True love
Little is known of the Queen of Navarre’s private love life, but her poems suggest that it was intense, varied, joyful, and at times painful. Love was the alpha and the omega of her existence.
For to be great and powerful on earth / Without being loved and loving is nothing.
But love also requires discernment—and that is precisely what Marguerite seeks to find. One of her poetic collections is titled The Definition of True Love (the 1896 edition reads The Distinction of True Love). For all the pleasures to which she was deeply attached, love also brings jealousy, desire, and instability. Moreover, “it is blind and wears a thick blindfold.” We then try, awkwardly, to protect ourselves through false modesty or bodily mortification. What a mistake, she argues: love must be allowed to guide us like a star, despite our failings. Les Adieux and Les Prisons bear witness to a relentless search for a love purer, fuller, and more complete than human love—always fragile, always subject to change.
In the Comédie de Mont-de-Marsan, written late in her life, Marguerite stages allegorical figures, each representing a way of moving through the world. Yet the final word does not belong to “the wise woman,” but to a shepherdess who merely sings and accepts her own ignorance: “You speak of it, and I feel it.” True love, Marguerite suggests, arises through grace. Wisdom and reason, at last, fall silent.
Words and silence
Marguerite de Navarre wrote long poems—La Coche, La Navire, Les Prisons—where love often provides inexhaustible inspiration, much as in Aragon’s Le Fou d’Elsa. Yet her later poems suggest that such abundance betrays a deeper truth: the fundamental inadequacy of language to express love.
Instead of praying / I only cry out;
My words have no color / To show my pain.
Profound suffering calls for silence; words cannot contain it:
… thinking of it does not come near
The pain that wrestles within me.
Words, she says, arise from the desire to seduce—a form of love that is yet another prison. From a literary standpoint, this leads to an impasse, as the end of Adieux makes clear:
I can no longer write a word.
Marguerite’s poetry has something of negative theology about it: we can say what God is not, but we cannot grasp or express His essence. In much the same way, she sets out the various forms of love experienced in human life (as in Les Prisons), yet all of them remain incomplete. They gesture toward divine love—perfect, and ultimately beyond expression.
François Clouet, Lady at Her Bath, 1571. Held at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Notice the parallel between the child’s arm reaching for the fruit and the lady’s arm holding a red carnation (a symbol of love).
The Nothing and the All
According to Marguerite in Les Prisons, true conversion and Christian joy rest on a dialectic of nothingness and the All. Human beings think themselves to be something; yet they must acknowledge their own nothingness in order to receive the All — God.
For this spirit, which destroys all in me,
…
Knows me and can transform me into Nothing;
And this Nothing cannot be confined,
For Nothing fears prison or locked doors.
Only after such self-renunciation can true freedom appear and cease to be an illusion built on false beliefs (cuider):
And when this Nothing is united with its All,
And the cuider in it has died and been cast out,
Then comes sweet, pure, and perfect freedom,
Contentment and sovereign joy.
Within this joy, words give way to silence or to music; language becomes useless:
O mighty All, full of unspeakable love!…
O little great one! O Nothing melted into Everything!
Evil
In the popular imagination, The Heptameron is a collection of witty, somewhat libertine tales. In reality, most of them are dark. Many revolve around the threat of rape; nearly all display male domination and violence. The women, too, are no innocents. Evil reigns: disappointment, deceit, brutality, perversion. In the discussions following each tale, the speakers oscillate between cynicism and misogyny (Hircan and Saffredent) and idealism about human relations (Oisille). In short, both the stories and the commentary remain fundamentally flawed. No unified vision emerges from the cacophony.
Marguerite’s reflection on evil is striking. She does not see evil as the product of malicious intention. Its roots lie deeper—in our nature, our condition. Excessive self-discipline or bodily mortification is useless, she argues: only an encounter with Christ can free us from evil, through grace, through love, through authentic desire.
François Clouet, Le Bain de Diane (Diana’s Bath), c. 1550. Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen.
The faun’s stare in the foreground and the carnage unfolding in the distance say it all: for the painter François Clouet, love is inseparable from violence. His vision finds a striking echo in that of his contemporary, Marguerite de Navarre.