72 pages • 2 hours read
Marguerite De NavarreHeptameron
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1558A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Prologue Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary
Set in late summer on the first day of September, the Prologue is told in the third person and opens in the spa town of Cauterets, located in the French Pyrenees, where highborn visitors have come from all over to enjoy the healing waters. As patients are preparing to leave, heavy rains come and flood the area, sweeping away bridges, carrying away people to their deaths, and trapping others in the mountains. Oisille, an older widow, decides to weather the floods in the abbey of Our Lady of Sarrance, losing her retinue along the way except for one man and one woman.
In the meantime, two noblemen named Dagoucin and Saffredent, who visited the spas, come upon two married couples, Hircan and Parlamente, and Longarine and her husband. While spending the night in a cottage nearby, Dagoucin and Saffredent are awakened by a fight nearby and find the married couples under attack by bandits. The two gentlemen kill the bandits, but not before Longarine’s husband is killed. Traveling on together, the group arrives at the abbey of Saint-Savin, where they find their friends Nomerfide and Ennasuite, who sought refuge at the abbey after fleeing a bear.
The next day at mass, another friend named Geburon comes running into the abbey fleeing bandits who attacked him in the night. Hircan and the men kill the attackers. The party learns that it is not possible to cross the river—the Gave de Pau—and the abbot offers them shelter. A monk arrives and tells them the story of an acquaintance, Simontaut, who is lodged at the abbey Our Lady of Sarrance after unsuccessfully trying to cross the river on horseback, losing his servants and horse to the floods. The party travels to join Simontaut, and with the flood waters worsening, they decide to settle in at the abbey until a new bridge can be constructed.
Seeking “some pastime to alleviate the boredom and distress” (66), and fearful they will become sick with boredom, or worse, “miserable and disagreeable” if they have too much time to reflect on all they have lost in the flood (66), Oisille suggests doing a daily Scripture reading in the morning. Hircan agrees, but he insists the group will benefit from some entertainment to fill their afternoons between lunch and vespers. In a brief moment of metanarrative, Parlamente suggests they follow the example of the Dauphine (Catherine de Médicis) and Marguerite (the author herself) in the court of Francis I, who set out to tell 100 tales in the style of Boccaccio, with the main difference that all their tales would be true. The group agrees to this proposition, and the next day, following a guided Scripture reading with Oisille, they begin their practice of each sharing one tale a day for the next 10 days.
Prologue Analysis
The Prologue opens at the spas of Cauterets, where wealthy people come from France and Spain to seek healing in the natural waters of the mountain spas. The setting is significant, for while the members of the group are seeking physical remedies for their physical weaknesses, the stories they eventually tell (along with their religious devotional practice in the mornings) will work to heal their spirits as well.
This remote location thus offers both spiritual and physical healing, but it also serves to illustrates the dangers that threaten happiness and livelihood. To illustrate the fragility of life and humankind’s dependence on a merciful God, the group encounters every sort of danger once the floodwaters begin. Opening with a biblical allusion, the narrator’s remarks gives the impression that the flooding was so bad that “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), implying one could lose faith in the face of such danger. Indeed, accustomed to courtly life, the group suddenly faces any number of life-threatening dangers, from flood waters to savage bandits looking to profit from the chaos and attacks from wild animals. However, their finding shelter in the local abbeys emphasizes the salvation to be found through faith in God.
The Prologue also provides literary context for the tales, overtly naming its intertextual relationship to Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, written in Italy in the mid-14th century. On one hand, this reference places the work in an established and respected tradition, one previously directed towards a female readership. Like The Heptameron, Boccaccio’s 10 storytellers began a similar project of storytelling to keep their spirits up while exiled to the countryside during a different threat, namely the Bubonic Plague’s devastating effect in nearby Florence and throughout Europe. As such, storytelling becomes an important means of succor and healing for the spirit during difficult times. Likewise, the trope of storytelling in the bucolic meadow is shared with The Decameron, symbolizing a pure, idyllic, almost Edenesque space for the men and women to interact and discuss each story in contrast to the religious confines of the abbey or the more sophisticated atmosphere at the French court.
The Prologue also sets the tone for the following prologues that start off each of the coming days, which will be bracketed by religious devotional activities: In the morning, the group studies Scripture with Oisille, and following their stories, they join the monks in the evening for Vespers. In this way, the stories are established as a supplement to their spiritual life, providing simple earthly context for the heavenly laws and ideals they devote themselves to in the morning and evening.
