SOURCE: “Ambiguity or the Splintering of Truth,” in Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron: Themes, Language, and Structure, Duke University Press, 1973, pp. 104-49.

[In the essay that follows, Tetel claims that the Heptameron's structure reflects a dramatization of ambiguity.]

“Puis notre bouquet sera plus beau, tant plus il sera remply de différentes choses” (“XLVIII,” 271). There can be no doubt of the wide variety of novellas offered in the Heptameron on the sociological, ethical, and behavioral levels. In this vein, Marguerite emulates Boccaccio and prefigures Balzac; all three create their own version of the human comedy and demonstrate that on the whole it has not greatly changed; the set evolves, but not the actors on stage. The question remains, however, as to the meaning and purpose of this variety.

In the past some felt that the variety involved contradictions disrupting the unity of the work as a whole or creating an enigma of the novellas.¹ An incompatibility between religion and ethics may help to explain away some conflicts among the commentators or between the boldness of the novellas and the idyllic and scriptural setting of the Heptameron.² Recently Jourda has seen the participants as a constant and unifying force: “Récits variés et qui, pourtant, témoignent d'une unité: ces deux caractères sont assurés par la diversité et la permanence des devisants, comme par la permanence et les santés de leur caractère.”³ Finally an American critic, Jules Gelernt, took a long step forward along this critical line of thought, but without pronouncing the essential word: “[The Heptameron] is a discussion which illuminates without claiming to reach absolutely final conclusions … the path leading through reality to an ideal remains to be discovered by every man through the trial-error process of living … the Heptameron finds in the midst of its inconclusiveness and contradictions tentative resting points from which the human scene may be surveyed with sympathetic understanding.”⁴

The key word is ambiguity. At last a French critic, Henri Coulet, utters it and considers it a fundamental basis for the thought and form of the Heptameron:

Elle [ambiguity] ne résulte pas seulement des opinions divergentes qui se font entendre dans le débat (opinions toutes également modernes, il faut le noter; sur la condamnation du passé tous les personnages sont bien d'accord); elle tient aussi au ton sur lequel elles sont prononcées, et parfois à l'humour du récit lui-même. … Cette ambiguïté explique la forme de l'ouvrage. Si Marguerite s'y était complu, ou si elle avait fait confiance à la vie pour dépasser et résoudre tous les problèmes, elle se serait contentée du récit, mais une telle conception du roman est impossible avant le XIXe siècle ou quelques précurseurs de génie au XVIIIe siècle. Si elle avait voulu développer des idées, s'exercer au discours et à la dialectique, elle eût fait comme beaucoup de conteurs de son temps, elle eût noyé l'anecdote dans le dialogue. Mais elle en est au stade de l'interrogation et de l'espérance: ses convictions sont plus des actes de foi que des idées démontrées, elle les confronte avec l'expérience, d'une part, avec les convictions de ses compagnons, d'autre part; l'expérience, c'est-à-dire le récit, suscite le heurt des convictions; le heurt des convictions renvoie à une nouvelle expérience.⁵

Ambiguity results naturally from a confrontation among a variety of experiences or among opinions based on formal knowledge; it can lead to some form of skepticism or positive questioning. Seen in this light, Marguerite figures as a typical prose writer of her century and takes her place between Rabelais and Montaigne. Concerning Rabelais, the notion of ambiguity, dialectical knowledge, is just beginning to elicit critical attention,⁶ although in retrospect it appears quite evident throughout his books and especially in the Third Book. Indeed, the Third Book is dedicated to Marguerite not merely because Rabelais on the surface treats in it a topic dear to her, marriage, but perhaps above all because he demonstrates the impossibility of attaining absolute truth or knowledge just as she does in the Heptameron.⁷ Rabelais then pays homage to the queen's viewpoint. Concerning Montaigne's position, the ambiguity and relativism of his thought is such a critical truism that it does not warrant here any explanation. The important fact, however, is that Montaigne no longer occupies the unique position which may have been attributed to him previously. Rabelais and Marguerite take their places in what becomes a major trait of the century that weakens the Romantic concept of boundless optimism during the Renaissance.⁸

Ambiguity depends to some degree on a consciously created uncertainty of belief in the reader. The technique of toying with the reader's credibility forms an integral part of the traditional popular conteur, and in the Heptameron it has two totally different functions as well. Continuous protestations of veracity delineate the question of the relationship between fiction and reality, as will be seen in our last chapter. And then, testing the reader's credibility envelops the novella in a sheath of doubt: “Je croy, mes dames, que vous n'estes pas si sottes de croyre en toutes les nouvelles que l'on vous vient compter, quelque apparence qu'elles puissent avoir de saincteté, si la preuve n'y est si grande qu'elle ne puisse estre remise en doubte” (“XXXIII,” 213). Precisely the conflict in the commentators' opinions, in Marguerite's experiences, brings forth another tale, and yet another, each contradicting the preceding one and illuminating it at the same time. And so Panurge in the Third Book propels himself from one consultation to another, seeking an absolute solution to his dilemma that he cannot ever hope to attain. The Essais fall into an identical category; each takes a step toward a position that merely becomes the springboard toward another different one. Gide must have had this in mind when he wrote “Oasis. La prochaine est toujours la plus belle.”⁹ These works by Marguerite, Rabelais, and Montaigne were never by their very nature designed to be finished. Therefore it really does not matter if the Heptameron remains at seventy-two novellas; even if it had reached a hundred, there would have been more examples, but still the same suspended result with a greater diversity of opinions and experiences and no final judgment.

The search for a constant produces ambiguity because it creates an acute realization of the insufficiency of human judgment. The modernity of this concept, starting with its all-pervading presence in the three major prose writers of the sixteenth century, manifests itself later in Diderot and then in this century with Proust, Pirandello, and Sartre. The image of scales and weight figures as one of the more obvious means to express the opposite of absoluteness, and Marguerite uses it in the discussion of an important story, that of Rolandine (“XXI”), where she imparts to Parlamente, one of her most explicit spokesmen, a very significant statement of relativistic judgment: “Car il n'y a fes si poisant que l'amour de deus personnes bien unies, ne puisse doucement supporter. Mais quand l'un faut à son devoir, et laisse toute la charge sur l'autre, la poisanteur est insuportable. Vous deveriez doncq, dit Géburon, avoir pitié de nous, qui portons l'amour entiére, sans que vous y dégnez mettre le bout du doigt, pour la soulager. Ha Géburon, dit Parlamente, souvent sont différens les fardeaus de l'homme et de la femme” (153). The particular dimension that Marguerite gives to this image is that each person must carry his own burden and decide for himself, even at the risk of being misunderstood by others.

The one dominant is absolute suspension of judgment; the commentators find themselves unable to concur because the purpose of the novellas is not to settle matters but to decipher them: “Or laissons ce propos, dit Symontaut. Car pour faire conclusion du cueur de l'homme et de la femme, le meilleur des deus n'en vaut rien. … La compagnie se teint à la conclusion de Symontaut, pour n'ettre plus au desavantage de l'une que de l'autre partie” (“XXI,” 153, and “XXII,” 154); or again, “Les propos précédens meirent la compagnie en telle contradiction d'opinions, que pour en avoir résolution, fut à la fin contrainte renvoyer cette dispute aus Théologiens” (“XXVI,” 180). Whether one wishes it or not, choice implies an arbitrariness: “Vous prendrez l'exemple qui vous plaira le mieus” (“XXVI,” 180). Yet choosing involves an inescapable judgment that could very well affect opinions others have of us; only an omniscient God can perceive the true motivations behind our actions. Living on earth, we must protect ourselves from each other—hence the masks and other subterfuges.¹⁰ The commentators find a momentary solution to their impasse by moving to another novella. They do not try to resolve the issue at hand, because there is no irrevocable solution; only another enriching experience prevails for the moment, and it will color a constantly changing conviction that dissolves in contact with others: “Mais laissons ces propoz d'impossibilité, et regardons à qui Symontaut donnera sa voys” (“XIV,” 103).¹¹

Ultimately the answer lies within oneself; this Delphic oracle comes toward the end of the Heptameron, and Oysille, the spiritual leader of the narrators, expresses this Pauline notion: “Par quoy ne faut juger que soy mesme” (“LXV,” 331). Panurge reaches an identical conclusion at the end of the Third Book, although he refuses to accept it. Montaigne, on the other hand, sets up self-awareness and self-knowledge as the very premise of his Essais and proposes himself as a model for others. The deficiency of human reason and judgment, whether real or contrived, still constitutes one of man's major assets and gives humanism its strongest foundation.

In face of the disintegration wrought on the novella by the commentators, it would appear that the tale has an inviolable fixity of meaning in contrast to the fluid discussions following it. But the fact remains that through various means such as a discrepancy between the avowed purpose of the story, stated at the beginning, and the end of the action, the use of antithesis and flaws in the characters that explain their vices or doom a relationship to failure, Marguerite creates ambiguity in her novellas. In about a fourth of them an unnatural element gives the impression that any analysis of a character's behavior will be futile if it does not take into account this flaw, and yet it is merely mentioned at the outset and rarely reappears in the course of the discussion. Thus Marguerite lays a trap that for the most part goes unnoticed. One is a wide age gap between the wife and husband; when twenty or thirty years separate them, infidelity does not surprise: “cette femme voyant que son mary étoit viel, preint en amour un june clerc nommé Nicolas” (“XXXVI,” 225).¹² For instance, in the notoriously famous story of Lorenzaccio, it is overlooked that this character's lasciviousness results in great part from his wife's very tender age which does not allow sexual relations yet. A sterile marriage, one without children, also leads the wife to seek solace with a younger partner (cf. “XXV,” “XXVI”).

A difference in social or class status prevents the happy fruition of love. In these frequent circumstances the couple suffers from the rigidity of a code imposed upon them by society and from which they cannot escape, no matter how well-meaning and pure their love may be, or how beneficial its success might be to both of them. It could be argued that Marguerite simply abides by a social code that she herself believes in and also follows a courtly love tradition; but given her relativistic frame of mind and her adherence as well to reason and nature, such an interpretation no longer has any validity.¹³ In these novellas she stresses too much the tragedy in the protagonists' lives brought about by their indecisions and feints, so that the social discrepancy becomes essentially another agent to be blamed for this condition, and Marguerite derides it. Fused with this social flaw is an avarice on the part of either parents or guardians of the young person in love who is not allowed to marry because the other party is not rich enough or because a greedy father refuses a dowry to his daughter. In the final analysis Marguerite depicts an individual emprisoned by society's unnatural restrictions and by man's own vices so that in one respect any following discussions attempting to explain the protagonist's actions are futile and are undermined by a basic flaw making the outcome inevitable. Marguerite then keeps the interpretative foundations of her novellas purposely quite fluid, and in creating unnatural barriers between her characters' freedom of action and their search for happiness she establishes an insuperable condition that could be termed an “espace tragique.”

Any literary text lends itself to varying and contradictory interpretations by the reader, but when the author narrates or structures her tale in order to consciously shroud it into a questioning veil, then this ambiguity can be considered an integral part of her thought and aesthetics. In some cases, the narrator states a given purpose for telling the story, then another one after narrating it, while the novella itself stresses still a different one. For example, the twenty-third tale claims to “dire quelque chose en l'honneur de sainte religion” (162), but actually it portrays the depravity of a monk who sleeps with his host's wife. The moral is that we have to be careful not to have our faith “divertie du droit chemin” and to beware of the “Ange Sathan [qui] se transforme en Ange de lumière à fin que l'œuil extérieur aveuglé par apparence de sainteté et dévotion, ne s'arrette à ce qu'il doit fuyr” (163). This moral, stated before the tale begins, applies not only to the monk but to the wife as well, because she gives in to him and because she loses her faith, abandoning all reason, by committing suicide. The aim of the novella, expressed after the narration, bears only a slight relationship to its previously avowed purpose: “Je croi, mes Dames, qu'apres avoir entendu cette histoire tresvéritable, il n'y aura aucune de vous qui ne pense deus fois à loger telz Pélerins en sa maison, et sçaurez qu'il n'y a venin plus dangereus que celuy qui est plus dissimulé” (168). Pointing out apparent contradictions may be an idle task here, for Marguerite toys consciously with shifts of emphasis in her tales, and not to confuse the reader. On the contrary she develops some varying interpretive avenues suggested by the story in order to avoid any absolute meaning which would conflict with the very essence of the Heptameron; every human act or thought has a multidimensional purpose and effect, perhaps contradictory on the surface, but basically complementary.

The discrepancy between the avowed purpose of a story and its meaning has the hallmark of a narrative technique typical of the novella genre and its medieval development. Again Boccaccio provides an excellent prototype; in addition to the framework setting that already creates several viewpoints, he also gives a very short synopsis as a title to each tale that cannot but slant the action along a certain interpretive line. Gruget, one of the Heptameron's first editors, must have had this model in mind when he added a title synopsis to each novella, but in doing so he interpreted the story to accord with his own viewpoints and thereby sought to fix its meaning sometimes in a manner contrary to Marguerite's thinking. In fact, he attempted to purify the novellas and their significance in order to portray a Queen of Navarre cast in a divine image. But Marguerite tended toward a dialectical presentation; therefore she eliminated the Boccaccio type of synopsis in favor of evaluations by the narrator-commentators at the end of each tale which fragments the narration even more. The fragmentation reflects a weighty preoccupation that makes the universe appear to the beholder more complex than it must have seemed to Boccaccio, although it may not necessarily be so. To Marguerite, the rise of Protestantism and the appeal of Platonism give insights into the place of man in the universe that defy any simplified or monolithic solution.

The twenty-fifth tale offers a further instance of a broadening scope of the narrative as a result of one avowed purpose stated at the beginning and another stated at the end of the story. After Oysille's belief that it is too easy to speak badly of women, Longarine will tell of “les inventions d'un jeune prince par lesquelles il trompa ceus qui ont accoutumé tromper tout le monde” (177); this prince, assumed to be François I and quite correctly so, lives under the aegis of Cupid who compels his subjects “d'user mensonge, hypocrisie et fiction” (177), although the king “passa en vertu tous les autres de son tems” (176). Apparent contradictions immediately come to the surface; no matter how virtuous one may be, he is seldom strong enough not to fall prey to Cupid's arrows. He may rationalize his actions by taking pleasure in seducing the wife of a lawyer who himself has tricked many defendants in his professional life, or by using a monastery to gain secret access to the woman's quarters and thereby do unto the monks what they frequently do unto others, yet the real underlying reason, stated at the end of the novella itself, remains quite different: “Et puis qu'Amour sçait tromper les trompeurs, nous autres simples et ignorantes le devons bien craindre” (180).

The avowed purpose of this “Twenty-Fifth Novella” may be to demonstrate that lawyers and monks who so often deceive others can in turn be deceived themselves, a typical fabliau concept; yet it is heavily counterpointed to the omnipotence of Cupid, which overshadows more innocuous deceptions, as the discussion following the tale emphasizes. The commentators focus on the merits of plaisir and its relation to confession and repentance. They oppose one's own morality to God's, and the creation of one's own god (Venus, Cupid) to the One that really exists. It follows implicitly that the prince's relative valor in tricking those whom literary tradition has always attacked is being questioned, notwithstanding his probable kinship to Marguerite. After all his craftiness in seducing the lawyer's wife and his feigning piety and receiving confession when he repeatedly crosses the monastery to gain secret access to her house do not quite befit a king. The abyss between man as he is and ought to be brings about a sense of relativism and its inevitable result: ambiguity. Nearly every one wears the irreducible three-cornered hat of deception, pleasure, and the need of religion, and in a daily situation Marguerite shows the difficulty man encounters in choosing one over the other—not in an ideal framework which would really not serve a valuable didactic purpose.

The fixity of a dominant meaning continues to be fractured when an apparent disconnection surfaces between the pre- and post-story purpose on the one hand and the discussion on the other hand. The “Thirtieth Tale,” for instance, is described as “piteuse et étrange” (198); “piteuse” because it elicits the reader's pity and compassion, and “étrange” because it deals with an incestuous relationship between mother and son. Here Marguerite points again to the helplessness and weakness of man, for no one is “impeccable” (202); even following Nature, always a cardinal rule, can have its definite dangers, and even if it has sinful results one cannot resist, as Racine's Phèdre knew so well. Marguerite makes this precept quite obvious: “Car elle pensoit que l'occasion faisoit le péché et ne sçavoit pas que le péché forge l'occasion” (202). Then in the commentaries following the novella itself, the emphasis shifts to an analysis of masochism; on the surface, the discussion of this subject would appear to have little connection with the theme of incest prevalent in the tale. Marguerite aims, however, at exposing two sides of the anti-Nature coin, masochism and incest; giving in to certain ugly pleasures of the flesh, although they cannot be avoided, is just as unnatural as restraining them beyond measure or reason. Both are extremes and equally “piteux et étranges.” Therefore, the discussion when apparently divorced from the theme of the story actually reinforces it or reveals another facet of it.

Because of the complexity and inherent contradictions of any given notion, Marguerite endeavors to explain actions and reactions. To this end she makes a most abundant use of explicative conjunctions such as tant que, autant que, plus que, si bien que, moins que, tel que; and very often she will also begin sentences with car. The frequency of such conjunctions, especially in the longer novella dominated by a dialectical concept of love, may cause a somewhat clumsy and emphatic syntax, but at the same time it bears witness to the need Marguerite feels to argue logically and multifariously. In turn these explicative conjunctions affect the composition of a tale: “La narration semble ne pas se composer toujours d'une série de faits mais plutôt d'un perpétuel va-etvient entre deux pôles: d'un côté, le détail descriptif, l'exaltation d'une qualité ou l'exagération d'une quantité; de l'autre, l'effet, les répercussions, qui constituent l'action proprement dite.”¹⁴ This oscillating movement brings out the discrepancy between a vain, empty, condition and the causes that overwhelm it or make it ironically meaningless and irresoluble:

Et combien que quelques uns la demandassent en maryage, ils n'avoient néantmoins autre réponse d'elle si non, puis qu'elle avoit tant demeuré sans ettre maryée, qu'elle ne le vouloit ettre.

[“XXI,” 142]

Car ainsi que l'amour se diminuoit du coté de luy, ainsi augmentoit du sien, et demeura, malgré qu'il en eut, l'amour entiére et perfette. Car l'amytié qui failloit du coté de luy, tourna en elle.

[“XXI,” 152]¹⁵

Explanation then leads to irresolution: a sign of consciousness and pain; what Montaigne calls his “scar.”¹⁶

Since attempts at explanation fail, the downward movement of the story itself will provide an additional means of producing ambiguity; therefore it becomes rather difficult to seize upon a stable point of reference that would fix a meaning for the tale. Doubtless deception and treachery constitute the theme of the thirteenth novella, but a question remains as to which of the protagonists is the most guilty, especially since the degree of the vices intensifies in the course of the narrative. Under the guise of planning a pilgrimage to Jerusalem with a lady and her husband, a captain deceives the woman into believing that he loves her purely; then unsuccessful in his bid, he leaves her. At this point she returns the ring she had received from him to his wife, telling her laughingly that he really loved her [his wife], hence a second deception. While he was away at war and on a crusade as well, we learn ipso facto that the officer second in command betrayed him and left him on a deserted island to be massacred by savages. Then this officer, after his return, succeeds in explaining away his treachery and receives acclaim from the king for his victories. Treachery triumphs, from an innocuous beginning to a costly end. Little consolation results from Oysille's assertion that only God can judge (98) who was the wickedest because we the readers have been purposely put at a loss by Marguerite to make a choice, all the more so because the bloodiest treachery and deception, on the officer's part, does not necessarily coincide with the worst moral wrong.

The discrepancy between the two purposes of the tale stated before and after the narrative illuminates the downward movement of a novella which in turn has a direct effect on its fluid meaning. At the beginning of the fifteenth story Longarine claims that she tells it in order to prove “qu'il y en [women] a d'aussi bon cueur, d'aussi bon esprit, et aussi plénes de finesse” (104). But then at the end she asserts that “j'ai voulu montrer … que souvent les femmes de grand cueur sont plus tot vincues de l'ire et de vengence … de désespoir” (114). Longarine's view of her own novella has indeed evolved from hope and praise to pessimism. The turn that the narrative took may have changed her mind, as if she herself had been unable to control it. Unloved by her husband, the female protagonist of this tale turns toward a “parfaict amy.” The downward spiral has already started, and it accelerates as she tests his love. He remains faithful partly because of her wealth; finally she casts him off for others. What caused her downfall will always remain problematic; the downfall can only be ascertained, not judged, for the outcome rests on a concatenation of events, not just a single one. Longarine's position at the start of the novella may be seen under an ironic light, and then some contradictions disappear; however, this viewpoint does not alter the protagonist's degeneration. Furthermore if the lady's behavior had stayed on an irreproachable level, the answer would be easier, but Marguerite does not wish to be simplistic; literature tends toward uncertainty and flexibility, rhetoric toward fixed positions.

Mutability and antithesis become then the order of the day; one leads to the other. Since sentiments are in a state of flux and stress, aims remain quite unclear. The tension between opposites comes to the fore; a step in one direction does not take the protagonist forward but actually brings him back a step in the other direction. As a result, indecision dominates, and attempts at movements of the mind produce immobility. Antithetical concepts in Marguerite may have a direct point of contact with the medieval débat, but they differ from this literary ancestor in that they do not constitute a mere rhetorical game between two opposites; instead they demonstrate the difficulty of choosing one over another. Argumentative principles yield to the edification of judgment and the development of reason.

In expressing antithetical notions, Marguerite fuses form and content; syntax reflects a conflicting meaning. The bruit/dissimulation antithesis illustrates such a fusion:

De sorte qu'elle ne fut non seulement consolée, mais contente de l'absence do son mary. Et avant les troys semainnes qu'il [husband] devoit retourner, fut si amoureuse du Roy, qu'elle étoit aussi ennuyée du retour de son mary, qu'elle avoit été de son alée. … Ma Dame la vengeance est douce de celuy qui en lieu de tuer l'ennemy, donne vie à son perfet amy. Il me semble qu'il est tems, que la vérité vous ote la sote Amour que vous portez à celuy qui ne vous ayme point et l'amour juste et raisonnable chace hors de vous la crainte qui jamais ne doit demeurer en un cœur grand et vertueus.

[“III,” 29, 30]

Antinomies stress ambivalence and indecision: “Or fut Nicolas bien marry de laisser sa Dame; et non moins joyeus d'avoir la vie sauve” (“XXXVI,” 226); “et ne veuil pas nyer, mes Dames, que la patience du gentilhomme de Pampelune et du Président de Grenoble n'ait été grande, mais la vengeance n'en a été moindre” (“XXXVII,” 228); “Car les plus asseurez étoient desespérez et les desespérez en prenoient assurance” (“LVIII,” 304). The object is not to produce agreement or harmony since it really does not exist; even the participants sometimes cannot agree on the choice of the next narrator (cf. “LXXI,” 357). The use of antitheses, and similar techniques, does not play at all the role of a stylistic artifice or of a mere rhetorical figure but integrates explicitly the notion of ambiguity on Marguerite's part.¹⁷

Marguerite ascribes to her characters an antithesis of concepts when she wishes to depict an interior conflict of a Cornelian nature between two senses of duty. Although she pits one side of the argument against the other, this would-be simplicity soon disappears as the characters' inner tension grows in complexity when set against a stated purpose of the novella, pregnant with chiasmic effects. In the Lorenzaccio story, the anonymous duke's friend upon hearing that his master has cast lustful eyes upon his sister finds himself in a quandary: “D'un coté luy venoit au devant l'obligation qu'il avoit à son maitre, les biens et les honneurs qu'il avoit receus de luy; de l'autre coté, l'honneur de sa maison, l'honnetteté et chasteté de sa sœur, qu'il sçavoit bien ne se devoir jamais consentir à telle méchanceté …” (“XII,” 83). By resolving his dilemma with the duke's assassination, he does not exactly absolve himself; in fact, the nature of this act and its goriness immediately put into question who may be the real villain, the promiscuous duke or his extremely vengeful friend-servant.

In one way, the whole tale also raises the question of breaking friendship bonds; here, of course, both parties abuse their trust toward each other.¹⁸ As a result, the purpose of the novella stated at the beginning takes on quite a fluid meaning: “comment Amour aveuglit les plus grans et honnettes cueurs, et comme une méchanceté est difficile à vincre par quelque bénéfice ou bien que ce soit” (82). Amour here means deformed passion, a loss of reason, and it applies both to the duke and his friend-assassin. At first, méchanceté would seem to relate only to the assassin, but actually it refers to the duke as well. And when the debaters in the course of the discussion wonder aloud if a woman's virtue or love is worth a murder, any attempt at synthesis or choice on our part fails under the weight of a helpless judgment.

Protagonists who find themselves in a situation where they are forced to make a choice never make the right one; otherwise the tragic sense surrounding man's condition along a Pauline line would cease to exist, as would all irony heightening this basic human incapacity. In the “Seventieth Novella,” the two male protagonists, the young nobleman and the duke, find themselves torn between two courses: “Le Duc d'un coté aymoit sa femme, et se sentoit fort injurié, d'autre coté portoit bien bonne affection à son serviteur” (343); “Or choisissez de deus choses l'une, de me dire celle que vous aymez plus que toutes, ou de vous aler banny de toutes les terres où j'ai autorité. … Ainsi pressé de deus cotés … Car d'un coté il voyoit qu'en disant la vérité il perdoit s'amye … Aussi en ne la confessant il étoit banny du païs” (346). Marguerite likes to place her characters in these situations limites, but they come out of them shattered and deprived of moderation and reason. Here, just as in the “Twelfth Tale,” a murder offers an imperfect solution; upon finding out the truth, the duke slits his wife's throat. Although this novella can be viewed under the lens of a no-exit situation, none of the four protagonists, including the Dame du Verger, has any real choice; the fundamental point is that a breach of trust constitutes the lowest form of human behavior and in a way explains, and perhaps even excuses, the murder. In such cases, Dante quite possibly looms around the corner, for betrayers occupy the very last circle in Hell.

A dominating antithesis in the Heptameron is the wisefool oxymoron, a Renaissance topos that Erasmus' Praise of Folly epitomizes and Montaigne's Essais later continue. Of course, Marguerite also acts as another link in the chain that could start with Plato's Symposium and proceed to Saint Paul.¹⁹ Although this spiritual parentage ought not to be denied, in this vein Marguerite is above all a daughter of her age. Her own contemporary, Rabelais bears witness to this fact. In his dizain dedicating the Third Book to her, he beseeches her “Esprit abstraict, ravy et ecstatic” to come down and partake of the “faictz joyeux de bon Pantagruel.” This dedication does not necessarily attest to the queen's spiritualism and mysticism, as some have claimed.²⁰ On the contrary, in offering his book to her, Rabelais testifies to their kinship and certainly not to the differences which this spiritualism and mysticism would imply.

Indeed, following the Platonic rule of expressing serious thoughts through irony,²¹ he admonishes her to take a position that she has already taken; and he knows it, for he has taken the same position in his own work. After numerous peregrinations in consulting all forms of human, natural, and supernatural knowledge, Panurge arrives before Triboulet the Fool, who advises him to continue his quest toward perfection, toward knowledge; the search may end up an empty one and a failure, but in the process Panurge has grown in stature. Naturally Rabelais did not see the publication of the Heptameron; he must have read some of the tales in manuscript form, widely circulated at the time. Furthermore, Rabelais's knowledge of the queen is not just an abstract one of the kind that might have been gained through the reading of her works. His position at her brother's court in the 1540s must have put him in frequent personal contact with her; thus he was able to read her mind at first hand. Finally, dedicating a book, or any other kind of creative work, to a person usually indicates either an affinity of spirit or is meant to praise. Both Marguerite in the Heptameron and Rabelais in the Third Book start on an intellectual journey to explore amenable avenues to achieve happiness through exposure to human experience and realization of the relativistic nature and value of these explorations. Herein lies the essential meaning of this dedication, as well as the reconciliation of the paradoxical concept of the wise fool.

Because the notion of fou-sage implies a judgment, it is quite fitting that it should occur in the discussion following a tale, where the narrator-debaters examine the merits of the story. This particular presence further exemplifies the relativistic basis of the discussions. In one discussion the wisefool dichotomy leads to a purposeful confusion of vice and virtue, while advocating freedom of action and truth toward oneself: “Je vous dirai, dit Nomerfide, je voi que les folz, si on ne les tue, vivent plus longuement que les sages, et n'y trouvent qu'une raison: c'est qu'ilz ne dissimulent leurs passions. S'ilz sont courroucez, ilz frapent, s'ilz sont joyeus, ilz rient. Et ceus qui cuydent ettre sages dissimulent tant leurs imperfections, qu'ilz en ont tout leurs cueurs empoisonnez” (“XXXIII,” 215). In stressing the interchangeability of the two concepts, Marguerite may not hesitate to paraphrase Saint Paul: “Et qui se cuyde sage est fol devant Dieu” (“XXXVIII,” 234; I Cor. 3:18), but any theological or dogmatic basis of this statement has a much broader scope: it relates to the wide spectrum of human behavior just as the apostle himself meant it.

Since what and how to know forms the underlying basis of the discussions following each novella, the ambivalent fou-sage concept inevitably becomes an integral part of them. We listen to what we want to hear and shut ourselves out of what we would reject. In other words, we interpret as we see fit; hence the brittleness and insufficiency of words in expressing thoughts. Laughter may momentarily shield us from this fundamental epistemology, but at the same time it reinforces our consciousness of the dilemma. Stoicism and skepticism may offer a solution; Diogenes' scorn of knowledge may be preferable to Plato's vanity of attempting to attain it, but not necessarily so. This viable debate is triggered by a story that depicts two monks, who, upon hearing the farmer who is their host say he is going to kill his two pigs, think they are the intended victims:

Et qu'est ce à dire, dit Nomerfide, que nous sommes plus enclins à rire d'une folie, que d'une chose sagement faite? Pour ce, dit Hircan, qu'elle nous est plus agréable, d'autant qu'elle est plus semblable à notre nature, qui de soy n'est jamais sage. Et chacun prend plaisir à son semblable, les folz aus folies, et les sages à la prudence. Je croi, dit Symontaut, qu'il n'y a ne sages ne folz qui se sceussent garder de rire de cette histoire. Il y en a, dit Géburon, qui sont tant adonnez à l'amour de sapience, que pour choses qu'ils sceussent oÿr, on ne les sçauroit faire rire. Car ilz ont une joye en leur cueur, et un contentement si modéré, que nul accident ne les peut muer … et mesmes Diogénes foula aus piez le lyt de Platon, par ce qu'il étoit trop curieus à son gré pour montrer qu'il déprisoit, et vouloit mettre sous les piez la vaine gloire du dit Platon, en disant: Je foule l'orgueil de Platon. Mais vous ne dites pas tout, dit Saffredan. Car Platon soudinnement luy répondit, que vrayement il le fouloit, mais avec une plus grand' présumption, d'autant que Dyogénes usoit d'un tel mépris de netteté, par une certaine gloire et arrogance.

[“XXXIV,” 218]

The vanity of self-knowledge focuses on a religious level. Marguerite does not merely score deceitful and hypocritical monks, but above all the women, “fausses dévotes,” who believe themselves wise when fulfilling their religious duties by giving large contributions, going to church, and wearing crucifixes; actually they are the epitome of folly.²² As a matter of fact, in such circumstances sage does not have an intrinsic or absolute function; it simply exists as a variant of fol which acquires thereby a dominant if not absolute role. Is it a wise wife who will mock her unfaithful husband by deceiving him with another man (cf. “LXIX,” 338)? Love of God or man seen in this light may very well lead one of the narrators, Ennasuite, to think that “tous les amours du monde soient fondées sur les folies” (“XIX,” 126). If any doubt is cast on the meaning of sage, none prevails for fol. The actions of a young lady who poses in bed with a man at the urging of his own lady are described as “folie” (“XVIII,” 124). So is the prior's carnal love for Sister Heroet (“XXII,” 159), and a mother's incestuous love for her son (“XXX,” 202), if she thought she was a saint, helplessly driven to it; and so are masochists who likewise think they are saints. However, the absoluteness of folie remains quite precarious since it reflects the opinion of one or more voices in a discussion, but very rarely a unanimous viewpoint.

At all times fou merges into sage, and vice versa, in order to produce a very fluid and relativistic concept. The “Twenty-Sixth Novella” provides a notable prototype of such a fusion. The presentation of the tale sets forth immediately the dichotomy and at the same time breaks down the duality: “J'ai en main l'histoire d'un sage et d'une fole. Vous prendrez l'exemple qui vous plaira le mieus et connoitrez qu'autant qu'Amour fait faire en un cueur méchant, de méchancetez, en un cueur honnette fait faire choses dignes de louange. Car Amour de soy est bon mais la malice du sujet luy fait prendre souvent un mauvais surnom de fol, léger ou vilain. … Amour ne change point le cueur, mais le montre tel qu'il est, fol aus folz, et sage aus sages” (180-81). Here the gentleman d'Avannes goes from an anonymous lady, living near Pampeluna, who did not resist her natural inclinations and loved him passionately, to the Lady of Pampeluna who refuses to uncover her love and to follow her real desires. In the story itself, the wise woman would seemingly be the latter one; even the sly narrator, Saffredan, momentarily takes this point of view (cf. 190). But the discussion following the tale definitely shifts the blame to the Lady of Pampeluna. One of the debaters, Géburon, paraphrasing Saint Matthew (6:28), crystallizes the majority opinion: “Quiconque regarde par concupiscence est jà adultère en son cueur” (191). As for the anonymous lady, she at least followed her natural instincts, somewhat unrestrained to be sure; at least she did not conceal herself behind pretenses. Both sage and fole can apply to either woman; these terms therefore become interchangeable. It all depends on which mirror one looks at.

Whether or not they focus on the interchangeability of terms, the discussions following each novella still substantiate quite clearly the ambiguity pervading the Heptameron. Since each debater-narrator in the course of these discussions interprets the novella according to his own beliefs and viewpoint, its meaning can never be clearly defined; it may be absolute if one takes a given debater's opinion, but divergent, contrasting, and fluid, if a composite picture of these viewpoints is drawn. Indeed, the discussions form the essential originality of the Heptameron over the imitated framework of the Decameron. These conversations bring Marguerite's work into closer alignment with Castiglione's Courtier, for they reflect the dialectic strain of Platonism and the communicating code among the noble class.²³ And by introducing this conversational element with its resulting disparateness, Marguerite leaves no doubt about the disintegrating effect of this device upon a clear cohesive meaning of the tale.

Furthermore the discussion imparts a certain dynamism to the whole complex of this new brand of novella, composed of a tale and judging conversations, since it is neatly separated from the relatively static story. Then too, these discussions by the narrators create a contrasting reality in relation to the tale itself (see chapter 6). Their argumentative nature reflects Marguerite's strong affinity for the debate on ethical issues, as in her theater. The discussions also form a counterpart to the dialogues and the long monologues in the stories, for which Marguerite shows a strong liking because all these means of communication allow her to bring together and to focus on diverging viewpoints. Finally this affinity for argumentation reveals the variability of logic and reason, for each debater in propounding his opinion offers his own approach to a particular question or action and his own reasoning on it. The importance of the word reason has even warranted recently an extensive study on its numerous meanings clustering about (1) explanation-argument-proof, (2) law on which man must regulate his conduct, and (3) just measure, moderation.²⁴ The multidimensional qualities of this word bear out once again the pressure Marguerite feels to explore all facets of a concept, which in turn destroy its arbitrariness.

The discussions following each novella reflect Marguerite's view of a fragmented and dialectical universe. Yet in the Heptameron she gradually eases into the symposium concept of these post-tale conversations. As a matter of fact, one has to wait until the “Twelfth Novella,” dealing with the murder of Lorenzaccio, to find the first fully developed debate. At the start, it elicits contrasting views as to whether the murder was warranted:

Cette histoire fut bien écoutée de toute la compagnie, mais elle y engendra diverses opinions. Car les uns soutenoient que le gentilhomme avoit fait son devoir de sauver sa vie et l'honneur de sa sœur, ensemble d'avoir délivré sa patrie d'un tel tyran. Les autres disoient que non, mais que c'étoit trop grande ingratitude de mettre à mor celuy qui luy avoit fait tant de bien et d'honneur. Les dames disoient qu'il estoit bon frere et vertueus citoyen; les hommes au contraire qu'il étoit traitre et méchant serviteur. Et faisoit bon oyr les raisons alleguées des deus costez.

[86]

Since this issue cannot be resolved, the discussion shifts to the question of whether a lady, the proverbial abstract “belle Dame sans mercy,” should cause a man's death by not responding to him, not even with a verbal acknowledgment, when she may feel positively toward him. Because of the impossibility of assessing an individual's basic motivations, the debaters cannot arrive at an agreement, and the long argument remains suspended.²⁵ The story itself almost acts as a catalyst for a discussion moving across strata of narrative, from a failure to judge a crucial point in the tale, to a critical attitude toward a deviated concept of perfect love caused by a human flaw, and to insights in the private lives of debaters, such as Géburon (87).

If ideologically the discussions diffuse instead of synthesize notions, linguistically they tend to fix the metaphoric meaning of words or to point up their oxymoronic nature. The story itself of the thirtieth novella, depicting a husband who seeks solace with a lower-class woman, juggles with the concept of health and cold, guérir and morfondu. Then the debaters in the course of their conversations seize upon these notions and proceed to transform them into fundamental metaphors of the narrative: “Il me semble, dit Symontaut, qu'il avoit plus d'occasion de retourner à sa femme, quand il avoit froid à sa métairie, que quand il y étoit si bien traité”; and then the novella ends with a paraphrase from Luke 5:31 and I Corinthians, 1:27-30: “Ceus, dit Géburon, qui par eus mesmes se peuvent ayder, n'ont point besoin d'ayde. Car celuy qui a dit qu'il étoit venu pour les malades, et non point pour les sains, est venu par la loy de miséricorde secourir à noz infirmitez, rompant les arrestz de la rigueur de sa justice. Et qui se cuyde sage, est fol devant Dieu” (233-34). It remains quite difficult to decide who is healthy and who is not, or who fares better, the man in the cold or the man in the warm; in fact, the wise-fool paradox accentuates this uncertainty of judgment.

It would be incorrect to assume that every debate on a given tale remains unresolved. Some (though few) arrive at a synthesis within that specific debate, and yet even among these a wavering aura weakens their strength. Indeed it is quite fitting that the discussion on a story marking the end of a day, here the fourth, should come to rest on a synthesizing notion. The story in question deals with a man who kills his sister's lover so that she will not marry him, because he disapproves of him as a brother-in-law. The discussion centers on the hideousness of the crime as well as on the foolishness of the maiden, who, never recovering from this missed opportunity, does not ever marry. It also pits the pros and cons of arranged marriages against the dangers and delights of marriages based on love that often result in jealousy and anger. And it criticizes social discrepancies between two lovers as a barrier to their marriage. A sizable portion of the discussion, especially toward the beginning, brings out the merits and agonies of life's inevitable and incessant sufferings. Finally Parlamente is given the opportunity by Marguerite to have the last word and to conclude that marriage, if adhered to according to its reputed vows, can provide the only modus vivendi to overcome man's weaknesses and misery:

Il me semble … que l'un et l'autre est louable, mais qu'il faut que les personnes se soumettent à la volonté de Dieu, ne regardans ny à la gloire, ny à l'avarice, ny à la volupté, mais par une amour vertueuse et d'un consentement desirent vivre en l'état de maryage comme Dieu et nature l'ordonnent. Et combien qu'il n'y ait état sans tribulation, si ai je veu ceus la vivre sans repentence. Et nous ne sommes pas si malheureus en cette compagnie, que nul des maryez ne soit de ce nombre la. Hircan, Geburon, Symontaut et Saffredan jurérent qu'ilz s'étoient mariez en pareille intention, et que jamais ne s'en étoient repentys. Mais quoy qu'il en fut de la vérité, celles à qui il touchoit en furent si contentes, que ne pouvans oÿr un meilleur propos à leur gré, se levérent pour en aler rendre graces à Dieu. …

[“XL,” 240-41]

Some couples—a few—succeed in marriage if they are able to close their eyes to each other's faults and make the best of the ups and downs of life; these individuals find a measure of happiness if they continue to be drawn to each other. However, this practical reality becomes almost an ideal because of the relatively small number of couples that fall in the category. A small number of tales substantiate this accommodation in marriage; the vast majority do not, for man cannot easily shed himself of gloire, avarice, and volupté. Hence the relatively ideal conception of marriage is cast against the ugly realities of life in the tales themselves, which are supposed to be one mirror of society. The debaters themselves then become another mirror of society, thus creating an interplay between two levels of fiction, but their condition in marriage only reinforces the condition observed in the stories they relate.

The debaters may seem on the surface to enjoy a degree of happiness in marriage, “Mais quoy qu'il en fut de la vérité. …” As far as the debaters are concerned, Marguerite the omniscient narrator intervenes to dispel Parlamente's thesis and to maintain that self-delusion plays an important part in achieving happiness in marriage; the facts do not bear out appearances. Parlamente's attempt at synthesis therefore fails because neither the bulk of the tales nor the private lives of the debators support her argument, all the less since she supposes a certain perfection in man. Marguerite's universe, therefore, remains quite fragmented and diversified; peeling off one mask only leads to another and adds to the uncertainty of truth. At the end of the day in this instance, even the usually infallible solace of “aler rendre graces à Dieu” is tinted with irony—and with a good dose of bitterness.

Yet, in spite of inevitable failure, attempts at synthesis must be made to seek knowledge about oneself and the world about us. The symposia at the end of the novellas provide a means to arrive at a composite and ever-changing synthesis. Marguerite prefers thesis and antithesis to absolute synthesis because according to her own observations human behavior comprises a succession of conflicting examples that make uniformity and cohesion impossible. In the narration of the tales themselves, Marguerite institutes the technique of long declarations which actually sometimes become full-fledged discourses, through which two protagonists confront each other from conflicting points of view. Or the thesis-antithesis pattern may result from an opposition between a single declaration in a story that acts as the pivot of the action, and the arguments in the ensuing symposium that destroy its focal position and its momentary synthesizing effect. Because a declaration of this sort is an attempt at synthesis, it represents within the protagonist a convergence of interior dialogues which are then externalized, and formalizes a state of mind or a particular opinion at a given time.

Although in the past these declarations have been interpreted as offering another method for detailed psychological analysis of the characters that indulge in them, their excessive rhetoric could not be entirely reconciled with this stated purpose.²⁶ This is certainly one valid interpretation of the discourses, for in them the protagonists not only state their sentiments but grope for motivations behind them. Yet the emotive rhetoric of these long tirades puzzles. Viewing them as preclassical, in the Cornelian or Racinian traditions, or as preromantic, in an Hernani vein, does not help to understand their meaning. Or again, to attribute their frequency to Marguerite's feminine lyricism remains unsatisfactory, although perhaps quite valid. In the final analysis, this abusive rhetoric, although elegant, repeatedly brings out a lack of sincerity or a complete helplessness on the part of the one who speaks, so that the shallowness of words and the difficulty of arriving at truth stand out more than ever. Then the clash among the long discourses within a story and between a pivotal discourse and the discussion at the end of a tale reinforces the notion of an ambivalent truth pervading the novellas.

The more developed tales contain the interplay of these declarations, whereas the shorter stories may have only one or at the most two discourse-declarations. Since the “Tenth” and “Seventieth” novellas are the best developed, they provide the more notable examples of this interplay, while declarations in them also provide interpretative guideposts. Looking first at the “Seventieth Novella” may prove to be useful because, being one of the last ones, it reflects the ultimate in Marguerite's affinity for the discourse form. In this tale, the first declaration occurs in an indirect way; by means of an allusive dialogue the duchess informs the young gentleman of her passion toward him (341, 342, 343). Allusion and indirectness then express true sentiments instead of frankness. In the first real discourse, the duchess needs almost a whole page to tell her husband, falsely, that the young man he has nurtured for years is now trying to seduce his wife (p. 343). This first full-fledged declaration in the story is thus a vehicle for lies and deception, meant to gain for the duchess her revenge against the man who has refused her advances. The pivotal part of the story consists of a dialogue between the duke and the young man in the course of which the latter agrees to divulge the identity of the lady he loves, i.e., to tell the truth, an act that will bring his own downfall as well as that of the famous Dame du Verger (346-47).

Both truth and lies bring about the death of all but the duke. The lengthy laments before their deaths, first by the Dame du Verger and then by her “amy,” although deploring the breach of secrecy in their relationship based on a courtly love concept, reveal above all their helplessness and their victimization due to these lies and truths. And it is actually difficult to distinguish which is the main causal agent of this tragic outcome: the expression of a dubious truth, the duchess's declaration of her somewhat unnatural passion; the same duchess's false confession to her husband; or the gentleman's confiding to the duke his protector the ultimate truth that will boomerang. The two ensuing laments form a counterpart and an inevitable result of the preceding declarations. Both the Dame du Verger, punctuating her despairing tirade with overabundant “O” and “Helas,” and the young nobleman, cursing extensively his ignorance of the world's wickedness, really fail to discern the truth of the matter;²⁷ she seizes upon her lover's verbal betrayal of her, and he simply puts all the blame upon himself.

Each of these laments expresses genuine inner sentiments, but when projected on the three previous forms of declaration, none any longer conveys an absolute or believable truth. Furthermore, seen in this light, the overinflated rhetoric of these two despairing discourses contributes to a certain loss of their credibility; in other words, a discrepancy exists between what the two protagonists say and what Marguerite means. Therefore the interaction among the five declarations has a disintegrating effect upon the truth and upon a clear meaning for the seventieth tale. An additional benefit of considering the various declarations as guideposts or signs of action and meaning is that this novella then transforms itself into a five-act tragedy.

In the “Tenth Novella” the two protagonists' declarations serve to unmask each other; often one mask is used against another, that is, the stated intentions differ vastly from unstated ones. These speeches then form the essential elements of a fencing or sparring match; they do not lead, however, to a light-hearted marivaudage, but to a Stendhalian exploration of motives dominated by self-interest or social restraint. A truthful relationship between Amadour and Floride never existed; actually the story moves from the area of an apparent truth to that of a totally falsified one, but ambiguity sets in when the reader or the debaters try to decide who or what is to blame for the tragic outcome: Amadour, Floride, external forces, or the inner-core frailness or preordained corruption in those two protagonists. Already the very first exchange of speeches casts a cunning Amadour against an incredulous Floride:

Ma Dame, je ne vous ai encores voulu dire la tresgrande affection que je vous porte, pour deus raisons. L'une, que j'attendoie par long service vous en donner l'expérience; l'autre, que je doutoie que penseriez une grande outrecuydance à moy, qui suis simple gentilhomme, de m'addresser en lieu qui ne m'appartient regarder. Et encores que je fusse Prince comme vous, la loyauté de votre cueur ne permetroit qu'autre que celuy qui en a pris la possession … Mais, ma Dame, tout ainsi que la nécessité en une forte guerre contraind faire degast du propre bien et ruyner le blé en herbe, à fin que l'ennemy n'en puisse faire son profit, ainsi pren-je le hazard d'avancer le fruyt qu'avec le tems j'espéroie cueuillir à fin que les ennemys de vous et moy ne puissent faire leur profit de votre dommage. …

Puis que ainsi est, Amadour, que ne demandez de moy que ce qu'en avez, pourquoy est ce que vous me faites une si longue harangue? J'ai si grand' peur que souz voz honnestes propoz, il y ait de la malice cachée pour decevoir l'ignorance jointe à ma junesse, que je suis en grande perplexité de vous répondre. Car de refuser l'honnete amytié que vous m'offrez, je feroye le contraire de ce que j'ai fait, qui me suis plus fiée en vous, qu'en tous les hommes du monde. … Je ne sçache chose qui me doive empécher de vous faire réponse selon votre desir, si non une crainte que j'ai en mon cueur, fondée sur le peu d'occasion que vous avez de me tenir telz propos.

[“X,” 61-62]

These declarations therefore blur the line between truth and lie, for neither protagonist operates on a sure footing. And as the tale (actually a novelette in length) progresses, Amadour's mask melts and Floride's gains depth because of her acquired sophistication and bitterness. The confrontations between the two, resulting from a succession of these speeches, instead of clarifying their relationship make its difficulty more distinct to both of them. At each meeting a chance for truth brings about another veil, until Amadour finally declares his lustful desires (74); this naked fact makes a sham out of his previous statements and explains Floride's protective jockeying. Yet for the many years that this offensive-defensive game persisted, Floride was under the illusion that conversation and attention alone would satisfy him; until at the end in utter despair he seeks out death on the battlefield. The declarations then delineate the downward curve of the action and focus on a psychological fencing that destroys any attempt of sincerity on the characters' part. However, if their lengthy speeches obscure truth and judgment, they do provide for the novella a framework that holds a key to its elusive meaning.

When only one or two declarations occur in a novella, they automatically become the focal point of the narrative and often the axis around which the action revolves. Due to its very length, a declaration acquires a central and overwhelming position in a relatively short tale. It supposedly reflects a state of mind or of the emotions, truthful or not, and thereby acquires a lyrical quality, but it can also be a vehicle for self-justification or for blame toward others.²⁸ At all times it is a rhetorical dramatization of facts and sentiments already established or stated previously; therefore its logical redundance cries out. And even if such a speech reflects sincerity, the verbose inflation that truth undergoes undermines the credibility of the sentiments expressed. Thus what some consider a narrative defect assumes the status of a conscious effort on Marguerite's part to reveal falseness of purpose or ambiguity.²⁹ The rhetoric of the long declarations outweighs the actual meaning and intent of the stated feeling, because elegant speech producing an unnatural and contrived tone does not necessarily convey a sense of genuineness. Accordingly, the artifice of the declarations does not constitute a defect but fits once again into Marguerite's aesthetics of exposing false appearances and disguised or impenetrable truth.

Pitting a lengthy declaration against the debate at the end of the tale creates a further disintegration of any hoped-for synthesis or near absolute. By its very nature a rhetorical exposition of sentiments represents a position reached at that moment and not necessarily indicative of the speaker's sincerity or social status. Given this framework, there will be a loss of cohesive meaning in every novella that contains such a pivotal declaration. The forty-second tale offers a typical example. Here a prince makes advances to a servant girl who naturally mistrusts him, and in a two-page oration which reveals a deliberate discrepancy between her elegant speech and her status, she admonishes him for not respecting her honor:

Non, Monseigneur, non. Ce que vous cerchez ne se peut faire. Car combien que je ne soi qu'un ver de terre, au pris de vous, j'ai mon honneur si cher, que j'aymeroie mieus mourir, que l'avoir diminué, pour quelque plaisir qui soit en ce monde. Et la crainte que j'ai que ceus qui vous ont veu venir céans se doutent de la vérité, me donne la peur et le tremblement que j'ai. Et puisqu'il vous plait me faire cet honneur de parler à moy, vous me pardonnerez aussi si je vous répon comme mon honneur le me commande. Je ne suis point si sote, Monseigneur, ne si aveuglée, que je ne voie bien la beauté et ne connoisce les graces que Dieu a mises en vous, et que je n'estime la plus heureuse du monde celle qui possédera le cors et l'amour d'un tel Prince. Mais de quoy me sert cela, veu que ce n'est pour moy, ny pour femme de ma sorte, et que seulement le desir seroit à moy perfette folye.

[“XL,” 248-49]

At first this harangue wards off the prince; ultimately it contributes to transforming his love into a sincere one toward her, but she still rejects him.

The debate at the end revolves around the question of honor, both the servant girl's and the prince's. And the overwhelming blame falls on Françoise the servant because what she considers honor may very well be hypocrisy and mortification, a blind refusal to accept true love when both parties love each other. The real hero of the tale turns out to be the prince, according to Longarine, the debater who has the last word: “Car qui peut faire mal et ne le fait point, cettuy la est bien heureus” (253). To the extent that it is possible, he has reached a degree of happiness by exhibiting an inner goodness and self-honesty that Françoise is not capable of, for she remains in darkness and in an ambiguous, even false context. Therefore her flowery declamation to him becomes in retrospect empty words and a mutilation of ideals. When cast against the disintegrating effects of the debate, the redundancy and inflated rhetoric in defense of her honor acquire a purpose: to better illustrate her mistaken or fluid position. The more a character attempts to substantiate a viewpoint or state of mind, the more he or she will reveal, in the eyes of the debaters and of Marguerite, flaws and uncertainties in motivation and attitude toward human conduct.

Marguerite's propensity for these dominating rhetorical patterns in tales appears in the form of long epistle-poems in four other novellas. These occurrences are nothing but a variation on the declaration-discourse technique and serve an identical purpose; they are found for the most part toward the beginning of the Heptameron with only one toward the end.³⁰ Prolixity and artifice mark these versified letters that contain the commoner clichés of love poetry and emulate the bombast of the Grands Rhétoriqueurs. It is all too easy to criticize the poor quality of this poetry, just as it may be tempting to blame the presence of these effusive and pretentious poems on Marguerite's carelessness in composing her novellas. Yet such immediate reactions deceive, for she must have been aware of the potential defects of these poem-epistles. Some may also criticize Balzac's long descriptive introductions before placing his characters into action or his affinity for letters that are accused of interrupting the flow of the narrative but in fact represent a portrait technique.

In the Heptameron, the poem-letter pierces through the veil of lies; in the very first example it unmasks its sender. Here the poem, just about four pages long, occupies almost half of the novella; it reveals a knight's love for his lady, a carnal love under a guise of purity. The accompanying diamond, featured in the envoi, pretends to symbolize this purity, but at the same time it implies a coldness:

O diamant, di, un amant m'envoie(31)
Qui entreprend cette douteuse voie,
Pour mériter par ses oeuvres et faitz
D'ettre du reng des vertueus perfetz,
A fin qu'un jour il puisse avoir sa place
Au désiré lieu de ta bonne grace.

[“XIII,” 94]

Because of its rhetorical prolixity, this poem echoes Jean Lemaire de Belges's Epistre à l'Amant Vert, but it lacks the latter's rhythm, fecund imagery, and sincere lyricism, though both use an artifice for a mouthpiece to express sentiments to a lady: a diamond and a parrot. Marguerite gives to her poem-letter an inflated and contrived look in order to stress the falsity of the knight's love; a mood of affectation then permeates the whole novella, so that when the lady cruelly and laughingly avenges herself upon the knight's wife, no sense of tragedy emerges. One understands but without condoning.

Marguerite condemns excessive parler, which is the exact opposite of truth. Hence when the debate at the end of the novella focuses on the lady's reaction and conduct and pictures them in a positive light, but without attacking the knight's intentions that caused this cruelty, the poetic epistle's emptiness stands out all the more; the longer it is, the emptier it looms. Structurally it has a pivotal position since it stands between the narration of the knight's advances and the lady's reaction to them; thus it points both to his hypocrisy and to her learning the truth. A long-winded, false verbal edifice becomes ironically a conveyor of the truth; however, if it exposes the knight, it unleashes the lady's calculated cruelty which is certainly not any more laudable than his calculated steps toward seducing her. Not only then is the poem-letter a dubious expression of sentiments, but it causes perplexing results that defy judgment.

Marguerite presents polarized situations based on irreconcilable viewpoints. The tale itself may lack such a polarization, but the ensuing debate is sure to introduce it, since each debater has his own irreducible logic. Faced with a universe of opposites, contradictions, and paradoxes, Marguerite does not helplessly abandon herself to the maelstrom about her; on the contrary, she observes and weighs and tries to understand, but not necessarily to judge. This process may occur implicitly in the presentation of the story, but it surfaces in the debate following the tale.

Thanks to its dialogue form the genre of the theater allows her further to picture contrasting characters who actually impersonate ethical or religious concepts. Her plays are a precise counterpart to the debates in the novellas, for she seeks to reproduce the conflicts in life, not an invisible harmony. In Le Mallade (1535?), an early play, she casts a Sick Man, worldliness; a Wife, superstition; a Doctor, wisdom; and a Chambermaid, ecstasy or faith. No attempt will be made to cure the wife, a hopeless case. But the chambermaid, counseled by the physician who is just as rapacious as he is sagacious, will heal the husband, without even any blood-letting. At this stage, black can turn into white; faith and reason may cure a spiritual illness, but only a moderate one. In a later play, however, the Comédie de Mont-de-Marsan (1548) written a year before her death, Marguerite recasts the same four characters; here La Sage stands up to La Ravie on an equal footing, and neither La Mondainne nor La Supersticieuse give in to their two rivals. Marguerite has lost the limited optimism she once had.

On the specific subject of love, two plays offer a microcosm of the Heptameron. The Comédie des quatre femmes (1542), two maidens and two married women, actually has a cast of ten since it also features an elderly couple, the wisdom of age, and four men who confess past unhappy loves; it could very well be that these ten characters mirror the ten debater-narrators of tales in the Heptameron. The first wife incarnates resentment and bitterness; she continues to love her husband, who is actually unworthy of her love. The second one impersonates jealousy; her husband loves elsewhere.³² The first maiden flaunts her indifference toward love—because she has never experienced it. The second one, recalling Louise Labé's Débat de Folie et d'Amour, praises the beneficial effects of love.³³ The elderly counseling couple cautions each of these protagonists against the weakness of her position, but to no avail; they do not and cannot change. When the four men appear toward the end of the play, their role will be again to oppose the women's attitudes and experiences; they will invite the ladies to dance, and Marguerite will not fail to pun on danser-tenser, “to quarrel.”

The Comédie du parfait amant (1549), written the year of Marguerite's death, echoes the Comédie des quatre femmes and in addition demonstrates that to the very last Marguerite faced, without solving it, the dialectics of an ideal set against the conflicting varieties of life. She condenses this failing search in just 186 verses, which in essence becomes a prototype of a debate at the end of a novella in the Heptameron. A timeless old woman is in search of crowning a “parfait amant.” First she finds a faithful wife who remained so only until her husband had to be away for three months. A second wife has remained faithful because there have not been any temptations yet; the husband has always stayed home. In the third case, a wife has remained faithful in spite of her husband's absence for six months, but if she ever learned of his betraying her, she would repay him in kind. Finally the old woman finds a perfect couple; however neither man or woman wants to accept the crown and thinks the other deserves it, thus exhibiting a positive lack of vanity and of philautie, love of self. In this last play Marguerite wrote, a kind of testament, it could be argued that she does not lose hope since an ideal is realized. But it is realized in a dream more than in reality. The play clearly indicates that innocence in man is not a natural and common state; it will be lost at the first opportunity, even for the perfect couple.

A quick glance at some of the plays not only reinforces the prevalent thematic patterns of the Heptameron but its very formal essence—ambiguity and dialogue.³⁴ Indeed, these plays actually do not present dramatizations of individuals and their condition; they are merely an exercise in dialectics, a debate on issues by means of dialogues and longer monologues comparable to the emotional declarations in the stories. Without a doubt, therefore, dialogue is a mode of expression proper and essential to Marguerite; it is a primary tool in the exchange of ideas and opinions following the tradition of the medieval debate and the Platonic symposium. In turn such a mode reflects Marguerite's fluid position; she dissects the truth, or what is thought to be the truth, and moves from one segment to another, from one vista to the next. Such a spatial and visual movement leads to a suspension of judgment, and it explains the innovative inclusion of the conversation-debate, the symposium, at the end of each story.

It would be misleading then to think that Marguerite in the Heptameron has forgone the use of dialogue, as some believe.³⁵ To begin with, each novella is composed of a story and a debate, and by virtue of the formal nature of this debate it contains a varying abundance of dialogue. In fact, Marguerite has unwittingly formulated her own definition of a novella: story plus debate; in her case then it would be deceptive to confuse short story or tale with novella. True, dialogue as a means of communication or as a character portrait technique, both of which also produce a certain dynamism in the narrative, does not abound in the stories themselves; she assigns this function to the debates. This relative scarcity, or better, economy, of dialogue in the tale itself does not necessarily reveal a narrative weakness; on the contrary, it can be argued that it is a studied element aimed at focusing more on the conversations of the debates and at deemphasizing dramatic components that may contribute to synthesis in the story. Attracting attention to a developed dialogue in the tale, which would tend to produce a coalescent meaning if communication took place, would in turn detract from the fragmentation effect that Marguerite wants to produce within the story and by means of the debate. Of course, dialogues do exist in the Heptameron, in the manner that critics expect them in order to judge the quality of a short story, but in a minor key.

This economy of dialogue in a number of tales is marked by only one word or a short sentence in direct-discourse form. Although its relative frequency can be attributed to a medieval narrative tradition such as the fabliau, which Marguerite continues in this sense, or to a formal reminiscence of even the Decameron, because Boccaccio can also sprinkle dialogue parsimoniously in his tales, the fact remains that Marguerite does so to suit her own purposes, which may coincide with the practices of some of her literary predecessors. But this rarity of dialogue does not amount to a defect, any more than it does in Boccaccio.³⁶ A one-word or a short-sentence dialogue takes on the role of a dramatic flash that momentarily gives the impression of meaningful synthesis but leaves waves of fluidity.

In the “Sixtieth Novella” the only word spoken is Jesus, which succinctly dramatizes the perversion of religious dogmas and rites that has dominated this tale: confession, extreme unction, marriage. Miracle is the only word spoken in the sixty-fifth tale, and it immediately brings into focus the dubious nature and ambivalence of religious practice and human credibility. Nothing else is needed for the specific intent of this novella; any additional dialogue would detract from it and shift the thematic emphasis. In the twentieth, the only dialogue in the tale, a one-sentence statement, summarizes the male protagonist's point of view when he discovers his so-called lady with the stable boy: “Ma Dame, prou vous face, aujourd'huy par votre méchanceté connue, je suis guéry et délivré de la continuelle douleur dont l'honnetteté, qu'à tor j'estimoie ettre en vous, étoit cause” (136). Naturally in a short tale this one restricted dialogue, a word or sentence, takes on significance since it stands for the synthesizing element which the ensuing debate will endeavor to disintegrate. In a longer tale, such an occurrence still has a similar effect; when an older gentleman comments “Monsieur, c'est trop” (“XXVI,” 190) upon seeing his adopted son kiss rather passionately his adopted mother, this short statement contributes immeasurably toward fixing for the moment a meaning to the story before arriving at the debate.³⁷

If an extreme concision of dialogue momentarily fixes a truth, an interpretation, a more dynamic, extended form of dialogue becomes a vehicle for deception, for veiling the truth. Again Marguerite reverses the common usage of a narrative technique, for extended dialogue does not constitute a truthful means of communication in her eyes. A rather heavy dose of direct discourse occurs, for example, in the fifth tale, in which a “batelière” pretends to lead two monks aboard her ferry to paradise, but actually leaves them in the desert; they do not succeed in seducing her. Dialogue abounds in the twenty-third tale, which features a confessor's success with the lady of the house to which he is attached; here to a great extent the dialogue serves as a means of shielding the confessor's devious intentions. The same means of deception hold true in the forty-first tale; a Franciscan monk at first attempts verbally to break down a maiden's resistance by engaging her in a conversation dominated by the erotic and deceptive metaphor “corde cinte” (243).

Even when the dialogue form totally dominates a tale, as when it fills two out of four pages in the forty-ninth tale, the pseudo-symposium atmosphere created by the participation of several conversationalists still conveys the sense of a game played with truth. The male protagonists finally drop the mask of pretense, realize and admit they have all been tricked by the same woman. The dialogue here stands for an admission and realization of truth, and counterpoints an earlier dialogue during which each protagonist kept his mask on; the conversation also reinforces the central element of playfulness and preludes the gentlemen's vengeance:

Ma prison, dit Hatillon, commença et fina tel jour. La miéne, dit Duraciel, commença le propre jour que la votre et fina et dura jusques à tel jour. Valuëbon, qui perdoit patience, se preit à jurer et dire: Par le sang Dieu, à ce que je vois, je suis le tiers qui pensoi ettre le prémier et seul. Car j'entrai et en sailly tel jour. Les autres troys qui étoient à table jurnt qu'ilz avoient bien gardé ce jurérent reng. Or puisqu'ainsi est, dit Hatillon, je dirai l'état de notre géoliére. Elle est maryée et son mary est bien loin. C'est cette la propre, répondirent ilz tous. Or pour nous mettre hors de péne, dit Hatillon, moy qui suis le prémier en roolle, la nommerai aussi le prémier. C'est ma Dame la Comtesse qui étoit si audacieuse, qu'en gangnant son amytié, je pensoi avoir vincu un Caesar. Qu'à tous les Dyables soit la vilaine, qui nous a fait d'une chose tant travailler. … Si aymeroi je mieus ettre mort, qu'elle demeura sans punition.

[274]

In this instance, Marguerite exhibits a certain talent in orchestrating a long comic dialogue which derives its humor from the development of an obvious notion beyond the logical limits of its meaning, as Molière could do so well; and the sparkle of this sort of dialogue adds considerably to the swift movement of the tale. Since this multiparty conversation, producing the atmosphere of a symposium, takes place in a tale dominated by the spirit of physical love, it brings out an anti-Platonic thrust, especially in the light of the setting: “un banquet où ils faisoient bonne chère” (273).

Marguerite, then, explores, in the tales themselves, several dialogue techniques always related to the many faces of truth and falsity. When a sparsity of dialogue prevails, the occurrence of a single word or sentence in direct discourse makes its calculated presence all the more dramatic and underscores its irony and double-entendre or its momentary validity. An identical effect results from a slightly extended dialogue, a rapid, strategically located exchange between the chief protagonists. A frequent cruelty, a piercing intellectual superiority, and a humorous brilliance tempered by irony form the trademark of the very concise as well as the slightly developed dialogue. In all these, direct flashes of discourse and conversation fall under a weight of constraint; they are never characterized by a total freedom of action and thought; they never give the impression of being a genuine means of communication; they conceal much more than they reveal. At all times, a dialogue, irrespective of its length, brings forth the oscillation between an apparent truth and its opposite, between wearing and dropping a mask, until the debate at the end of the story delineates the Pirandellian concept of naked masks, the relativism of truth. Considered in this light, Marguerite adapts to her own needs the paucity of dialogue typical of the medieval conte and even to some extent of the Decameron.

Because of the inherent weakness of the conventional dialogue form, as Marguerite sees it, she opts for the Platonic dialectical format which allows for an exchange of views and avoids the fixity of a global ideological conviction. Her Platonic affinity explains the usual overwhelming presence of the debate following a relatively short tale as well as its still strong impact on a more developed story. And the reason for the relative sparsity of conventional dialogue in the tales themselves then becomes quite plausible. Since the opinions propounded in the debate fragment the story, turn it upon itself to produce a kaleidoscopic effect just as happens in Diderot's Jacques le fataliste, these conversations understandably take on Marguerite's own peculiar stamp; they constitute a prime factor promoting ambiguity.

However, in the midst of fluidity and fragmentation, the characters of the narrator-conversationalists in the debates provide a constancy and also an index of any evolution there may be throughout the Heptameron. By remaining faithful to, or even somewhat evolving within, their framework of beliefs and moral code, the debaters become the real protagonists of the Heptameron, who coordinate this fresco of human conduct. A dialogue then ensues from one novella to another; it leads to a concatenation from which emerges an all-embracing unity of the work. The final synthesis is not an absolute thematic one but depends on the studied movement between and among novellas and on Marguerite's effort to provide foretelling and echoing thematic patterns throughout the Heptameron. Indeed, a structural study will easily demonstrate this dynamic unity.

Notes

1. “Il est assez difficile de décider si cet ouvrage, dans son ensemble, est moral ou immoral. L'austérité et la légèreté, la délicatesse sentimentale ou pathétique et la gaillardise plus ou moins grivoise, parfois même un peu grossière, l'esprit d'ironie et l'accent d'une piété sincère s'y mélangent à doses presque égales et en font une des compositions les plus bizarres de notre littérature.” L. de Loménie, “La Littérature romanesque …,” p. 683. Cf. P. Toldo, “Rileggendo il novelliere della Regina di Navarra,” Rivista d'Italia, 26 (July 15, 1923), 380-405, who points out apparent discrepancies as major flaws, but his article still has some value if seen in light of our argument, for uniformity was never Marguerite's intent.

2. Cf. L. Febvre, Autour de l'Heptaméron, p. 282.

3. P. Jourda, “L'Heptaméron: Livre préclassique,” p. 134. Because of this permanence, Marguerite formulates a “moral pratique et concrète” (p. 136). Jourda's position, here, rightfully emphasizes Marguerite's earthiness instead of her spirituality. Furthermore he no longer considers it, and correctly so, chiefly under a psychological light, as he had done in his monumental thesis thirty years previously. For a similar point of view on the Heptameron, cf. J. Ferrier, Forerunners of the French Novel: An Essay on the Development of the Novella in the late Middle Ages (London, 1954), pp. 89-91.

4. J. Gelernt, World of Many Loves …, p. 166.

5. H. Coulet, Le Roman jusqu'à la révolution (Paris, 1967), pp. 126, 128.

6. Cf. F. Gray, “Ambiguity and Point of View in the Prologue to Gargantua,” Romanic Review, 56 (1965), 12-21; both J. Paris (Rabelais au futur [Paris, 1970]) and M. Beaujour (Le Jeu de Rabelais [Paris, 1969]) base a good deal of their study on the concept of ambiguity.

7. The Third Book (1546) obviously was published before the Heptameron (1558), but the dedication would indicate that Rabelais was quite familiar with Marguerite's works, some still in manuscript form, such as the novellas.

8. Musset, a notable exception who knew well the Heptameron as is proven by his Lorenzaccio (based on novella XII), already perceived this new view of Marguerite:

   Je veux voir moins loin, mais plus clair;
   Je me console de Werther
   Avec la reine de Navarre.
   Et pourquoi pas? Croyez-vous donc,
   Quand on n'a qu'une page en tête,
   Qu'il en faille chercher si long,
   Et que tant parler soit honnête?
   Qui des deux est stérilité,
   Ou l'antique sobriété
   Qui n'écrit que ce qu'elle pense,
   Ou la moderne intempérance
   Qui croit penser dès qu'elle écrit?
   …
   Cette belle âme si hardie,
   Qui pleura tant après Pavie,
   Et dans la fleur de ses beaux jours,
   Quitta la France et les amours
   Pour aller consoler son frère
   Au fond des prisons de Madrid,
   Croyez-vous qu'elle n'eût pu faire
   Un roman comme Scudéry?
   Elle aima mieux mettre en lumière
   Une larme qui lui fut chère,
   Un bon mot dont elle avait ri.
   Et ceux qui lisaient son doux livre
   Pouvaient passer pour connaisseurs …

   cited in C. Garosci, Margherita di Navarra (Turin, 1908), pp. 146-47. In this relatively early study on Marguerite, the author discerns a beginning of ambiguity but does not quite know what to make of it:

   Qui Margherita ci rivela un'altra delle sue spiccate facoltà; quella di saper proporsi, intorno ad un argomento, tutte le opinioni e di mostrare di fronte ad esse una strana indecisione. … Certo Margherita spinge il piacere di comprendere fino ai limiti estremi, fino al punto in cui esso diventa un ostacolo al giudizio, alla scelta; ella entra naturalmente nell'opinione altrui e si mette dal punto di vista del suo interlocutore ora sedotta dallo spirito arguto dello scetticismo, ora dall'austerità della Riforma, ora dagli splendori immortali dell' amore filosofico, ora dagli aspetti mutevoli, dai pittoreschi contrasti della passione umana.

   (pp. 167-68)

9. A. Gide, Les Nourritures terrestres, in Romans, récits, soties et œuvres lyriques (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1964), p. 235.

10. Cf. “Dieu qui juge le cueur, dit Longarine, en donnera sa sentence, mais c'est beaucoup que les hommes ne nous puissent accuser” (XXVI, 191).

11. This notion of suspension of judgment at the end of novellas does not occur on an isolated basis; on the contrary, it is quite pervasive; cf. XVI, 115; XX, 137; XXIII, 162; XXXI, 208; XXXVI, 225; XLV, 263.

12. For additional examples of age flaws see XIII, XV, XXVI, XXIX, LXV, LXII.

13. Cf. Gelernt, “love is a perfectly appropriate foundation for marriage, provided that the match does not violate important tenets of social propriety” (163); in other words no social breach should occur. But on the contrary, Marguerite underlines the tragedy resulting from these rigid and senseless codes; in this vein, she follows the naturalistic trend set by Boccaccio. For examples of social breach see IX, XL, XLII.

14. A. Lorian, “Intensité et conséquence dans l'Heptaméron de Marguerite de Navarre,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 63 (1963), 118.

15. These two examples from the same novella are only a mere sample of their high frequency. The above article by Lorian gives numerous examples of the use of explicative conjunctions but does not quite see them in the light that we wish to stress here.

16. “Je ne veux donc pas oublier encor cette cicatrice, bien mal propre à produire en public: c'est l'irrésolution.” “De la præsumption,” œuvres complètes, ed. M. Rat. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris, 1965), p. 637.

17. Evidently we do not quite agree with Jourda's assessment of this stylistic trait: “elle sait user de l'antithèse dans le développement même de ses nouvelles: il y a là un effet de style un peu précieux que nous n'apprécions plus guère aujourd'hui, mais qui était alors fort à la mode” (Marguerite d'Angoulême, II, p. 968).

18. As a matter of fact, the basic antithetical metaphor in one novella is the “unir-rompre amytié” theme, cf. XLVII. These verbs, with an emphasis on rompre, recur as a leitmotiv throughout the tale and the discussion and become integrated therefore with the notion of mistrust promulgated by the story.

19. Cf. I Corinthians, 3:18-20; 4:10; and II, 11:23.

20. Cf. A. Lefranc's comments to this poem in his critical edition of the Third Book (Paris, 1931), p. 2.

21. Cf. E. Wing, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (New York, 1968), p. 236.

22. “Les Cordeliers doncq, dit Hircan, ne devroient jamais prescher pour faire sages les femmes, veu que leur folye leur sert tant. Ilz ne les preschent pas, dit Parlamente, d'ettre sages, mais bien de le cuyder ettre. Car celles qui sont du tout mondaines et foles, ne donnent pas grandes aumonnes. Mais celles qui pour fréquenter leur convent, et porter leurs Paternotres marquées de testes de mor, et leurs cornettes plus basses que les autres, cuydent ettre les plus sages, sont celles lon peut dire les plus foles. Car elles constituent leur salut en la confience qu'elles ont en la sainteté des iniques” (XLIV, 259).

23. Cf. Garosci, p. 133 and Loménie, p. 686; the former stresses the affinities with Castiglione while the latter focuses on the social behavioral value of these conversations.

24. H. Vernay, esp. pp. 179-81.

25. In tracing the sources of these discussions, R. Lebègue suggests the “dialogue naturel” of Boccaccio's characters, the medieval farce, medieval religious and profane theater, and the lively conversations at the court, but he fails to mention the Platonic dialogue which would also be the basis of these debates, especially in view of the subject matter of the Heptameron, love and the human behavioral code, which relates directly to the Symposium. “Réalisme et apprêt dans la langue des personnages de l'Heptaméron,” Actes du Colloque de Strasbourg: La littérature narrative d'imagination (Paris 1961), p. 83.

26. Cf. Jourda, Marguerite d'Angoulême, II, 973-74.

27. “O malheureuse, quelle parole est ce que j'ai oÿe? quel arrest de ma mor ai je entendu? Quelle sentence de ma fin ai je receuë? O le plus aymé qui oncques fut, est ce la récompense de ma chaste, honnette et vertueuse amour? O mon cueur, avez vous faite une si perilleuse election de choisir pour le plus loyal, le plus infidèle, pour le plus véritable, le plus fint, pour le plus secret, le plus médisant? Hélas est il possible qu'une chose cachée aus yeus de tous les humains, ait été révélée à ma Dame la Duchesse? Hélas mon petit chien tant bien appris, le seul moyen de ma longue et vertueuse amytié, ce n'a pas été de vous qui m'avez décelée, mais celuy qui a la voys plus éclatante que le chien abboyant, et le cueur plus ingrat que nulle beste. C'est luy, qui contre son serment et sa promesse a découverte l'heureuse vie que nous avons longuement mené, sans tenir tor à personne” (351); “O mon Dieu, pour quoy me créates vous homme ayant l'amour si légère et le cueur si ignorant? Pour quoy ne me créates vous le petit chien qui a fidèlement servi sa maitresse? Hélas, mon petit amy, la joye que me donnoit votre japer, est tournée en tristesse mortelle, puis que par moy, autre que nous deus a oÿe votre voys. Si est ce, m'amye, que l'amour de la Duchesse ny de femme vivante ne m'a fait varier, combien que plusieurs fois la méchante m'en ait requis et prié. Mais ignorance m'a vincu pensant à jamais asseurer notre amytié. Toutesfois, pour cette ignorance je ne laisse d'ettre coulpable. Car j'ai révélé le secret de m'amye, j'ai faucé ma promesse, qui est la seule cause dont je la voi morte devant mes yeus …” (352-53).

    Although rhetoric and redundance may abound in these declarations, they are not carelessly assembled. J. Frappier has shown how rhythmic patterns exist in them that can actually be structured into rhymed verses (“La Chastelaine de Vergi, Marguerite de Navarre et Bandello,” pp. 139-41).

28. Novellas XV, XIX, XXII, XXIV, XL, XLII, XLVII, LIII, LXIII contain one or two declarations as central elements in the narrative pattern and attest to this frequency.

29. One of the most recent such opinions in a rather fairly long accepted line of criticism can be found in R. Lebègue, “Réalisme et apprêt dans la langue des personnages de l'Heptaméron,” p. 80.

30. See novellas XIII, XIX, XXIV, LXIV.

31. As part of a parody of love poetry, and the abuses of Petrarchism, Rabelais uses a similar play on words when Pantagruel receives a note, cast in a ring, from a Parisian lady he has abandoned: “Dy amant faulx, pourquoy me as tu laissée?” (Pantagruel, ch. XXIV). Interestingly enough, this pun is not as frequent as one may think. Cf. my Rabelais et l'Italie (Florence, 1969), p. 94.

32. See Théâtre profane, p. 107:

    Il ayme ailleurs: voilà ma mort, ma guerre
    Je brusle, et ards: je me morfonds, je sue.
    En fièvre suis: mais mon seul Medecin [mari]
    Qui me pourroit du tout guarir, me tue.

33. See again Théâtre profane, pp. 110, 111:

              Sans Amour, un homme
    Est tout ainsi, comme
    Une froide Idole.
    Sans Amour, la Femme
    Est fascheuse, infame,
    Mal plaisante, et folle …

              Qui tient donc Amour
    Pour prison, et tour,
    Il ha tresgrand tort.
    Amour je soustiens,
    Cause de tous biens
    Jusques à la mort.

34. For additional themes common to Marguerite, see the following plays: the Comédie des Innocents which opposes cuyder (false truth) to vérité both on a religious and ethical plane and delineates the discrepancy between an ideal state and an existing situation; L'Inquisiteur which plays on the words savant and voir; Trop, Prou, Peu, Moins which contrasts oreille (a natural but faulty hearing device, related to the first two characters) to corne (an artificial hearing aid equally uncertain), and both, of course, bear upon the bruit frequently found in the Heptameron. This last drama can be considered the most literary one because of its highly metaphoric language and its ambiguity due to the multifaceted nature of words. Its characters, at the same time enigmatic and mythic, create a pervading ambivalence that brings to mind Bonaventure Des Périers's Cymbalum mundi.

35. “Elle en [dialogue] use peu: c'est qu'elle se préoccupe moins de la mise en scène dramatique de ses nouvelles que de l'étude des sentiments” (Jourda, Marguerite d'Angoulême, II, 973).

36. Cf. V. Branca, Boccaccio medievale (Florence, 1956).

37. For a further samples of one word or sentence dialogue, see novellas XLVIII, LI, LIX.

Works Cited

1. Basic Editions of Marguerite de Navarre's Works

L'Heptaméron. Ed. Félix Frank. 3 vols. Paris: Liseux, 1879.

L'Heptaméron des Nouvelles. Ed. MM. Le Roux de Lincy and Anatole de Montaiglon. 4 vols. Paris: Eudes, 1880. Slatkine Reprints, 1969.

Les Marguerites de la Marguerite des princesses. Ed. Félix Frank. 4 vols. Paris: Librairie des Bibliophiles, 1873. Slatkine Reprints, 1970.

Les Dernières poésies de Marguerite de Navarre. Ed. Abel Lefranc. Paris: Colin, 1896.

La Navire; Ou Consolation du roi François I à sa sœur Marguerite. Ed. Robert Marichal. Paris: Champion, 1956.

L'Heptaméron. Ed. Michel François. Paris: Garnier, 1960.

Théâtre profane. Ed. V. L. Saulnier. Geneva: Droz, 1963.

Nouvelles. Ed. Yves Le Hir. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967.

œuvres choisies. Ed. H. P. Clive. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1968.

La Coche. Ed. Robert Marichal. Geneva: Droz, 1970.

Chansons spirituelles. Ed. Georges Dottin. Geneva: Droz, 1971.

2. Critical Studies

Coulet, Henri. “Marguerite de Navarre.” Le Roman jusqu'à la révolution. Collection U. Paris: Colin, 1967. Pp. 121-28.

Febvre, Lucien. Autour de l'Heptaméron: Amour sacré, amour profane. Paris: Gallimard, 1944.

Ferrier, Janet. Forerunners of the French Novel: An Essay on the Development of the Novella in the late Middle Ages. London: Manchester University Press, 1954.

Frappier, Jean. “La Chastelaine de Vergi, Marguerite de Navarre et Bandello.” Mélanges de la Faculté des Lettres de Strasbourg, 2 (1946), pp. 89-150.

Garosci, Cristina. Margherita di Navarra. Turin: Lattes, 1908.

Gelernt, Jules. World of Many Loves: The Heptameron of Marguerite de Navarre. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1966.

Jourda, Pierre. Marguerite d'Angoulême, Duchesse d'Alençon, Reine de Navarre (1492-1549). Etude biographique et littéraire. 2 vols. Paris: Champion, 1930. Bottega d'Erasmo Reprint, 1966.

———. “L'Heptaméron: Livre préclassique.” Studi in onore di Carlo Pellegrini. Turin: Società Editrice Italiana, 1963. Pp. 133-36.

Lebègue, Raymond. “Réalisme et apprêt dans la langue des personnages de l'Heptaméron.” Actes du colloque de Strasbourg: La littérature narrative d'imagination. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1961. Pp. 73-86.

Lorian, Alexandre. “Intensité et conséquence dans l'Heptaméron de Marguerite de Navarre.” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 63 (1963), 106-19.

Toldo, Pietro. “Rileggendo il novelliere della Regina di Navarra.” Rivista d'Italia, 26 (1923), 380-405.

Vernay, Henri. Les divers sens du mot “raison” autour de l'œuvre de Marguerite de Navarre, reine de Navarre (1492-1549). Heidelberg: Winter, 1962.