Compassion's Edge. Katherine Ibbett
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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 figure of the mother.
This version of the pitiless mother is, I contend, 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.
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