in Marguerite’s writings 63n77, 202, 212 Cepparello (character in Decameron 1.1) 76, 133n43, 185, 187 Chansons spirituelles, Les 55–6 characters in Heptaméron: female 71, 81, 84, 94; see also devisants; names of individual characters Charles II de Valois, Duke of Orléans (Marguerite de Navarre’s nephew) 55 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor (Charles II, Duke of Burgundy and Lord of the Netherlands, King Charles I of Spain) 41–5, 48, 51–5, 104, 149 Charles VIII, King of France 36, 196, 197, 244n151 Charlotte, Princess (Marguerite de Navarre’s niece) 44 Chilton, Paul (translator of Heptaméron) 13, 89 Chinon 35

263

Cholakian, Patricia 8, 14, 33, 37–8, 97, 112–3, 115 Cholakian, Patricia and Rouben 51, 55; on Marguerite’s upbringing 60n32, 131n8; view of woman writer as outsider 39 choses basses, les (lowly things) 16, 149, 151, 154, 158; frequent election of, by God 73–4; linked to downward exegetical gaze 74, 212, 213, 229; as narrative cue or clue 247, 249; perspective of 206, 209; as source of revelation 110, 113, 170, 172, 183n79 Church 63n75, 87, 221, 226; abuses of 7, 169, 215, 218, 229; body of 221, 242n141; conservative factions of 39; and patriarchy 94, 98–9, 102, 148; from reformist perspective 39, 46, 49, 52, 88, 227; and State 30, 185, 194, 215–17, 220, 223–5, 229, 242n147 class, social 14–16, 131, 148–76, 248–9; see also poverty; rank; servants Claude, Queen of France (Marguerite de Navarre’s sister-in-law) 40, 44 clerical or clergy abuse see abuse, clerical or religious Coche, La 1 Cognac 60n22, 34, 35 Collège de France 45 Colonna, Vittoria 70, 136n75 Columbus, Christopher 29 Comédie de Mont-de-Marsan, La 56 Comédie des quatre femmes, La 51–2 Comédie sur le trépas du roy, La 55 communication 123; across class and gender lines 170; barriers to 15, 116, 122, 130, 248; nonverbal 170, 219; see also body language; language; rhetoric community 168, 174, 179n23, 221; of devisants 67, 119; evangelical 119, 132n17; ideal of 67, 153; monastic 216, 222; perspectival consensus of (in N. 5) 79; portrayal of 16, 185, 230; of readers 74 Condom, bishop of (Erard de Grassoles) 52–3

264

Index

condottieri 99, 163 confession, sacrament of 24n30, 37, 38, 216, 240n120, 240n121 confessional, abuses of 169, 216–17, 241n131 conscience 88, 165, 201, 249; frequency of term 24n31; personal, vs. patriarchal laws and constraints 124, 162, 208, 209–10, 230–1; potential strength of, vs. worldly temptations 193, 194; in reformist thought 7, 24n31, 71, 206; and sacrament of confession 216; weakness of, among miscreants 102, 106, 141n136, 207–10 contextualizations, historical and biographical 3–5, 7, 15–16, 32–3, 59 contrapasso, Dantean 91, 137n77, 199; see also Dante convents and monasteries 31; abuses in 196, 214, 216, 222, 225; reasons for entering 161; reform of 40, 227; as refuge 55, 112, 160–1, 206 Cordelier(s) (Franciscan friars) 153, 161, 215; capture, arrest, and condemnation of 76, 196, 219–23; greed of 153, 168, 216; hypocrisy of 110–11, 113–14, 168, 170, 214, 226–7, 229; lasciviousness of 80, 168, 214; mistreatment of the poor and disempowered 168–9; murder committed by 169–70, 217–19; rape or attempted rape by 73, 76, 79, 94, 112, 169, 225; unmasked 224–5 Corneille, Pierre de 223, 227 Coucy, Edict of 48 counterdiscourse 19, 97 counterexamples 13, 71–2, 74–5, 81, 97, 115 courtier: author as 27n51, 209; Castiglione’s 70, 249; female, qualities of 30, 58n5, 69; male 15, 83, 91 courtly norms 95, 110, 200, 206; in literature and Marguerite’s own tales 3, 15, 119, 153, 156–8, 248; in love and flirtations 30, 38, 71, 77, 80, 81, 83, 95, 108–10, 115–16,

119–23, 130, 141n134, 142n136, 145n183, 150, 174; in society 26n47, 40, 51, 80–1, 83, 94–7, 107, 114, 233n15 courtoisie (courtliness) 95, 119; inner vs. outer 113 Crenne, Hélisenne de 65 Crépy, Peace of 54–5 cues: narrative 3–4, 8–9, 14, 16, 21n14, 149, 185; perspectival 16, 66, 90, 112, 149, 165, 185, 230 dagger, use and symbolism of 169, 183n80, 217–18, 222 Dagoucin (devisant, in Heptaméron): class status and observations on power and rank 120, 150, 202; commentary on N. 12 105–6, 201–2, 208; complaints about women 95, 120–1; Platonizing discourse and courtly values of 115–16, 158; as serviteur 95, 120–1, 150, 202; views on marriage 130 Dante 11, 75, 194, 198, 213, 245n159, 249; see also contrapasso D’Aubigné, Agrippa 228–9 Davis, Natalie Zemon 38 Decameron 9, 10, 14, 17, 18, 66–9, 71–4, 86–7, 89, 95, 101, 107, 157–8, 185, 187, 212, 214, 230, 247; see also Boccaccio; names of individual characters Demoulin, François 35 De mulieribus claris 66, 71; see also Boccaccio De Riant, seigneur (character in Heptaméron, N. 20) 156, 179n27 Dernières poésies 55, 60n34, 64n92, 64n93, 64n95 desire: androcentric, of hegemonic male subject 78, 82–4, 86, 116–18, 146n199, 165, 193–4; birth of, through a gaze 92, 145n183, 155–6, 194; female 82–4, 90, 92, 97, 104, 105, 107, 108, 110, 117, 124, 127, 128, 142n146, 145n183, 156; patrilineal 89, 103; rhetoric of, vs. biological reality 120; romanticized 121, 126; royal or princely 192–3,

Index 198; specularity of 78, 84, 135n63, 156–7; sublimation of 161; transgressive, of lascivious friars 76, 112, 169, 226 destinataires 10; Boccaccian 66; female 72, 74, 247; male 97, 133n36; viewing angle of 120; see also narratees; reader De Thou, Adrien 141n136 devisants (storytellers) 132; balance and dichotomies between male and female 63, 236n63; female, viewpoints and traits of 65, 66, 68, 74, 82, 106, 107, 110, 119, 131n19, 145n181, 180n32, 210 dialogism 13–14, 17–18, 70; of Castiglione, in Book of the Courtier 70, 247; humanistic 3, 18, 32 Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne 50 discourse: androcentric 27n56, 65, 67–72, 82, 84–85, 96, 103, 131n15, 137n77, 139n96; competing fields of 18–19, 24n32, 32, 116; courtly and Platonizing 115, 120, 161; dialogic 3, 14, 17; evangelical 108, 212; female 38, 73, 97, 101, 108; of gender, class, and politics 14–15, 21n12, 33, 148, 152, 161, 203, 229, 231; hegemonic vs. nonhegemonic 17, 28n68, 150, 152–3, 165, 167; official vs. private 15, 17, 153, 176; re-gendering and rewriting of 65, 66–72, 73, 108, 130; theories of 4–5 disease 31, 54, 71 displacement, psychological 94 dissidence, in early modern France: of Marguerite 235n5; religious 34, 41, 43, 47–8, 50, 52, 218, 246; traces of, in text 53 dissimulation 2, 57; in Heptaméron 64n96; in love and courtly flirtations 117, 121, 141n135, 235n57; of Marguerite 57, 243; poetics of 17, 121; in politics and diplomacy 14, 41–2, 44, 117, 121; use of language for 123, 198 distaff and spindle 65

265

Dolet, Etienne 55 droit du seigneur 106, 198 Du Bellay, Joachim 29 Du Ha, Bernard (character in Heptaméron, N. 28) 155 Du Mesnil, chevalier de (character in Heptaméron, N. 1): affair with, and betrayal by, Saint-Aignan’s wife 75, 133n45, 174, 185; murder of 13, 99, 100–1, 170, 185; servants of, as witnesses 170–1 egalitarianism 139n98, 230; between the sexes 61n40, 70, 118; Christian and evangelical 119, 157; in community of storytellers 12, 70, 118–19, 153, 231 Eleanor of Austria, Queen Consort of Portugal and France (Marguerite’s sister-in-law) 41, 42 Elisor (character in Heptaméron, N. 24) 95–6, 119, 122 Ennasuite (devisante in Heptaméron) 73, 102, 122, 136n76, 161, 203; attitude toward lower classes and servants 151–3, 155–6, 167, 175; confidence in godliness of clergy 111–12; praise of Mary Magdalene 86–7, 213 Erasmus, Desiderius, of Rotterdam 11, 18, 30, 39, 40, 58n4, 156, 220, 238n107, 238n108, 238n111 eucharist 87–8, 137n77; see also mass Eulalia, saint 132n34 évangélisme (evangelism or evangelicalism, an early reform movement in France) 31, 46, 62n55, 237n94, 241n135; Marguerite’s association with 7, 14, 39–40, 43–5, 48, 50, 52, 55, 184, 194, 215, 224, 246; role of women in 71; traces of, in Marguerite’s writings 7, 8, 14, 56, 74, 86, 87–9, 112, 119, 168, 176, 206, 208–9, 212, 216, 226, 231 Eve (biblical figure) 75, 100, 101, 109 exempla and exemplarity 12, 15, 66, 72–96; contestation of, in Heptaméron 94–6, 101, 130; universal, ideal of 13

266

Index

experience 3; of author 5, 33, 38, 42–4, 56–7, 98; of the disempowered 165, 170, 172, 176; female vs. male 29, 31, 66, 70, 97, 125–6, 128, 130, 148; perspective of 130, 201, 224; role of, in narratological theory 5, 21n13, 22n20, 22n21, 32–3, 59n14; traces of, in text 4–5, 8, 14, 19, 32, 61n44, 70, 72, 112 Fable du faux cuyder, La 53 fabliau 3, 169, 217, 240n128, 240n129 Faculty of Theology 7, 39, 45, 46, 52, 54, 62n53, 189, 215, 224; see also Sorbonne faith 25n42, 43–4, 168, 191, 221; Catholic, defense of 43, 47, 54, 216; evangelical, reformist, and Waldensian 7, 31, 50, 52, 54, 55, 56, 88; as fealty, to lord or lady 53, 108–9, 122, 174–5; in God 112, 151, 210; in love and marriage 68, 96, 102, 103, 105, 126, 129; vs. works 46, 214–15 family and household dramas, with political undercurrents 16, 31, 57, 99, 197, 199, 248, 249 Farel, Guillaume 7, 45, 47 fealty 199; conflicting bonds of 106, 164; interrogation and collapse of 122, 148, 164, 207, 210; pledge of, to high-born lady 119, 122 feast of fools 74 Febvre, Lucien 8, 24n35, 26n49 feminine space, of hearth, home, and convents 31 Ferguson, Margaret W. 10–11, 27n51, 190, 209, 215, 249 ferrywoman see batelière filiation, rhetoric of 39–40 flood, figure of 9, 11, 71 Floride (character in Heptaméron, N. 10) 38, 112, 115–16, 121–2, 125–7, 144n169, 159–60 Fludernik, Monika 21n13, 22n21, 32–3 Foucault, Michel 4, 5, 8, 21n12, 22n17, 22n18, 22n19, 28n68, 134n53, 135n56

frame discussions 6, 8, 9, 73; egalitarianism of 12, 70, 229; and gender 13, 69, 70, 95–7, 135n65; multiperspectivism of 3, 13, 17–18, 25n39, 72, 82, 95; sociopolitical discourse in 15, 197, 206–12, 231, 248; tradition of 18, 69–70, 73 Franciscans see Cordeliers François I, King of France (Marguerite de Navarre’s brother) 185, 224–5; accession to throne 40; allusions to, in Marguerite’s writings 10, 56, 185–92, 194, 195, 215–17, 228; captivity of, in Spain 41–3; education and upbringing of 35; Marguerite’s influence on 15, 40, 44, 45, 52; poor health and death 54, 55; portraits of 20n8, 99, 245n160; relationship with Marguerite 7, 24n30, 33, 37, 40, 47, 49–50, 243n149; role in Jeanne d’Albret’s first marriage 51; treatment of reformers and humanists 41, 45, 47–8, 52–4, 62n53; war and military activities 52, 244n151 François III, Duke of Brittany and Dauphin of France (Marguerite de Navarre’s nephew) 42, 45 François, Michel 217, 233n16 Françoise (character in Heptaméron, N. 42) 117, 174, 180n32, 191–5 Freccero, Carla 23n30; on feminine authority in Heptaméron 71, 92; on political resonances of Heptaméron 10–11, 26n50, 27n51, 190, 215, 233n25, 244n151, 249; views of Jeanne d’Albret’s marriage 51, 59n12 Frelick, Nancy 128, 135n63, 139n96 game, theme and dynamics of 11, 101, 103, 121, 122 gaze, the: ascending 12, 13, 14, 77, 223; descending 2, 13, 14, 17, 18, 29, 172, 224, 231, 247, 248; experiential 3; hegemonic or patriarchal 3, 135n65, 180n35; male 15, 84, 110, 130; privileged and insightful, of victims and underlings

Index 113, 115, 132, 148; reader’s 4, 13, 66, 72, 75, 87, 99, 108, 110, 112, 115, 119, 125–8, 130, 148, 149, 159, 162, 167–9, 184, 191, 209, 211–12, 217, 227, 230; in Renaissance paintings 1–2, 29; shifting 12, 15, 33, 57, 66, 75, 161, 247, 248, 250; triggering love or desire 92, 119; see also perspective; standpoint Geburon (devisant in Heptaméron) 95, 107, 109–10, 120, 128, 141n136, 174–5, 177n8, 211, 221 Gelernt, Jules 8, 24n35, 249–50 Germany, reform movement in 43, 46, 47, 48, 50, 54 Ghismonda (character in Decameron 4.1) 67–8, 107, 131n10, 142n138, 158 Gié, Maréchal de 36 gift, theme and economy of 9, 10, 11–12 Glidden, Hope 108, 110, 135n65, 141n134, 141n135, 141n136, 142n146, 143n148 Gouffier, Guillaume, seigneur de Bonnivet 37–8, 61n42, 61n44, 118, 129 Gournay, Marie de 65 government and governance 184–231; abusive or tyrannical 29, 53, 164, 197–211; of France, under monarch 49, 53, 55, 224–5; Marguerite’s role in 15–16, 48, 56; positive models of 56, 185–97, 223; role of women in 30, 58n7, 96, 107; secular vs. ecclesiastical 215–16; view of, from perspective of subjects 18, 209; weak, dangers of 99–100, 221–2, 226–7 grid, interpretive 12, 137n77 Griselda (character in Decameron 10.10) 67, 71, 73–4, 87, 95–6, 133n40; see also Boccaccio Gruget, Claude 6 Gualtieri (character in Decameron 10.10) 87, 95, 96; see also Boccaccio Guérin, Thomas (character in Heptaméron, N. 1) 140n107, 232n10

267

Guicciardini, Francesco 104 Guinizelli, Guido 157, 174, 179n17 Guiscardo (character in Decameron 4.1) 67–8, 158; see also Boccaccio gynocracy 15, 95, 119, 248 hagiography 14, 55 Henri II (d’Albret), King of Navarre 1, 7, 45; associated with Hircan 9, 147n201; and daughter Jeanne 46, 51–2, 63n79; infidelity of 50; marriage to Marguerite 20n2, 20n5, 33, 46 Henri II, King of France 55, 104, 118, 239n118; allusions to, in Marguerite’s correspondence and poetry 56, 64n92, 178n15; as hostage, and ransom of 42, 44–5, 243n148; in prologue to Heptaméron 9, 10 Henri IV, King of France 34, 54 Henry VII, King of England 36, 125 Henry VIII, King of England 34, 44, 55, 63n75, 186–8, 191, 242n147 Heptaméron, L’ (The Heptaméron): characters in 67, 69, 71; evolution and composition of 25n39; prologue 4, 9–12, 14, 16, 26n44, 51, 66–7, 68, 70, 72, 123, 132n17, 148, 150, 151, 153, 157, 167, 175, 176, 211–12, 230, 231; first nouvelle 13, 75, 81, 99, 149–50, 174, 185–91, 197, 232n10, 247; second nouvelle 12–14, 27n53, 38, 61n44, 72–3, 75–6, 80, 81, 112, 113, 119, 134n48, 138n48, 144n164, 153, 165, 171, 173, 247, 248; third nouvelle 9, 171, 201, 203, 230, 247; fourth nouvelle 28n60, 38–9, 61n42, 61n44, 77–80, 105, 113–14, 116, 121, 134n48, 174; fifth nouvelle 13, 43–4, 72–3, 76–7, 79–81, 141n181, 230, 234n151, 245n159; sixth nouvelle 72, 133n45; seventh nouvelle 114, 174; eighth nouvelle 129, 165–6; ninth nouvelle 115–16, 158–9, 181n49; tenth nouvelle 38, 112, 114, 116, 120–1, 125, 144n173, 145n183, 159, 181n79,

268

Index

235n60, 235n63, 244n151; eleventh nouvelle 83n79, 230; twelfth nouvelle 97, 99, 104–6, 112, 199, 202, 208, 210, 231, 232n5; fourteenth nouvelle 38, 61n40, 125, 127, 181n49; fifteenth nouvelle 61n40, 82, 125, 127, 181n49; seventeenth nouvelle 99, 195; nineteenth nouvelle 18, 118, 124, 146n191, 159, 160–1, 175; twentieth nouvelle 28n60, 81–4, 110, 134n48, 135n63, 135n65, 142n146, 149, 154, 156–8, 180n35; twenty-first nouvelle 67–8, 162, 181n49, 231; twenty-second nouvelle 155, 210, 244n151; twenty-third nouvelle 58n9, 61n44, 94, 112–14, 134n48, 190–1, 225, 227–9; twenty-fourth nouvelle 81, 95, 119, 122, 128; twenty-fifth nouvelle 191, 135n62; twenty-sixth nouvelle 115–16, 181n49; twentyseventh nouvelle 154, 156, 179n23; twenty-eighth nouvelle 154–5; twenty-ninth nouvelle 149, 174; thirtieth nouvelle 90, 91, 93–4, 138n79, 155, 175; thirty-first nouvelle 112, 114, 134n48, 169, 183n80, 213–20, 223–7, 241n135, 242n141, 242n147, 243n149; thirty-second nouvelle 72–3, 84–90, 103–4, 124, 136n71–2, 137n78, 196, 213, 244n151; thirty-third nouvelle 233n15, 243n149; thirtysixth nouvelle 102, 175, 167; thirty-seventh nouvelle 123, 128–30, 139n95; thirty-eighth nouvelle 167; thirty-ninth nouvelle 173; fortieth nouvelle 96, 123–4, 156, 159–60, 181n49; forty-first nouvelle 245n159; forty-second nouvelle 116–17, 157, 159, 174–5, 180n32, 180n35, 191–5, 233n25, 244n151; forty-third nouvelle 28n60, 94, 107–10, 119, 141n131, 142n146, 145n181; forty-fourth nouvelle 111, 168; forty-sixth nouvelle 244n151; forty-eighth nouvelle 114, 244n151; forty-ninth nouvelle 135n63,

144n165, 244n151; fifty-first nouvelle 99, 162–4, 203n206, 208–11; fifty-second nouvelle 105, 183n79; fifty-fourth nouvelle 148, 173; fifty-sixth nouvelle 244n151; fifty-ninth nouvelle 166; sixty-first nouvelle 115; sixty-second nouvelle 61n44; sixty-third nouvelle 104–5; sixty-seventh nouvelle 29; seventieth nouvelle 99, 182n72; seventy-second nouvelle 114, 240n129 heresy and heretics 166; condemnation and persecution of 39, 40–1, 44–5, 48, 50, 52, 54, 189, 191, 222; Marguerite’s association with 47, 49, 246; reformers as 47, 62n55 Herman, David 21n14, 22n17, 22n20, 22n21, 32 Héroët, Antoine 69 Hircan (devisant in Heptaméron) 9, 128, 138n79, 161; dissolution of rank-based distinctions among devisants 12, 14, 16, 68, 148, 153; on female desire and sexual fulfillment 82–3, 90–3, 114, 116; indiscretions of, with chambermaids 165–6; on matriarchal rule 147n201; trials of, in prologue 153, 175; on uxoricide and rape 102–3, 116, 134n48 honnête amour (“honest” love) 38, 78, 80, 83, 84, 115, 121, 130 honor: appearance of, vs. reality 75, 81, 90, 93, 114; conflicting types and demands of 79, 104–6, 115–17, 122, 164, 248; vs. faith and grace 138n92; familial and seigniorial 102, 105–6, 125, 164, 175, 200, 206–7, 223, 227, 231; female, in patriarchal culture 61n40, 73, 80–1, 84, 87; as a hypocritical social construct 75, 81, 118; lapses and breaches of 37, 99–100, 104, 195, 202, 206; in lowborn people or “les choses basses” 74, 163, 174, 192–3, 204; male vs. female 97, 107, 114–17; personal or familial, vs. the common good 91, 223, 225; prideful and

Index exaggerated 81, 91, 94; rhetoric of 119–20, 193, 200; in sexual assault 39, 79–81, 116, 118; and violence 99, 107, 118, 223 horizontal interpretive axis 12, 27n57, 118, 165, 191; see also grid, interpretive Huchon, Mireille 6 Huizina, Johan 145n183 humanism 18, 30, 39, 40, 45, 55 humor and laughter 24n33, 96, 109, 171, 183n79; female 61n44; juxtaposed with pathos 8, 61n44, 134n48, 139n98, 250; misogynistic 111; types and theories of 151, 155–6 hypocrisy: clerical 11, 112, 114, 118, 168–9, 212, 214, 225; feminine, from male perspective 81, 107, 110–11, 117, 118, 120; unveiling of, in Heptaméron 44 icons and iconography 15, 119, 133n46, 171; depicting Marguerite and her family 2, 238n109; of female prototypes 73, 84, 97, 128, 132n30, 133n47, 172, 197, 247; religious 12, 50, 73, 87–8, 137n77; visual and interpretive complexity of 15, 17, 27n53, 73, 77, 84, 91, 110, 134n48, 156, 171, 173, 238n105; see also art(s) incest 8, 59n12, 63n64, 90–4, 241n130 infidelity 4, 8, 15–16, 65, 71, 88–90, 102, 123–31, 241; effect on marriage 129; female 88, 90, 102–3, 235n57; male 61n40, 68, 82, 173; of Marguerite’s husband 46, 50; responses to 82, 84, 102, 129–30, 167, 171; see also adultery Inquisiteur, L’ (The Inquisitor) 50 intentional fallacy 40 intentions and intentionality: good, but with tragic results 163, 204–5, 221; in literature and literary criticism 3–5, 8, 21n14, 22n10, 22n17, 22n21, 172; vs. outward appearances 121, 218, 224

269

intertexts and intertextuality, in Heptaméron 4, 14, 15, 17, 22n20, 66–72, 86, 90, 95, 101, 103, 136n71, 213, 240n129 Jambique (character in Heptaméron, N. 43): alternative interpretations of 110, 142n146; betrayal of, by serviteur 108–9; condemnation of, from androcentric perspective 107, 110, 141n136; and courtly protocols 108–9, 119–20, 174; hypocrisy of, to protect reputation 94, 111, 122; mask and dissimulation of 135n65, 141n134, 141n135; proactive role of, as “unwomanly” aggressor 107–8, 142n138, 145n183 Jameson, Fredric 184 Jeanne III, Queen of Navarre (Albret, Jeanne d’, Marguerite de Navarre’s daughter) 6–8, 23n30, 29, 34, 46, 49–54, 184, 202, 212 Joan of France (Jeanne de France, Saint Joan of Valois), Duchess of Berry and Queen of France 40 Job (biblical figure) 95 Jossebelin (character in Heptaméron, N. 21, 40) 68, 124, 160 Jourda, Pierre 6, 19, 31 juges délégués 62n55 judgment 3, 39, 95; evangelical 71, 82, 241n135; formation and honing of 11–14, 39; impediments to 109, 242n138; of prince or king 54, 216, 224, 247, 249; role of individual conscience in 162, 209–10; rush to 222, 225 justice 16, 39, 79, 98, 174; challenges of, in cases of rape 39, 79–80; collective 230; divine 185, 222–23; imperial 196, 222, 225; vs. injustice 5, 7, 56, 99, 103, 198, 207, 250; monarchical 52, 56, 185–6, 188–91, 198, 223, 228; officially sanctioned, vs. personal vendettas 99, 103, 222–3, 228, 244n152; tempered with mercy 52

270

Index

Kelly, Joan 30 Kritzman, Lawrence 25n42 Labé, Louise 6, 65, 71 Lacan, Jacques 113 language 10, 78, 191, 208; courtly and amorous 120, 123; gendered 39; limitations and perversions of 113, 120, 122, 143n159, 146n193, 154, 176; of Marguerite 9, 36, 39, 62n49, 243n149; nonverbal, including body language 1, 78, 80, 170, 218, 247, 250; patriarchal 118, 120; see also communication; rhetoric law(s): breaches of 130, 207, 217, 222–3; divine 61n40, 97–8, 124; ecclesiastical or canon 98, 225, 227, 245n155; of love and marriage 69, 130, 222; monarchic, in France 222, 238n109, 242n142; natural 97, 190, 207; patriarchal 61n40, 97–8, 103, 117, 208, 221–2; of primogeniture 98, 159–60; restricting behavior and authority of women 30, 36, 46, 58n7, 98, 117 Lefèvre d’Etaples, Jacques 39, 45 Le Maçon, Antoine 10, 53 Lemaire de Belges, Jean 1 Leonardo da Vinci 1, 3, 40 Libro del cortegiano, Il (The Book of the Courtier) see Castiglione, Baldassare Livre d’heures de Catherine de Médicis, Le 1–2 Livre de la cité des dames, Le see Christine de Pizan Longarine (devisante in Heptaméron) 86–7, 93–4, 102–3, 120, 127–9, 150–2, 165–6, 180n32 Lorenzo de’ Medici (Lorenzino, Lorenzaccio) see Medici, Lorenzo de’ Lorraine, Marguerite de (mother of Marguerite de Navarre’s first husband) 37 Louis XII, King of France 35, 36, 40 Louise de Savoie (Louise of Savoy, Marguerite de Navarre’s mother) 9; regency and political duties of 41,

44–5, 62n55, 187, 243n148; as young wife and mother 34–7 love 50–1, 69, 117; between aristocrat and underling 82–3, 85, 119, 156–9, 160, 174, 180n35, 191–4, 248; of author, for her brother 37, 42, 43, 49; born of a gaze 78, 92, 145n183, 155–6, 192, 194; competing discourses of 8, 69, 116, 134n141; courtly 15, 30, 80, 81, 95, 97, 107–10, 119–22, 130, 142n136, 145n183, 248; disappointment and betrayal in 68, 84–90; extramarital 61n40, 84–5, 119, 126–7, 130; familial 106; female agency in 51, 67, 68, 83, 107; marital 68, 123–4, 126–8, 148, 162; maternal 90–2, 112; and nobility 119, 126, 149, 153–4, 157–8, 174, 179n17, 180n35; obsessive and possessive 85, 112, 115; Platonic 81, 115; reciprocity in 89, 101, 117, 240n118; semantic conflation of, with lust and sexual violence 76, 78, 109, 113–15, 153–4, 170, 217–19; specular or narcissistic 85–6, 108, 128, 164, 206, 241n130, 244n152; spiritual or divine 87–8, 93, 96, 121, 124, 160–1; thwarted or unrequited 15, 115, 127, 156; words and lavish displays of 83, 102, 114, 120–3, 156; see also desire; marriage Lucretia, echoes of 72 Luther, Martin 40, 88, 215–17, 242n147 Lutheranism 47 Lyons, John D. 72 Machiavelli, Niccolò 9, 53, 163, 231; on artful rhetoric 18, 206; consequentialism of 121, 197, 200–1, 206; on governance and politics 140n104, 191, 197, 200–1, 206; realism of 31; viewing position or perspective of, in The Prince 18, 206; as writer of comedies 121, 153 Madrid, Treaty of 42, 44 Mannerism 145n183, 216

Index manuscripts, of Heptaméron 1–2, 8, 25n39 Marcourt, Antoine 47 Margaret of Austria, Duchess of Savoy and Governor of the Netherlands 20n4, 44 Marguerite de Navarre (also Marguerite d’Angoulême, Marguerite d’Alençon), Queen of Navarre and Duchess of Alençon and Berry: biography 14, 17, 32, 33–57; comedies 51–2, 55–6, 178n15; correspondence 15, 30, 36, 37, 39, 43, 50, 54, 56, 62n49, 63n64, 98, 136n75, 178n15, 224, 232n5, 243n149; poetry 4, 6, 7, 15, 21n16, 25n43, 35, 44, 46, 48, 53, 56–7, 62n54, 152, 178n15, 212, 239n111, 246; see also évangélisme; Heptaméron; individual titles of other works Marguerites de la Marguerite des princesses tresillustre royne de Navarre, Les 25n43, 62n54, 56 Marot, Clément 31, 33, 40, 47, 48, 56, 59n18, 132n30 marriage 15, 123–31; clandestine 68, 85, 88, 124, 131n13, 160, 176, 181n49, 231; expectations of partners in 123–4, 127–8; of Jeanne d’Albret 50–4; give and take in 147n201; love in 68, 123–4, 126–8, 148, 162; Marguerite’s, with Charles d’Alençon 36–7, 40; Marguerite’s, with Henri d’Albret 20n5, 45–6, 50; patriarchal-style 84–90, 96, 98, 100, 102–3, 123, 125, 128, 130, 203–9 Mary Magdalen(e) 72, 86, 87, 136n72, 136n75, 152, 213, 238n110 Mary Tudor, Queen of France 40 mass 47, 138n81, 194; see also eucharist Mathieu-Castellani, Gisèle 17, 131n2 meaning, crisis of 12, 28n69; “deep” or “higher,” hints of, in Heptaméron 11, 13, 25n38, 25n43, 74, 212, 213, 238n106; order of 118 Meaux 39, 55; see also Briçonnet, Guillaume

271

Medici, Alessandro de’ 104–7, 164–5, 199–202 Medici, Catherine de’ 1–2, 9, 104, 200 Medici, Giuliano de’ 58n5 Medici, Lorenzo (Lorenzino, Lorenzaccio) de’ 104–7, 164–5, 199–202 mediocritas (moderation, the golden mean), behavioral and governmental ideal of 94, 99 Meigret, Aimé 62n55 Melanchthon, Philip 48, 63n71 memory 118, 189 mendacity 42–4, 75, 78, 81–2, 99, 110, 111–12, 119–22, 155, 171, 206, 210; see also dissimulation; language; rhetoric Mérindol 54, 55; see also Vaudois; Waldensians metonymy 123, 185, 211, 212, 238; in metonymic allegory 213, 215, 224–5, 227, 239n112, 249 Meun, Jean de 69, 117 Michelet, Jules 31 Miroir de l’âme pecheresse, Le (The Mirror of the Sinful Soul) 2, 7, 9, 20, 20n6, 25n43, 40, 46, 47, 48, 178n15 mirror, theme of 10, 84, 111, 113, 174, 218, 241; in early modern literature and paintings 10; as literary device 106, 111, 157, 164, 199, 202; in portraits 1–2, 20n6; symbolizing self-love 78–9; in transference and psychological projection 84, 113, 135n63 misogyny 27n56, 67, 69, 70, 92, 101, 111, 152; see also antifeminism Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) 144n166, 153, 163, 183n80, 214 monks and friars see Cordelier(s) Montaigne, Michel de 6, 94 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de 3–4 Montmorency, Anne de 37, 47, 49, 51, 60n37 morality 84, 91, 208; gendering of 75, 82; patriarchal 102, 118, 138n79,

272

Index

248; and power 98, 102, 208, 211, 243n149; rhetoric of 118, 200; of servants 174 moral or lesson, of nouvelles 8, 12, 13, 14, 15, 72–4, 76, 81–2, 92–3, 95, 97, 106, 111, 154, 163, 187, 202, 203 muletière (muleteer’s wife, character in Heptaméron, N. 2) 12–13, 16, 38, 61n44, 73–81, 119, 134n48, 153–4, 171, 173, 229, 230 multiperspectivism 3, 7, 12, 14, 19, 21n12, 31, 33, 94, 124, 128, 191, 230, 247 Musset, Alfred de 104 narratees 12, 156; female 25n39, 65, 72, 97, 247; male 97; see also destinataire; reader narratology 21n13; experiential 5, 22n21, 32–3; intentionalist 5, 22n17, 22n20, 22n21; theories of 3, 32; see also cues, narratological and perspectival narrator(s) 25n39, 33, 153; Boccaccian, in Decameron 67, 71, 73, 136n71; female, in Heptaméron 139n99; male, in Heptaméron 106, 109, 156; omniscient or pseudo-omniscient 13, 93; see also devisants; names of individual devisants naturalism 93, 117–18, 144n177 Navarre, Henri de see Henri II d’Albret, King of Navarre Navarre, Marguerite de see Marguerite de Navarre Navire, Le (The ship) 56 Nérac 48 New Testament 72, 74, 86–9, 161, 169, 172, 187, 206, 211–13, 230, 247 nobility: of birth vs. character 157, 160–1, 179n17; relationship with monarchy 41, 242n143, 244n151 Nomerfide (devisante in Heptaméron) 73, 111, 124, 153, 156 nouvelle, genre and tradition of 3, 27n53, 29

ocularity and ocular elements 2–3, 20n11, 32, 33, 57, 64n96, 79, 94, 113, 128, 165, 186; see also gaze; perspective Office de Sainte-Anne, L’ (St. Anne’s Prayer Book) 1–2 Oisille (devisante in Heptaméron) 9, 82, 132n30; contestation of “his-story” and abuses of power 103, 163, 203, 207, 210–11; focus on religion and traditional morality 11–13, 71, 73, 80, 84–5, 89–90, 93, 103, 107, 109–10, 120, 153–5, 157; humor and witty observations of 73, 81; on marriage 123, 148; mistrust of Church doctors and friars 112, 114; praise of “les choses basses” 16, 73–4, 154; 203, 207, 210–11, 226 Olivier, François, Chancellor of Alençon 191, 228, 233n24 Orléans, Charles d’ see Angoulême, Charles d’, Count of Other, the, and otherness 15–18, 31–2, 39, 68, 84–5, 90, 99, 103, 106, 125, 127, 130 Ottaviano (character in Book of the Courtier) 163, 209, 249 outsider, viewing position of 15, 35, 39, 89, 103 outsider within, in standpoint theory 32–3, 76, 103, 125, 130–1, 149, 180n35, 190, 193, 214, 224 Ovid 97 Pallavicino, Gaspare (character in Book of the Courtier) 70 Papon, Jean 140n116, 140n121, 141n124 pardon: royal, by François I 52, 54; tales or narratives of, in early modern history 38; theme of, in Heptaméron 78–9, 102, 131n12, 136n78, 160, 185–8, 190–1, 197, 209, 213, 228, 232n10 Parfaicte amye, La see Héroët Parkin, John 65, 131n4, 134n48, 142n141, 178n11 Parlamente (devisante in Heptaméron) 9, 71, 110, 147n201; condemnation

Index of female licentiousness and clandestine marriages 90, 102, 107, 124; critique of patriarchal abuses 81, 95–6, 103, 116, 129, 130, 148, 211; early leader of the group 10–11, 14, 66, 212; flirtation and banter with Simontaut 100–1, 122; on love, nobility, and the lower classes 161, 174–5; provisional acceptance of patriarchy 96–8; skepticism toward friars and preachers 111–12 Parlement: at Aix 54; of Paris 41, 43, 44, 45, 47, 54, 58n7, 62n55, 240n119, 242n147 paternalism 12, 39, 65, 73, 105, 118 patriarchy 16, 33, 65–131, 215; breakdown of 100, 215–17, 226–7; critique and contestation of 30–1, 65–6, 82, 94, 96, 97, 99, 103, 117, 142n146, 148, 158, 209; vs. gynocracy or the courtly paradigm 15, 94–6, 107–10, 119–20, 248; hegemonic gaze and discourse(s) of 3, 72, 84–5, 102, 106, 130, 248; premises, abuses, and shortcomings of 98–103, 115–16, 118–19, 161, 167, 204, 241n130, 247; see also androcentrism; gaze, the; marriage Paul, Anne Murphy 21n13, 59n15 Paul, saint, in New Testament 89 Pavia, Battle of 37, 41, 42, 188, 199 Peace of the Ladies 44 peasants 1, 31, 72, 74, 76, 148, 152, 177n4; see also poverty and the poor; servants Philip II, King of Spain 51 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni 154, 179n19, 179n20 Pizan, Christine de 35, 65, 69, 71, 98 Placards Affair see affaire des placards Plato 18, 35, 151 Plutarch 146n193 Poline (Pauline or Paulina, character in Heptaméron, N. 10) 126–7 Poline (Pauline or Paulina, character in Heptaméron, N. 19) 160–1, 181n49

273

portraiture 1–2, 10, 19n1, 20n8, 20n11, 29, 70, 99, 130, 196, 245n160; see art(s); iconography poverty 2, 56, 80n35, 148–9; effects of 115–16, 130, 158–63, 165–9, 174–5, 193–4; “genteel,” of Marguerite’s parents 35–6; from religious and evangelical perspective 74, 112, 149, 152, 161, 172, 176, 230, 247; in Renaissance 31, 149, 176; view of, among aristocracy 154, 177n8; vows of, by Cordeliers 111, 168 power, abuses of see abuse power differentials 15, 23n21, 248 pride, sin of 53, 90, 92, 94, 178n15, 211 Prisons, Les (Prisons) 37 privilege 17; of author 5, 32, 33, 39, 149–50, 172, 188, 248; perspectival, from “below” 4, 15, 23n21, 32, 39, 70, 97, 113, 131, 202, 209, 224, 248, 249; and power, abuses of 149, 209, 224; rank- or gender-based 68, 79, 151, 193, 225; see also abuses, of power; standpoints prologue see Heptaméron Protestants and Protestantism 48, 50, 54, 56; see also évangélisme; Reformation Putnam, Samuel 65 querelle des femmes (woman question) 3, 15, 69, 70, 81, 92, 130, 132n17, 132n20, 180n32, 247 Rabelais, François 9, 65, 122, 146n193, 246; allusions to buried truths 176, 184, 211–12, 247; controversial nature of 48, 69; emphasis on conscience 208–9; focus on otherness 172; Marguerite’s patronage of 55; realism of, in glimpses of violence, disease, and poverty 31, 57n2, 149; reputed antifeminism of 69, 152; shifting perspective of 18, 19; utopian community of 153, 230 Randall, Catharine 14

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Index

rank 2, 19, 116–17, 148–76; abuses of 98; of author 1, 18, 31; disparities of 12, 14, 15, 80, 83, 186, 192; disregard for 12, 14, 35, 68, 207, 230; and gender 38, 96; as impediment to love and marriage 15, 117, 124, 192, 248; vs. virtue or godliness 74, 194 rape, actual or attempted 8, 29, 99; by clergy 17, 73, 76, 79, 94, 112, 114, 155, 217, 221, 230; by employer 166, 248; by friend or friend of relative 78, 105, 159–60, 165; by men of lesser rank 38, 113, 153, 173; multiple views of 16, 78, 80, 115–16, 118, 130, 134n48, 139n99, 159–60; probable, of author herself 17, 38, 57, 80; responses to 39, 44, 76–81, 113–14; unprosecuted and unnamed 31, 80, 143n159 rape narrative(s) 13, 15, 33, 38, 65, 77, 81 reader 6, 7, 9, 11, 13; background and experiences of, as exegetical tools 33, 59n14, 86, 95, 135n66, 136n71, 189, 247; construction of, as critical thinker 11, 13, 17, 19, 27n53, 72, 75, 82–3, 100, 133, 136n71, 139n98, 153, 162, 176, 198; implied and inscribed 9–10, 12, 17, 72, 74, 97; interpretive freedom of 76, 107, 135n66; lessons for 3, 13, 17, 77, 161, 187, 191; male vs. female 66–7, 72, 74, 82, 107, 133n36; mobilized standpoint of 3, 11–12, 14, 82; perspectival cues for 9, 64, 74, 107, 125, 148, 161, 165, 226–7, 247, 248; responses of 6, 7, 17, 28n60, 52, 151, 161; see also destinataire, narratee realism 4, 14, 32n2, 57n2, 70, 128, 196, 197, 213, 233n16 Reid, Jonathan A. 14, 63n75, 232n5, 243n149, 246 Reformation 23n21, 31, 71, 191 relics 88, 136n72, 137n77 Renaissance 29–31, 149; ambiguity, tensions, and pluralism of 3, 19,

24n37, 31, 57, 120, 137n77, 172; anticlerical satire in 7, 169, 245n159; art and iconography of 2, 20n5, 34, 40, 70, 88, 133nn46–7; despotic rulers of 53, 141n126, 163, 185, 197; love and marriage in 83–5, 119–20, 123; new learning of 11, 35; northern 71; southern 40; underside of 31, 35; war and violence in 97; women in 30–1, 37, 68, 74, 108, 113 resisting subject 110, 117, 118 revelation, vehicles of 19, 70, 170–6, 218, 248 reversal, of earthly values 161–2 Reynolds (-Cornell), Regine 180n35, 182n72, 246 rhetoric 102–3, 111, 119, 120, 121, 122; androcentric 65, 96–7, 100–1, 103, 118–19; artful 18, 70, 81, 101–2, 176, 206, 212, 224; courtly or “honnête” 3, 83, 119–22, 128, 193; empty 101, 146n193; holy, of hypocritical clergy 14, 111–12, 217, 226; of honor and morality 3, 200; learned 70, 208, 226; of Marguerite, in correspondence with the king 36, 49, 243n149; martial 83, 121, 244n151; for persuasion 56, 201, 217; Platonizing 81, 119; reformist or evangelical 68, 74, 93, 128, 212; of sight and seeing 3, 16, 90, 92, 220; of silence, 63 Rigolot, François 86, 136n72, 137n77, 213, 237n94, 237n105, 238n110  Roberval (Robertval), sieur de, JeanFrançois de la Rocque 29 Roches, Anne des 65 Rochete, Louis de 48 Rohan, François de, Master (of) 19n1 Rolandine (character in Heptaméron, N. 21) 67–8, 96, 124, 129, 131n12, 131n15, 139n94, 160, 162, 209, 210, 231 Roman de la rose (Romance of the Rose) 69 Ronsard, Pierre de 29–30 Rorty, Richard 18 Roussel, Gérard 7, 45, 46, 48

Index Roussillon, Guillaume de (character in Decameron 4.9) 86, 89 Rutebeuf 169, 213–14, 216–17 Saffredent (devisant in Heptaméron): admirer of Parlamente 150, 203; androcentric discourse of 81–2, 84, 96, 102; defense of the poor 156–8, 168, 175, 180n35; naturalism of, through lens of male desire 116–22, 166 Saint-Aignan (character in Heptaméron, N. 1) 75, 99–102, 150, 170–1, 174, 185–91, 232n10, 233n16, 247 Saint-Léger, Ysambert de 1 Sainte-Marthe, Charles de 6 saints, cult of 14 Salic law 30, 46, 58n7, 98 Sannazaro, Jacopo 53 Sartre, Jean-Paul 5, 134n53, 184, 232n6 satire, anticlerical 168, 216, 238, 277 Sedan, Monseigneur de (character in Heptaméron, N. 44) 111 seeing, language and rhetoric of see language; ocularity; perspective; rhetoric Sees, bishop of (character in Heptaméron, N. 1) 99 servant(s) 148, 150, 158, 178n10; attitudes of nobility toward 151–2, 154–8, 166, 175; of God 152, 178n15, 210; perspective of, as outsiders and witnesses 4, 15, 17, 19, 25n42, 70, 71, 74, 91, 113, 131, 150, 153, 165, 201, 219, 248, 250; sacrifices of 149, 151, 153, 175; as serviteurs or courtly admirers 15, 17, 71, 95, 107–9, 118–19, 120–2, 126, 171, 174; two types of 158; as vehicles of revelation 170–3, 175–6, 182n72, 202–3, 223–5, 247; as victims, of the privileged and powerful 112, 160, 165–70, 205, 214, 217–20, 248 settings 10, 29, 51, 66, 70, 83, 107 sexes, battle of 33, 65, 69, 93, 101, 184 sexuality, female, theories of 118

275

Seyssel, Claude de 99, 177n4 Sforza, Duke Francesco Maria of Milan 45 shepherd, in prologue 11, 151, 153 sight vs. insight, dynamics of 32, 78, 158, 160, 170, 192, 219, 241n135 silence, code of 80, 81, 85, 90, 93, 95, 127 Simontaut (devisant in Heptaméron): androcentric discourse of 75–6, 99–101, 190; flirtation with Parlamente 101, 122, 151; narrator of N. 1 16, 68, 75–6, 99–101; naturalism of 83, 117, 144n177; rescued by shepherd 11, 151, 153; sadness of, over death of servants 151, 153, 175 social text 5, 22n20, 22n21, 190, 215, 247 Sorbonne 62n55; censorship by 5, 63n77, 202, 212, 218, 224; François I’s relationship with 45, 47, 62n53, 220, 224, 229, 249; Marguerite’s relationship with 5, 7, 46, 47, 50; persecution of humanists and evangelicals 40, 45, 47, 48, 218; see also Faculty of Theology sorcerer(s) and sorcery 75, 174, 177n8, 186–7 Spain 29, 41–2, 43–5, 50–1, 188, 243 standpoints: alternative or multiple 14, 16, 95, 219, 224; evangelical or religious 82, 210; experiential 32, 38, 112, 126, 130; gendered 19, 117; hegemonic 106, 107, 114, 130, 151; of historical writer 8, 14, 32–3; naturalistic 82; nonhegemonic 4, 15, 65, 103, 118, 127, 128, 129, 130, 193, 203; shifting 53, 72, 100 standpoint theory 5, 23n21, 23n22, 32, 180n35 Stephenson, Barbara 14, 18, 62n49, 189, 232n5, 232n7, 242n143, 243n149 storytellers see devisant(s) Suleyman, Sultan 53 suspicion, poetics of 17 Suyte des Marguerites de la Marguerite, La 56, 144n171

276

Index

Suzuki, Mihoko 131n10, 139n94, 139n98, 241n130 syphilis 31, 54 Tancredi (character in Decameron 4.1) 67–8, 158 testimony (also testimonios): first-hand 3, 5, 7, 32–3, 38–9, 70, 79–81, 104, 149–150, 167, 169–72, 186, 248; hearsay 38, 69, 186; hegemonic 85, 247; nonhegemonic 32, 39, 70, 79, 80–1, 130, 149, 150, 167, 169–72, 176, 248 Tetel, Marcel 8, 14, 24n37, 28n69, 178n10, 237n105, 245n159 Thomas, Brook 12–13, 27n57 Tiraqueau, André 69 transference, psychological 79 trauma narratives 38 tribulation narratives 95 tricked trickster 75–6 Trinité, La (François I, Louise de Savoie, Marguerite de Navarre) 35–6 truth: alternative, contingent on point of view 18, 28n68, 120, 176; blindness of princes to 199, 209; buried or hidden 13, 17, 25n41, 35, 44, 57, 74, 110, 176, 212, 223, 229, 247; dissimulation of 17, 28n65, 75, 84, 120; excavation of 13, 18, 28n68, 28n70, 35, 44, 74, 100, 110, 172, 212, 239n111, 212; hegemonic vs. nonhegemonic 9, 14, 19, 75, 147n201, 153, 176, 199, 229; manipulation of 86, 108; of nouvelles 18, 28n70, 66, 91, 93, 98, 126, 197; revelation of, by insights “from below” 15, 17, 170–3, 175, 182n72, 223, 248; spiritual 28n65, 112, 172, 242n135; words and rhetoric vs. 44, 70, 120, 122, 146n193, 176, 212, 247

Urbino, court of, in Book of the Courtier 69–70 Urbino, Duke of (character in Heptaméron, N. 51) 162–3, 166–7, 203–11 uxoriousness 100, 127, 129 Van Eyck, Jan 10 Vaudois 54 see also Mérindol; Waldensians Velasquez, Diego 10 vertical interpretive axis 12–13, 27n57, 73 viewing angles 12, 61n44, 66, 76, 81, 96, 158; see also perspective; standpoints violence and victimization 31, 38, 101–3, 116, 250; class- and genderbased 4, 14–15, 17, 38, 65, 77, 97–9, 106–7, 115–16, 118–19, 123, 136n71, 247–8; clerical 217, 221, 224; patterns of 16, 130, 250; related to honor 99, 228; religious 52; see also abuse Virgil 35 vows: courtly 119, 141n136, 145n183; marriage 209; religious 111, 159, 161, 168 Waldensians 52, 54; see also Mérindol;Vaudois Willette, Jeanne S.M. 5 William, Duke of Cleves (Marguerite’s son-in-law) 50–4, 63n79 Wilson, Raymond J. 213 Wolsey, Cardinal 34 women: objectification of 108, 110; in Reform theology 71; on top 97, 107, 130; status of 31, 37, 66–7, 74 world-upside-down 99, 121, 133n47, 211, 224, 239n112