both sides shared a deep familiarity with rhetoric as a training in the deployment of emotions, seeking to bring about a particular effect. Renaissance rhetorical texts and editions of classical rhetoric directed an increasing amount of attention to the emotions, setting out a series of protocols for arousing pity. Sometimes, the Roman rhetor Quintilian writes, an accuser might weep tears of pity for the guilty party he condemns, in order to provoke the judge’s response, but this is a risky practice he warns us against.17 At other moments the orator must adopt a persona in order to bring about pity in his listener, for Quintilian notes that first-person narrations are most apt to bring about emotion. But trying to evoke pity is a delicate task: the moment of compassion cannot last too long nor be too overplayed, and its timing is important.18 Quintilian suggests that the proper punctuation of emotion will often depend on the careful use of visuals: the showing of a wound, the appearance of the client, and so on. The care in the proper distribution of these managed moments of pity is certainly key to the texts of the Wars of Religion, in which words recall bodily actions or gestures that denote emotion. But whereas Quintilian discusses how to deploy pity in the conclusion or epilogue of a trial, sixteenth-century writers distribute such moments throughout their texts, frequently repeating and recycling scenes from other writers even as they proclaim each scene they describe to be superlative in the suffering it shows. In the arousal of pity, repetition is crucial.
Catholics: From Ronsard to the League
In Catholic writing, the arousal of pity tells us a great deal about Catholic understandings of their position relative to the fortunes of the nation. Although Catholic forces were frequently besieged, especially in the south, their political position was preeminent and they imagined themselves not as a party but rather as representatives of the whole; the Catholic voice imagines itself to be objective where the Protestant knows it can never be. In the first years of the wars, Catholic usage of the topos illuminates these Catholic assumptions about the national imaginary. In Ronsard’s first of the Discours des Miseres de ce temps of 1562, written for the queen regent Catherine de Médicis in the first year of the conflict, France’s ship of state has become a “piteux naufrage” (44) [“pitiful shipwreck”], and Ronsard bemoans that the situation of France is so dire that even her unfriendly neighbors “a nostre nation en ont mesmes pitié” (90) [“even have pity for our nation”].19 To open the following poem, the Continuation, Ronsard invokes the affective horror of the wars by figuring the horror of he who could ignore them:
Ma Dame, je serois ou de plomb ou du bois,
Si moy que la Nature a fait naistre François,
Aux siècles à venir je ne contois la peine
Et 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
