If you like the Canterbury Tales or the Decameron, you’ll love this book. Here we have ten toffs – five women and five men – trapped by floods in an abbey in the Pyrenees. While they wait a week or so for the peasants to rebuild a bridge back to their sumptuous palaces and chateaux, they entertain each other with stories, each person telling a story a day. Originally, they were to tell ten stories each over the course of ten days, but in this edition, we have seventy-two, and that’s all that were produced, apparently. Whether they were written by Marguerite de Navarre, or by a writer she patronised, is open to conjecture. She probably wrote at least some of the tales herself. The editor of this edition believes that she is the storyteller Parlement and tha the other storytellers are based on people known to her, including her husband.
Most of the stories are about marriage, sex, fidelity and the lack of it. There is a ritual where they all go to church in the morning and the group matriarch (interesting that it’s a woman, not a man) gives a reading from the scriptures, so their souls are duly cleansed before they go down to a meadow near the abbey and embark on a day of bawdy tales. Meanwhile, the abbey’s monks hide in the bushes eavesdropping and enjoying the smut. There is also a clear gender fault line with female and male story tellers competing to show how faithless, deceitful and wicked the other gender is. Both sides unite, though, in their contempt for the poor old friars and other men of the cloth, who get a special kicking as shameless hypocrites. This edition retains the inter-story banter between the story tellers, which apparently has been cut from many earlier editions. I can’t think why as some of these interludes are at least as entertaining as the stories themselves. Part of the appeal of the book is that the story tellers do come across as ten distinct personalities. There is clearly at least one couple (Marguerite and her husband), possibly more, and that leads to some very tense exchanges as they comment on each other’s stories.
The Penguin edition has the kind of thorough and informative introduction that you would expect from Penguin Classics. The authorship of the work is still in dispute. It’s credited to Marguerite, sister of King Francois I of France, but she might have been merely the patron of the actual author. The editor also attempts to identify the identities of the ten storytellers, though there’s no suggestion that they actually wrote the stories they tell. We also learn that multiple versions of the book appeared within a few years of the first edition, with variations in the number of tales. If you find long books daunting, don’t be put off by this one as most of the stories are short and can be easily digested in a few minutes. The translator of this edition has done a remarkable job in producing something that reads as modern English but also feels authentically sixteenth-century.
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