Heptaméron, L'. A collection of 72 stories (originally intended as 100, but unfinished) by Marguerite de Navarre, not published in her lifetime. The first edition by Boaistuau was entitled Histoire des amants fortunés (1558); the name Heptaméron was first used by Claude Gruget in a new edition the following year. The cycle is clearly inspired by Boccaccio's Decameron, of which a French translation, commissioned by Marguerite, had appeared in 1545. Five noblemen and five ladies, cut off by floods in the Pyrenees, gather in a monastery and tell stories while waiting for a bridge to be constructed. Each tale is followed by a discussion of its moral implications, inevitably bringing out the divergence of opinion between the sexes. A number of the story-tellers have been identified, e.g. Parlamente as Marguerite herself and Hircan as her husband Henri.
As in Boccaccio's cycle, the tales vary widely in length and manner, from the brief and excremental (stories 11 and 52), through the equally bawdy sexually explicit (several), to the high-minded with an unhappy ending (e.g. 19, where two lovers unable to marry end up in holy orders). There are also some 20 tales about lubricious clerics, especially the Franciscans. But unlike the comic anticlericalism of the Decameron, Marguerite's, characteristic of the Reformation, involves unequivocal denunciation of corrupt clergy.
The unity of the cycle is thematic, virtually all the tales being about relationships between the sexes—love, marriage, adultery, rape. In contrast with the Decameron and the misogynistic Cent nouvelles nouvelles, the Heptaméron, particularly in the discussions, presents a vigorous defence of woman and a highly sympathetic portrayal of her problems in a society where a courtly veneer conceals brutal sexual mores. But Marguerite sees as almost impossible the reconciliation of male needs for endless conquest with female ideals of chastity and conjugal fidelity. While there is a case for seeing Marguerite as an early feminist, she seems largely to accept the traditional male view of woman: she portrays more unfaithful wives than husbands, and her libertine women are unambiguously condemned by all the speakers. Although we are invited to attach considerable importance to Parlamente's Neoplatonic definition of human love as leading to divine love (19), more earthly points of view which see the sexual side of love as legitimate are not rejected.
Though neither as skilful nor as witty as the Decameron, the Heptaméron represents both a considerable literary achievement and an invaluable evocation of life in Renaissance France.
[Christine Scollen-Jimack]
Bibliography
- L. Febvre, Amour sacré, amour profane: autour de l'Heptaméron (1944)
- M. Tetel, Marguerite de Navarre's ‘Heptaméron’: Themes, Language and Structure (1973)
- N. Cazauran, L'Heptaméron de Marguerite de Navarre (1976)
