The Heptameron Read online

  THE HEPTAMERON

  PAUL CHILTON was formerly Reader in French Studies at the University of Warwick and is currently Professor of Linguistics at the University of East Anglia. His publications cover a range of topics and disciplines. In addition to work on French Renaissance literature, he has published books and articles on discourse and metaphor; he is known for his work on the language of politics.

  MARGUERITE de NAVARRE

  The Heptameron

  Translated with an Introduction by

  P. A. CHILTON

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First translation published in 1984

  Reprinted with updated Further Reading 2004

  24

  Copyright © P. A. Chilton, 1984, 2004

  All rights reserved

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

  to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

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  EISBN: 978–0–141–91115–1

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  1. THE TEXT

  2. THE STORYTELLERS

  3. THE STORIES

  4. TRANSLATIONS

  5. TRANSLATABILITY

  BIOGRAPHICAL AND

  HISTORICAL SUMMARY

  THE NAMES OF THE STORYTELLERS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  THE HEPTAMERON

  SUMMARIES OF THE STORIES

  INTRODUCTION

  1. THE TEXT

  The Heptaméron is a collection of some seventy stories. It has no definitive form: the order of the stories, the stories actually included and the textual details vary considerably from manuscript to manuscript and from printed edition to printed edition. As for the author, the scholarly consensus confidently attributes the collection to Marguerite de Navarre (1492–1549), sister of François I, patron of Rabelais, Marot and Des Périers, protector of reforming churchmen, and writer of intense mystical verse. However, this attribution is based on evidence which is at best circumstantial, and which needs to be interpreted with moderation.

  Marguerite died in 1549, but the collection did not appear in print until 1558. It bore the title Histoires des Amans fortunez, and was edited by the humanist scholar Pierre Boaistuau. This first edition had only sixty-seven stories, arranged in an order not found in any of the other versions, and omitted the linking discussion passages found in the fullest manuscripts. Moreover, in his dedication (to the Duchess of Nevers) Boaistuau makes no explicit mention of Marguerite de Navarre as the author. Perhaps this was because Boaistuau had made a botch of her work. Perhaps it was because Marguerite was not the real author of the collection, or at least not the original author of all the tales and all the dialogues.

  One year later in 1559 a new edition came out which claimed to restore the stories to their ‘true’ arrangement and to give credit for authorship where it was due – namely, to the late Queen of Navarre. Pierre Gruget, the new editor, also gave the collection a title it has had ever since, though it never had it in the manuscripts: L’Heptaméron des Nouvelles. In a dedication to Marguerite’s daughter, Jeanne d’Albret, Gruget grumbles about Boaistuau’s ‘omission or concealment’ of the author’s name, and claims to have restored her work to its pristine state by collating all the available manuscript versions. Gruget certainly ordered the tales differently, distributed them into ‘Days’ of ten stories, and brought in fuller prologues and dialogues. But he still remains close to his predecessor. Both of them disguise proper names and suppress passages which might have been suspect to conservative theologians or which might have offended the religious orders. This did not become plain until the nineteenth-century editors returned to the extant manuscripts. At the same time it emerged that Gruget had removed three whole stories (stories 11, 44 and 46 in the manuscripts), presumably because they represent the Franciscans as gluttons, parasites and rapists, and had substituted three which were less disturbing.

  So Gruget, who appeared to be establishing the Heptaméron canon, ends up raising questions about it. Where did his three stories come from? Are they by Marguerite? Are there any mislaid stories which still might turn up and make the Heptaméron the French Decameron its editors wanted it to be? Twentieth-century researchers have believed this to be the case. They have given attention to one particular version – an elegant manuscript dated 1553 prepared by the scholar Adrien de Thou. This manuscript calls itself Le Décaméron of Marguerite, and seems to leave empty pages for missing tales to complete the hundred implied in the title. It needs emphasizing, however, that this text, although it is consistent, readable and bristling with variants, appears to be a heavily edited version of other, earlier, manuscripts which are often incomplete or obscure. Its main interest, therefore, is as a guide to alternative readings and as an indication of how a careful sixteenth-century reader could make sense of faulty copy.

  The expectations aroused by de Thou’s blank pages have hardly been fulfilled. Apart from Gruget’s three substitutes, only two further candidates have been discovered, a short story which occurs in three idiosyncratic manuscripts and a fragment of dialogue in another manuscript of de Thou’s. So there are four more possible tales that one could add to the canon. While in style and content they are more or less compatible with the main corpus, there is no direct evidence as to authorship, and it remains largely a matter of taste whether or not one includes them. They have been left out of the present translation.

  Much more research into the manuscripts needs to be done before we can have a complete picture of the Heptaméroris evolution. There are seventeen existing manuscripts of differing degrees of completeness. They can be divided into two groups, although it has not so far been the custom to look at them in this fashion. The first group, whether or not they have the full seventy-two tales of Gruget or the full linking dialogues, all agree with his arrangement. The clearest and most complete of these (manuscript Fr. 1512 in the Bibliothèque Nationale) has been used as the basis of Michel François’s edition, which is nowadays the most widely used version, and which has been adopted as the basis for this translation. But even here François has had to amend (using de Thou), and the resulting text still contains words, phrases and whole sentences which either do not make sense or require acrobatic interpretation. The second group of manuscripts has the stories in an order different from both Gruget and Boaistuau. It has no discussions between the storytellers, but instead an ‘argument’ preceding each tale and a ‘conclusion’, whose function is primarily to draw out moral and pious lessons. One of the stories in two of these manuscripts is the fourth ‘find’ which has been mentioned above. The best of this group is in the Pierpont Morgan l
ibrary in New York. Besides offering seventy tales, it includes the Prologue and a delicate contemporary pen drawing of the storytellers. What is the status of this second group of manuscripts? In so far as it is mentioned at all by scholars it is usually assumed to represent later anthologies à la Boaistuau. Strictly speaking, however, it still remains to determine whether these manuscripts do not represent a Proto-Heptaméron with a logic and intention of its own.

  There is thus no definitive or generally agreed text. The variety of manuscripts suggests considerable scribal and editorial freedom, with at least three ways of organizing the material. If Marguerite was the sole author it appears that she did not set a personal prescription on the form of her work. And the same would be true of any other proposed author. In fact there is one definite proposal which should be mentioned, if only to save it from oblivion, and that is a proposal first put forward in 1839 by Charles Nodier, who claimed that the author of all or most of the Heptaméron was Bonaventure des Périers. Des Périers was the probable author of the satirical Cymbalum mundi (1537) and of much of a collection of stories called Nouvelles récréations published in the same year as Boaistuau’s Histoires des Amans fortunez. He was also Marguerite’s valet de chambre from at least 1536. Nodier’s proposal should not be taken too seriously, but what it points to should – that just as it is difficult to pin down a single authoritative text, so it is impossible to pin down a single author. The reason is that the Heptaméron was a collective enterprise. The stories themselves may have been contributed by a number of different people, probably high-ranking noblemen and noblewomen in Marguerite’s entourage. In all likelihood Marguerite was herself a contributor, and may also have edited them and added the story-telling framework in which they are embedded. The court gossip-monger Brantôme says in his memoirs that his grandmother, who was a lady-in-waiting to Marguerite, told him that the Queen ‘composed’ her tales as she was carried about the country in her litter. As Nodier pointed out, however, the tales could have been described as ‘hers’ by sovereign right, since their contributors were her servants. The fact is that the Heptaméron itself represents itself as produced by a group of individuals at the court of François I who really did, so the text claims, undertake to tell one another a collection of stories.

  2. THE STORYTELLERS

  The Prologue of the Heptaméron introduces the five men and five women who after various adventures involving bandits, floods and bears, find refuge in a Pyrenean abbey, where they agree to pass their time telling edifying stories until it is safe for them to return home. In so doing they are following an ancient tradition of fictional characters who find themselves in dangerous or unusual situations – a tradition that includes the Thousand and One Nights, the Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio’s Decameron. The origins of the French nouvelle or short story are medieval: the lais of Marie de France, moral tales or exempla used by preachers, the fabliaux. But it was the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that saw the rise of the short story as an important genre, and it was primarily Boccaccio’s Decameron that served as the model. The first French translation of the Decameron, by Laurent Premierfait, appeared in 1414, inspiring the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles composed in or before 1462. A new translation of Boccaccio is referred to in the Heptaméron’s Prologue. It was commissioned by Marguerite herself, was undertaken by one of François I’s royal councillors, Antoine Le Maçon, and came out in 1545. This is a period of French history in which the kings sought to annex Italian territory by means of ambitious military expenditions and to assimilate and surpass Italian literary and artistic culture as well.

  The Heptaméron’s Prologue tells us how much the royal family admired Boccaccio, and how Marguerite and the Dauphine (Catherine de Médicis) joined with other persons of the court to produce a French Decameron. There was, however, to be an important difference: all the tales were to be true, and on the insistence of the Dauphin (the future Henri II) there were to be no scholars or men of letters amongst the storytellers, since rhetoric was felt to be incompatible with historical truth. These stipulations appear to have left their mark on the Heptaméron we know. All the storytellers claim that their tales are true, and about twenty tales have been verified by modern research. There is only one from a literary source (number 70) and the storytellers permit this one only after discussion. But more important is the constant concern with the problem of truth and language. Rhetoric, lying, parody, blasphemy and obscenity – the treachery of human language is a theme that is subtly interwoven in the stories and discussions, counterbalanced by the theme of the search for verbal purity and security in the Word of God.

  However, it is one of the puzzles of the Heptaméron that the text we now have is not, according to the Prologue, the same thing as this original royal project, which, we are told, was interrupted by more pressing affairs of state (like the invasion of France in 1544) and completely forgotten. This assertion provides the opportunity for the fictional, or rather semi-fictional, storytellers to make good the loss.

  A lot of scholarly effort has been expended in trying to establish the historical identities of the storytellers on the basis of the various clues to be found in the text. It certainly seems to be the case that the names of the storytellers refer to some historical individuals, and that the Prologue and the discussion passages are meant to represent some historical story-telling enterprise. But each storyteller becomes a distinct character in the fictional world of the Heptaméron, relating to the others in a consistent manner, speaking in an idiosyncratic style, and telling stories to reflect his or her personality. There are antagonisms within the group, the most fundamental of which is between the male and female members.

  The names of these characters are bizarre at first sight. The general principle behind them, however, appears to be this: a historical individual’s name is rearranged to form an anagram, not a meaningless anagram, but one which suggests the personal attributes of the character to whom it is applied. In some cases oral and scribal transmission may have obscured the original; in others it may even have introduced new meanings and associations. The oldest and most authoritative storyteller is Oisille. The name could be derived anagrammatically from ‘Loise’ (a possible spelling of ‘Louise’). This character may, it is thought, stand for Louise de Savoie, Marguerite’s mother, or more plausibly for Louise de Daillon, Brantôme’s grandmother and a lady-in-waiting to Marguerite at about the right period. It is Oisille who is the group’s spiritual leader, and this within the setting of a monastery, that is, within an exclusively male community. She is imbued with the spirit of evangelical reform, and her name (which suggests oiselle, ‘female bird’) can be taken to reflect her longing for spiritual flights. Parlamente, also an authoritative figure, may represent Marguerite herself, since the name can be derived from perle amante, ‘loving pearl’, which would be a pun on marguerite, another word for ‘pearl’. There would also be symbolic associations of purity and perfection. Incidentally, if Marguerite is taken to be the author of the Prologue, then we have a curiously self-reflexive piece of writing. Marguerite as writer-narrator would be talking about herself (‘Parlamente’, the ‘pearl’ or ‘marguerite’) talking about herself (‘Madame Marguerite’) talking about writing a Decameron. The name Parlamente has in the past been associated with the old verb parlementer, and thus with talking, conversing, eloquence and urbanity. This suits the story-telling character, as well as the real Marguerite, who was often so described by her contemporaries. The name of Parlamente’s fictional husband, Hircan, can be derived from Henri (alternatively spelt Henric or Hanric), the name of Marguerite’s real-life second husband, Henri de Navarre. Hircan (Hircain in some versions) suggests the Latin for ‘goatish’ (hirquinus), but also Hircania, the rugged habitat of tigers and other wild beasts in Classical and Renaissance literature. Hircan is a warrior, jealous of his honour, and blunt in speech and manners. He is one of the main exponents of male dominance over women, and insists on the male right to intercourse with any female of his ch
oice, while at the same time demanding the domestication and fidelity of wives.

  These three, Oisille, Parlamente, Hircan, are at the apex of a miniature aristocratic society. They represent too a three-cornered antagonism that runs throughout the Heptaméron – an antagonism between female intelligence and love, masculine aggressiveness, and transcendent spirituality. The other characters and their names emerge in a similar fashion, and all contribute to a range of attitudes towards the topics of their stories and conversations, from the naturalistic cynicism of Saffredent to the Platonizing self-repression of Dagoucin. Above all they talk – some to flatter and flirt, some to dominate, some to resist, some to distort and deceive, some to preach and pray and some to extol the virtue of not speaking at all.

  3. THE STORIES

  The storytellers, then, have firm roots in their historical context, though their fictional context presents them in such a way as to focus on types of attitude towards the world. The stories also are interwoven with their historical context, not only in the sense that they actually refer to particular individuals – kings, princes, abbots, officers of the crown and so forth – but also in the sense that they present real contemporary social and spiritual problems. It is this dimension that makes the tales relevant also to our own historical context.

  To summarize the complexities and conflicts of the first half of the sixteenth century in France would be impossible. But there are some major historical threads which it is useful to bear in mind while reading the Heptaméron. First, it is in this period that France begins to construct its identity as a nation-state controlled by a centralized monarchy, and to express itself in both political and cultural rivalry with Italy, Spain and England. Secondly, the traditional aristocracy (from which the Heptaméron’s storytellers are drawn) is confronted with changes such as the rise of the commercial, legal and bureaucratic classes. Thirdly, women may have been more self-assertive. Many noblewomen experienced increased independence and responsibility while their husbands were fighting in the Italian wars. There was certainly a flourishing literary debate on the status of women, which produced some remarkable declarations on both sides. Finally, the whole period is marked by the various ideological changes that go under the term Reformation, the most prominent of which are the emphasis on inner faith as opposed to external ritual, the emphasis on individual conscience as opposed to ecclesiastical authority and the challenge to the priesthood, monasticism and the doctrine of celibacy. In broad terms, it is a period of rapid cultural change, a period in which assumptions are being questioned and horizons broadened, both in the geographical sense (story 67 of the Heptaméron, for instance, concerns a voyage to Canada) and in the historical sense of the discovery of the values of the ancient non-Christian civilizations.