Christiane Singer (1943–2007)

In her preface to this novel published in 2007, Christiane Singer says that nothing appears to her more apt when thinking unreal thoughts of today and comparing them equally to other ways of thinking which can be equally passionate and fantastic. She chooses to think about an incident from a story in the Heptameron by Marguerite de Navarre published in 1558: a friend of a person of the nobility is invited to stay in a chateau and at diner time he sits down to be served at a long table, while he is eating a beautiful young woman with a shaved head takes her place at the other end of the table, she does not say anything, eats a little and then the waiter brings out a drink contained in the skull of a dead person. The woman drinks and leaves the table as silently as she came into the room.

Singer imagines a backstory to this event, which she tells in an epistolary format. The first long letter is by Sigismund of Ehrenberg to his friend the Seigneur de Bernage. He tells of his passion for a young girl of 13 years whom he marries as soon as she is considered to be of age; not very long after her next birthday. He worships the ground she walks on and she loves him with equal passion. His business affairs take him away from the castle and he arranges for one of his squires to keep his young wife Albe entertained. When he catches sight of them in bed together he stabs his squire to death and locks his wife in her room and arranges for a barber to visit her every three days to shave her head. The next instalment of the story is from a notebook kept by Albe during her internment. She still loves her husband, she tries to make the best of her new life and prays for the day when he will come to her again. The third piece is another letter from Sigismund to his friend. Sigismund is now at the end of his life, he has four children with Albe and has lived happily, he reminds his friend of the evening that he stayed to diner and Albe had appeared at the other end of the table.

This is a story where a contemporary author has imagined how a young wife from another age might think when an incident causes her husband to take harsh retaliatory measures. It is a story of love within the context of the times. Albe knows her duty to her husband, she accepts her punishment she knows that his love for her will triumph in the end. It is not a story that sits easily with contemporary thoughts on love and marriage, but it works well enough in this beautifully told story. It has also reminded me that I have not yet read The Heptameron and so 4 stars.… (more)