In June 1521, Marguerite, sister of King Franpois I of France, opened a three-year epistolary exchange with the Bishop of Meaux, Guillaume Briponnet. Her husband, Duke Charles of Alenpon, has led the king’s army into Champagne, where the men will likely engage in warfare, Marguerite explains, and her beloved aunt Philiberte is about to leave her for Savoy.
Involved in things that give her cause for great fear, Marguerite intends to involve (“emploie”) Briponnet in her affairs and requests spiritual aide.1 The anxious female subject that Marguerite creates in this letter contrasts poignantly with the familiar politically savvy, self-possessed one that emerges from other writings and especially with the assessments of her in ambassadors’ correspondence.
True, early-modern French letter writers routinely represent themselves as small and frightened when they address spiritual advisors, social or family superiors, or, at times, close friends. Marguerite’s mother, the formidable Louise of Savoy, regent during the king’s absences, also represents herself as uncertain and frightened in letters to her daughters and the king. [426]What I would like to argue in this chapter, then, is not that Marguerite’s fearful persona is unusual, but that, far from a simple convention of letter-writing, it was an important element of an emotional regime: it was a genuine emotive, in William Reddy’s terms, that is, an expression of emotion that acts on the emotional state of the one uttering it.[427] Female political activity demanded a high level of emotional labor, and, I propose, Marguerite and Louise assumed fearful personae within their intimate circles as a means of relieving the burden.[428] Focusing closely on sources in which Marguerite and Louise describe themselves in this way takes us beyond the conventions of letter writing and adds an important element to the our understanding of how these powerful women managed the anxiety that they would certainly have experienced as they negotiated the duties that fell to them as defenders of the Angouleme-Valois dynasty, especially after the defeat of their brother and son by the troops of Emperor Charles V at Pavia in 1525.