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 Chapter 4.
The demarcation of readerly community was particularly fraught in the early years of the war. The pitiful discourse seen in wartime accounts like that of Loys de Perussiis published in 1563 makes clear that distinctions between Catholic and Protestant were fairly recent and somewhat porous. Loys writes, he says, wearily, “aiant veu et ouy dire que le filz soit allé contre le père, les frères et cousins l’un contre l’autre, amis contre les siens plus intrinsèques. Brief ce n’ha esté que une propre guerre civile, sanglante et sans mercy” [“having seen and heard say that sons went against their fathers, brothers and cousins against one another, friends against their most familiar friends. In short it had been a real civil war, bloody and merciless”].32 In describing the “pitoyables tragédies” (430) [“pitiful tragedies”] inflicted on southern Catholics by the Protestant regional majority, Loys gives up, faced with “tant d’autres cruautés que les escrivant la force me default, pour la pitié que mon ame en sent” (404) [“so many other cruelties that I have not the strength to write them, for all the pity that my soul feels for them”].
These the distinctions between Protestant cruelty and Catholic suffering are, for Loys, not always absolute. In one dreadful battle, some of the Protestants turn out to be kinder than might have been feared. On seeing a Catholic dangling from a rock, “Ce voyant lesdictz adversaires (parmy lesquelz se treuvent quelques pitoyables) le firent secourir, et la vie luy fut sauve” (453). [“Seeing this the said adversaries (amongst whom were some men of pity) rescued him, and his life was saved.”] In this period, the usage of “pitoyable” wavers between “object of pity” and “feeler of pity,” with most usage still relating to object rather than subject. Fittingly, here the usage switches to the subject, and the surprise that the Protestant other might show pity suggests how easy it would be for subject and object to change sides in these early years of the civil wars.
Yet the Protestant pitier’s emotional exception is made only for one individual; the rest of the Catholics are killed and floated downstream to Avignon, with horns on their head and a mocking note in their hand, to be received by the Catholic prelate Fabrice de Serbellon: “Voyant Monseigneur Fabrice ce piteux spectacle, meu de pitié et de compassion, ordonna qu’ilz fussent tous inhumes et ensevellis et honnorablement en terre sacrée … usant de son accoustumée grandeur et clémence” (454). [“When Monseigneur Fabrice saw this pitiful spectacle, moved by pity and compassion, he ordered that they were all disenhumed and buried honorably in sacred ground … with his usual grandeur and clemency.”] The priest’s response to something he sees (“voyant”) recalls that of the exceptional Protestant who spared a Catholic in seeing his suffering (“ce voyant”), but Loys makes clear that the Protestant action is parenthetical where the Catholic is usual. Loys’s praise of Serbellon’s accustomed compassion is key to the rebuilding of a Catholic community in the Protestant-dominated district, where the prelate had recently arrived; he dedicates his book to him, building his history around a compassionate response that is both exemplary and entirely to be expected.
In Loys’s account, compassion between Protestants and Catholics is possible only in an exceptional and singular instance which does not alter the terrible flow of events. We are reminded that the rift is recent, and left in a state of shock that such neighborly or even familial closeness has been so rapidly polarized by the early events of the wars. Pity marks the flickering of something that reaches across those boundaries, but it never manages to make room for a lasting understanding or peace. Loys’s observation of that passing pitiful instant speaks of a relatively moderate Catholic positioning that can still imagine a compassionate gesture from the other side, something akin to what would later be the position of the “politiques.”
This Catholic language of pity would also become ripe for exploitation by more extremist voices. In his Registre-journal written during the reign of Henri III, the moderate politique Pierre de l’Estoile recounts an incident that took place in the summer of 1587. The extremist League, the Guisard faction, had placed a painting in a cemetery showing the anti-Catholic cruelties of England’s Elizabeth I, in order to whip up the crowd against the Huguenots. L’Estoile writes that when the “sot peuple” [“stupid people”] of Paris saw it, they fell for the Guise logic and cried out for war: “Il s’esmouvoit, criant qu’il faloit exterminer tous ces meschans Politiques et Huguenos.” [“They were moved, shouting that all the wicked Politiques and Huguenots should be exterminated”]. In early modern usage, “esmouvoir” and “esmoution” refer primarily to unrest; the affective meaning of emotion comes secondarily to the sense of civil disorder, and L’Estoile suggests that here the crowd is moved to passionate unrest. In order to prevent this misuse of spectacle by the Ligue, the king’s more moderate forces then had to act without themselves causing a spectacle; the king orders that the painting be removed “mais le plus secrettement et modestement qu’ils pourroient, crainte d’esmotion” [“but the most secretly and modestly as possible, for fear of emotion/unrest”].33 L’Estoile clearly means that the king seeks to order unrest; but his text also suggest that such an “esmotion” can arise from the exploitation of what we today call emotion in the form of the pitiful spectacle. The Ligue respond to the king’s gesture by turning the missing painting into an emotional ekphrasis, placing sonnets all over town:
Laissez
