Dialogue, space, and selfhood in La Chastelaine de Vergi and Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron 70.(Critical essay)

When in Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron Oisille, the oldest and wisest of the group of travelers forced to spend their days narrating stories while they wait for the floodwaters in the Pyrenees to subside, hesitates embarking upon the 70th story, it is because she realizes that the story she had in mind is not only too long to be considered an orally transmitted novella ("pour sa grande longueur"), but also that it violates a rule the devisants had established in the Prologue, and to which she explicitly refers, namely not to recount old stories, especially those from written sources: "pour ce que n'est pas de nostre temps; ... et nous avons jure de ne riens mectre icy qui ayt este escript" (477). (1) Since her story is a retelling of the popular thirteenth-century anonymous verse narration La Chastelaine de Vergi, it is virtually the only story in the Heptameron so faithfully modeled after a literary source, and therefore indeed a strange guest in the collection. Although the novella's incongruous nature is recognized by fellow storyteller Parlamente, who knows the story too, the latter nevertheless encourages Oisille to recount ir, since "il a este escript en si vieil langaige, que je croy que, horsmis nous deux, ii n'y a icy homme he femme qui en ayt ouy parler; parquoy sera tenu pour nouveau" (ibid.). This so strongly emphasized exception to the storytelling rules towards the end of the collection (Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron counts 72 stories) makes us wonder why this particular story, in spite of its transgressive nature, is granted a place in the exchange of novellas within the frame-story.

That a key to understanding this novella should be sought in the intertextual link to its medieval source has been common agreement in the critical field. Indeed, numerous critics have analyzed Marguerite's retelling of the Chastelaine de Vergi story from this perspective, e.g. by comparing the two versions in terms of narrative structure and technique, (2) and by proposing insightful interpretations of Marguerite's recasting of the medieval tale's emphasis on problems of speech, language, and communication. (3)

However, little critical thought has been given to the way in which the medieval tale has been integrated into the Heptameron as a larger project that dramatizes the interaction between the genres of the novella and the dialogue by embedding the stories in a collective dialogue of a classical Ciceronian character (whereby the discussions often exceed the novellas in length). Against this background of dynamics between dialogue and novella, I would like to propose a different interpretation of Marguerite's Chastelaine de Vergi recasting. First, I will argue that the anonymous medieval tale has a privileged status in the book because of its questioning of dialogical principles that contrasts with, and ultimately mimetically reinforces, the dynamics of devisants' collectire dialogue. Second, the mimetic interplay between the dialogical dynamics of novella and frame-story manifests a particular link to a notion of selfhood: the tragical unfolding of the novella suggests a collapse of the bonds that tie individual selves to their social and affective others, a breakdown that is repaired at the level of the collective dialogue in the frame-story. Third, dialogue and selfhood are in correlation with certain uses of space: I will argue that, on a narrative as well as a metanarrative level, spatial elements help mimetically reinforce dialogical patterns and notions of selfhood. Space is hereby understood both in an abstract sense, such as the space of dialogue or social bonds between characters, and in the concrete sense of 'locations,' such as rooms and caskets. With respect to this latter element, my analysis will take into account the famous series of fourteenth-century ivory caskets depicting the Chastelaine de Vergi story.

Both in the medieval and in Marguerite's version, the interest of the story, and no doubt a major reason for its popularity, lies in a sequence of dilemmas between various contracts of trust, loyalty, and secrecy by which the four characters, i.e. the Duke and the Duchess, and the young knight and his lady of Vergi, are bound to each other. Aside from some narrative changes, Marguerite leaves the basic development of their bonds therefore virtually the same as in the medieval story (4): the Duchess, bound by matrimony, falls in love with the young gentleman, who he himself has a secret bond of courtly love with the Duke's niece, the Dame de Vergi. When the young courtier refuses the Duchess' inappropriate courtship, the Duchess takes revenge by lying to her husband the Duke that the young man made indecent proposals to her. In a first confrontation between the Duke and the young knight, bound to each other by feudal vows, the latter at first convinces his master that his wife's rendering of events is not true. The Duchess forces the situation by making her husband promise to find at least evidence that the young handsome knight loves another. In respect of the feudal contract, the young man thus decides to break the courtly one, i.e. the promise made to his lady. Imploring his lord never to betray the secret in his turn, the gentilhomme lets the Duke observe from the garden of his lady's castle how a little dog runs out to greet him as a sign of all's clear, and how he spends some time with his lady in her bedroom. The Duke is now convinced, but finds himself in his turn in a 'contractual' dilemma, as his spouse claims her right to know the actual evidence, which means betraying the young gentleman's secret communicated to him under the feudal bond. She manages to obtain it from her husband at the condition that he will kill her if she betrays the secret.

The house of cards of these fragile mutual bonds then tragically collapses: at a feast at court, the jealous Duchess revengefully reminds the lady of Vergi that no love is so secret as never to be revealed, just as a little dog will always betray its presence by barking. Knowing her secret disclosed, the lady retires in a small room where, after a long lamentation against love, she dies of sorrow. A young maid who was hidden under the bed recounts what she heard to the young lover who, after an evenly long lamentation full of regret for his imprudence, stabs himself to death. The Duke finds out and furiously kills his wife in the middle of the ongoing festivities. The story ends with the Duke leaving to fight the infidels (as a Knight Templar in the medieval tale), although Marguerite adds one more detail to the ending: after his experience in the Holy Land, the Duke eventually returns to France to live the rest of his life in a monastery.

Both narratives feature the three basic bonds, or covenants (i.e. courtly love, the matrimonial bond, and the feudal contract), as idiosyncratic binary universes, small symbioses of intimacy and allegiance set apart in the text by face-to-face exchanges that contrast with the two communal scenes, i.e. the feast at court and the scene of the Duke's killing of his wife in front of the assembled courtiers. (5) These bonds are designated with highly affective terms that bestow upon them a character of philia, a union of two-souls-in-one based on the classical friendship ideal. The most notable is the relationship between the two lovers, staged as a self-contained symbiosis which in the medieval tale is based on the lovers' "couvenant" not ever to disclose its existence to the outside world (v. 23, v. 274), (6) and which Marguerite de Navarre further describes as "honneste amytie" (476, 488,497), a mutual and egalitarian affection between the sexes typical for many novellas in the Heptameron. (7) Although in medieval lyric concealment is certainly a classic ingredient of courtly love's behavioral code, the emphasis on secrecy from the outside world as the raison d'etre of the relationship is nevertheless striking. Marguerite further stresses this element of their bond when Geburon in the discussion following the novella asks the legitimate question "puis que l'amour estoit si honneste ... comme vous la nous paignez, pourquoy la falloit il tenir secrette?" (497). This heavily marked 'covenant of non-disclosure' in both tales, more than simply obeying formal rules of courtly lyric, highly denotes the lovers' bond as lacking all exterior purposes, and as being motivated entirely from within: its raison d'etre thus exemplifies what Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics defined as the highest (i.e. virtuous) form of friendship. (8)

As for the relationship between the Duke and his young knight, the inequality inherent to feudal loyalty at first seems to exclude the possibility of a mutually affective union. We are nevertheless struck by the frequency with which the thirteenth-century poeta stresses the great love and friendship that reigns between them. To be sure, the designation of the vassalic bond with the term amor in the sense of friendship had become common currency in feudal practice, and thus we should seek not too much behind the Duke's use of the word, alongside the notions of loyalty and fidelity, in a ...