and observer; and to write about pity, as d’Aubigné does so insistently, is also to observe a distinction between those who pity and those who do not.
One key passage in Les Feux, detailing the execution of the English Protestant Anne Askew, sets out the clear structure of this affective otherness. When presented with the scene of her torture, this extraordinary exemplar takes pity on those who inflict pain on her: “On presente à ses yeux l’espouventable gehenne, / Et elle avoit pitié en souffrant de la peine / De ces faux justiciers.” [“They present to her eyes the dreadful rack / And she took pity on them, feeling grief / For the false justice of her jailers”] (IV:161–63). In contrast, her jailers’ anger blinds them to such generous emotion: “la passion desrobbe / La pitié de leurs yeux” [“passion steals / pity from their eyes” (IV:174–75). D’Aubigné presents us with a scene that ought to bring about pity but that instead underscores only the emotional gulf between Catholic and Protestant, in which one passion, an anger so great as not to need a specific name, drives out the more precise response of pity. In these pages, we know Askew is a martyr because of her eyes on heaven; we know the judge is a tyrant because of his pitiless response. As if to underwrite the correct way to look, we learn that God himself responds to the sight of the English martyrs with pity, seeing “deux precieux tableaux, / Deux spectacles piteux” [“two precious tableaux, two pitiful spectacles”] (IV:151–52). In looking without pity, the Catholic cuts himself off from God.
This identifying unpity structures the ethical world of the Tragiques. We recognize the enemy other by their lack of emotion faced with scenes that ought to bring about pity, scenes in which the ordinary affect of human intimacy is denied: “ces proches inhumains / Dessus ces tendres corps impiteux s’endurcirent” [“these inhuman neighbors / grew hardhearted and pitiless over these tender bodies”] (IV:1016–17); in battle the Catholics sound the noisy alarm “de peur que les voix tremblantes, lamentables, / Ne tirent la pitié des cœurs impitoyables” [“lest the trembling, lamentable voices / Pull pity from pitiless hearts”] (IV:569–70). It is not just historically identifiable characters who are marked out by their pitilessness; in La Chambre dorée, d’Aubigné sketches a series of pitiless allegorical figures: Cruelty, with a portrait of pity thrown at her feet (III:379); pitiless Stupidity (352); Ignorance, lacking pity (365); Ire, veiled “De peur que la pitié ne volle dans le cœur / Par les portes des yeux” [“Lest pity fly into her heart / Through the doors of her eyes”] (303–4). All of these figures refuse sight and in so doing refuse pity.57 D’Aubigné places modern Protestant suffering as part of a long history of the elect; even the massacre of the Innocents “ne sonnoient la pitié dans les cœurs impiteux” [“could not sound pity from the depths of pitiless hearts”] (VI:468). Pitilessness places the enemy beyond the transhistorical bounds of humanity: “ce cœur sans Oreille, et ce sein endurcy / Que l’humaine pitié, que la tendre mercy / N’avoient sceu transpercer” [“this unlistening heart, this hardened breast unpierced / by human pity and tender mercy”] (VI:475–77). D’Aubigné wields the label of humanity not as a universalizing gesture but as another rhetorical weapon allowing him to distinguish between sides: on one side humans, on the other horror. He holds out the hope that pity will bring the other side round, that it may serve as a weapon of proselytization—“La je vis estonnez les cœurs impitoyables” [“There I saw pitiless hearts amazed”] (I:433), he writes of one moment of proper response—but such moments are always isolated. The pitiful spectacle allows us to distinguish between sides; it is a contrivance for the proper direction of attention, the apportioning and distribution of affect, and for the immediate identification of those who ally themselves against the true faith whether throughout history or in the present day.58
One particular pitiless figure in the Tragiques, whose presence reverberates throughout the text, is of particular historical significance for the French early modern configuration of pity: the pitiless mother. D’Aubigné returns to this figure again and again. In the opening pages of Miseres, he sets up France as mother. Later in Miseres, that maternal figure reappears in viciously deranged guise as the cannibal mother who eats her own child during a siege, and in order to act so dreadfully she must deny all pity even as she invites it:
La mere deffaisant pitoyable et farouche,
Les liens de pitié avec ceux de sa couche,
Les entrailles d’amour, les filets de son flanc,
Les intestins bruslans, par les tressauts du sang,
Le sens, l’humanité, le cœur esmeu qui tremble,
Tout cela se destord, et se desmesle ensemble. (I:505–10)
[The mother, pitiful and wild, undoing
The bonds of pity and those of family,
The bowels of love, the filiation of her flanks,
Her burning guts, through the leaping of her blood,
The sense, the humanity, the moved heart which trembles,
All that is tangled and untangled together.]
Yet here the pitiless mother, undoing the bonds of pity and the bowels of love (recalling the biblical bowels of compassion) is herself worthy of pity, “pitoyable et farouche.” Even as her wildness places her beyond the bounds of humanity, she is still somehow within the reach of our emotion. D’Aubigné plays here on the twin valence of pitoyable, to be full of pity or to be worthy of pity, and lets us feel the painful balance between the two possibilities. This mother is not like the pitiless figures above; she undoes her pity from necessity. It is not the mother but an allegorized and agency-bearing hunger that is without pity:
Cette main s’emploioit pour la vie autrefois,
Maintenant à la mort elle emploie ses doigts,
La mort, qui d’un costé se presente effroyable,
La faim de l’autre bout bourrelle impitoyable:
La mere ayant long-temps combatu dans son cœur,
Le feu de la pitié, de la faim la fureur … (I:515–20)
[This hand was once used for life,
Now for death it uses its fingers,
On one side dreadful death,
But hunger on the other side torments without pity:
The mother having long fought in her heart
Against pity’s fire and hunger’s rage …]
The mother is herself divided, between love and the drive to survive, between the sweetly nostalgic sigh for the sustaining “autrefois” and her dreadful future. Unlike the allegorical pitiless women elsewhere in the text—Stupidity with her dead complexion (III:350–51)—this mother is still fleshly, still human even as she trembles on the border of humanity. This is a touched and touching figure, despite her horrific action. And where d’Aubigné’s usual assignation of pity or unpity marks the absolute divide between Protestant and Catholic, here the mother’s troubled unpity is a sign of her own internal divisions: she is both sufferer and causer of suffering, a Protestant who has lost her natural pity through no fault of her own. As d’Aubigné puts it, “C’est en ces sieges lents, ces sieges sans pitié, / Que des seins plus aymants, s’envole l’amitié” [“It is in these slow sieges, these pitiless sieges / That love flees from the most loving breasts”] (I:499–500). It is the times that are without pity, not the poor pitiful mothers. The sorting mechanism of pity fails for a moment as it encounters the troubled
