a historically significant figure. It recalls, of course, the figure of Catherine de Médicis, the queen mother reviled as pitiless by the Protestants. But more significantly it bitterly revises the allegorical figure of France as mother. D’Aubigné’s dreadful imagining of this most inhuman and yet pitiable figure seems to mark a limit case that cannot be repeated. In sketching the mother who cannot show pity, d’Aubigné draws on seemingly unshakable gender norms to imagine the horrors of what history had wrought. In Léry’s account of the siege of Sancerre, from which d’Aubigné draws this scene, it is a couple who eat their child. Here, d’Aubigné focuses on the woman alone in order to shock his readership more effectively. As Sarah McNamer has shown, late medieval and early Renaissance reckonings of pity and compassion drafted such emotions as the ultimate feminine virtue, stemming from a tradition of Marian worship.59 Such figures are frequent in France in the sixteenth century, too, but seventeenth-century compassion is largely a masculine preserve. Of course, theological battles between Catholic and Protestant had made the Marian figure more controversial. But I suggest that the compassionate as mother disappears chiefly because of wartime accounts such as that of Léry, and d’Aubigné’s extraordinary pitiful rendering of them. After the cannibal mother, the representation of female compassion becomes impossible. To what new figure does d’Aubigné point in her place?
Another maternal scene suggests the new affective exemplar after the displacement of the compassionate mother. A mother divided against her maternity returns in different form with d’Aubigné’s ekphrasis of the judgment of Salomon, where two mothers dispute their claim on one child:
On void l’enfant en l’air par deux soldats suspendre,
L’affamé coutelas, qui brille pour le fendre:
Des deux meres le front, l’un pasle et sans pitié,
L’autre la larme à l’œil tout en feu d’amitié. (III:725–28)
[We see the child suspended in the air by two soldiers,
The hungry sword, which shines ready to cut him in two:
The faces of the two mothers, one pale and pitiless,
The other, tears in her eyes and burning with love.]
The emotional rift between these two mothers recalls the divisions of France: on the one side pity and on the other the absence of affect. Both mothers are looking at the same thing, but they respond to what they see differently, figuring once again the absolute distinction between pity and unpity stitched throughout this text. Yet ultimately their emotional response is of less import than the careful response of Salomon the judge. Salomon judges not the mothers’ actions but their affective response; in turn, d’Aubigné asks his readers to reflect on which kind of looking and which kind of emotional response entails that we will, at the Last Judgment, be judged to be right. In this settlement, as elsewhere in the period, the ideal compassionate is not the maternal nurturer but rather the cool-headed male judge who apportions affective resources; each side figures themselves as a Salomon, a judge able to respond to the emotion of others to good effect.
In these necessarily partisan accounts, the pitiful spectacle is always related to a structure of judgment.60 It posits a binary of spectatorship—the good and the bad, the inside and the outside—and it polices the borders of that binary. But other moderate or politique writers imagined a different affective relation to the spectacle of the wars. In the next section I turn away from the pitiful spectacle that cries out for judgment to the account of the pitiful spectacle given by a retired judge: Michel de Montaigne. Montaigne’s version of this language establishes a less partisan way of seeing and reading.
Pity and Reading: Montaigne
In “De la physionomie” (III, 12), an essay centrally concerned with the wars, the essayist Michel de Montaigne writes,
Comme je ne ly guere és histoires ces confusions des autres estats que je n’aye regret de ne les avoir peu mieux considerer présent, ainsi faict ma curiosité que je m’aggrée aucunement de veoir de mes yeux ce notable spectacle de nostre mort publique, ses symptomes et sa forme. Et puis que je ne la puis retarder, suis content d’estre destiné à y assister et m’en instruire.
Si cherchons nous avidement de recognoistre en ombre mesme et en la fable des Theatres la montre des jeux tragiques de l’humaine fortune.
Ce n’est pas sans compassion de ce que nous oyons, mais nous nous plaisons d’esveiller nostre desplaisir par la rareté de ces pitoyables evenemens.61
[As I seldom read in histories of such commotions in other states without regretting that I could not be present to consider them better, so my curiosity makes me feel some satisfaction at seeing with my own eyes this notable spectacle of our public death, its symptoms and its form. And since I cannot retard it, I am glad to be destined to be able to watch it and learn from it.
Thus do we eagerly seek to recognize, even in shadow and in the fiction of the theatres, the representation of the tragic play of human fortune.
Not that we lack compassion for what we hear; but the exceptional nature of these pathetic (pitoyables) events arouses a pain that gives us pleasure.]62
Montaigne’s discussion of spectacle distinguishes between reading accounts of change and seeing them with his own eyes; to this extent he stays within the rhetoric of the eyewitness so important to much writing of the religious wars. But his positioning as reader or witness is very different from that posited by partisan writers. Both reading and seeing allow him to exercise his curiosity, a notion that sets him apart from the partisan spectator. As Neil Kenny describes, early modern curiosity is not only the desire for knowledge; the term also marks a diligence or care (the terms are related) for the object of curiosity. In the sixteenth century it was frowned upon by Catholic and Calvinist orthodoxy alike.63 Montaigne’s curiosity to look upon the spectacle of the wars makes him an observer who is not disinterested, but neither is he blindly driven by affect. His reappraisal of the arousal of pity makes room for an entirely different sort of reading.
Montaigne continues with a statement of some embarrassment at how little these public misfortunes have cost him as a moderate sheltered from the effects of partisan opinion, concluding: “Aussi qu’en matiere d’interests publiques, à mesure que mon affection est plus universellement espandue, elle en est plus foible.” [“Also, in the matter of public calamities, the more universally my sympathy is dispersed, the weaker it is.”]64 Montaigne’s pitiful spectacle allows for a less ferociously partisan response and affords its onlooker something almost pleasurable. Where the wartime rhetoric sought to direct and focus affective response, here Montaigne speaks of diffused affections. In this model, one can feel—pitifully, pleasurably—in response to what one sees, but this feeling does not compel communitarian identification nor partisan action. The Essais draft a new model of political spectatorship, moving away from the exemplary toward an imagining of things invisible to the public eye. In “De la gloire” (II, 16) Montaigne inquires into the status of deeds unwitnessed but not unwasted: “Combien de belles action particulières s’ensevelissent dans la foule d’une bataille?” [“How many fine individual actions are buried in the press of a battle!”]65 Where Protestant writers build a pitiful spectacle and imagine that the right sort of audience will come, Montaigne is uncertain that any spectacle can give rise to a predictable outcome. How many pitiful sights disappear without anyone being moved at all?
This hesitation about the legitimacy of the pitiful spectacle structures the extraordinary opening essay of Montaigne’s Essais, “Par divers moyens on arrive à pareille fin,” probably written in 1578 and first published as the opening to the first edition of 1580.66 Montaigne begins
