[In the following essay, Hampton reads the Heptameron as a reflection of the shifting political and ideological ground of the Renaissance.]

Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres.

—Caesar

STORIES AND THE STATE

The Heptaméron (1559) takes place on disputed territory. Marguerite de Navarre's prologue to her collection of framed tales focuses on the adventures of a group of aristocrats who have come to take the waters at Cauterets, in the Pyrenees. Cauterets lies in Marguerite's own kingdom of Navarre, and Navarre is located on the border between the two most bitter enemies in sixteenth-century Europe, the Spain of Charles V and the France of Marguerite's brother, Francis I. Indeed, Navarre was one of the several spots on the edges of “France” that seemed unable to stay “French.” The small multilingual kingdom, a pawn in territorial disputes between Charles and Francis, changed hands a number of times over the course of the century.¹ Against this unstable background Marguerite sets a scene of international harmony, depicting “many people, from both France and Spain” (60) [plusieurs personnes, tant de France que d'Espagne (1)] who have come to bathe and be healed.² By setting her French text in Navarre and including Spaniards in the company of bathers, Marguerite would have evoked for sixteenth-century readers the vexed question of the political and geographic identity of France itself.

How is this series of stories involved in the making of France? Stories, as readers of Homer and Calvino know, are often about defining space. They make legible our location in the world. They trace out borders and define what can be known by setting it against the strange, the inconceivable, the monstrous. Through the process of narration, zones of engagement are defined and lines of communication set up that break the world into spiritual fragments, into bright plains and dark caverns, open seas and fearsome forests. Yet the geography that literature imagines often comes into conflict with the geography of politics. Quite literally, the borders traced by stories may cross the stenciled lines that split the surface of the globe into political units. Metaphorically, the psychic loci of literary landscapes may disrupt the political project of organizing spaces into easily definable units. Sites that harbor traditional forms of magical power and energy (caves, springs, mountaintops) may become pockets of resistance to the psychic reshaping involved in forming national communities.

For Europe in the sixteenth century, a period of rapid political transformation and extraordinary literary experimentation, one function of secular literary culture may have been to help shape the relationship between traditional literary geography and the new spaces of the emerging nation-state.³ How does storytelling participate in the chorographic marking out of national territory? How do literary narratives help further the political operations of the state and define the more imaginary cultural space of the nation?⁴ How do they help readers place themselves at moments of political change?

As one of the two major French prose narratives of the Renaissance, the Heptaméron participates in the political transformation of France under Francis I. On a number of levels Marguerite's text reflects Francis's project of turning a loose collection of duchies into a unified, protomodern state. However, the political function of the Heptaméron involves, first and foremost, the question of literary genre. Marguerite's text dismantles the political and cultural space of the genre of romance and replaces it with a different narrative form, the novella, that embodies new types of social and moral behavior for an emerging court culture. Tensions between competing narrative genres, between romance and novella, may be read as symptoms of a transformation in the cultural and political space of France. Marguerite's text is produced at a moment of great ferment in political practice and theory, a moment that predates anything like our modern notions of state and nationalism. Nevertheless, it registers some of the first glimmerings of the transformations in literary culture that will accompany those new institutions.⁵

As France moves toward a new centralization of power, moreover, changing relationships between political representation and literary representation are mediated by a discourse on gender. Marguerite draws on the medieval tradition of the querelle des femmes to legitimate new political and cultural alignments and to critique outmoded ideologies. Her linking of politics with the gender politics of the querelle points to the particularly dynamic and unstable relationship between literature, gender, and national identity in France. In recent years students of the Renaissance have approached the national by exploring the relationship between representations of the female body and representations of nations. Not surprisingly, most of their work has focused on England, since the example of Elizabeth I as queen, virgin, and island suggests a homology, albeit a problematic one, between land, power, and gender identity.⁶ However, the situation is more complicated in France, where male monarchs rule with counsel from powerful women such as Marguerite de Navarre and Catherine de' Medici. Here emerging national identity is mediated through competing models of the relationship between space, community, and political authority. Therefore it may be useful to shift from the parallel of woman and nation to an investigation of how socialized gender roles, narrative paradigms, and emerging notions of political space intertwine and shape each other.

ROMANCE AND THE ARISTOCRACY

The longest, most famous, and most complex narrative in the Heptaméron is the story of Amadour and Floride, the tenth story of the first day. Often considered the prototype for the first modern French novel, Madame de Lafayette's La Princesse de Clèves (1678), it is, in a sense, the founding narrative of modern French literature. The story unfolds as follows: Amadour, a young noble of modest standing, falls in love with Floride, a woman of high rank. He follows her as a serviteur, or courtly admirer, over many years, while cultivating a friendship with her somewhat overbearing mother, the countess of Arande. Amadour even marries Floride's lady-in-waiting Aventurade to be closer to his beloved. Floride, for her part, is married off to a man she does not love, the duke of Cardonne. She chastely acknowledges Amadour's devotion until he attempts to rape her. She resists his violence and, when he persists, mutilates her own face with a stone to drive him away. After his violent attentions fail, the two part, he to die heroically in battle and she to bury her husband and enter a convent.

The question of borders and territories, evoked at the outset, is paradoxically prominent in the tale. Like the prologue, the Amadour and Floride story unfolds on the border between France and Spain (though in fifteenth-century Catalonia instead of sixteenth-century Navarre). The background to the main action is filled with border wars and territorial conflicts that underscore the importance of geographic boundaries. Yet the borders and political frontiers in the story's setting are counterbalanced by the frequent use of the tradition of romance, which provides the plot structure, the social setting, and many of the iconographic motifs.

The wandering romance hero is, almost by definition, a crosser of boundaries. The words and deeds of the romance knight are typically emblematic not of a national entity but of a set of values relating to a particular social group, the aristocracy.⁷ From the time of its medieval flowering, romance has functioned as a tool of aristocratic education and socialization. This function undergoes a transformation in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. First, the magical landscape of medieval romance is expanded, under the pressure of voyages of discovery, to reflect a new knowledge of world geography. As the errant heroes of romance increasingly cover the world, from Paris to the New World to Cathay, their travels reflect and refer to actual navigations. Yet everywhere they go they meet other heroes whose codes of honor and values mirror their own. Romance thus projects a homogeneous international aristocracy that rules the world through nuptial alliances and blood ties. Subsequently, as the aristocracy's “universality” is threatened by developing forms of centralized political power (nowhere more rapidly than in France), romance assumes a new ideological task. It reaffirms a fantasy of aristocratic independence at the moment that aristocratic dominance is challenged. The easy movement of the romance hero from country to country is transmuted into the theme of international travel, which remains a characteristic of aristocratic adventure up to the eighteenth century, when Don Giovanni uses his “international identity” for amorous conquest. However, the pressures on the universality of the romance hero can already be seen in the Renaissance, in the work of Marguerite's contemporaries. Parody of chivalric mobility takes its most humorous form in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1532), in which Astolfo crisscrosses the earth on a winged horse, and a more pathetic form in Don Quixote (1605), in which the melancholy reader of romance sallies forth “through the four parts of the world in quest of adventures on behalf of the oppressed.”⁸

Amadour, Marguerite's male protagonist, spends virtually the entire tale on the move, circling in and out of battles and conflicts and back to his beloved Floride. His mobility is closely linked to the expression of his martial virtue. In fact, only through movement is his virtue made manifest. As the very first paragraph of the story notes, when peace breaks out at home, Amadour proves his heroism by seeking war abroad [aux lieux estranges (56)]. Moreover, the combination of mobility and heroism places him above contingent identities and communities. Whenever Amadour fights, he earns the respect of enemies as well as friends. He is admired not only in Spain but in France and Italy as well (56). His portable virtue connotes his universality, his capacity to transcend boundaries, be they national or ideological.⁹

The military hero respected by his enemies has, of course, been common in literature since Homer (indeed, at one point Amadour is called the “Achilles de toutes les Espaignes” [68] [Achilles of all the Spanish lands (136)]). Midway through the story, however, the relationship between Amadour's geographic mobility and his aristocratic identity is emphasized. Like the Spain of Marguerite's day, the Spain of the story is engaged in constant border wars with its neighbor to the north. Encouraged by these squabbles, the king of Tunis decides to attack Spain.¹⁰ Though cast in the tradition of Moorish-Spanish conflicts, the attack has clear resonances of the Turkish threat against sixteenth-century Europe (the infidels are variously referred to as “Turcs” and “Maures”). In the ensuing battle Amadour falls into the hands of a Muslim named Dorlin, “gouverneur du Roy de Thunis” (68) [Governor of the King of Tunis (136)], who keeps him as a servant for two years. After this time word gets around that the Tunisian king plans to torture Amadour unless he renounces his faith [renoncer sa foy (70)] and converts to Islam. Under this threat Amadour uses his aristocratic identity as a tool. For he negotiates his release from Dorlin by giving his word of honor that he will pay a ransom once he is back in Spain: “And thus, without speaking of it to the King, his master let him go on faith” (138) [Et ainsi, sans en parler au Roi, le laissa son maître aller sur sa foy (70)]. The repetition of the word foy, which denotes both the gentleman's religion and his word of honor, sets up a contrast between religious identity and social identity. The chivalric foy that saves Amadour's religious foy (as well as his skin) defines him as a member of an international aristocratic network. Chivalric faith turns the master Dorlin into a gentleman first and a Muslim second. The romance trope of chivalric friendship mends the rift between two enemies whose different religious identities recall pressing contemporary geopolitical conflicts.¹¹

The embodiment of international aristocratic values, Amadour is described at his introduction as a perfect knight, destined for a life of public service and politics: “Although he was only eighteen or nineteen years of age, he had such confident grace, and such good sense, that one would have judged him the one in a thousand worthy to take over the state” [Combien qu'il n'eust que dix huict ou dix neuf ans, si avoit-il grace tant asseurée et le sens si bon, que l'on l'eust jugé entre mil digne de gouverner une chose publicque (55)]. The description goes on to figure him as a tournament field on which various moral or psychic qualities compete for the honor of being first: “If his beauty was exquisite, his language followed so closely that one could not tell which was more deserving of honor: his grace, his beauty, or his eloquence” [Si la beauté estoit tant exquise, la parolle la suyvoit de si près que l'on ne sçavoit à qui donner l'honneur, ou à la grace ou à la beauté, ou au bien parler (56)].¹² Amadour's identity is defined externally through the judgment of others. Yet his perfection drives the language of courtliness almost to parody: one knows that he is excellent, but one cannot say exactly how, any more than one can say by looking at him whether he is eighteen or nineteen. Perfect romance heroism produces semiotic vagueness, a code of signs that connote courtliness while making precise judgment impossible.

Amadour's character almost seems produced by the language used to describe him. Indeed, the terms that introduce him are echoed a few lines later in the first description of Floride, who is also presented from the outside. But if he is presented through the court's eyes, she is presented through his: “Never, he thought to himself, as he contemplated her grace and beauty, had he beheld so fair and noble a creature. If only she might look with favour upon him, that alone would give him more happiness than anything any other woman in the world could ever give him” (123) [En regardant la beauté et bonne grace de … Floride … se pensa en luy-mesmes que c'estoit bien la plus honneste personne qu'il avoit jamais veue, et que, s'il povoit avoir sa bonne grace, il en seroit plus satisfaict que de tous les biens et plaisirs qu'il pourroit avoir d'une autre (56)].¹³ Both Floride and Amadour are described with the same courtly clichés: beauté, honneur (or honneteté, in Floride's case, though her “honneur” is affirmed elsewhere), and grace. The codified language of chivalric virtue and courtly love, coupled with the exterior nature of character description, raises the question of whether these characters actually embody virtue, from the inside out, as it were, or are mere surfaces to which chivalric language adheres. In short, the opening of the story establishes the close relationship between the space or “geography” of romance, in which certain virtues can be observed by a collective gaze, and the language that describes these virtues. As the story unfolds, however, it wrenches the language of chivalry from the space into which it is so carefully set at the outset.

The repetition of such terms as beauté and honneur throughout the story indicates the extent to which Amadour and Floride are, like the protagonists of many a romance, doubles of each other.¹⁴ (The one characteristic that Amadour seems to possess that Floride does not is “le bien parler,” control of language, which leads to a fundamental crisis in the story.) What keeps these romance “twins” apart is social hierarchy. Though noble, Amadour is without a large fortune. The difference in social standing between him and Floride keeps them from marrying: Amadour undergoes a lengthy amorous servitude, and much of the story is taken up with the elaborate rituals of fidelity and confidence played out between the two protagonists. In good romance fashion Amadour marries Aventurade, Floride's lady-in-waiting, who permits him access to his beloved. Through a series of barely perceptible signs known only to lover and lady, including at one point absolute silence and separation, desire flows back and forth between them. In a classic economy of courtly service, looks, words, and sighs are sent and returned; each year of Amadour's devotion increases his value in Floride's eyes, and each year of her chastity increases her worth in his. Through his respect for Floride's “honneteté” and his desire for her “bonne grace,” he is led away, as predicted at the outset, from the more mundane temptations of “biens” and “plaisirs.” A process of education and service is undertaken that recalls such late medieval romances as Antoine de la Salle's Jehan de Saintré (1450s), which Marguerite would have known well. The combination of a socially prescribed amorous servitude with the universal martial virtue of the young knightly hero produces a potentially endless narrative of desire and heroism.¹⁵

Yet if Marguerite's descriptions of her male protagonist use courtly clichés such as honneur and grace, Amadour's relationship to the geography of the story intimates the darker side of aristocratic universality. The paradox of universality—that it also implies rootlessness and a lack of fixity—may mean that to be a perfect romance hero, heedless of borders and nations, is also to be a shifty character, difficult to pin down. When Amadour is described in geographic terms, in his relationship to space, his malleability stands out. For example, we are told that, though born in Toledo to a rich and honorable family, Amadour seems more a Catalan than a Castilian for having frequented the border region [et avoit tellement hanté ceste frontiere, à cause des guerres, qu'il sembloit mieulx Cathelan que Castillan, combien qu'il fust natif d'auprès de Tollete, d'une maison riche et honnorable (56)]. In a still more restricted decor, the house of Floride's mother, Amadour appears as a character whose precise identity constantly mutates. He is compared to the countess's son [fut traicté comme son propre filz (61)], to a saint or an angel [l'on se fyoit en luy de toutes choses comme un sainct ou ung ange (61)], and even, in a remarkable moment, to a woman [print telle hardiesse et privaulté en la maison … que l'on ne se gardoit de luy non plus que d'une femme (60)].

The faintly parodic nature of such descriptions hints that the social and political landscape of the story is somehow at odds with the literary topography of romance on which it draws so heavily. When mapped onto the restricted space of the manor house or country chateau, heroic universality does not quite fit. It begins to look like mere slipperiness. To move at ease through the domestic space of the house, the hero must take on multiple identities. The story unfolds, as it were, between the extremes of the wide world, through which Amadour wanders at ease, and the circumscribed house of Floride's mother, in which he seems to lose shape. Its terrain is both boundless and absolutely local. The one space that it seems to elide, despite the many border wars and territorial struggles that rage in the background, is the space between the oikos of the private house and the boundless world. That space is the space of the political world, the space of the nation.¹⁶

RAPE, POLITICS, AND THE END OF ROMANCE

Both the wandering of the hero Amadour and his service to Floride come to an abrupt end two-thirds of the way through the tale. On his release from captivity in Tunis, Amadour and Floride are joyfully reunited, and the narrator tells us that Floride is finally, after many years, on the verge of accepting Amadour as her lover. Then the tone of the story suddenly shifts. Without warning, the king sends Amadour away on “some affair of importance” (139) [quelque affaire d'importance (71)]. The commission has dire consequences. When she hears that her husband is to be sent away, Amadour's wife, Aventurade, swoons and falls down a flight of stairs, injuring herself fatally [se blessa si fort, que oncques puis n'en releva (71)]. The conjunction of the king's claim on Amadour's person and the subsequent death of his wife places Amadour in a desperate situation. For he has lost every pretext for ever seeing Floride again. Amadour decides to play, as the narrator puts it, in a phrase recalling the Renaissance humanist obsession with chance and fortune, “double or nothing” (140) [jouer à quict ou à double (72)]. He tries to rape the woman he has served as courtly admirer for seven years.¹⁷

The attempted rape is generally understood as the crucial event in the story. It has attracted much critical attention and has been seen as an emblem of how gender difference structures the world of the Heptaméron. To be sure, the social problem of rape was important in early modern society, and to deny that the scene comments on the sexual violence of court society would be to ignore an important theme in the Heptaméron.¹⁸ Yet to isolate the rape from the event that occasions it, the king's summons of Amadour, not only overlooks the formal integrity of the plot but neglects an important political dimension to the story and to the representation of gender throughout Marguerite's work. More than shifting the plot away from the dynamics of courtship, the king's summons of Amadour marks the point at which romance and aristocratic identity itself are placed in question.

The king's enlistment of Amadour for an “affair of importance” is an anachronism, a textual moment at odds with the rest of the story, a topos out of place. For it signals the incursion of sixteenth-century political life into the timeless world of romance. The hero of romance is conventionally his own man. His political service usually consists of doing what comes naturally, that is, slaying monsters and fighting strangers. Against a romance background, however, the king's “affaire d'importance” evokes a world in which princes enlist nobles as envoys in situations of political precariousness unimaginable to the Charlemagnes and Arthurs of romance. When the king summons Amadour, the text speaks from its own Renaissance context and breaks the illusion of quaintness suggested by the medieval setting. Furthermore, Amadour's gift of “le bien parler,” which in medieval romance is conventionally taken as a mode for channeling male desire into courtly conduct, is turned to the purposes of international politics.¹⁹

The importance of the summons becomes clear when we contrast it with the other royal gesture in the story, the plan by the king of Tunis to force Amadour to renounce his faith and become a “good Turk” (136) [le randre bon Turc (70)]. Since conversion implies circumcision, the Tunisian's command could have consequences no less irrevocable than the death of Aventurade. Amadour escapes this conversion by pledging his faith to his noble master. But he cannot escape the Spanish king's command, which puts an end to his courtship. Amadour responds by demanding immediate domination of Floride's body. The king's command, which enlists the actions of his male subject, is translated into violence as that subject attempts to rape his lady.

To understand the larger implications of the king's claim on Amadour, one must consider the situation of the French aristocracy in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. A new emphasis on political centralization, first under Charles VIII and Louis XII and then, more aggressively, under Francis I, began the shift of power from the traditional aristocracy to a single ruler. As Machiavelli noted in his Ritratto di cose di Francia (c. 1510), previous French rulers had constantly been forced to fight provincial barons [privati baroni], whose interests and power had kept the country fragmented. Under recent members of the Valois dynasty, however, the country became increasingly united and powerful, with the good land all gathered under the crown. Brittany, Guienne, Bourbon, and Burgundy were now “subject and very obsequious” [suddita et ossequentissima] to the king of France.²⁰

The international aristocratic heroism represented by Amadour stands in uneasy tension with the processes of political centralization, which aims to replace the ideal of the chivalric wanderer with a national subject. The confusion produced by this historical transition may be seen in representations of the life of Bayard, the great hero of Marignano and the contemporary French figure whose exploits most clearly recall those of Amadour. In his Les Gestes ensemble la vie du preulx chevalier Bayard (1525), the Lyonnais humanist doctor Symphorien Champier recounts how Bayard was captured by a vassal of the emperor Maximilian. The emperor, realizing that he had in his hands the greatest general in Christendom, offered to pay Bayard's ransom if, in return, he served the empire. When the French king Louis XII got wind of it, he hurried to pay Bayard's ransom for him. Whereas Amadour saves himself with a chivalric promise, Bayard has to be rescued to preserve his allegiance. The French king must step in to keep this French subject—whose battle cry, Champier assures us, was “France! France!”—from defecting to a rival prince.²¹

The confusion in political allegiances is matched by the perplexity over authority in one of the last episodes in Champier's biography. In his camp outside the gates of Milan, the young Francis I decides to knight his captains to reward them for their service. Since one must be a knight to make knights, the king himself must first undergo the ritual. He asks to be knighted by Bayard, who, like Amadour, is famous the world over (“en plusieurs royaulmes et provinces,” as Francis puts it). Bayard hesitates, claiming that Francis has been knighted by God and needs no earthly sanction. But Francis orders him to go through with the ceremony: “Do my will and command, if you want to be one of my good servants and subjects” [Faictes mon vouloir et commandement, si voulés estre du nombre de mes bons serviteurs et subjectz]. In this beautifully ironic moment, the prince of the nascent modern state must use his authority as prince to bring about the completion of a ceremony that will make him and his men members of the international “ordre de chevalerie” (Champier, 195).²²

The controversial practice of selling letters of nobility was crucial to the political centralization of France. The creation of a noblesse de robe led to a new, “artificially” aristocratic social stratum that would be no longer internationally connected by bloodlines but attached to a single ruler through a bureaucratic network. State service became the path to success.²³ This new practice was lamented by aristocratic writers from Monluc to Brantôme. The latter complained that the debacle of Francis's foreign policy could be traced to the fact that his diplomatic corps tended to be staffed by men of the robe instead of by men of the sword, that is, in the terms that I have used here, by diplomats and bureaucrats instead of by romance heroes. The more subtle Machiavelli realized that the sale of titles would redefine aristocratic family customs. High government posts, traditionally passed, like all property, from fathers to first-born sons, could suddenly be purchased by other male children as well. However, these pretenders to power must first gain fame in battle. Thus the new system both strengthened the French military (which, Machiavelli noted, had improved in recent decades) and deflected sibling infighting among the aristocracy into state service. For Machiavelli, the great admirer of centralized French power, chivalric heroism became the first step toward a career serving the prince (56).²⁴ As a second son whose military exploits prepare the way for his enlistment in the king's service, Amadour perfectly illustrates the political transition explicated by Machiavelli.

Marguerite's story reflects the changing relationship between aristocratic identity and centralized politics on several levels. For one thing, it is never quite clear whom, or what, Amadour represents when he fights. Throughout the tale he comes and goes as he pleases. His concern is for his honor and that of his country, but he seems to have no real allegiance to that country. Political action occasionally seems to be defined according to noble household and occasionally according to king and country. In the battle with the Moors that brings about Amadour's death, the Christian knights beg the king to let them participate, and he does, according to their houses [selon leurs maisons (67)]. Yet earlier Floride describes Amadour's capture by the Moors as a loss for the house [grande perte pour toute leur maison (68)], while others lament the honor of the country [l'honneur du pays (68)]. The difficulty of attaching Amadour to a specific geographic entity is compounded by the fact that pays may mean everything from “region” to “village” to “country.”²⁵

One sees the emerging tension between an embryonic national identity and internationalism most clearly, however, in the king's incursive claim on the wandering Amadour. The free circulation of desire and aristocratic male bodies that characterizes romance is suddenly channeled by an overarching authority; in an instant, through something like the famous Althusserian gesture of “interpellation,” Amadour becomes the subject of a state.²⁶ The general tension between a geography marked by borders and the image of an aristocracy without borders is concentrated in this moment.

The incursion of the king involves, moreover, both a crisis of aristocratic identity and a crisis of literary representation. The relationship of these two issues may be seen in the relationship of the king's command to the attempted rape. They cannot be separated; in fact, they make each other legible. The command arrests the logic of romance on which courtly love relies; when it does, courtly love is stripped of its veneer of gentility. Seduction without a romance plot to sweeten it is revealed as rape. Conversely, just as the king's political claim on Amadour halts the narratives through which aristocratic fantasies of mobility articulate themselves, so is the attempted rape, for all of its horror, the necessary literary response to the king's summons. For it marks the point at which the paradigm of romance that informs the story until now is replaced by another literary genre, the novella, which relies not on endless wandering and courtship but on sudden reversals of fortune and tests of moral character. The attempted rape turns romance into novella. It shifts attention from the perfect heroism of the knight Amadour to the lady Floride's attempt to preserve her chastity. Female integrity, rather than male martial prowess, becomes the focus of the story.

Thus the tension between aristocratic mobility and centralized power is, in turn, expressed as a conflict between literary genres. The crisis in the story comes when chivalric heroism is harnessed by centralized power and literary representation turns back against itself. For it is precisely Amadour's perfect romance heroism that leads the king to choose him for the “affair of importance.” The moral crisis that follows disrupts the romance idyll and clouds the bright image of Amadour's virtue. The perfect achievement of a romance ideal, when touched by centralized power, flips dialectically to destroy romance itself. The king's summons stops the plot of romance, while the attempted rape demystifies its ideology. The attempted rape both follows from the king's summons and provokes the replacement of romance by novella. As such, it mediates the relationship between politics and literature. Amadour's attempt to control Floride echoes the king's dominion over him, while his violent impatience disrupts the formalized world of romance. In the conjunction of the command and the attempted rape a process of political transformation inscribes itself into the literary text at the level of genre.

The end of the story reaffirms, in more programmatic terms, the tension between gender roles and the narrative forms that represent them. After the female narrator Parlamente has completed her narrative, the storytellers in the frame tale debate whether Amadour's virtue is more laudable than Floride's. Geburon, one of the men in the group, claims that Amadour “was the most noble and valiant knight that ever lived” (154) [estoit ung aussy honneste et vertueulx chevalier qu'il en soit poinct (84)]. Parlamente holds Floride up as a model for the way in which she defends her virtue.²⁷ As she does so, however, Parlamente warns the ladies in the group to avoid Floride's naïveté toward men. Excessive naïveté, she says, resulted in her “cruelty” (that is, her flirting with Amadour) and in her despair when she realized Amadour's true character. This warning is important. For it shows the impossibility of reconciling romance heroism and chastity within the increasingly limited world of court society. Romance heroism, when it is arrested by political authority, reveals the violence it has kept hidden. Her virtuous defense of chastity against that violence makes Floride the heroine not of a romance but of a novella. Moreover, from the perspective of the novella, that is, from the viewpoint of a postromance consciousness, Floride's love for Amadour is read as naïveté, as the illusion of one ignorant of men's deceits. In short, the two types of virtue and the two literary genres cannot inhabit the same world. Genre and character are at odds. Men cannot be perfect heroes unless they have naïve heroines; women cannot show virtue unless they are threatened by unheroic men. Yet, by the same token, the romance background is necessary to the tale, since it lends Floride's self-defense its heroic proportions. The initial idealization of her character gives her a dignity not often accorded female protagonists of the “bourgeois” novella. The contrast between romance and novella permits Marguerite simultaneously to critique the heroic ideologies of an aristocracy in crisis and to raise the genre of the novella to new nobility as the vehicle of a Christian humanist moral discourse.²⁸

Thus a conflict that the storytellers take to be a difference of moral or psychological dispositions may be better understood as a crisis of genre. In this light, gender in the Heptaméron may have less to do with maleness and femaleness than with the location of the subject in narrative. Identity would then be defined positionally, as a location at the conjunction of a narrative and social space.²⁹ This “positionality” is then reflected on other levels of the story. Aristocratic universality is under political pressure from the eruption of a new, protonational centralized political regime. The narrative vehicles that represent that universality are in turn broken up. The process of fragmentation, first seen in the generic shift following the king's summons and the attempted rape, is subsequently diffused into the courtly lexicon itself. The violence visited by Amadour on the body of Floride occasions the return of the coded language of courtly love, spoken in the initial presentation of the two characters. Now, however, that language is systematically stripped of its gentility and generality. If Amadour and Floride are first described in terms of their “honneur” and “honneteté,” we are later told that Amadour's groping attack is a search for “that which a lady's honour protects” (140) [ce que l'honneur des dames défend (72)]. The euphemism replaces honor as genteel excellence with honor as female corporeity. The linguistic shift is stressed when Floride confronts Amadour: “‘And what,’ she replied, ‘has become of the honour you preached about so often?’ ‘Ah! my Lady,’ he said, ‘no one in the world could possibly hold your honour as dear as I do! Before you were married I conquered my heart so well that you were unable to learn my will’” (141) [Et où est l'honneur, dit Floride, que tant de fois m'avez prêché?—Ah, madame, dit Amadour, il n'est possible de plus aimer pour votre honneur que je fais, car avant que fussiez mariée, j'ai su si bien vaincre mon coeur que vous n'avez su connaître ma volonté (73)]. For Floride honor is virtue and chastity, whereas for Amadour it is reputation. Other key terms in the courtly vocabulary are redefined in similar ways. The word grace, used countless times throughout the story to describe Amadour's desire for Floride (he seeks to “avoir sa bonne grace”), recurs when Amadour returns several years later and tries once more to assault Floride. After she has cut her face with a stone, she tries to call him off: “I plead with you and ask for grace [mercy]. Just let me live in peace! Let me live the life of honour and virtue to which, as you yourself once urged me, I have committed myself” (148) [Je vous fais ma plainte et demande grace, à fin que vous me laissez vivre en paix et en l'honnêteté que selon votre conseil j'ai délibéré de garder (79)]. The word grace almost seems a parody of its earlier self; now it denotes neither sexual favor nor courtly esteem but simple pity. As for the “beauté” so central to the initial descriptions of the two young people, it has given way to disfiguration. As Amadour's lust sets his handsome face [le plus beau teint du monde (78)] afire [rouge comme feu (78)], Floride's despair drives her to wound herself with a stone. Thus the descriptive symmetry linking the two characters when they are first presented is thrown off balance.

Furthermore, we seem to have fallen from romance timelessness into history. Even as she disfigures herself, Floride laments that Amadour tested her will “in the days when I was young, and when my beauty was at its most fresh” (147) [du temps de ma jeunesse et de ma plus grande beauté (78)], whereas now she is older and ugly [en l'âge et grande laideur où je suis (78)]. By falling into the world of the novella, we also fall into time, into the moment at which history supersedes romance enchantment. Yet, again, the shift from one world to another is incomplete, mediatory, and disposed along the lines of both gender and genre. Floride loses her beauty through age but remains morally pure, whereas Amadour, who never loses the youth of a conventional knightly hero, loses his beauty through moral turpitude. Her transformation is physical and suggests the experience of time that will, almost a century later, inform the discourse of the novel. His is moral and recalls the allegorized metamorphoses of characters in romance.

These exchanges reveal what the text has kept implicit thus far: the same words mean different things to different genders. Once the shift from romance to novella has been effected, sexual difference can be thematized, for the first time in the Heptaméron, as a problem of the word.³⁰ Each of the key terms used to describe the main characters of the story on their first appearance, honneur/honneteté, grace, and beauté, is fractured, as it were, following the attempted rape. The coded language of courtly love and romance fiction is revealed as a mask that promotes group solidarity by obscuring sexual difference. The story registers a crisis of the ideology of aristocratic heroism through a critique of the narrative conventions that advance it. The violence accompanying the centralization of political power, represented by the king's claim on Amadour, is displaced into a discourse on gender. At the moment that borders between states take on new importance, borders between women and men are first physically violated and then reconfigured as language.

In a fragmented world characterized by emerging national states and a fracturing of the courtly lexicon, the universal aristocratic male subject Amadour has no place. The sustained diachrony of his quest gives way to a more spatial model of a world organized by opposing political and gender positions. It is only fitting that Amadour's death should involve both the question of how language is relational or perspectival and the issue of narrative understanding. On the last page of the tale Amadour fights the Moors again. In the heat of the fray he courageously rescues the bodies of the count of Arande (Floride's relative) and the duke of Cardonne (her husband). But he finds himself surrounded by enemies:

And he, who no more wanted to be taken than he had been able to take his beloved, nor to break his faith with God than he had broken his faith to her, knowing that, if he were brought before the King of Granada, he would die a cruel death or renounce Christianity, decided not to give either the glory of his death or his capture to his enemies; so, kissing the cross on his sword, and rendering body and soul to God, gave himself such a blow that he needed no help.³¹

[Et luy, que ne vouloit non plus estre pris qu'il n'avoit sceu prendre s'amye, ne faulser sa foy envers Dieu, qu'il n'avoit faulsée envers elle, sçachant que, s'il estoit mené au Roy de Grenade, il mourroit cruellement ou renonceroit la chrestienté, delibera ne donner la gloire ne de sa mort ne de sa prinse à ses ennemys; et, en baisant la croix de son espée, rendant corps et ame à Dieu, s'en donna ung tel coup, qu'il ne luy en fallut poinct de secours.]

(82)

Earlier, Amadour's chivalric faith has taken precedence over his religious faith. Now, having broken chivalric faith with Floride, he reverts to the religious identity that once was subordinate. Even more strikingly, for the first time Amadour learns from his experience. His sins as a lover guide his deeds as a knight. The connection established between political subjectivity and sexual violence by the conjunction of the king's summons with the attempted rape is now recalled by Amadour's recognition that his being taken by the Saracens—with all of the fear of circumcision and rape that that might have implied in the sixteenth century—would parallel his attempt to take Floride. His retrospective reconsideration of his own experience seems almost to lead to an identification with the woman he has insulted. That identification provokes the final sacrifice that redefines Amadour as a chivalric subject. Now, however, his universality takes the form of martyrdom. It is no accident that this moment of self-consciousness comes at the end of the story, since Amadour's actions have demonstrated the tension between romance heroism and the genre of the novella. If the novella, as some critics have argued, finds its origins in the medieval tradition of the moral exemplum or saint's life, Amadour comes as close as possible to that tradition while remaining allied with the world of romance. Perhaps one of the ways that romance can be preserved in the face of political and social change is by veering into hagiography.³²

NOVELLA AND NATION

The literary-historical importance of the tangled representations of gender, genre, and politics in the story of Amadour and Floride comes into focus if we return now to the text with which we began, the prologue of the Heptaméron. Like the story of Amadour and Floride, the prologue takes place on the Spanish-French border and explores themes of liminality. At this border, we are told in the opening passages, a number of people, both Spanish and French [plusieurs personnes tant de France que d'Espaigne (1)], come together to take the waters at Cauterets. These waters are so marvelous [si merveilleuses] that even those long abandoned by doctors come away from them healed [tout guariz]. Into this scene of tranquil vacationers comes the catastrophe that occasions the stories to follow. After three weeks at the spa, when the sick visitors realize that they are able to go home, a series of rainstorms breaks forth “with such extraordinary force you would have thought that God had quite forgotten that once He had promised to Noah never again to destroy the world by water” (60) [les pluyes si merveilleuses et si grandes, qu'il sembloit que Dieu eut oblyé la promesse qu'il avoit faicte à Noé de ne destruire plus le monde par eaue (1)]. The biblical reference points to the type of redemptive discourse developed by Marguerite in her mystical writings. The marvelous rains replace the marvelous waters of the spa and suggest the need for a spiritual cleansing of humanity.

However, the politics of this allegorical moment indicate that here, as in the story of Amadour and Floride, the tension between emerging national states and fantasies of aristocratic universality is at issue. One of the clichés of the history of the aristocracy is that it meets at watering holes like Cauterets, Baden-Baden, and Abano. The scene set at the opening of Marguerite's text evokes the world of an international aristocracy in which family connections and intermarriages construct a web of influence transcending national and linguistic boundaries. The book may begin with a harmonious coming together of political enemies, France and Spain, yet it is precisely the moment of seeming harmony that is swept away by the deluge. Indeed, the flood suggests the allegorical redemption or punishment of humanity, but it produces the consolidation of nations. It may be a symbol of universal wrath, but it is also a machine for outlining the map of Europe. For as soon as the rains come, the visitors to the spa split into two groups divided along national lines. The Spaniards get home “as best they can” (60) [le mieulx qu'il leur fut possible (1)], and the French take refuge in an abbey.

The fragmentation of the initial community also makes possible the Heptaméron itself. The splitting into nations coincides with the moment at which the text finds its project: the French nobles decide to tell stories until they are rescued. Bathing with the enemy is all well and good, but a novella collection seems to require the consolidation of a national group.³³ If the beginning of the prologue implies that literature requires a national community, the ending hints, conversely, that a national community needs literature. For we learn on the last page of the prologue that the idea of writing a new Decameron was proposed by Marguerite herself, to a group of men and ladies of the French court.³⁴ When the court become preoccupied by other “affairs” [les grandes affaires survenuz au Roy depuis (9)], the project had to be scrapped. These affairs (which recall the affair that takes Amadour from Floride) include the invasion of France by the emperor and Spanish monarch Charles, which casts an ironic light on the opening depiction of the French and Spanish bathing peacefully together. As an antidote to the political emergency, and as a gesture of reverence, the storytellers decide that they will collect the stories they tell and present them to Francis and his circle when they return from their forced isolation.³⁵ The Heptaméron itself will reaffirm the unity of the Valois court and the submission of the aristocracy to the king. The book that we are reading will be the material sign of political consolidation. If romance heroism and aristocratic wandering are questioned within the Heptaméron, the definition of a new national group is furthered by the Heptaméron.³⁶

Just as the return from exile in the mountains involves a progression from a universal, cosmic disaster (the flood) to political community, so does the Heptaméron draw on literary traditions from a prenational moment and recast them to reflect an emerging centralized political order. Just as the tale of Amadour and Floride takes us from an increasingly problematic romance tradition to the moral world of the novella, so does the frame project a physical journey from a landscape of allegorical catastrophe to a more circumscribed court society. By returning from their wanderings equipped with a set of moral tales, the storytellers prepare themselves for life as members of a social group that is being forced, for the first time, to understand its conflicts in terms that are contingently ethical and political instead of cosmically universal.

The emerging community requires a new language. The central role of the king's summons in provoking the attempted rape and its consequences compels us to reconsider one of the most obvious features of the Heptaméron, the feature that has, in fact, been instrumental in its rising fortunes among literary scholars recently: the importance it accords debates about gender roles. Like its prototype, the Decameron, the Heptaméron features a group of young people who tell stories. Unlike the Decameron, however, it has them follow each story with a long debate about the relative virtues and vices of the men and women in the stories. Seen against the background of the Amadour and Floride story, the novella form itself, which makes possible the discourse on gender, may be seen as a response to the failure of the romance ideals of aristocratic mobility. Marguerite's aristocratic appropriation of the traditionally “mercantile” or bourgeois novella form sets the stage both for the demonstration of new forms of courtly (as contrasted with knightly) virtue and for a discussion of what that virtue might be. Thus the discourse on gender must be located within a larger political realignment. Only in this way can one analyze how and why it becomes as necessary and as important as it does. The gender debates give voice to an aristocracy forced to reconsider its identity, its relationship to space and stories. They provide a vocabulary for a critique of the patriarchal power that structures courtly love, while they help socialize subjects to a space in which romance is increasingly anachronistic.³⁷

Thus the Heptaméron participates in the emergence of the French state under Francis I by redefining narrative traditions that conventionally transgress territorial boundaries. By depicting the impossible relationship between romance and community, Marguerite's text registers the impact of an emerging political realignment. Through the mediation of a reflection on gender relations, the political is inscribed into the text on the level of form, in the tension between romance and novella. By divulging the sexual violence that underpins fantasies of martial virtue, Marguerite's text points up the anachronistic status of aristocratic heroism in an increasingly circumscribed court society. Finally, on a more general level, the Heptaméron's exploration of the relationship between genre and geography helps us reimagine the historiography of the Renaissance itself. Marguerite's text suggests that, however much the founding moments of Renaissance culture may involve such often-discussed issues as the “rediscovery” of antiquity and the “discovery” of the New World, they have just as much to do with how subjects define their changing relationships to narratives and spaces. The reshaping of those relationships might be seen as one of the functions of an emerging secular literary culture during the period.

Notes

1. Navarre changed hands at least four times between 1512 and 1521. In fact, Francis I's first military experience was part of an unsuccessful attempt to win Navarre back to France (he performed without distinction). In 1520 Henri d'Albert, Marguerite's future husband, helped reconquer Navarre, though it was eventually ceded back to Spain at the peace of Crépy in 1543. The failure of the cardinal de Tournon, who negotiated that treaty, to insist on Navarre's restoration to Marguerite's husband occasioned Tournon's fall from her favor. For background see R. J. Knecht, Francis I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 69-70, 105-8, 415. On the role of Navarre's neighboring border state Catalonia in the development of Franco-Spanish political identity see Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

2. Citations are from Michel François's edition of the Heptaméron (Paris: Garnier, 1967). The English translation is by P. A. Chilton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984). Chilton's translation is wonderfully readable; Marguerite's text is not, however, so Chilton necessarily departs from a close reproduction of the French. Thus, on numerous occasions, I have altered his version to conform more closely to the language of the original.

3. On the relationship between space and narrative see Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 117-30. For a suggestive reflection on the relationship between psychology and space see Guy Debord's various discussions of the dérive in the Situationist International Anthology, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, Calif.: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), passim. On the question of the social and political construction of space see Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), chap. 2.

4. For a good discussion of the tension between the political regime of the state and the more mythical nation see the concluding pages of Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

5. Discussions of nationhood by historians have tended to be divided between a more political approach that privileges the emergence of central power and the work of nation building, and a more social and cultural focus on the myths and symbols that contribute to the definition of national consciousness. Literature, which represents the transformations of state organization through the consciousness of imagined subjects, provides a mediating space for thinking about the relationship between these discourses. For a subtle account of the difficulties surrounding the discussion of nationhood in early modernity see Sahlins's introduction. For two very different recent treatments of the relationship between politics and imaginative writing see Timothy J. Reiss, The Meaning of Literature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992); and Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).

6. Noteworthy among many studies of this topic are Peter Stallybrass's influential essay “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed,” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers, Women in Culture and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 123-44; Louis Montrose, “The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery,” Representations 33 (1991): 1-43; and Patricia A. Parker, “Rhetorics of Property: Exploration, Inventory, Blazon,” in Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987), 126-54. Helgerson provides a comprehensive consideration of the relationship between mapping and emerging nationalism in England, though he scrupulously points out that England may not be paradigmatic for Europe (chap. 3, esp. 140-5).

7. The very origins of medieval romance, in fact, may be traced to the emergence of the aristocracy in the twelfth century as a “universal class” rather than as a group scattered among isolated farms. Romance is about how the aristocracy escapes its rural roots. See, for strong literary-critical discussions of the relationship between romance and territory, Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), chap. 2; and R. Howard Bloch, Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 194-7. More generally, see Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, trans. L. A. Manyon, vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961).

8. See Martin de Riquer, ed., Don Quijote de la Mancha (Madrid: Editorial Juventud, 1966), pt. 1, chap. 1. My translation. Stallybrass points out in passing that the socially mobile male, or the “class aspirant,” projects women in the class to which he aspires as both closed and open, both difficult of access (so as to lend value to his quest) and available (thus not impossible to reach). Stallybrass links this paradoxical body to romance: “Within literary discourse, class aspiration can be displaced onto the enchanted ground of romance, where considerations of status are transformed into considerations of sexual success” (134). His analysis, however, focuses on Othello, whose romance he merely alludes to. My own discussion sees romance not as the genre of class aspiration but as the tool of aristocratic ideology generally. On the ideological function of romance as a definer of class identity in the sixteenth century see David Quint, “Tasso, Milton, and the Boat of Romance,” in Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton, Literature in History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 248-67. For a somewhat different interpretation of similar issues see Helgerson, chap. 4. I discuss the tension between romance and history as two literary genres that project different models of community and political engagement in my reading of Don Quixote in Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), chap. 6.

9. Critical attention to the story has focused on psychological or psychoanalytic concerns, virtually to the exclusion of political, ideological, or even literary-historical issues. One of the few critics to note, if only in passing, the presence of romance motifs in the tale is Patricia Francis Cholakian, Rape and Writing in the “Heptaméron” of Marguerite de Navarre, Ad Feminam (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 88-9. It might be useful, in this regard, to contrast Amadour with a national hero such as Rodrigue, in Corneille's Le Cid. To be virtuous, Rodrigue must be at home. When he leaves the court, it is to go into hiding in shame. His emergence from hiding and return to court coincide with his demonstration of his virtue, as he saves the state from a Moorish invasion. Amadour's virtue, on the other hand, is linked to his very absence.

10. In the notes to his edition François suggests that this invasion refers to a Moorish attack on the coast of Spain in 1503 (458-9). Locating the story in the first years of the century, he asserts that the moment of peace between France and Spain, mentioned in the first paragraph as the setting for the meeting of Amadour and Floride, alludes to the treaty of Blois, signed in 1505. However, since the invasion follows the moment of peace in the tale and precedes it in actual chronology, one must beware of linking the tale too closely to current events.

11. The traces of anti-Spanish sentiment in the story may be strengthened by a topical reference that echoes distantly in the background. In 1535 Charles V had conquered Tunis and become “le roy de Thunis.” It was, of course, common in French propaganda to represent the emperor in many fearful and loathsome guises. See, for another instance, the figure of Picrochole, “the coleric one,” in Rabelais's Gargantua (1534).

12. I have here substituted my own translation altogether.

13. On the importance of Amadour's gaze in framing Floride see Lawrence D. Kritzman, The Rhetoric of Sexuality and the Literature of the French Renaissance, Cambridge Studies in French (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 47-8. Tom Conley argues that the names of the two protagonists are scattered through the text by a process of graphic fragmentation (“The Graphics of Dissimulation: Between Heptameron 10 and l'histoire tragique,” in Critical Tales: New Studies of the “Heptameron” and Early Modern Culture, ed. John D. Lyons and Mary B. McKinley [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993], 75).

14. For a good discussion of the relationship between doubling, narrative, and family identity in medieval romance see R. Howard Bloch, chap. 5. The structure of doubling that asserts the similarity of lovers is, of course, stronger in more classically inflected forms of romance than it is in medieval forms. Even such an early text as Chrétien's Erec et Enide, however, introduces its lovers through a formulaic repetition that stresses their similarity while making clear their social and sexual differences: Enide: “Never was God able to form a finer nose, mouth and eyes. What could I say of her beauty?” Erec: “Never was greater prowess seen in any man of his age. What could I say of his virtue?” I cite the translation of D. D. R. Owen in Arthurian Romances, Everyman Classics (London: Dent, 1987), 2, 4.

15. For an exploration of the relationship between the errancy of romance and the potential endlessness of narrative see Patricia A. Parker, Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), chap. 1.

16. The similarity between this courtly romance and La Salle's Jehan de Saintré has been noted as well by Lucien Febvre, Autour de l'“Heptaméron” (Paris: Gallimard, 1944), 243. Carla Freccero draws on Stallybrass's discussion in “Patriarchal Territories” to stress the importance of Amadour's social inferiority (“Rape's Disfiguring Figures,” in Rape and Representation, ed. Lynn A. Higgins and Brenda A. Silver, Gender and Culture [New York: Columbia University Press, 1991], 227-47). I would want to place equal emphasis on Amadour's geographic mobility, since doing so brings the questions of rape and social mobility into dialogue with the theme of geopolitics, which is central to the tale.

17. The sense that the tale works very self-consciously on romance clichés is underscored by Aventurade's very name, which suggests the concentrated matter of romance as lemonade suggests the concentrated form of lemon. Romance thrives on the tension between the two senses of adventure, as both exciting event and arbitrary occurrence. Aventurade is both the screen (like the “screen” lady of Dante's Vita nuova) who makes the erotic adventure possible and the victim of circumstance. Fittingly, she gets a name that seems quintessential.

18. This question of rape is Cholakian's central theme, but see also Carla Freccero's entry on Marguerite de Navarre in A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier, with R. Howard Bloch et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 145-7. For a consideration of the importance of rape in the representation of marriage during the same period see Susanne L. Wofford, “The Social Aesthetics of Rape: Closural Violence in Boccaccio and Botticelli,” in Creative Imitation: New Essays on Renaissance Literature in Honor of Thomas M. Greene, ed. David Quint et al., Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 95 (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992), 189-238.

19. On the channeling of male desire into language in medieval romance see Geraldine Heng, “The Woman Wants,” Yale Journal of Criticism 5 (1992): 101-34.

20. Niccolò Machiavelli, Ritratto di cose di Francia, in Tutte le opere, vol. 1, ed. Mario Martelli (Florence: Sansoni, 1971), 56. My translation.

21. Champier, Les Gestes ensemble la vie du preulx chevalier Bayard, ed. Denis Crouzet, Collection acteurs de l'histoire (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1992), 183.

22. Bayard's international reputation is stressed again when he encounters Francis de Stirlingen, whose servant points out that Bayard “a couru par tous royaulmes chrestiens, et ne trouva oncques homme à qui il aye desnyé combat, soit Cyclien, italien, espaignol, ny aultre de quelle region que il fust, Angloys, Flamans, Ennoyers, Brebanson, Escoussays ou Dannoys et Souysses” [traveled through all Christian kingdoms, and never found a man to whom he denied combat, be he Sicilian, Italian, Spanish, nor of any other region whatsoever, English, Flemish, Antwerpan, Brebanter, Scot, Danish, or Swiss (Champier, 200). The text ends with a series of comparisons, à la Plutarch, between Bayard and ancient heroes (Theseus, David, Scipio, Hannibal, etc.). Bayard, of course, always comes off as more heroic, in many cases because he died for his country [la chose publique (230)]. I do not mean to suggest too close a connection between Amadour and Bayard or to claim that Amadour is somehow based on Bayard. Certainly the legend of Bayard stresses his moral rectitude no less than his martial heroism. Etienne Pasquier's Recherches de la France, for example, recounts how Bayard, visiting a bishop and being offered as company for the night a young girl whose indigent mother was selling her into prostitution, took pity on the girl, paid for her freedom, provided her with a dowry, and sent her on her way.

23. Of course, the new social stratum produced the writers who defined national identity for the next generation of French intellectuals. The relationship between the definition of French history in the late sixteenth century and the noblesse de robe is explored by Corrado Vivanti, “‘Les Recherches de la France’ d'Etienne Pasquier: L'Invention des gaulois,” in Les Lieux de mémoire, ed. Pierre Nora, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 215-45.

24. For Brantôme's anxiety about the dominance of the traditional aristocracy in state service see his “portrait” of Francis I in his Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3 (Paris, 1869), esp. 255-60. For a good discussion of similar anxieties before the bureaucratization of the French administration in the sixteenth century see the opening chapters of Jonathan Dewald, Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture: France, 1570-1715 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). On Francis's court as a turning point in the history of the imagery of the nobility, in which the courtier begins to replace the chevalier, see Michael Nerlich, Ideology of Adventure: Studies in Modern Consciousness, 1100-1750, trans. Ruth Crowley, Theory and History of Literature, 42-3, vol. 2 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), chap. 10. Nerlich's discussion is heavily indebted, as is my own, to the classic study by Norbert Elias, The Court Society, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon, 1983). For a discussion of Francis I see Elias, 152-65.

25. On the semantic valences of pays, as well as other terms used to define “country” and “nation,” see the opening passages of E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, Wiles Lectures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Even today one uses the terms pays and paese in rural France and Italy to refer to one's village.

26. See Louis Althusser, “Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1971), 121-73.

27. On the general question of the exemplary in Marguerite's text see the fine study by John D. Lyons, Exemplum: The Rhetoric of Example in Early Modern France and Italy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989).

28. Obviously the emergence of a new form of virtue, linked to the transformation of the novella, must be tied as well to the emergence of a Christian humanist moral discourse in which every man or woman becomes an exemplar of chastity. Central to a consideration of this transition is whether the universal subject of Christian humanism is able to replace the universal subject of late medieval aristocratic culture without the mediation of an emerging national identity. I hope to examine this question in a forthcoming book-length study of literature and national identity in Renaissance France. For a somewhat different consideration of the relationship between genre, subjectivity, and space, which focuses on the domestic space of the novella tradition, see Daniel Russell, “Conception of Self, Conception of Space, and Generic Convention: An Example from the Heptaméron,” Sociocriticism, nos. 4-5 (1986): 159-83.

29. Both Freccero (235) and Kritzman (55) identify the moment at which Floride wounds herself a bit later as the inscription of a feminine writing on the text of history. I want to build on this insight to understand not only how Floride's act asserts her “identity” but how it locates it in a particular nexus of political, cultural, and social fields that make her identity possible in the first place. In her discussion of the querelle des femmes Constance Jordan demonstrates the ways in which attempts both to defend and to attack women during the literary quarrels of the period are undermined by rhetorical paradoxes stemming from the limited position of the speaker (Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990], 86-7).

30. The point is recalled yet again, following story 26, when we are informed that men and women have different forms of honor: “L'honneur des hommes et des femmes n'est pas semblable” (218). The question of different notions of honor has been raised by several critics, though none has traced how a courtly lexicon is wholly dismantled. See, in particular, Freccero, 235; Nicole Cazauran, L'“Heptaméron” de Marguerite de Navarre (Paris: Société d'édition d'enseignement supérieur, 1976), 200-5; and Margaret W. Ferguson, “Recreating the Rules of the Game,” in Quint et al., 153-88 (see n. 18). For a general consideration of the “splintering” of language in the text see Marcel Tetel, Marguerite de Navarre's “Heptaméron”: Themes, Language, and Structure (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1973), chap. 4. For an analysis of the ways in which the rhetoric of friendship throughout the story is submitted to a similar fracturing see Ullrich Langer, Perfect Friendship: Studies in Literature and Moral Philosophy from Boccaccio to Corneille, Histoire des idées et critique littéraire, 331 (Geneva: Droz, 1994), chap. 4.

31. This is my translation.

32. On the connection between novella and exemplum see Walter Pabst, Novellentheorie und Novellendichtung (Heidelberg: Winter, 1967).

33. This consolidation involves the beginnings of the famous notion of “imagined community” that Benedict Anderson offers to help explain the emergence of nationalism (Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism [London: Verso, 1983], esp. chaps. 1-2).

34. The critical bibliography on the prologue is vast. Among the many studies of the relationship between the prologues to the Heptaméron and the Decameron, I have consulted Cazauran, chap. 3; Glyn P. Norton, “Narrative Function in the ‘Heptaméron’ Frame Story,” in La Nouvelle française à la Renaissance, ed. Lionello Sozzi, Bibliothèque Franco Simone, 2 (Geneva: Slatkine, 1981), 435-47; Ferguson (see n. 30); K. Kasprzyk, “Marguerite de Navarre, lecteur du Décaméron,” Studi francesi 34 (1990): 1-11; and Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani, La Conversation conteuse: Les Nouvelles de Marguerite de Navarre, Ecrivains (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1992), chap. 1. No critic has commented on the political dimension.

35. François's notes (449) mention the invasion as contemporaneous with the first French translation of Boccaccio, to which Marguerite alludes. On the invasion of 1544 more generally see Knecht, 366-7 (see n. 1).

36. For a somewhat different reading of the gesture of the gift see Ferguson, 168-9. On the general question of exchanges in the text see Mathieu-Castellani, 169-71.

37. Natalie Zemon Davis suggests that carnivalesque reversals of gender roles functioned during the same period as a safety valve, bolstering hierarchy (in her example, social hierarchy) while providing the vocabulary and opening the perspectives for criticizing it (“Women on Top,” in Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1975], 124-51). I would make a similar argument about the gender debates in the Heptaméron. In a well-known article Joan Kelley-Gadol makes the point that the emergence of a newly centralized court society in the Renaissance undermined, rather than affirmed, the independence of women (“Did Women Have a Renaissance?” in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977], 139-64). One consequence of the increasingly constrained space of court society, I suggest, is that it both disrupts the aristocracy's traditional image of its function in society and, almost as a compensation, produces a discourse about the status of women. The diminution in the relative mobility and power of women seems to recur at moments of transition to more centralized political systems. For an analogue in eighteenth-century France see Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), 201-10. Landes points to the tension between the “universalism” of the masculinist Revolution and the “general” importance of that same Revolution for women.