Marguerite de Navarre, queen consort of Navarre and sister of François I of France, composed the Heptameron as a collection of seventy-two tales in the tradition of Boccaccio’s Decameron, framed by a group of aristocrats snowbound in the Pyrenees. The stories, written in the mid-sixteenth century, deal with love, desire, honor, and deception among the noble classes of France, debated by the storytellers with sophistication and often surprising frankness.
This fifth volume completes the collection. Download this public-domain English translation as a free EPUB.