Heptameron

Story 31 takes place in the lands of Emperor Maximilian of Austria, where a gentleman becomes very close to a Franciscan friar from a well-respected monastery. This friar essentially joins the household and falls in love with the gentleman’s wife. One day when the husband is away, the friar begins eliminating the maids and servants by cutting their throats, and when the lady finally discovers the gruesome murders, the friar kidnaps the woman, disguising her as a friar, and begins to ride away with her. She wisely decides “to pretend to obey him, as much to save her life as to gain time, in the hope that her husband would return” (327). They pass the husband on the road, and his servant recognizes the wife and follows them going the opposite direction. When he is attacked and killed by the friar, the husband intervenes and is almost killed himself but overpowers the friar and subdues him with the help of his wife. They bring him before the court of the Emperor of Flanders, where he confesses, and it is discovered that his monastery has long been abducting women and girls by this same violent method. The women are rescued, and the friars are locked inside the monastery, which is burned to the ground as a monument to the crime.

Story 32 follows an experience of Bernage, the Seigneur of Sivray, who is traveling in Germany at the behest of King Charles VIII. When he stays overnight in a castle, he witnesses a strange scene: The hosting gentleman’s wife, whose hair is short, wears only black and dines quietly by herself at the end of the table. She eats very little and is only allowed to drink from a cup made of a skull, after which she returns to a room behind a tapestry. Bernage learns that the husband discovered his wife having a love affair with a younger man in the household. As punishment for the wife, he killed her lover and decided “to lock her up in the very room where she used to go to wallow in her pleasures” (332) along with the lover’s skeleton. He serves her drink from the lover’s skull as a constant reminder: “Thus when she takes dinner and supper she sees the two things that must distress her most, her living enemy and her dead lover, and all by her own sin” (333). Bernage meets the woman in her room and, before leaving the next day, encourages the gentleman to forgive his wife, who seems genuinely remorseful. For the sake of his lineage, the husband eventually forgives the woman, and they have many children together.

In Story 23, a girl living an austere life near Cognac is found to be pregnant, though she is still a virgin. When the local people begin to treat her as a second Virgin Mary, Count Charles of Angoulême, father of the future King Francis I, sends two of his men to investigate. They are present when the parish priest, who is the girl’s brother, interrogates her publicly while serving her communion. She swears she is a virgin and that no man has touched her any more than her own brother. The men, convinced her oath is true, relate this to the Count, who sees through her play on words and correctly guesses the baby is her brother’s. He has the priest thrown into prison, where he confesses. Once the baby is born, the brother and sister are burnt at the stake.

Story 34 takes place in a small village where two traveling Franciscan friars are staying at a butcher’s house. They listen in on their host that evening, and when the butcher speaks of slaughtering his pigs the next day, he calls them “our little friars” (341), and the eavesdropping friars misunderstand him. They panic, thinking he is planning to murder them. Their door is locked, so they jump out the window one by one; the younger one runs off without incident, while the other, who is heavier, hurts his leg and crawls into the pigsty to hide. When the butcher comes the next morning to slaughter his pig, the friar crawls out begging for mercy, and the butcher and his wife are just as terrified. Everyone has a good laugh, and the butcher dresses the friar’s wounded leg.

In Story 35, a Spanish lady in the town of Pamplona falls in love with a Franciscan friar giving a sermon on Ash Wednesday. She begins to write to him, but her letters are intercepted by her husband, who then writes back in the voice of the friar. After Easter, the wife and “friar” set a time for a tryst, and the husband borrows the friar’s frock, comes to her room, and begins to beat her, shouting “Temptation! Temptation! Temptation!” (349). The next day she is healing in bed and her husband invites the friar to dinner, then asks him to heal her of being possessed by the devil. When he leaves them alone together, she screams and bites at him, terrified of him, while the friar believes he is exorcizing a demon. The husband is content with his punishment, and the wife comes to hate her folly, thereafter devoting herself to him.

In Story 36, the president of the Parliament of Grenoble hears from his servant that his wife is having an affair with a young clerk named Nicolas. Being a prudent man, he awaits evidence before believing the story. When the servant notifies him that Nicolas is in the bedroom with his wife, the husband enters and discovers the couple, but he does not want to shame his house, saying, “I do not wish to see my household dishonored or the daughters I have had by you disadvantaged” (354). To salvage the situation, he hides Nicolas in a side room and then invites the servant into the room. When the servant cannot find Nicolas, the husband berates him for falsely accusing his wife of infidelity and dismisses him with five to six years’ wages (as he was a good servant). Not long after, he scares Nicolas into leaving town and covertly poisons his wife with herbs from their garden, thus avenging himself and preserving the honor of his family.

Story 37 tells of a wife whose husband begins to leave her at night to sleep with a chambermaid after many happy years together. At first the wife despairs, but when implored to think of their children, she rallies and decides to confront the problem. One night, she finds her husband “in an obscure closet asleep in bed with the ugliest, dirtiest and foulest chambermaid in the house” (359). She sets fire to straw in the middle of the room to give him a scare but realizes it might also kill him. She wakes him up, warning him she may not be able to save him a second time if he continues down this path. He promises to stay true, and they live together happily.

In Story 38, set in Tours, a bourgeois woman discovers that her husband has been having an affair with a woman who farms his land. Every time he comes home from visiting her, he has a terrible cold, so the wife, who cares deeply for her husband, goes to visit this farm. She finds it in terrible shape, “so cold, dirty and ill-kept that she felt sorry for him” (362), and she outfits the place with all the finery her husband enjoys. When her husband visits his lover, he is surprised to see her humble place so well appointed, and she admits to him that his wife did it and asked her to take care of him. He ends the affair and returns to his wife to live in harmony.

In Story 39, the Seigneur de Grignols, a knight of the Queen of France, returns home to find his wife living in a neighboring estate because their residence is haunted by a ghost. The Seigneur de Grignols decides to test this by sleeping in the house, and during the night he is awakened by a hard slap and is tormented by moving furniture and strange voices. He is “more worried about losing sleep than about the ghost” (365), so the next night he waits until he hears someone approaching him, and when the “ghost” slaps him even harder, he catches the hand and discovers it’s their chambermaid. She confesses she scared his wife away so that she could enjoy the house with her lover, another servant in the house, and this has been ongoing for two years. The Seigneur has them both severely beaten and thrown out of the house.

Story 40 tells of the sister of the Comte de Jossebelin (Rolandine’s father), who, despite being beautiful, has not married due to her brother’s possessiveness. She falls in love with a young gentleman who has been part of the household since their childhood, and since the brother often remarks “that he only wished that the young gentleman was from as good a family as she” (368), the two decide to secretly elope, believing the brother will forgive them, since, “Those blinded by love believe what they wish to believe” (368). Eventually someone discovers them and tells the brother, who catches them in bed together. The husband flees by the window, while the sister begs for his life, admitting he is now her husband. The Comte is filled with rage and orders the guards to kill him, and with that done, the sister begs him to kill her as well. Once the Comte calms down, he regrets murdering his sister’s husband, but to avoid her revenge, he shuts her up in a castle built in the middle of the forest. There she stays, refusing his later offer to allow her to remarry, until she dies. The Comte’s family members all die miserably, except Rolandine, who inherits the castle and estate.

Following Story 40, the group discusses marriage in depth, with all agreeing that they have enjoyed happy marriages. They retire after telling stories of their respective courtships, with the married couples not sleeping much that evening.