Compassion's Edge. Katherine Ibbett

l’extreme Malheur dont nostre France est pleine. (1–4)

      [My lady, I would be made of lead or of wood,

      If I, whom Nature made born a Frenchman,

      Did not, to the centuries to come, recount the suffering

      And the extreme unhappiness with which our France is beset.]

      In the first poem France herself, the whole nation, is the object of pity because of her internal divisions; in the second, factionalism makes a conditional unpitier imaginable. This distinction between the sensitive pitier and the unpitying other will later come to full fruition in the partisan Protestant epic of Ronsard’s great reader Agrippa d’Aubigné.

      Yet if pity’s grammar was shared on both sides, Catholic emotive language bemoaning the civil wars often looks rather more like courtly tropes than it does the epic models on which Protestants draw. Where Ronsard’s love poetry, decades earlier, had drawn on Petrarchan tropes of the pitiless woman spurning her lover, now Ronsard set out the binaries of pitiful and pitiless in a martial context.²⁰ Wartime texts like the poem “Complainte sur les miseres de la guerre civile” set into Jacques Yver’s Le Printemps of 1570, in which six nobles gather together to spin tales taking their mind off the war, consistently recycle the figure of the spurned lover, this time voiced by a distressed France: “Jamais de mon piteux œil / Ne se tarit la fontaine” [“Never shall my pitiful eye / See its fountain run dry”].²¹ This is language that provides a familiar literary framework through which to understand France’s crisis; it seeks not to shock but to console.

      The Catholic language of pity also draws on a more generalized sensationalism stemming from the genre known as the histoire tragique, in which accounts of the wars blend in with other sorts of horror. In these stories pity marks the stakes of a story in which it is important to take sides. The histoire tragique displays horrors so that readers might be directed to the right—Catholic—path, and the represented and elicited pity displays the proper feelings we must show. The collections of Histoires tragiques (1559–60) by Pierre Boaistuau and François de Belleforest established the topoi of the genre just before the outbreak of the wars; as the wars evolved, so did the genre.²² These stories often ended with a pitiful spectacle, a body over which readers were asked both to mourn and to reflect on their own Christian comportment. One figures a woman about to be executed who calls on her children to fear God “et que souvent ils eussent à se rémemorer ce piteux spectacle” [“and that often they might recall this pitiful spectacle”].²³ The genre was rapidly widespread and instantly recognizable, with each production vying for superlatives. A Complainte pitoyable d’une damoyselle angloise qui a heu la teste tranchée [Pitiful complaint of an English maiden who had her head cut off] published in La Rochelle in 1600 notes, “Entre les calamités plus pitoyables, qui sont arrivés en ce siecle au sexe feminin: Cestuy-ci me semble tres digne d’estre remarqué.” [“Between the most pitiful calamities which have happened to women in this present time, this one seems to me very worthy of comment.”] Like the versions forty years before, this story too ends with the family weeping over a body, and the insistence that “chacun avoit pitié et horreur d’un si piteux spectacle” [“everyone felt pity and horror at such a pitiful spectacle”]. This pairing of pity with horror draws loosely on Aristotle’s pairing in the Poetics, in which the pity we feel for a sufferer is accompanied by a fear that a similar suffering may befall us (this pairing returns in the following chapter). It points to the beginnings of the language of tragic response that will structure seventeenth-century discussions of compassion, even if later French readers would likely have been familiar with the pairing as much from the histoire tragique as from more formal discourses on tragedy.²⁴

      In its insistence on the horrors of “this time,” the story of the executed Anglaise is typical of the histoire tragique’s mingled methodology, in which ubiquity and horrific particularity are simultaneously underlined. The wars make themselves felt in such stories as both outlying horror and ever-present backdrop for “ce siècle,” this present time. The Parisian Catholic Christophe de Bordeaux wrote chiefly about the wars, but in a Discours lamentable et pitoyable sur la calamité, cherté et necessité du temps present [Lamentable and pitiful discourse on the calamities, scarcities and necessities of the present time] (1586) he offers a story that is both about the wars and yet displaces their details from their specific emplotments.²⁵ Christophe’s account of the “temps present” moves through a number of famine stories from the Bible to Léry ending with the story of a woman who strangles her children because she has nothing to feed them. The Catholic Christophe even borrows the most horrific point of his story—a cannibal mother—from the Protestant writer Jean de Léry’s account of the siege of Sancerre, to which I will return later. Pushing Ronsard’s more stately allegorical language into the realm of faits divers, Christophe piles up the language of fellow-feeling in a rush of hendiadys: he tells us a story “plaine de commiseration et pitié” [“full of commiseration and pity”].²⁶ The starving widow was refused “pitié et commiseration” (c3) [“pity and commiseration”] by others, and so, as frequent authorial nudges remind us, it will fall to the readers to supply the necessary emotion. A family who stitch themselves into their sheets and wait to die are “chose si pitoyable que je ne sache cueur si dyamantin qui ne fust rompu voyant une telle pitié” (a4) [“something so pitiful that I know no heart hard enough that it was not broken on seeing such a pity”]. Such language asks the readers to lean in to see the scene and test their hearts. The story denounces the hardheartedness of present-day France but also allows its readers—or spectators—a ghoulish thrill along the way.

      The pitiful spectacle’s many invitations to its readers suggest the extent to which this genre seeks to shape an ideal readerly community. The topos frames our viewing of particular sights: it builds careful sight lines along which our sentiment can be properly organized. Like many texts of the late sixteenth century, Christophe begins his account by addressing “lecteurs mes amis.”²⁷ The ideal reader is the friend, a person on side with the writer. These texts build both ideal community and ideal reader at the same time and as necessary conditions of each other. With the reflowering of the histoires tragiques in the early seventeenth century, pitiful scenes are increasingly directed to our attention not by the characters but by the narrator. In François de Rosset’s Histoires mémorables et tragiques de ce temps (1619) the narrator pauses to exclaim, “Démons de la douleur, génies effroyables, prêtez-moi vos plaintes lamentables, afin que je puisse dignement décrire cette pitoyable aventure!” [“Demons of pain, terrifying sprites, lend me your lamentable plaints so that I may properly describe this pitiful adventure!”]²⁸ In Pierre Boitel’s Le théâtre tragique of 1622 the narrator begins quite straightforwardly, “C’est ici une histoire digne de compassion.” [“This is a story worthy of compassion.”]²⁹ The histoire tragique chivvies its reader into the proper affective stance, deriving some of its authority from the wartime need to choose sides amidst the difficulties of the “present time.”

      The clunky narratorial interventions of this sensationalist genre go on to shape more refined forms of fiction throughout the seventeenth century. In Boaistuau and Belleforest’s 1559 collection of histoires tragiques, which piles up the possible instances of pity, a woman imprisoned writes to her jailer in the hope of moving him to “quelque compassion et pitié” [“some compassion and pity”] as “l’objet d’un si piteux spectacle” [“the object of such a pitiful spectacle”].³⁰ When the jailer reads her letter he is “surpris de grand sursaut car haine et pitié, amour et dédain (ainsi que dedans la nuée le chaud et le froid avec plusieurs vents contraires) commencèrent à se débattre et contrarier en son cœur” [“surprised with a great start, for hatred and pity, love and disdain (as clouds mix together heat and cold with several contrary winds) started to battle and contradict themselves in his heart”].³¹ Here, the flickering of pity and its eventual loss shapes both a sense of character and our readerly response to such figures. Similar scenes in which women ask for pity and men respond with mixed emotions will in more elegantly poised prose punctuate the late seventeenth-century nouvelle historique and early novel seen in