The Heptameron Read online

  Academic introductions to the Heptaméron usually say that the main themes are various concepts of ‘love’ on the one hand offset on the other by ‘religion’, in particular the evangelism with the Platonic tinge that was characteristic of French attempts to reform the Church from within. Earlier generations who expurgated or excused the Heptaméron were possibly more aware that the principal themes of the stories and the conversations that accompany them are rape, seductions bordering on rape, incest and numerous infringements of the sex and marriage codes of aristocratic Europe. Sex is rarely fun in the Heptaméron (unlike Boccaccio’s Decameron), and where characters do find enjoyment, it is accidental (as in story 8, or furtive and hypocritical (stories 43 and 49), or tragically revenged (story 32 and the clandestine marriage stories 21, 40 and 51) or guilt-ridden and roundly condemned (as in story 26). One has the impression that marriage and relationships between the sexes in general are deeply problematic for the world which the Heptaméron reflects. There are very few stories which do not directly concern such themes (story 17 about the prowess of François I; 28 and 52, which concern food and its debasement; 55 and 65, which are solely concerned with superstitious attitudes towards religion).

  Rape in the Heptaméron sometimes takes place when the desires of a socially inferior male for a superior woman of conspicuous qualities are frustrated. This is so in the case of the muledriver’s wife and the servant who finally murders her (story 2), but it is also true in the long and tortuous tenth story, where the warrior Amador’s attempts to transgress social barriers and possess the young Florida lead not only to violence against the woman, but to the woman’s violence against herself. There is an element of pathological obsession in such stories. But the most pervasive motive has to do with the masculine ethos of honour and military glory. There are implicit structural parallels between military and sexual violence in the Amador story; in fact the whole story can be seen as a kind of exploration of the uglier implications of the concept and practice of chivalrous love.

  Hircan openly advocates rape in order to avert the threat to a gentleman’s honour posed by resistance to seduction. The borderline between the two is indeed frequently blurred, as in stories 14 and 16 (both told by men), where the valiant Admiral Bonnivet outdoes his Italian rivals and overcomes the resistance of two Italian women during the French occupation of Milan. Both the newer and the older senses of the term ‘chauvinism’ sum up these examples. To fail in an attempted rape constitutes the greatest humiliation for these men. Bonnivet again, in story 4, attempts to rape a high-born princess (rumoured by Brantôme to be Marguerite herself), only to be fought off by the lady’s superior strength. Significantly, the storytellers agree that the woman was wise not to expose her attacker, since the prevailing view was (as also in story 62) that women only spoke of rape in order to mask their complicity, and that willing or not they were in any case dishonoured.

  But the chief rapists and seducers are monks and friars. In fact almost all the many stories concerning monks and friars centre on this theme. They may rape or abduct in revenge for resistance (stories 5, 46), or because they take it to be some sort of right (stories 23, 31, 48 and 72, where the victim is a nun). They often associate it with punishment and penance (stories 46, 22, 41). In story 23 a rape-victim’s suicide is actually attributed to the theology she learned from the Franciscans, with its stress on self-redemption by good works rather than on acceptance of human nature and grace freely given by a merciful God. But it is also stated that the woman feared for the purity of the family line. Even a story like story 11, which at first sight is purely scatological, is linked with monastic rape and fear of dishonour.

  Coupled with the evangelical critique of Franciscan theology these tales are more than the traditional medieval farces about lecherous and gluttonous monks. Why are the religious orders depicted so consistently as sexually dangerous? It is not just criticism of the corruptness of monastic life, though it is that as well, or a portrayal of exploding frustrations. Clerical sexuality as such does not appear scandalous. There are two stories (56 and 61) in which women themselves initiate ‘marriage’ with clerics, creating situations which are treated humorously and somewhat ambivalently. It seems rather to be clerical aggression against, and degradation of, women that is presented in particularly horrific and horrified terms. Evangelical thinkers such as Erasmus and Rabelais had criticized the celibate life of monks and priests because it presupposed the inferiority of marriage. It also presupposed the biological, moral and intellectual inferiority of women (Rabelais’s own views on this are not easy to determine). The reader of the Heptaméron may be able to link the work’s evident dislike of friars to this background, that is, to the anti-feminist, anti-family and anti-marriage implications of the monastic outlook. Amongst other details it is worth noting that there is particular resentment in the Heptaméron of the intrusion of friars into family life, in part no doubt because of the threat to legitimacy and thus to a whole aristocratic society based on in heritance. Also, the victims of rape are frequently presented as women distinguished by being particularly active, clever or virtuous. Rape seeks to show that they are none of these. It has been claimed as a general principle that in periods when women show signs of assertiveness there is a corresponding preoccupation with violence against them. Be this as it may, in the Heptaméron the representation of rape is used in two main ways: as proof of the worth of women and as proof of the aggressive intentions of the men.

  If one goes further and asks why the Heptaméron should be so concerned with the themes of celibacy and marriage, one possible answer is that an aristocratic society in a changing world was necessarily concerned with procreation and marriage rules in order to sustain itself. This concern is stated explicitly as well as implicitly, as we shall see. The ideology of marriage which emerges does so negatively, by way of examples of infractions, and is not without ambivalences and unresolved contradictions. Many stories deal with the infidelities of married people. The fate of the erring wife is usually different from that of the wenching husband. Thus the President of Grenoble poisons his wife for taking a lover (story 36). A German nobleman (story 32) imposes on his wife a macabre, ritualistic punishment, which eventually leads to expiation of her offence. A wife is beaten (story 35) for her ‘spiritual’ love for a visiting friar. Story 70 is an evocation of the claustrophobic atmosphere of a feudal court where private passion and public honour vie with one another; but at its core is the representation of the Duchess of Burgundy as a woman depraved by jealousy and lust whose verbal revenge leads to death and perpetual shame. The male fear of cuckoldry is everywhere, and in one case (story 47) becomes so obsessive as to actually provoke it.

  Not all the Heptaméron’s women fare badly by any means. Some of the sexually enterprising ones reflect the fabliau tradition: wayward and wanton women of lowly station outwit old or stupid husbands. Their high-born counterparts in stories 43 and 49 have to go to extreme lengths for sexual gratification, and they have to resort to desperate measures in order to conceal their activities and conserve their reputation. Some of the more extended stories include tentative justification of the woman’s action, even if the storyteller and his or her companions do not accept it in discussion. The woman in story 61, for example, escapes what is described as domestic ‘slavery’ to live happily (though not quite ever after) with a canon of the Church. The energetic lady in story 15 is eventually locked up for the tricks she perpetrates upon her husband, but not before she has hugely enjoyed herself and delivered a closely argued speech during the course of which she asserts that ‘although the law of men attaches dishonour to women who fall in love with those who are not their husbands, the law of God does not exempt men who fall in love with women who are not their wives’. Here, as elsewhere in the Heptaméron, the prevailing ethos is being challenged in reforming evangelical terms.

  When the husband is unfaithful in the stories the role of the wife is fairly clearly defined, although all the storytellers do not
always agree with all the implications. The paradigmatic case is story 37, in which a husband has an affair with a chambermaid, who is made to symbolize disorder, dirt and decay of the family fortunes. He is ‘converted’ by several acts of ritual significance on the part of his devout and devoted wife, who simultaneously restores order, purity and prosperity. A similar role is assumed in stories 38, 54, 59, 68, 69 and 71, in all of which a man’s unfaithfulness is arrested by a wife’s patience and ingenuity. Fidelity and long-suffering virtually make a saint of the wife who is marooned with her husband on a desert island (story 67).

  There are few stories of reciprocal infidelity. The Queen of Naples, however, does take as her lover the husband of her own husband’s mistress, and does so out of revenge, though she never discloses what she has done (story 3). Ignorance is also important in the neat farce of story 8, where a husband is unknowingly faithful, and his wife unknowingly unfaithful: she substitutes herself for a chambermaid (compare also story 45), and he invites his drinking-companion to share the spoils. In both these stories it is the husband’s own infidelity that brings about his cuckoldry. Thus alongside those tales advocating the wife’s moral influence as the remedy for her partner’s unfaithfulness, there is a small minority of stories claiming something approaching a symmetry of sexual rights in marriage. But only one form of extramarital relationship is overtly sanctioned – that of the serviteur and his lady. This too turns out to embody the same values as marriage itself. According to the serviteur practice as the Heptaméron presents it, a married aristocratic woman has the right to maintain several devoted knights in her service. Such men are clearly not on a par with chambermaids, as story 58 makes, clear. ‘Fidelity’ is required of both partners: ladies who betray their admirers are denigrated in stories 20 and 53, and the rule for serviteurs themselves is made clear in 58 and 63. Indeed story 63 implies that fidelity to one’s lady is a stronger influence than fidelity to one’s wife – a position which Parlamente at least criticizes. Since it is supposed to be chaste, the serviteur relationship, this remnant of courtly and chivalric love, can coexist with faithful marriage; in fact it is virtually a simulacrum of marriage. Nevertheless, there is evidently considerable anxiety about the institution as such, as the Amador and Florida story strongly indicates.

  The stories of wanton women were traditionally exempla of their inferior nature, and this is how some of the male storytellers use them. But in the context of the work as a whole they emerge more as a means of rejecting the asymmetrical marriage in which the male has greater sexual freedom. In practice, of course, lineal purity was so important to the aristocratic circle that female infidelity could not be condoned; so the symmetry is achieved by demanding male fidelity and seeking to achieve it by any means. If those means involve sacrifice and humiliation, the suffering takes on a sanctifying quality. The nature of the importance of marriage for the storytellers becomes clear when one looks at the numerous stories which are essentially concerned with the question: ‘Who may marry whom upon whose authority?’ This was a question much discussed by sixteenth-century jurists and others (Erasmus and Rabelais, for example) who rejected the purely sacramental view of marriage to concentrate on its social and political function.

  Stories 21 and 40, which are concerned with clandestine marriages entered into without family consent, pinpoint the issues. In both tales the family in question is probably the ancient family of Rohan. Story 40 gives us a count (the father of the heroine of 21) who preserves the honour of his blood by slaughtering his sister’s secret husband, a lesser nobleman, and by locking his sister up in a castle in a forest. After the story Saffredent demands to know why a lesser nobleman should not marry a lady of higher status. He is told by Dagoucin:

  The reason is… that in order to maintain peace in the state, consideration is given only to the rank of families, the seniority of individuals and the provisions of the law, and not to men’s love and virtue, in order that the monarchy should not be undermined.

  Men or women in the Heptaméron who transgress or try to transgress this rule frequently come to a tragic or ‘piteous’ end. There is sympathy for individual affections, but the social imperative remains paramount, and the resulting conflict is presented as a natural inevitability. It is a conflict which is generally ‘resolved’ or sublimated in some sort of religious transcendence. Discussing story 40, Parlamente verbalizes such a ‘solution’ in the language of evangelism, expressing a hope that somehow personal, parental and social preference will merge in submission to divine will. Her own earlier story about Rolandine (Anne de Rohan) is structured to the same end. The thirty-year-old heroine’s secret marriage to a bastard is disapproved of by the Queen (Anne of Brittany), and she is locked up in the forest castle mentioned in story 40. But the marriage falls within the letter of ecclesiastical law. There is thus a confrontation of church and state. Evangelical opinion was in general opposed to the ecclesiastical marriage laws, not least because it was mainly the friars who were called upon to exploit them. However, in the story Rolandine’s feelings are treated with great respect by the storyteller, and there is no clear taking of sides on the issues involved. Rather, the story is so set up that the conflict is resolved by the course of events which are narrated. Rolandine’s ‘perfect’ love for the bastard is preserved, but since he deserts her and dies, she is able to be reconciled with her family, make a suitable marriage (with Pierre de Rohan) and produce suitable heirs.

  The problem in these two stories is how to dissolve misalliances once they have been contracted. Some stories deal with the prevention of misalliances. Men and women whose choices are disapproved of and effectively suppressed vent their emotions in expressions of mystical union. Thus the man in story 9 is not permitted to love the lady of his choice within marriage, and his love is too ‘perfect’ to love her outside of marriage, so the only possible union is a deathbed embrace which assimilates human love to mystical love of God. Story 19 works this solution out in more explicit detail. A misalliance between a rich lady and a poor nobleman is blocked, and the lovers enter the religious life, he the Observant Franciscans, she the sister order of St Clare. Paradoxically united in their separation they transform their desires for one another into parallel mystical marriages. It is in the ensuing dialogue that Parlamente expounds her famous Platonic doctrine of ‘perfect’ love, a doctrine that enables tragic contradictions to be transcendentally resolved – that is, not resolved at all but merely mystified. Adulterous affections may be ‘resolved’ in the same way. In story 24, the narcissistic knight Elisor, who loves above his station, converts his chivalrous love and becomes a hermit. There is a not dissimilar pattern in story 13. But almost the reverse seems to be the case in story 64, where we have family approval of a marriage apparently producing the lady’s rejection of her suitor, who subsequently consoles himself with the cloister. Even here, however, it is hinted that the girl’s self-frustration is the result of an excessive sense of family honour seeking to outdo her parents and relatives. All four of the tales of the transformation of frustrated love into spiritual love contain verse passages – passages in which linguistic resonances are fully (if somewhat cumbersomely) exploited in order to express the notion of transcendent passion.

  With the tales of perfect lovers turning into mystical recluses we come full circle from the image of friars as wandering sexual predators. Just as in the Prologue the storytellers visit a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ monastery, so the monastic institutions portrayed in the stories are double-edged. On the one hand there is sexual aggression and abasement; friars attack women, intrude into the family, disrupt the social order. On the other hand, there is sexual suppression and sublimation; frustrated lovers leave society in order not to transgress its rules, entering the inner mystical world in order to resolve their conflict with such rules. Thus the obverse of the image of the monk as rapist is the image of the secular person ravished by divine love. The religious outlook which condemns the worldliness of corrupt religious orders, but es
pouses the direct mystical approach to God, is typical of moderate reforming evangelism such as Marguerite’s own. It is possible to consider its manifestation in the Heptaméron in isolation, but to do so is to fail to interpret its significance in relation to the work as a whole. In the world of the Heptaméron there is a thematic logic which relates the image of the religious life not only to the contemporary problem of the nature and status of women, but also to an intense preoccupation with preserving the fine nuances of the aristocratic hierarchy through the rules and rites of marriage. This by no means exhausts the fictional fabric of the Heptaméron and its implications; there are many more intricate patterns which the reader may wish to puzzle out for himself.