Heptaméron

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.

Many of the stories deal with love, lust, infidelity, and other romantic and sexual matters. One was based on the life of Marguerite de La Rocque, a French noblewoman who was punished by being abandoned with her lover on an island off Quebec.

In 1973, the French director Claude Pierson made an adaptation of this work, entitled Oh, If Only My Monk Would Want (Ah! Si mon moine voulait...) as a French and Canadian coproduction, with a cast of both French and Quebecois actors.

History of the text

The collection first appeared in print in 1558 under the title Histoires des amans fortunez edited by Pierre Boaistuau, who took considerable liberties with the original version; he used only 67 of the stories, many in abbreviated form, and omitted much of the significant material between the stories. He also transposed stories and ignored their grouping into days as envisaged by the author.

A second edition by Claude Gruget appeared only a year later in which the editor claimed to have "restored the order previously confused in the first impression".