The Heptaméron is a collection of 72 short stories written in French by Marguerite de Navarre (1492–1549), published posthumously in 1558. It has the form of a frame narrative and was inspired by The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio. It was originally intended to contain one hundred stories covering ten days like The Decameron, but at Marguerite’s death it was completed only as far as the second story of the eighth day.
Portrait of Marguerite, Queen of Navarre, attributed to Jean Clouet, c. 1530.
The Gentleman's Spur catching in the Sheet. Illustration from an 1894 edition of The Tales of the Heptameron.
Marguerite de Navarre, also known as Marguerite of Angoulême and Margaret of Navarre, was a princess of France, Duchess of Alençon and Berry, and Queen of Navarre by her second marriage to King Henry II of Navarre. Her brother became King of France, as Francis I, and the two siblings were responsible for the celebrated intellectual and cultural court and salons of their day in France. Marguerite is the ancestress of the Bourbon kings of France, being the mother of Jeanne d'Albret, whose son, Henry of Navarre, succeeded as Henry IV of France, the first Bourbon king. As an author and a patron of humanists and reformers, she was an outstanding figure of the French Renaissance. Samuel Putnam called her "The First Modern Woman".
Portrait attributed to Jean Clouet, c. 1527
17th century portrait of Charles d'Alençon, Marguerite's first husband.
Henri d'Albret King of Navarre
Francis I and Marguerite de Navarre by Richard Parkes Bonington