WITH SOME NOTICE OF PRECEDENT COLLECTIONS OF TALES IN FRANCE, OF THE
AUTHOR, AND OF HER OTHER WORKS.
It is probable that every one who has had much to do with the study of
literature has conceived certain preferences for books which he knows
not to belong absolutely to the first order, but which he thinks to have
been unjustly depreciated by the general judgment, and which appeal to
his own tastes or sympathies with particular strength. One of such books
in my own case is _THE HEPTAMERON_ of Margaret of Navarre. I have read
it again and again, sometimes at short intervals, sometimes at longer,
during the lapse of some five-and-twenty years since I first met with
it. But the place which it holds in my critical judgment and in my
private affections has hardly altered at all since the first reading.
I like it as a reader perhaps rather more than I esteem it as a critic;
but even as a critic, and allowing fully for the personal equation, I
think that it deserves a far higher place than is generally accorded to
it.
Three mistakes, as it seems to me, pervade most of the estimates,
critical or uncritical, of the _Heptameron_, the two first of old date,
the third of recent origin. The first is that it is a comparatively
feeble imitation of a great original, and that any one who knows
Boccaccio need hardly trouble himself to know Margaret of Navarre. The
second is that it is a loose if not obscene book, disgraceful for a lady
to have written (or at least mothered), and not very creditable for
any one to read. The third is that it is interesting as the gossip of
a certain class of modern newspapers is interesting, because it tells
scandal about distinguished personages, and has for its interlocutors
other distinguished personages, who can be identified without much
difficulty, and the identification of whom adds zest to the reading. All
these three seem to me to be mistakes of fact and of judgment. In
the first place, the _Heptameron_ borrows from its original literally
nothing but plan. Its stories are quite independent; the similarity of
name is only a bookseller’s invention, though a rather happy one; and
the personal setting, which is in Boccaccio a mere framework, has here
considerable substance and interest. In the second place, the accusation
of looseness is wildly exaggerated. There is one very coarse but not
in the least immoral story in the _Heptameron_; there are several broad
jests on the obnoxious cloister and its vices, there are many tales
which are not intended _virginibus puerisque_, and there is a pervading
flavour of that half-French, half-Italian courtship of married women
which was at the time usual everywhere out of England. The manners are
not our manners, and what may be called the moral tone is distinguished
by a singular cast, of which more presently. But if not entirely a book
for boys and girls, the _Heptameron_ is certainly not one which Southey
need have excepted from his admirable answer in the character of author
of “The Doctor,” to the person who wondered whether he (Southey) could
have daughters, and if so, whether they liked reading. “He has
daughters: they love reading: and he is not the man I take him for if
they are not ‘allowed to open’ any book in his library.” The last error,
if not so entirely inconsistent with intelligent reading of the book as
the first and second, is scarcely less strange to me. For, in the first
place, the identification of the personages in the framework of the
_Heptameron_ depends upon the merest and, as it seems to me, the idlest
conjecture; and, in the second, the interest of the actual
tittle-tattle, whether it could be fathered on A or B or not, is the
least part of the interest of the book. Indeed, the stories altogether
are, as I think, far less interesting than the framework.
Let us see, therefore, if we cannot treat the _Heptameron_ in a
somewhat different fashion from that in which any previous critic, even
Sainte-Beuve, has treated it. The divisions of such treatment are not
very far to seek. In the first place, let us give some account of the
works of the same class which preceded and perhaps patterned it. In
the second, let us give an account of the supposed author, of her other
works, and of the probable character of her connection with this one. In
the third, without attempting dry argument, let us give some sketch of
the vital part, which we have called the framework, and some general
characteristics of the stories. And, in the fourth and last, let us
endeavour to disengage that peculiar tone, flavour, note, or whatever
word may be preferred, which, as it seems to me at least, at once
distinguishes the _Heptameron_ from other books of the kind, and
renders it peculiarly attractive to those whose temperament and
taste predisposes them to be attracted. For there is a great deal of
pre-established harmony in literature and literary tastes; and I have a
kind of idea that every man has his library marked out for him when he
comes into the world, and has then only got to get the books and read
them.
Margaret herself refers openly enough to the example of the _Decameron_,
which had been translated by her own secretary, Anthony le Maçon, a
member of her literary coterie, and not improbably connected with the
writing or redacting of the _Heptameron_ itself. Nor were later Italian
tale-tellers likely to be without influence at a time when French was
being “Italianated” in every possible way, to the great disgust of some
Frenchmen. But the Italian ancestors or patterns need not be dealt with
here, and can be discovered with ease and pleasure by any one who wishes
in the drier pages of Dunlop, or in the more flowery and starry pages of
Mr. Symonds’ “History of the Renaissance in Italy.” The next few pages
will deal only with the French tale-tellers, whose productions before
Margaret’s days were, if not very numerous, far from uninteresting, and
whose influence on the slight difference of _genre_ which distinguishes
the tales before us from Italian tales was by no means slight.
In France, as everywhere else, prose fiction, like prose of all kinds,
was considerably later in production than verse, and short tales of the
kind before us were especially postponed by the number, excellence, and
popularity of the verse _fabliaux_. Of these, large numbers have come
down to us, and they exactly correspond in verse to the tales of the
_Decameron_ and the _Heptameron_ in prose, except that the satirical
motive is even more strongly marked, and that touches of romantic
sentiment are rarer. This element of romance, however, appears
abundantly in the long prose versions of the Arthurian and other
legends, and we have a certain number of short prose stories of the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, of which the most famous is that
of _Aucassin et Nicolette_. These latter, however, are rather short
romances than distinct prose tales of our kind. Of that kind the first
famous book in French, and the only famous book, besides the one before
us, is the _Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_. The authorship of this book
is very uncertain. It purports to be a collection of stories told by
different persons of the society of Louis XI., when he was but Dauphin,
and was in exile in Flanders under the protection of the Duke of
Burgundy. But it has of late years been very generally assigned
(though on rather slender grounds of probability, and none of positive
evidence), to Anthony de la Salle, the best French prose writer of
the fifteenth century, except Comines, and one on whom, with an odd
unanimity, conjectural criticism has bestowed, besides his acknowledged
romance of late chivalrous society, _Petit Jehan de Saintré_ (a work
which itself has some affinities with the class of story before us), not
only the _Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_, but the famous satirical treatise
of the _Quinze Joyes du Mariage_, and the still more famous farce of
_Pathelin_. Some of the _Nouvelles_, moreover, have been putatively
fathered on Louis XI. himself, in which case the royal house of France
would boast of two distinguished taletellers instead of one. However
this may be, they all display the somewhat hard and grim but keen and
practical humour which seems to have distinguished that prince, which
was a characteristic of French thought and temper at the time, and which
perhaps arose with the misfortunes and hardships of the Hundred Years’
War. The stories are decidedly amusing, with a considerably greater,
though also a much ruder, _vis comica_ than that of the _Heptameron_;
and they are told in a style unadorned indeed, and somewhat dry, lacking
the simplicity of the older French, and not yet attaining to the
graces of the newer, but forcible, distinct, and sculpturesque, if not
picturesque. A great license of subject and language, and an enjoyment
of practical jokes of the roughest, not to say the most cruel character,
prevail throughout, and there is hardly a touch of anything like
romance; the tales alternating between jests as broad as those of the
Reeve’s and Miller’s tales in Chaucer (themselves exactly corresponding
to verse _fabliaux_, of which the _Cent Nouvelles_ are exact prose
counterparts, and perhaps prose versions), and examples of what has been
called “the humour of the stick,” which sometimes trenches hard upon
the humour of the gallows and the torture-chamber. These characteristics
have made the _Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_ no great favourites of late,
but their unpopularity is somewhat undeserved. For all their coarseness,
there is much genuine comedy in them, and if the prettiness of romantic
and literary dressing-up is absent from them, so likewise is the
insincerity thereof. They make one of the most considerable prose
books of what may be called middle French literature, and they had much
influence on the books that followed, especially on this of Margaret’s.
Indeed, one of the few examples to be found between the two, the _Grand
Paragon de Nouvelles Nouvelles_ of Nicolas de Troyes (1535), obviously
takes them for model. But Nicolas was a dull dog, and neither profited
by his model nor gave any one else opportunity to profit by himself.
Rabelais, the first book of whose _Pantagruel_ anticipated the _Paragon_
by three years, while the _Gargantua_ coincided with it, was a great
authority at the Court of Margaret’s brother Francis, dedicated one
of the books (the third) of _Pantagruel_ to her, before her death, in
high-flown language, as _esprit abstrait, ravy et ecstatic_, and must
certainly have been familiar reading of hers, and of all the ladies and
gentlemen, literary and fashionable, of her Court. But there is little
resemblance to be found in his style and hers. The short stories which
Master Francis scatters about his longer work are, indeed, models of
narration, but his whole tone of thought and manner of treatment are
altogether alien from those of the “ravished spirit” whom he praises. His
deliberate coarseness is not more different from her deliberate delicacy
than his intensely practical spirit from her high-flown romanticism
(which makes one think of, and may have suggested, the Court of La
Quinte), and her mixture of devout and amatory quodlibetation from his
cynical criticism and all-dissolving irony. But there was a contemporary
of Rabelais who forms a kind of link between him and Margaret, whose
work in part is very like the _Heptameron_, and who has been thought to
have had more than a hand in it. This was Bonaventure Despériers, a man
whose history is as obscure as his works are interesting. Born in or
about the year 1500, he committed suicide in 1544, either during a fit
of insanity, or, as has been thought more likely, in order to escape
the danger of the persecution which, in the last years of the reign of
Francis, threatened the unorthodox, and which Margaret, who had
more than once warded it off from them, was then powerless to avert.
Despériers, to speak truth, was in far more danger of the stake than
most of his friends. The infidelity of Rabelais is a matter of inference
only, and some critics (among whom the present writer ranks himself) see
in his daring ridicule of existing abuses nothing inconsistent with a
perfectly sound, if liberally conditioned, orthodoxy. Despériers, like
Rabelais, was a Lucianist, but his modernising of Lucian (the remarkable
book called _Cymbalum Mundï_), though pretending to deal with ancient
mythology, has an almost unmistakable reference to revealed religion.
It is not, however, by this work or by this side of his character at all
that Despériers is brought into connection with the work of Margaret,
who, if learned and liberal, and sometimes tending to the new ideas in
religion, was always devout and always orthodox in fundamentals. Besides
the _Cymbalum Mundi_, he has left a curious book, not published, like
the _Heptameron_ itself, till long after his own death, and entitled
_Nouvelles Récréations et Joyeux Devis_. The tales of which it consists
are for the most part very short, some being rather sketches or outlines
of tales than actually worked-out stories, so that, although there
are no less than a hundred and twenty-nine of them, the whole book is
probably not half the bulk of the _Heptameron_ itself. But they are
extremely well written, and the specially interesting thing about them
is, that in them there appears, and appears for the first time (unless
we take the _Heptameron_ itself as earlier, which is contrary to all
probability), the singular and, at any rate to some persons, very
attractive mixture of sentiment and satire, of learning and a love of
refined society, of joint devotion to heavenly and earthly love, of
voluptuous enjoyment of the present, blended and shadowed with a
sense of the night that cometh, which delights us in the prose of the
_Heptameron_, and in the verse not only of all the Pléiade poets in
France, but of Spenser, Donne, and some of their followers in England.
The scale of the stories, which are sometimes mere anecdotes, is so
small, the room for miscellaneous discourse in them is so scanty, and
the absence of any connecting links, such as those of Margaret’s own
plan, checks the expression of personal feeling so much, that it is
only occasionally that this cast of thought can be perceived. But it
is there, and its presence is an important element in determining the
question of the exact authorship of the _Heptameron_ itself.
It can hardly be said that, except translations from the Italian (of
which the close intercourse between France and Italy in the days of the
later Valois produced many), Margaret had many other examples before
her. For such a book as the _Propos Rustiques_ of Noël du Fail,
though published before her death, is not likely to have exercised any
influence over her; and most other books of the kind are later than
her own. One such (for, despite its _bizarre_ title and its distinct
intention of attacking the Roman Church, Henry Estienne’s _Apologie
pour Hérodote_ is really a collection of stories) deserves mention, not
because of its influence upon the Queen of Navarre, but because of the
Queen of Navarre’s influence upon it. Estienne is constantly quoting the
_Heptameron_, and though to a certain extent the inveteracy with
which the friars are attacked here must have given the book a special
attraction for him, two things may be gathered from his quotations and
attributions. The first is that the book was a very popular one; the
second, that there was no doubt among well-informed persons, of whom and
in whose company Estienne most certainly was, that the _Heptameron_ was
in more than name the work of its supposed author.
From what went before it Margaret could, and could not, borrow certain
well-defined things. Models both Italian and French gave her the scheme
of including a large number of short and curtly, but not skimpingly,
told stories in one general framework, and of subdividing them into
groups dealing more or less with the same subject or class of subject.
She had also in her predecessors the example of drawing largely on that
perennial and somewhat facile source of laughter--the putting together
of incidents and phrases which even by those who laugh at them are
regarded as indecorous. But of this expedient she availed herself rather
less than any of her forerunners. She had further the example of a
generally satirical intent; but here, too, she was not content merely to
follow, and her satire is, for the most part, limited to the corruptions
and abuses of the monastic orders. It can hardly be said that any of the
other stock subjects, lawyers, doctors, citizens, even husbands (for she
is less satirical on marriage than encomiastic of love), are dealt with
much by her. She found also in some, but chiefly in older books of the
Chartier and still earlier traditions, and rather in Italian than in
French, a certain strain of romance proper and of adventure; but of
this also she availed herself but rarely. What she did not find in
any example (unless, and then but partially, in the example of her own
servant, Bonaventure Des-périers) was first the interweaving of a great
deal not merely of formal religious exercise, but of positive religious
devotion in her work; and secondly, the infusing into it of the peculiar
Renaissance contrast, so often to be noticed, of love and death, passion
and piety, voluptuous enjoyment and sombre anticipation.
But it is now time to say a little more about the personality and work
of this lady, whose name all this time we have been using freely, and
who was indeed a very notable person quite independently of her literary
work. Nor was she in literature by any means an unnotable one, quite
independently of the collection of unfinished stories, which, after
receiving at its first posthumous publication the not particularly
appropriate title of _Les Amants Fortunés_, was more fortunately
re-named, albeit by something of a bull (for there is the beginning
of an eighth day as well as the full complement of the seven), the
_Heptameron_.
Few ladies have been known in history by more and more confusing titles
than the author of the _Heptameron_, the confusion arising partly from
the fact that she had a niece and a great-niece of the same charming
Christian name as herself. The second Margaret de Valois (the most
appropriate name of all three, as it was theirs by family right) was the
daughter of Francis I., the patroness of Ronsard, and, somewhat late
in life, the wife of the Duke of Savoy--a marriage which, as the bride
carried with her a dowry of territory, was not popular, and brought some
coarse jests on her. Not much is said of her personal appearance after
her infancy; but she inherited her aunt’s literary tastes, if not her
literary powers, and gave Ronsard powerful support in his early days.
The third was the daughter of Henry II., the “Grosse Margot” of her
brother, Henry III., the “Reine Margot” of Dumas’ novel, the idol of
Brantôme, the first wife of Henry IV., the beloved of Guise, La Mole,
and a long succession of gallants, the rival of her sister-in-law
Mary Stuart, not in misfortunes, but as the most beautiful, gracious,
learned, accomplished, and amiable of the ladies of her time. This
Margaret would have been an almost perfect heroine of romance (for she
had every good quality except chastity), if she had not unluckily lived
rather too long.
Her great-aunt, our present subject, was not the equal of her
great-niece in beauty, her portraits being rendered uncomely by a
portentously long nose, longer even than Mrs. Siddons’s, and by a very
curious expression of the eyes, going near to slyness. But the face is
one which can be imagined as much more beautiful than it seems in the
not very attractive portraiture of the time, and her actual attractions
are attested by her contemporaries with something more than the
homage-to-order which literary men have never failed to pay to ladies
who are patronesses of letters. Besides Margaret of Valois, she is
known as Margaret of Angoulême, from her place of birth and her father’s
title; Margaret of Alençon, from the fief of her first husband; Margaret
of Navarre, of which country, like her grand-niece, she was queen, by
her second marriage with Henry d’Albret; and even Margaret of Orleans,
as belonging to the Orleans branch of the royal house. She was not,
like her nieces, Margaret of France, as her father never reigned, and
Brantôme properly denies her the title, but others sometimes give it.
When it is necessary to call her anything besides the simple “Margaret,”
Angoulême is at once the most appropriate and the most distinctive
designation. She was born on the 11th or 12th of April 1492, her father
being Charles, Count of Angoulême, and her mother Louise of Savoy. She
was their eldest child, and two years older than her brother, the future
King Francis. According to, and even in excess of, the custom of the
age, she received a very learned education, acquiring not merely the
three tongues, French, Italian, and Spanish, which were all in common
use at the French Court during her time, but Latin, and even a little
Greek and a little Hebrew. She lived in the provinces both before and
after her marriage, in 1509, to her relation, Charles, Duke of Alençon,
who was older than herself by three years, and though a fair soldier
and an inoffensive person, was apparently of little talents and not
particularly amiable. The accession of her brother to the throne
opened a much more brilliant career to her. She and her mother jointly
exercised great influence over Francis; and the Duchess of Alençon, to
whom her brother shortly afterwards gave Berry, was for many years one
of the most influential persons in the kingdom, using her influence
almost invariably for good. Her husband died soon after Pavia, and
in the same year (September 1525) she undertook a journey to Spain on
behalf of her captive brother. This journey, with some expressions in
her letters and in Brantôme, has been wrested by some critics in order
to prove that her affection for Francis was warmer than it ought to have
been--an imputation wanton in both senses of the word.
She was sought in marriage by or offered in marriage to divers
distinguished persons during her widowhood, and this was also the time
of her principal diplomatic exercise, an office for which--odd as it now
seems for a woman--she had, like her mother, like her niece Catherine of
Medicis, like her namesake Margaret of Parma, and like other ladies of
the age, a very considerable aptitude and reputation. When she at last
married, the match was not a brilliant one, though it proved, contrary
to immediate probability, to be the source of the last and the most
glorious branch of the royal dynasty of France. The bridegroom bore
indeed the title of King of Navarre and possessed Bearn, but his kingdom
had long been in Spanish hands, and but for his wife’s dowry of Alençon
and appanage of Berry (to which Francis had added Armagnac and a large
pension) he would have been but a lackland. Furthermore, he was eleven
years younger than herself, and it is at least insinuated that the
affection, if there was any, was chiefly on her side. At any rate,
this earlier Henry of Navarre seems to have had not a few of the
characteristics of his grandson, together with a violence and brutality
which, to do the _Vert Galant_ justice, formed no part of his character.
The only son of the marriage died young, and a girl, Jane d’Albret,
mother of the great Bourbon race of the next two centuries, was taken
away from her parents by “reasons of state” for a time. The domestic life
of Margaret, however, concerns us but little, except in one way. Her
husband disliked administration, and she was the principal ruler in
their rather extensive estates or dominions. Moreover, she was able at
her quasi-Court to extend the literary coteries which she had already
begun to form at Paris. The patronage to men of letters for which her
brother is famous was certainly more due to her than to himself; and to
her also was due the partial toleration of religious liberty which for a
time distinguished his reign. It was not till her influence was weakened
that intolerance prevailed, and she was able even then for a time to
save Marot and other distinguished persons from persecution. It is
rather a moot-point how far she inclined to the Reformed doctrines,
properly so called. Her letters, her serious and poetical work, and
even the _Heptameron_ itself, show a fervently pietistic spirit,
and occasionally seem to testify to a distinct inclination towards
Protestantism, which is also positively attested by Brantôme and others;
but this Protestantism must have been, so far as it was consistent and
definite at all, the Protestantism of Erasmus rather than of Luther, of
Rabelais rather than of Calvin. She had a very strong objection to
the coarseness, the vices, the idleness, the brutish ignorance of the
cloister; she had aspirations after a more spiritual form of religion
than the ordinary Catholicism of her day provided, and as a strong
politician she may have had something of that Gallicanism which has
always been well marked in some of the best Frenchmen, and which at
one time nearly prevailed with her great-great-grandson, Louis XIV.
But there is no doubt that, as her brother said to the fanatical
Montmorency, she would always have been and always was of his religion,
the religion of the State. The side of the Reformation which must
have most appealed to her was neither its austere morals, nor its bare
ritual, nor its doctrines, properly so called, but its spiritual pietism
and its connection with profane learning and letters; for of literature
Margaret was an ardent devotee and a constant practitioner.
Her best days were done by the time of her second marriage. After the
King’s return from Spain persecution broke out, and Margaret’s influence
became more and more weak to stop it. As early as 1533 her own _Miroir
de l’Ame Pécheresse_, then in a second edition, provoked the fanaticism
of the Sorbonne, and the King had to interfere in person to protect
his sister’s work and herself from gross insult. The Medici marriage
increased the persecuting tendency, and for a time there was even an
attempt to suppress printing, and with it all that new literature which
was the Queen’s delight. She was herself in some danger, but Francis had
not sunk so low as to permit any actual attack to be made on her. Yet
all the last years of her life were unhappy, though she continued to
keep Court at Nérac in Pau, to accompany her brother in his progresses,
and, as we know from documents, to play Lady Bountiful over a wide area
of France. Her husband appears to have been rather at variance with
her; and her daughter, who married first, and in name only, the Duke
of Cleves in 1540, and later (1548) Anthony de Bourbon, was also not
on cordial terms with her mother. By the date of this second marriage
Francis was dead, and though he had for many years been anything but
wholly kind, Margaret’s good days were now in truth done. Her nephew
Henry left her in possession of her revenues, but does not seem to have
been very affectionately disposed towards her; and even had she
been inclined to attempt any recovery of influence, his wife and his
mistress, Catherine de Medici and Diana of Poitiers, two women as
different from Margaret as they were from one another, would certainly
have prevented her from obtaining it. As a matter of fact, however, she
had long been in ill-health, and her brother’s death seems to have dealt
her the final stroke. She survived it two years, even as she had been
born two years before him, and died on the 21 st December 1549, at the
Castle of Odos, near Tarbes, having lived in almost complete retirement
for a considerable time. Her husband is said to have regretted her dead
more than he loved her living, and her literary admirers, such of them
as death and exile had spared, were not ungrateful. _Tombeaux_, or
collections of funeral verses, were not lacking, the first being in
Latin, and, oddly enough, nominally by three English sisters, Anne,
Margaret, and Jane Seymour, nieces of Henry VIII.’s queen and Edward
VI.’s mother, with learned persons like Dorât, Sainte-Marthe, and Baïf.
This was re-issued in French and in a fuller form later.
Some reference has been made to an atrocious slur cast without a shred
of evidence on her moral character. There is as little foundation for
more general though milder charges of laxity. It is admitted that she
had little love for her first husband, and it seems to be probable that
her second had not much love for her. She was certainly addressed in
gallant strains by men of letters, the most audacious being Clement
Marot; but the almost universal reference of the well-known and
delightful lines beginning--
“Un doux nenny avec un doux sourire,”
to her method of dealing not merely with this lover but with others,
argues a general confidence in her being a virtuous coquette, if
somewhat coquettishly virtuous. It may be added that the whole tone of
the _Heptameron_ points to a very similar conclusion.
Her literary work was very considerable, and it falls under three
divisions: letters, the book before us, and the very curious and
interesting collection of poems known by the charming if fantastic title
of _Les Marguerites de la Marguerite des Princesses_, a play on the
meanings, daisy, pearl, and Margaret, which had been popular in the
artificial school of French poetry since the end of the thirteenth
century in a vast number of forms.
The letters are naturally of the very first importance for determining
the character of Margaret’s life as a woman of business, a diplomatist,
and so forth. They show her to us in all these capacities, and also in
that of an enlightened and always ready patroness of letters and of men
of letters. Further, they are of value, though their value is somewhat
affected by a reservation to be made immediately, as to her mental and
moral characteristics. But they are not of literary interest at all
equal to that of either of the other divisions. They are, if not spoilt,
still not improved, by the fact that the art of easy letter-writing,
in which Frenchwomen of the next century were to show themselves such
proficients, had not yet been developed, and that most of them are
couched in a heavy, laborious, semiofficial style, which smells, as far
as mere style goes, of the cumbrous refinements of the _rhétoriqueurs_,
in whose flourishing time Margaret herself grew up, and which conceals
the writer’s sentiments under elaborate forms of ceremonial courtesy.
Something at least of the groundless scandal before referred to is
derived in all probability, if not in all certainty, from the lavish
use of hyperbole in addressing her brother; and generally speaking,
the rebuke of the Queen to Polonius, “More matter with less art,” is
applicable to the whole correspondence.
Something of the same evil influence is shown in the Marguerites. It
must be remembered that the writer died before the Pléiade movement had
been fully started, and that she was older by five years than Marot,
the only one of her own contemporaries and her own literary circle who
attained to a poetic style easier, freer, and more genuine than the
cumbrous rhetoric, partly derived from the allegorising style of the
_Roman de la Rose_ and its followers, partly influenced by corrupt
following of the re-discovered and scarcely yet understood classics,
partly alloyed with Flemish and German and Spanish stiffness, of which
Chastellain, Crétin, and the rest have been the frequently quoted and
the rarely read exponents to students of French literature. The contents
of the _Marguerites_, to take the order of the beautiful edition of
M. Félix Frank, are as follows: Volume I. contains first a long and
singular religious poem entitled _Le Miroir de l’Ame Pécheresse_, in
rhymed decasyllables, in which pretty literal paraphrases of a large
number of passages of Scripture are strung together with a certain
amount of pious comment and reflection. This is followed (after a
shorter piece on the contest in the human soul between the laws of the
spirit and of the flesh) by another poem of about the same length as the
_Miroir_, and of no very different character, entitled _Oraison de L’Ame
Fidèle à son Seigneur Dieu_, and a shorter _Oraison à Notre Seigneur
Jésus Christ_ completes the volume. The second volume yields four
so-called “comedies,” but really mysteries on the old mediæval model,
only distinguishable from their forerunners by slightly more modern
language and a more scriptural tone. The subjects are the Nativity, the
Adoration of the Three Kings, the Massacre of the Innocents, and the
Flight into Egypt. The third volume contains a third poem in the
style of the _Miroir_, but much superior, _Le Triomphe de l’Agneau_, a
considerable body of spiritual songs, a miscellaneous poem or two,
and some epistles, chiefly addressed to Francis. These last begin the
smaller and secular division of the _Marguerites_, which is completed
in the fourth volume by _Les Quatre Dames et les Quatre Gentilhommes_,
composed of long monologues after the fashion of the Froissart-Chartier
school, by a “_comédie profane_,” a farce entitled _Trop, Prou [much],
Peu, Moins_; a long love poem, again in the Chartier style, entitled _La
Coche_, and some minor pieces.
Opinion as to these poems has varied somewhat, but their merit has never
been put very high, nor, to tell the truth, could it be put high by any
one who speaks critically. In the first place, they are written for the
most part on very bad models, both in general plan and in particular
style and expression. The plan is, as has been said, taken from the
long-winded allegorical erotic poetry of the very late thirteenth, the
fourteenth, and the fifteenth centuries--poetry which is now among the
most difficult to read in any literature. The groundwork or canvas being
transferred from love to religion, it gains a little in freshness and
directness of purpose, but hardly in general readableness. Thus, for
instance, two whole pages of the _Miroir_, or some forty or fifty lines,
are taken up with endless playings on the words _mort_ and _vie_ and
their derivatives, such as _mortifiez, and mort fiez, mort vivifiée and
vie mourante_. The sacred comedies or mysteries have the tediousness
and lack of action of the older pieces of the same kind without their
_naïveté_; and pretty much the same may be said of the profane comedy
(which is a kind of morality), and of the farce. Of _La Coche_, what has
been said of the long sacred poems may be said, except that here we
go back to the actual subject of the models, not on the whole with
advantage: while in the minor pieces the same word plays and frigid
conceits are observable.
But if this somewhat severe judgment must be passed on the poems
as wholes, and from a certain point of view, it may be considerably
softened when they are considered more in detail. In not a few passages
of the religious poems Margaret has reached (and as she had no examples
before her except Marot’s psalms, which were themselves later than at
least some of her work, may be said to have anticipated) that grave and
solemn harmony of the French Huguenots of the sixteenth century, which
in Du Bartas, in Agrippa d’Aubigné, and in passages of the tragedian
Montchrestien, strikes notes hardly touched elsewhere in French
literature. The _Triomphe de l’Agneau_ displays her at her best in this
respect, and not unfrequently comes not too far off from the apocalyptic
resonance of d’Aubigné himself. Again, the _Bergerie_ included in the
Nativity comedy or mystery, though something of a Dresden _Bergerie_ (to
use a later image), is graceful and elegant enough in all conscience.
But it is on the minor poems, especially the Epistles and the _Chansons
Spirituelles_, that the defenders of Margaret’s claim to be a poet rest
most strongly. In the former her love, not merely for her brother, but
for her husband, appears unmistakably, and suggests graceful thoughts.
In the latter the force and fire which occasionally break through the
stiff wrappings of the longer poems appear with less difficulty and in
fuller measure.
It is, however, undoubtedly curious, and not to be explained merely by
the difference of subject, that the styles of the letters and of the
poems, agreeing well enough between themselves, differ most remarkably
from that of the _Heptameron_. The two former are decidedly open to
the charges of pedantry, artificiality, heaviness. There is a great
surplusage of words and a seeming inability to get to the point. The
_Heptameron_ if not equal in narrative vigour and lightness to Boccaccio
before and La Fontaine afterwards, is not in the least exposed to
the charge of clumsiness of any kind, employs a simple, natural, and
sufficiently picturesque vocabulary, avoids all verbiage and roundabout
writing, and both in the narratives and in the connecting conversation
displays a very considerable advance upon nearly all the writers of the
time, except Rabelais, Marot, and Despériers, in easy command of the
vernacular. It is, therefore, not wonderful that there has, at different
times (rather less of late years, but that is probably an accident),
been a disposition if not to take away from Margaret all the credit of
the book, at any rate to give a share of it to others. In so far as this
share is attempted to be bestowed on ladies and gentlemen of her Court
or family there is very little evidence for it; but in so far as the pen
may be thought to have been sometimes held for her by the distinguished
men of letters just referred to (there is no reason why Master Francis
himself should not have sometimes guided it), and by others only less
distinguished, there is considerable internal reason to favour the idea.
At all times and in all places--in France perhaps more than anywhere
else--kings and queens, lords and ladies, have found no difficulty (we
need not use the harsh Voltairian-Carlylian phrase, and say in getting
their literary work “buckwashed,” but) in getting it pointed and
seasoned, trimmed and ornamented by professional men of letters. The
form of the _Heptameron_ lends itself more than any other to such
assistance; and while I should imagine that the setting, with its strong
colour, both of religiosity and amorousness, is almost wholly Margaret’s
work, I should also think it so likely as to be nearly certain that in
some at least of the tales the hands of the authors of the _Cymbalum
Mundi_ and the _Adolescence Clémentine_, of Le Maçon and Brodeau, may
have worked at the devising, very likely re-shaped and adjusted by the
Queen herself, of the actual stories as we have them now.
The book, as we have it, consists of seven complete days of ten novels
each, and of an eighth containing two novels only. The fictitious scheme
of the setting is somewhat less lugubrious than that of the _Decameron_,
but still not without an element of tragedy. On the first of September,
“when the hot springs of the Pyrenees begin to enter upon their virtue,”
a company of persons of quality assembled at Cauterets, we are told, and
abode there three weeks with much profit. But when they tried to return,
rain set in with such severity that they thought the Deluge had come
again, and they found their roads, especially that to the French side,
almost entirely barred by the Gave de Béarn and other rivers. So they
scattered in different directions, most of them taking the Spanish
side, either along the mountains and across to Roussillon or straight to
Barcelona, and thence home by sea. But a certain widow, named Oisille,
made her way with much loss of men and horses to the Abbey of Notre Dame
de Serrance. Here she was joined by divers gentlemen and ladies, who
had had even worse experiences of travel than herself, with bears and
brigands, and other evil things, so that one of them, Longarine, had
lost her husband, murdered in an affray in one of the cut-throat inns
always dear to romance. Besides this disconsolate person and Oisille,
the company consisted of a married pair, Hircan and Parlamente; two
young cavaliers, Dagoucin and Saffredent; two young ladies, Nomerfide
and Ennasuite; Simontault, a cavalier-servant of Parlamente; and
Geburon, a knight older and discreeter than the rest of the company
except Oisille.(1)
1 These names have been accommodated to M. Le Roux de
Lincy’s orthography, from MS. No. 1512; but for myself I
prefer the spellings, especially “Emarsuitte,” more usual in
the printed editions.--G. S.
These form the party, and it is to be noted that idle and contradictory
as all the attempts made to identify them have been (for instance, the
most confident interpreters hesitate between Oisille and Parlamente, an
aged widow and a youthful wife, for Margaret herself), it is not to be
denied that the various parts are kept up with much decision and spirit.
Of the men, indeed, Hircan is the only one who has a very decided
character, and is represented as fond of his wife, Parlamente, but
a decided libertine and of a somewhat rough and ruthless general
character--points which have made the interpreters sure that he must be
Henry d’Albret. The others, except that Geburon is, as had been said,
older than his companions, and that Simontault sighs vainly after
Parlamente, are merely walking gentlemen of the time, accomplished
enough, but not individual. The women are much more distinct and show a
woman’s hand. Oisille is, as our own seventeenth-century ancestors would
have said, ancient and sober, very devout, regarded with great respect
by the rest of the company, and accepted as a kind of mistress both of
the revels and of more serious matters, but still a woman of the
world, and content to make only an occasional and mild protest against
tolerably free stories and sentiments. Parlamente, considerably younger,
and though virtuous, not by any means ignorant of or wholly averse to
the devotion of Simontault, indulging occasionally in a kind of mild
conjugal sparring with her husband, Hircan, but apparently devoted to
him, full of religion and romance and refinement at once, is a very
charming character, resembling Madame de Sévigné as she may have been
in her unknown or hardly known youth, when husband and lovers alike were
attracted by the flame of her beauty and charm, only to complain that
it froze and did not burn. Longarine is discreetly unhappy for her
dead husband, but appears decidedly consolable; Ennasuite is a haughty
damsel, disdainful of poor folk, and Nomerfide is a pure madcap,
a Catherine Seyton of the generation before Catherine herself, the
feminine Dioneo of the party, and, if a little too free-spoken for
prudish modern taste, a very delightful girl.
Now when this good company had assembled at Serrance and told each other
their misadventures, the waters on inquiry seemed to be out more widely
and more dangerously than before, so that it was impossible to think of
going farther for the time. They deliberated accordingly how they should
employ themselves, and, after allowing, on the proposal of Oisille, an
ample space for sacred exercises, they resolved that every day, after
dinner and an interval, they should assemble in a meadow on the bank of
the Gave at midday and tell stories. The device is carried out with
such success that the monks steal behind the hedges to hear them, and an
occasional postponement of vespers takes place. Simontault begins, and
the system of tale-telling goes round on the usual plan of each speaker
naming him or her who shall follow. It should be observed that no
general subject is, as in the _Decameron_, prescribed to the speakers
of each day, though, as a matter of course, one subject often suggests
another of not dissimilar kind. Nor is there the Decameronic arrangement
of the “king.” Between the stories, and also between the days, there is
often a good deal of conversation, in which the divers characters, as
given above, are carried out with a minuteness very different from the
chief Italian original.
From what has been said already, it will be readily perceived that the
novels, or rather their subjects, are not very easy to class in any
rationalised order. The great majority, if they do not answer exactly to
the old title of _Les Histoires des Amants Fortunés_, are devoted to
the eternal subject of the tricks played by wives to the disadvantage
of husbands, by husbands to the disadvantage of wives, and sometimes by
lovers to the disadvantage of both. “Subtilité” is a frequent word in
the titles, and it corresponds to a real thing. Another large division,
trenching somewhat upon the first, is composed of stories to the
discredit of the monks (something, though less, is said against the
secular clergy), and especially of the Cordeliers or Franciscans, an
Order who, for their coarse immorality and their brutal antipathy to
learning, were the special black (or rather grey) beasts of the literary
reformers of the time. In a considerable number there are references
to actual personages of the time--references which stand on a very
different footing of identification from the puerile guessings at the
personality of the interlocutors so often referred to. Sometimes these
references are avowed: “Un des muletiers de la Reine de Navarre,” “Le
Roi François montre sa générosité,” “Un Président de Grenoble,” “Une
femme d’Alençon,” and so forth. At other times the reference is somewhat
more covert, but hardly to be doubted, as in the remarkable story of a
“great Prince” (obviously Francis himself) who used on his journeyings
to and from an assignation of a very illegitimate character, to turn
into a church and piously pursue his devotions. There are a few curious
stories in which amatory matters play only a subordinate part or none
at all, though it must be confessed that this last is a rare thing.
Some are mere anecdote plays on words (sometimes pretty free, and then
generally told by Nomer-fide), or quasi-historical, such as that
already noticed of the generosity of Francis to a traitor, or deal with
remarkable trials and crimes, or merely miscellaneous matters, the best
of the last class being the capital “Bonne invention pour chasser le
lutin.”
In so large a number of stories with so great a variety of subjects, it
naturally cannot but be the case that there is a considerable diversity
of tone. But that peculiarity at which we have glanced more than once,
the combination of voluptuous passion with passionate regret and a
mystical devotion, is seldom absent for long together. The general
note, indeed, of the _Heptameron_ is given by more than one passage
in Brantôme--at greatest length by one which Sainte-Beuve has rightly
quoted, at the same time and also rightly rebuking the sceptical Abbé’s
determination to see in it little more than a piece of _précieuse_
mannerliness (though, indeed, the _Précieuses_ were not yet). Yet even
Sainte-Beuve has scarcely pointed out quite strongly enough how entirely
this is the keynote of all Margaret’s work, and especially of the
_Heptameron_. The story therefore may be worth telling again, though
it may be found in the “Cinquième Discours” of the _Vies des Dames
Galantes_.
Brantôme’s brother, not yet a captain in the army, but a student
travelling in Italy, had in sojourning at Ferrara, when Renée of France
was Duchess, fallen in love with a certain Mademoiselle de la Roche. For
love of him she had returned to France, and, visiting his own country
of Gascony, had attached herself to the Court of Margaret, where she
had died. And it happened that Bourdeilles, six months afterwards, and
having forgotten all about his dead love, came to Pau and went to pay
his respects to the Queen. He met her coming back from vespers, and she
greeted him graciously, and they talked of this matter and of that. But,
as they walked together hither and thither, the Queen drew him, without
cause shown, into the church she had just left, where Mademoiselle de
la Roche was buried. “Cousin,” said she, “do you feel nothing stirring
beneath you and under your feet?” But he said, “Nothing, Madame.”
“Think, cousin,” then said she once again. But he said, “Madame, I have
thought well, but I feel nought; for under me there is but a stone, hard
and firmly set.” “Now, do I tell you,” said the Queen, leaving him
no longer at study, “that you are above the tomb and the body of
Mademoiselle de la Roche, who is buried beneath you, and whom you loved
so much in her lifetime. And since our souls have sense after our death,
it cannot be but that this faithful one, dead so lately, felt your
presence as soon as you came near her; and if you have not perceived it,
because of the thickness of the tomb, doubt not that none the less she
felt it. And forasmuch as it is a pious work to make memory of the dead,
and notably of those whom we loved, I pray you give her a _pater_ and an
_ave_, and likewise a _de profundis_, and pour out holy water. So
shall you make acquist of the name of a right faithful lover and a good
Christian.” And she left him that he might do this.
Brantôme (though he had an admiration for Margaret, whose lady of
honour his grandmother had been, and who, according to the Bourdeilles
tradition, composed her novels in travelling) thought this a pretty
fashion of converse. “Voilà,” he says, “l’opinion de cette bonne
princesse; laquelle la tenait plus par gentillesse et par forme de devis
que par créance à mon avis.” Sainte-Beuve, on the contrary, and with
better reason, sees in it faith, graciousness, feminine delicacy, and
piety at once. No doubt; but there is something more than this, and that
something more is what we are in search of, and what we shall find, now
in one way, now in another, throughout the book: something whereof the
sentiment of Donne’s famous thoughts on the old lover’s ghost, on the
blanched bone with its circlet of golden tresses, is the best known
instance in English. The madcap Nomerfide indeed lays it down, that
“the meditation of death cools the heart not a little.” But her more
experienced companions know better. The worse side of this Renaissance
peculiarity is told in the last tale, a rather ghastly story of monkish
corruption; its lighter side appears in the story, already referred
to, of the “Grand Prince” and his pious devotions on the way to not
particularly pious occupation. But touches of the more poetical and
romantic effects of it are all over the book. It is to be found in the
story of the gentleman who forsook the world because of his beloved’s
cruelty, whereat she repenting did likewise (“he had much better have
thrown away his cowl and married her,” quoth the practical Nomerfide);
in that of the wife who, to obtain freedom of living with her paramour,
actually allowed herself to be buried; in that (very characteristic of
the time, especially for the touch of farce in it) of the unlucky
person to whom phlebotomy and love together were fatal; and in not a
few others, while it emerges in casual phrases of the intermediate
conversations and of the stories themselves, even when it is not to be
detected in the general character of the subjects.
And thus we can pretty well decide what is the most interesting and
important part of the whole subject. The question, What is the
special virtue of the _Heptameron_? I have myself little hesitation
in answering. There is no book, in prose and of so early a date, which
shows to me the characteristic of the time as it influenced the two
great literary nations of Europe so distinctly as this book of Margaret
of Angoulême. Take it as a book of Court gossip, and it is rather less
interesting than most books of Court gossip, which is saying much. Take
it as the performance of a single person, and you are confronted with
the difficulty that it is quite unlike that other person’s more certain
works, and that it is in all probability a joint affair. Take its
separate stories, and, with rare exceptions, they are not of the first
order of interest, or even of the second. But separate the individual
purport of these stories from the general colour or tone of them;
take this general colour or tone in connection with the tenor of the
intermediate conversations, which form so striking a characteristic
of the book, and something quite different appears. It is that same
peculiarity which appears in places and persons and things so different
as Spenser, as the poetry of the Pléiade, as Montaigne, as Raleigh,
as Donne, as the group of singers known as the Caroline poets. It is
a peculiarity which has shown itself in different forms at different
times, but never in such vigour and precision as at this time. It
combines a profound and certainly sincere--almost severe--religiosity
with a very vigorous practice of some things which the religion it
professes does not at all countenance. It has an almost morbidly
pronounced simultaneous sense of the joys and the sorrows of human life,
the enjoyment of the joys being perfectly frank, and the feeling of
the sorrows not in the least sentimental. It unites a great general
refinement of thought, manners, opinion, with an almost astonishing
occasional coarseness of opinion, manners, thought. The prevailing note
in it is a profound melancholy mixed with flashes and intervals of a no
less profound delight. There is in it the sense of death, to a strange
and, at first sight, almost unintelligible extent. Only when one
remembers the long night of the religious wars which was just about to
fall on France, just as after Spenser, Puritan as he was, after Carew
and Herrick still more, a night of a similar character was about to fall
on England, does the real reason of this singular idiosyncrasy appear.
The company of the _Heptameron_ are the latest representatives, at first
hand, and with no deliberate purpose of presentment, of the mediaeval
conception of gentlemen and ladies who fleeted the time goldenly. They
are not themselves any longer mediaeval; they have been taught modern
ways; they have a kind of uneasy sense (even though one and another of
themselves may now and then flout the idea) of the importance of other
classes, even of some duty on their own part towards other classes.
Their piety is a very little deliberate, their voluptuous indulgence has
a grain of conscience in it and behind it, which distinguishes it not
less from the frank indulgence of a Greek or a Roman than from the still
franker naïveté of purely mediaeval art, from the childlike, almost
paradisiac, innocence of the Belli-cents and Nicolettes and of the
daughter of the great Soldan Hugh in that wonderful serio-comic
_chanson_ of the _Voyage à Constantinople_. The mark of modernity is on
them, and yet they are so little conscious of it, and so perfectly free
from even the slightest touch of at least its anti-religious influence.
Nobody, not even Hircan, the Grammont of the sixteenth century; not
even Nomerfide, the Miss Notable of her day and society; not even the
haughty lady Ennasuite, who wonders whether common folk can be supposed
to have like passions with us, feels the abundant religious services and
the periods of meditation unconscionable or tiresome.
And so we have here three notes constantly sounding together or in
immediate sequence. There is the passion of that exquisite _rondeau_
of Marot’s, which some will have, perhaps not impossibly, to refer to
Margaret herself--
En la baisant m’a dit: “Amy sans blasme,
Ce seul baiser, qui deux bouches embasme,
Les arrhes sont du bien tant espéré,”
Ce mot elle a doulcement proféré,
Pensant du tout apaiser ma grand flamme.
Mais le mien cour adonc plus elle enflamme,
Car son alaine odorant plus que basme
Souffloit le feu qu’Amour m’a préparé,
En la baisant.
Bref, mon esprit, sans congnoissance d’âme,
Vivoit alors sur la bouche à ma dame,
Dont se mouroit le corps énamouré;
Et si la lèvre eust guères demouré
Contre la mienne, elle m’eust succé l’âme,
En la baisant.
There is the devout meditation of Oisille, and that familiarity with the
Scriptures which, as Hircan himself says, “I trow we all read and
know.” And then there is the note given by two other curious stories of
Brantôme. One tells how the Queen of Navarre watched earnestly for hours
by the bedside of a dying maid of honour, that she might see whether the
parting of the soul was a visible fact or not. The second tells how
when some talked before her of the joys of heaven, she sighed and said,
“Well, I know that this is true; but we dwell so long dead underground
before we arise thither.” There, in a few words, is the secret of _THE
HEPTAMERON_: the fear of God, the sense of death, the voluptuous longing
and voluptuous regret for the good things of life and love that pass
away.