Paul Linden
Emory University

Stylus, Stilet and the Double-Edged Sword: the Politics of
Self-Sacrifice in the Tragiques

One of the most furious partisans of the Huguenot cause during the French Wars of Religion, Agrippa d’Aubigné commonly imports souvenirs of his numerous military experiences into his literary works. Presented as a surrogate means of combat after Aubigné was mortally wounded on the battlefield, the epic masterpiece les Tragiques is bears witness not only to the civil disputes rending the country’s social and political fabric but to those that set the author at odds with himself. Carefully extended throughout the Tragiques, the metaphor of the pen as sword achieves significant political force by the fact that Aubigné must cut away the false veneer of commissioned history in order for providential history to become legible. However, in order to bear witness to the divine plan, Aubigné must temporarily cut himself out of the terrestrial sphere. From the perspective of the disposition of the text, this metaphor conjugates the violence of Aubigné’s political satire (books 1-3) with the mystical visions and apocalyptic testimony with which the work concludes (books 5-7). The principal idea of this study is that we may read this articulation in the development of the symbol of the rose which is cut out of one referential domain (that of profane, courtly discourse) and inscribed into another (that of Christian mysticism and martyrology). These acts of cutting all exemplify the metaphor of the pen as sword not simply as a thematic image, but as a principal of the performance of poetic creation in the Tragiques.

In support of my principal idea, I set forth two points: the allegiance of the author with the allegorical persona of Truth and, the represented relationship of obfuscation between profane language and providential, as opposed to commissioned, history. In the first case, the allegory of Truth is one of three separate articulations of writing that either explicitly or implicitly evoke the metaphor of the pen as sword. Located in between the devalued image of the iniquitous judge whose stylus becomes a stilet as he signs a sentence of death and the biblical image of the word of God as a "glaive à deux trenchants" (Ephesians 6: 17; Hebrews 4: 12), the "couteau" carried by Truth performs a polyvalent (and not simply reciprocal) violence for which the double sided sword serves as a symbol. It violates the enemy (surgically exposing and correcting the profanity of mercenary, courtly discourse), as well as the author’s own mortality. The blade of Truth participates in Aubigné’s strategy of self-sacrifice which functions according to the logic of martyrdom, exposing the secrets of Providential History before the liberated spirit of the narrator. Set against the verisimilar poetics informing commissioned history, the negative performance of Aubigné’s pen is legible in the semantic shift of the floral paradigm away from connotations of "rhetorical flowers" and toward the early Christian association of the rose and the blood of the martyr. On the other hand, the positive performance of the author’s pen is contingent upon the sacrifice of his flesh, a scenario in which the blade becomes an instrument of salvation inasmuch as it figures the gesture of sacrifice as well as the inscription of the author’s name in the heavenly registers of the elect.