ABSTRACT
Marguerite de Navarre took friendship as a central concern in her patronage and in her writing. This chapter focuses on a tale in the Heptaméron about a putative friendship between a ruler and a subject. By concentrating on the dubious nature of the original friendship between the characters, the chapter offers a complementary account of the novella. The chapter reviews Marguerite de Navarre's novella alongside period accounts of the assassination of Alessandro. According to the historical record, Alessandro and Lorenzo were indeed close, but their bond was not described in terms drawn from the rhetoric of perfect friendship. The discussion of the storytellers also connects the novella's specific concern with male friendship to the preoccupations of the collection as a whole. Elsewhere in the Heptaméron, Marguerite rehearses the ability of the rhetoric of love to enable and seemingly to ennoble what will ultimately be revealed as the self-interested pursuit of an inappropriate object.
