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 Marguerite
d'Angoulême, daughter of Charles d'Angoulême,
comte d'Orléans, and Louise de Savoie and brother
of the future Francis I, spent her childhood in Cognac,
then at Blois. Her education was extensive, and she
read widely in classical philosophy and the Scriptures.
In 1509 she married Charles, duke of Alençon.
In 1515, her brother Francis took the throne, and Marguerite
joined him at the court. After a series of military
campaigns in northern Italy, Francis was defeated at
Pavia in 1525 by Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, and
taken prisoner to Madrid. Marguerite traveled to Madrid
and negotiated her brother's release for a high ransom.
Her husband died in the same year. In 1527 she married
Henri d'Albret, king of Navarre, with whom she had one
daughter, Jeanne, later the mother of the future Henry
IV.
 Marguerite
continued her political role at her brother's court,
but she devoted much of her energy and attention to
spiritual matters as well. In 1521 she began a correspondance
with Guillaume Briçonnet, bishop of Meaux, who
introduced her to the evangelist movement and the call
for reform within the Catholic Church and a return to
the original purity of the Scriptures. Briçonnet,
along with Jacques Lefèvre d'Etaples, shaped
Marguerite's religious beliefs, and she in turn encouraged
reform within the church and the need to reinterpret
the Scriptures and translate them into French. She herself
habitually retired to meditate and pray, and composed
numerous works of devotional poetry, including those
published in the Marguerites de la Marguerite
des princesses (1547). Her Miroir de
l'âme pecheresse, first published in 1531,
then again as the first poem in the Marguerites
(1547), provoked the censure of the Sorbonne theologians
for its expression of ideas associated with the religious
reform movement.
Eventually,
Marguerite withdrew from the world of politics and diplomacy
more frequently and spent longer periods of time in
the serenity of her various chateaux in southwestern
France. Along with her works of spiritual poetry and
theater, Marguerite began writing the novellas she envisioned
would compose a French Decameron. She died before
the project was complete, leaving 73 novellas that the
editor, Claude Gruget, entitled the Heptameron
(from the greek hepta, "seven") in his 1559 posthumous
edition. Inspired by the Italian predecessor's model,
Marguerite develops and animates the fictional frame
around her novellas much more than does Boccaccio. The
great diversity of stories and the often contradictory
opinions of the "devisants" who tell and discuss them
reflect the complexity of human nature, the coexistence
of good and bad in the world, the abyss between the
spiritual and the material, and the dilemma of how to
face that abyss.
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