Compassion's Edge. Katherine Ibbett
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an affective response to the wars.54
It is not enough, of course, just to be roused to emotion in seeing; the Protestant suspicion of illusion means that the connections between looking and feeling and acting must be carefully delineated. The text presents a clear rift between those who see poorly and those who see right. Sometimes the evil thrive, d’Aubigné tells us, but we must not let ourselves be fooled by thinking that such earthly success is all. In Les Feux the narrator drives away worldly illusions:
Si la prosperité dont le meschant jouit
Vous trompe et vous esmeut, vostre sens s’esblouit
Comme l’œil d’un enfant, qui en la tragédie,
Void un coquin pour roy … (IV:819–22)
[If the prosperity the wicked man enjoys
Tricks you and moves you, your senses are dazzled
Like the eye of a child, who in a tragedy
Takes a wretch for a king …]
This theatrical illusion is the model for bad seeing, in which we are fooled and moved. In contrast, d’Aubigné proffers exemplars who see correctly. A son whose weeping father has been condemned to die tells him:
Mon amour est esmeu, l’ame n’est pas esmeuë,
Le sang non pas le sens se trouble à vostre veuê:
Vostre blanche vieillesse a tiré de mes yeux
De l’eau, mais mon esprit est un fourneau de feux. (IV:937–40)
[My love is moved, but my soul is not moved,
My blood but not my judgment is troubled at your sight:
Your gray-haired age has pulled water
From my eyes, but my mind is a fiery furnace.]
This correct vision makes room for emotion—the response of love—but does not trouble rationality; blood can boil and eyes can weep, but the seer is not fooled and remains untroubled. This austere and distanced appraisal is the model Protestant emotional response. Like that model son, even when they suffered losses Protestants were so certain of their position as God’s elect that they could imagine themselves to have won a heavenly victory if not an earthly one.55 Against a background of such radical indifference to earthly outcomes, Protestants rewrite the relation between affect and action. It is more important to feel properly than to have brought about earthly victory. D’Aubigné’s take on pity asks not only what sort of emotion might be the best response to suffering but also what kind of an action emotion might be. Might that affective response alone be enough to guarantee the future of the Protestant Church?
In d’Aubigné’s telling the true distinction of the Wars of Religion is less theological then emotional. From his opening address to readers, d’Aubigné stakes his claim to wrangle with the emotions of his audience. People are bored of books that teach, he writes, and they clamor for something else, for the writer to “esmouvoir” [“move”] (Au Lecteur:13) them, even if seeking to move others might suggest “la passion partizane” [“partisan passion”] (AL:167), a label d’Aubigné takes on with gusto.56 As it is for other writers of the wars, the pitiful spectacle is d’Aubigné’s prime way to move readers. The first book Miseres is described as a “tableau piteux du royaume en general” [“pitiful painting of the whole kingdom”] (AL:134), and it opens the way for long sequences of tableaux which encapsulate the bloody action of the religious wars: allegories, portraits, dreams, and so on. Throughout these scenes, d’Aubigné forms the reader’s properly directed emotion by labeling events with their affective force: readers are urged to look upon “Le massacre piteux de noz petits enfans” [“the pitiful massacre of our little children”] (I:408), or more generally on “l’estat piteux de nos calamitez” [“the pitiful state of our calamities”] (I:1207). This adjectival usage is compulsively partisan, and in its forceful repetitions it underlines the partisan structure of pity itself. In one telling couplet—“Quand esperdu je voy les honteuses pitiez / Et d’un corps divisé les funebres moitiez” [“When lost I see the shameful pity / Of a divided body the deadly moiety”] (I:131–32)—the rhyme words, pity and moiety, underline the affective distinctions and divisions at work. To pity is to observe a distinction between sufferer 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