The Tales Of The Heptameron Volume I Part 6

From what has been said already, it will be readily perceived that the novels, or rather their subjects, are not very easy to cla.s.s in any rationalised order. The great majority, if they do not answer exactly to the old t.i.tle of _Les Histoires des Amants Fortunes_, are devoted to the eternal subject of the tricks played by wives to the disadvantage of husbands, by husbands to the disadvantage of wives, and sometimes by lovers to the disadvantage of both. "Subtilite" is a frequent word in the t.i.tles, and it corresponds to a real thing. Another large division, trenching somewhat upon the first, is composed of stories to the discredit of the monks (something, though less, is said against the secular clergy), and especially of the Cordeliers or Franciscans, an Order who, for their coa.r.s.e immorality and their brutal antipathy to learning, were the special black (or rather grey) beasts of the literary reformers of the time. In a considerable number there are references to actual personages of the time--references which stand on a very different footing of identification from the puerile guessings at the personality of the interlocutors so often referred to. Sometimes these references are avowed: "Un des muletiers de la Reine de Navarre," "Le Roi Francois montre sa generosite," "Un President de Gren.o.ble," "Une femme d'Alencon," and so forth. At other times the reference is somewhat more covert, but hardly to be doubted, as in the remarkable story of a "great Prince" (obviously Francis himself) who used on his journeyings to and from an a.s.signation of a very illegitimate character, to turn into a church and piously pursue his devotions. There are a few curious stories in which amatory matters play only a subordinate part or none at all, though it must be confessed that this last is a rare thing.

Some are mere anecdote plays on words (sometimes pretty free, and then generally told by Nomer-fide), or quasi-historical, such as that already noticed of the generosity of Francis to a traitor, or deal with remarkable trials and crimes, or merely miscellaneous matters, the best of the last cla.s.s being the capital "Bonne invention pour cha.s.ser le lutin."

In so large a number of stories with so great a variety of subjects, it naturally cannot but be the case that there is a considerable diversity of tone. But that peculiarity at which we have glanced more than once, the combination of voluptuous pa.s.sion with pa.s.sionate regret and a mystical devotion, is seldom absent for long together. The general note, indeed, of the _Heptameron_ is given by more than one pa.s.sage in Brantome--at greatest length by one which Sainte-Beuve has rightly quoted, at the same time and also rightly rebuking the sceptical Abbe's determination to see in it little more than a piece of _precieuse_ mannerliness (though, indeed, the _Precieuses_ were not yet). Yet even Sainte-Beuve has scarcely pointed out quite strongly enough how entirely this is the keynote of all Margaret's work, and especially of the _Heptameron_. The story therefore may be worth telling again, though it may be found in the "Cinquieme Discours" of the _Vies des Dames Galantes_.

Brantome's brother, not yet a captain in the army, but a student travelling in Italy, had in sojourning at Ferrara, when Renee of France was d.u.c.h.ess, fallen in love with a certain Mademoiselle de la Roche. For love of him she had returned to France, and, visiting his own country of Gascony, had attached herself to the Court of Margaret, where she had died. And it happened that Bourdeilles, six months afterwards, and having forgotten all about his dead love, came to Pau and went to pay his respects to the Queen. He met her coming back from vespers, and she greeted him graciously, and they talked of this matter and of that. But, as they walked together hither and thither, the Queen drew him, without cause shown, into the church she had just left, where Mademoiselle de la Roche was buried. "Cousin," said she, "do you feel nothing stirring beneath you and under your feet?" But he said, "Nothing, Madame."

"Think, cousin," then said she once again. But he said, "Madame, I have thought well, but I feel nought; for under me there is but a stone, hard and firmly set." "Now, do I tell you," said the Queen, leaving him no longer at study, "that you are above the tomb and the body of Mademoiselle de la Roche, who is buried beneath you, and whom you loved so much in her lifetime. And since our souls have sense after our death, it cannot be but that this faithful one, dead so lately, felt your presence as soon as you came near her; and if you have not perceived it, because of the thickness of the tomb, doubt not that none the less she felt it. And forasmuch as it is a pious work to make memory of the dead, and notably of those whom we loved, I pray you give her a _pater_ and an _ave_, and likewise a _de profundis_, and pour out holy water. So shall you make acquist of the name of a right faithful lover and a good Christian." And she left him that he might do this.

Brantome (though he had an admiration for Margaret, whose lady of honour his grandmother had been, and who, according to the Bourdeilles tradition, composed her novels in travelling) thought this a pretty fas.h.i.+on of converse. "Voila," he says, "l'opinion de cette bonne princesse; laquelle la tenait plus par gentillesse et par forme de devis que par creance a mon avis." Sainte-Beuve, on the contrary, and with better reason, sees in it faith, graciousness, feminine delicacy, and piety at once. No doubt; but there is something more than this, and that something more is what we are in search of, and what we shall find, now in one way, now in another, throughout the book: something whereof the sentiment of Donne's famous thoughts on the old lover's ghost, on the blanched bone with its circlet of golden tresses, is the best known instance in English. The madcap Nomerfide indeed lays it down, that "the meditation of death cools the heart not a little." But her more experienced companions know better. The worse side of this Renaissance peculiarity is told in the last tale, a rather ghastly story of monkish corruption; its lighter side appears in the story, already referred to, of the "Grand Prince" and his pious devotions on the way to not particularly pious occupation. But touches of the more poetical and romantic effects of it are all over the book. It is to be found in the story of the gentleman who forsook the world because of his beloved's cruelty, whereat she repenting did likewise ("he had much better have thrown away his cowl and married her," quoth the practical Nomerfide); in that of the wife who, to obtain freedom of living with her paramour, actually allowed herself to be buried; in that (very characteristic of the time, especially for the touch of farce in it) of the unlucky person to whom phlebotomy and love together were fatal; and in not a few others, while it emerges in casual phrases of the intermediate conversations and of the stories themselves, even when it is not to be detected in the general character of the subjects.

And thus we can pretty well decide what is the most interesting and important part of the whole subject. The question, What is the special virtue of the _Heptameron_? I have myself little hesitation in answering. There is no book, in prose and of so early a date, which shows to me the characteristic of the time as it influenced the two great literary nations of Europe so distinctly as this book of Margaret of Angouleme. Take it as a book of Court gossip, and it is rather less interesting than most books of Court gossip, which is saying much. Take it as the performance of a single person, and you are confronted with the difficulty that it is quite unlike that other person's more certain works, and that it is in all probability a joint affair. Take its separate stories, and, with rare exceptions, they are not of the first order of interest, or even of the second. But separate the individual purport of these stories from the general colour or tone of them; take this general colour or tone in connection with the tenor of the intermediate conversations, which form so striking a characteristic of the book, and something quite different appears. It is that same peculiarity which appears in places and persons and things so different as Spenser, as the poetry of the Pleiade, as Montaigne, as Raleigh, as Donne, as the group of singers known as the Caroline poets. It is a peculiarity which has shown itself in different forms at different times, but never in such vigour and precision as at this time. It combines a profound and certainly sincere--almost severe--religiosity with a very vigorous practice of some things which the religion it professes does not at all countenance. It has an almost morbidly p.r.o.nounced simultaneous sense of the joys and the sorrows of human life, the enjoyment of the joys being perfectly frank, and the feeling of the sorrows not in the least sentimental. It unites a great general refinement of thought, manners, opinion, with an almost astonis.h.i.+ng occasional coa.r.s.eness of opinion, manners, thought. The prevailing note in it is a profound melancholy mixed with flashes and intervals of a no less profound delight. There is in it the sense of death, to a strange and, at first sight, almost unintelligible extent. Only when one remembers the long night of the religious wars which was just about to fall on France, just as after Spenser, Puritan as he was, after Carew and Herrick still more, a night of a similar character was about to fall on England, does the real reason of this singular idiosyncrasy appear.

The company of the _Heptameron_ are the latest representatives, at first hand, and with no deliberate purpose of presentment, of the mediaeval conception of gentlemen and ladies who fleeted the time goldenly. They are not themselves any longer mediaeval; they have been taught modern ways; they have a kind of uneasy sense (even though one and another of themselves may now and then flout the idea) of the importance of other cla.s.ses, even of some duty on their own part towards other cla.s.ses.

Their piety is a very little deliberate, their voluptuous indulgence has a grain of conscience in it and behind it, which distinguishes it not less from the frank indulgence of a Greek or a Roman than from the still franker navete of purely mediaeval art, from the childlike, almost paradisiac, innocence of the Belli-cents and Nicolettes and of the daughter of the great Soldan Hugh in that wonderful serio-comic _chanson_ of the _Voyage a Constantinople_. The mark of modernity is on them, and yet they are so little conscious of it, and so perfectly free from even the slightest touch of at least its anti-religious influence.

n.o.body, not even Hircan, the Grammont of the sixteenth century; not even Nomerfide, the Miss Notable of her day and society; not even the haughty lady Ennasuite, who wonders whether common folk can be supposed to have like pa.s.sions with us, feels the abundant religious services and the periods of meditation unconscionable or tiresome.

And so we have here three notes constantly sounding together or in immediate sequence. There is the pa.s.sion of that exquisite _rondeau_ of Marot's, which some will have, perhaps not impossibly, to refer to Margaret herself--

En la baisant m'a dit: "Amy sans blasme, Ce seul baiser, qui deux bouches embasme, Les arrhes sont du bien tant espere,"

Ce mot elle a doulcement profere, Pensant du tout apaiser ma grand flamme.

Mais le mien cour adonc plus elle enflamme, Car son alaine odorant plus que basme Souffloit le feu qu'Amour m'a prepare, En la baisant.

Bref, mon esprit, sans congnoissance d'ame, Vivoit alors sur la bouche a ma dame, Dont se mouroit le corps enamoure; Et si la levre eust gueres demoure Contre la mienne, elle m'eust succe l'ame, En la baisant.

There is the devout meditation of Oisille, and that familiarity with the Scriptures which, as Hircan himself says, "I trow we all read and know." And then there is the note given by two other curious stories of Brantome. One tells how the Queen of Navarre watched earnestly for hours by the bedside of a dying maid of honour, that she might see whether the parting of the soul was a visible fact or not. The second tells how when some talked before her of the joys of heaven, she sighed and said, "Well, I know that this is true; but we dwell so long dead underground before we arise thither." There, in a few words, is the secret of _THE HEPTAMERON_: the fear of G.o.d, the sense of death, the voluptuous longing and voluptuous regret for the good things of life and love that pa.s.s away.

George Saintsbury.(1)

London, October 1892.

1 As I have spoken so strongly of the attempts to identify the personages of the _Heptameron_, it might seem discourteous not to mention that one of the most enthusiastic and erudite English students of Margaret, Madame Darmesteter (Miss Mary Robinson), appears to be convinced of the possibility and advisableness of discovering these originals. Everything that this lady writes is most agreeable to read; but I fear I cannot say that her arguments have converted me.--G. S.

_DEDICATIONS AND PREFACE_,

PREFIXED TO THE FIRST TWO EDITIONS OF THE TALES OF THE QUEEN OF NAVARRE.

_To the most Ill.u.s.trious, most Humble, and most Excellent Princess_,

Madame Margaret de Bourbon,

d.u.c.h.ess of Nevers, Marchioness of Illes, Countess of Eu, of Dreux, Retelois, Columbiers, and Beaufort, Lady of Aspremont, of Cham-Regnault, of Arches, Rencaurt, Monrond, and La Chapelle-d'Angylon, Peter Boaistuau surnamed Launay, offers most humble salutation and perpetual obedience.(1)

1 This dedicatory preface appeared in the first edition of Queen Margaret's Tales, published by Boaistuau in 1558 under the t.i.tle of _Histoires des Amans Fortunez_. The Princess addressed was the daughter of Charles, Duke of Vendome; she was wedded in 1538 to Francis of Cleves, Duke of Nevers, and by this marriage became niece to the Queen of Navarre.--Ed.

Madam, That great oracle of G.o.d, St. John Chrysostom, deplores with infinite compa.s.sion in some part of his works the disaster and calamity of his century, in which not only was the memory of an infinity of ill.u.s.trious persons cut off from among mankind, but, what is more, their writings, by which the rich conceptions of their souls and the divine ornaments of their minds were to have been consecrated to posterity, did not survive them. And certainly with most manifest reason did this good and holy man address such a complaint to the whole Christian Republic, touched as he was with just grief for an infinity of thousands of books, of which some have been lost and buried in eternal forgetfulness by the negligence of men, others dispersed and destroyed by the cruel incursions of war, others rotted and spoiled as much by the rigour of time as by carelessness to collect and preserve them; whereof the ancient Histories and Annals furnish a sufficient example in the memorable library of that great King of Egypt, Ptolemy Phila-delphus, which had been formed with the sweat and blood of so many notable philosophers, and maintained, ordered, and preserved by the liberality of that great monarch. And yet in less than a day, by the monstrous and abominable cruelty of the soldiers of Caesar, when the latter followed Pompey to Alexandria, it was burned and reduced to ashes. Zonarius, the ecclesiastical historian, writes that the same happened at Constantinople in the time of Zeno, when a superb and magnificent palace, adorned with all sorts of ma.n.u.script books, was burnt, to the eternal regret and insupportable detriment of all those who made a profession of letters. And without amusing ourselves too curiously in recounting the destruction among the ancients, we have in our time experienced a similar loss--of which the memory is so recent that the wounds thereof still bleed in all parts of Europe--namely, when the Turks besieged Buda, the capital of Hungary, where the most celebrated library of the good King Matthias was pillaged, dispersed, and destroyed; a library which, without sparing any expense, he had enriched with all the rarest and most excellent books, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic, that he had been able to collect in all the most famous provinces of the earth.

Again, he who would particularise and closely examine things will find that Theophrastes, as he himself declares, wrote and composed three hundred volumes, Chrysippus sixty, Empedocles fifty, Servus Sulpicius two hundred on civil law, Gallienus one hundred and thirty on the art of medicine, and Origenes six thousand, all of which St. Jerome attests having read; and yet, of so many admirable and excellent authors, there now remain to us only some little fragments, so debased and vitiated in several places, that they seem abortive, and as if they had been torn from their author's hands by force.

On account of which, my Lady, since the occasion has offered, I have been minded to present all these examples, with the object of exhorting all those who treasure books and keep them sequestered in their sanctuaries and cabinets, to henceforth publish them and bring them to light, not only so that they may not keep back and bury the glory of their ancestors, but also that they may not deprive their descendants of the profit and pleasure which they might derive from the labour of others.

In regard to myself, I will set forth more amply in the notice which I will give to the reader the motive that induced me to put my hand to the work of the present author, who has no need of trumpet and herald to exalt and magnify her(1) greatness, inasmuch as there is no human eloquence that could portray her more forcibly than she has portrayed herself by the celestial strokes of her own brush; I mean by her other writings, in which she has so well expressed the sincerity of her doctrines, the vivacity of her faith, and the uprightness of her morals, that the most learned men who reigned in her time were not ashamed to call her a prodigy and miracle of nature. And albeit that Heaven, jealous of our welfare, has s.n.a.t.c.hed her from this mortal habitation, yet her virtues rendered her so admirable and so engraved her in the memory of every one, that the injury and lapse of time cannot efface her from it; for we shall ceaselessly mourn and lament for her, like Antimachus the Greek poet wept for Lysidichea, his wife, with sad verses and delicate elegies which describe and reveal, her virtues and merits.

1 In the French text Boaistuau invariably refers to the author as a personage of the masculine s.e.x, with the evident object of concealing the real authors.h.i.+p of the work.

Feminine p.r.o.nouns have, however, been subst.i.tuted in the translation, as it is Queen Margaret who is referred to.

--Ed.

Therefore, my Lady, as this work is about to be exposed to the doubtful judgment of so many thousands of men, may it please you to take it under your protection and into your safe keeping; for, whereas you are the natural and legitimate heiress of all the excellencies, ornaments, and virtues which enriched the author while she adorned by her presence the surprise of the earth, and which now by some marvellous ray of divinity live and display themselves in you, it is not possible that you should be defrauded of the fruit of the labour which justly belongs to you, and for which the whole universe will be indebted to you now that it comes forth into the light under the resplendent shelter of your divine and heroic virtues.

May it therefore please you, my Lady, to graciously accept of this little offering, as an eternal proof of my obedience and most humble devotion to your greatness, pending a more important sacrifice which I prepare for the future.

Peter Boaistuau, surnamed Launay, To the Reader.(1)

1 This notice follows the dedicatory preface in the edition of 1558.

Gentle Reader, I can tell thee verily and with good right a.s.sert (even prove by witnesses worthy of belief) when this work was presented to me that I might fulfil the office of a sponge and cleanse it of a mult.i.tude of manifest errors that were found in a copy written by hand, I was only requested to take out or copy eighteen or twenty of the more notable tales, reserving myself to complete the rest at a more convenient season and at greater leisure.

However, as men are fond of novelties, I was solicited with very pressing requests to pursue my point, to which I consented, rather by reason of the importunity than of my own will, and my enterprise was conducted in such fas.h.i.+on, that so as not to show myself in any wise disobedient, I added some more tales, to which again others have since been adjoined.

In regard to myself, I can a.s.sure thee that it would have been less difficult for me to build the whole edifice anew than to mutilate it in several places, change, innovate, add and suppress in others, but I was almost perforce compelled to give it a new form, which I have done, partly for the requirements and the adornment of the stories, partly to conform to the times and the infelicity of our century, when most human things are so exulcerated that there is no work, however well digested, polished, and filed, but it is badly interpreted and slandered by the malice of fastidious persons. Take, therefore, in good part our hasty labour, and be not too close a censor of another's work until thou hast examined thine own.

_To the most Ill.u.s.trious and Virtuous Princess_, Madame Jane de Foix, Queen of Navarre,

Claud Gruget, her very humble servant, presents salutation and wishes of felicity. (1)

I would not have interfered, Madam, to present you with this book of the Tales of the late Queen, your mother, if the first edition had not omitted or concealed her name, and almost entirely changed its form, to such a point that many did not recognise it; on which account, to render it worthy of its author, I, as soon as it was divulged, gathered together from all sides the copies I could collect of it written by hand, verifying them by my copy, and acting in such wise that I arranged the book in the real order in which she had drawn it up. Then, with the permission of the King and your consent, it was sent to the press to be published such as it should be.

Concerning it, I am reminded of what Count Balthazar says of Boccaccio in the Preface to his _Courtier_(2) that what he had done by way of pastime, namely, his _Decameron_, had brought him more honour than all his other works in Latin or Tuscan, which he esteemed the most serious.

1 This preface was inserted in the edition issued in 1559 by Claud Gruget, who gave the t.i.tle of "_Heptameron_" to Queen Margaret's tales.

2 The _Libro del Cortegiano_, by Count Balda.s.sare Castiglione, was the n.o.bleman's _vade-mec.u.m_ of the period.

First published at Venice in 1528, it was translated into French in 1537 by J. Colin, secretary to Francis I.--Ed.

Thus, the Queen, that true ornament of our century, from whom you do not derogate in the love and knowledge of good letters, while amusing herself with the acts of human life, has left such beauteous instructions that there is no one who does not find matter of erudition in them; and, indeed, according to all good judgment, she has surpa.s.sed Boccaccio in the beautiful Discourses which she composes upon each of her tales. For which she deserves praise, not only over the most excellent ladies, but also among the most learned men; for of the three styles of oration described by Cicero, she has chosen the simple one, similar to that of Terence in Latin, which to every one seems very easy to imitate, though it is anything but that to him who tries it.

It is true that such a present will not be new to you, and that you will only recognise in it the maternal inheritance. However, I feel a.s.sured that you will receive it favourably, at seeing it, in this second impression, restored to its original state, for according to what I have heard the first displeased you. Not that he who put his hand to it was not a learned man, or did not take trouble; indeed it is easy to believe that he was not minded to disguise it thus, without some reason; nevertheless his work has proved unpleasing.

I present it to you then, Madam, not that I pretend to any share in it, but only as having unmasked it to restore it to you in its natural state. It is for Your Royal Greatness to favour it since it proceeds from your ill.u.s.trious House, whereof it bears the mark upon the front, which will serve it as a safe-conduct throughout the world and render it welcome among good company.

As for myself, recognising the honour that you will do me in receiving from my hand the work thus restored to its right state, I shall ever feel obliged to render you most humble duty.