Margarita of Navarre (1492–1549) — a French princess, one of the first women writers in France, a patroness of the arts and sciences, a poetess, a prose writer, a religious mystic, the author of philosophical dialogues, poems, and plays. However, for many centuries she has been celebrated for the «Heptameron» — a classic of Renaissance literature, a collection of novellas inspired by Boccaccio's «Decameron». Here too there are ten people, temporarily cut off from the world, entertaining themselves and each other by telling instructive, funny, cruel, candid, and touching stories — tales that lie somewhere between parable and gossip, narratives of love, betrayal, honor, and deceit. Reflecting on their characters and their most base or most noble soul ambitions, the storytellers — several alter egos of Margarita of Navarre, as well as figures based on her friends and relatives — inadvertently reveal their own souls to some extent, and together with them we comprehend the entire complexity of human nature and ourselves.
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