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In her Mémoires, Marguerite de Valois offers a veritable socio-political theory of the passions, in which jealousy is the pivot. Whether one is the target of a fierce jealousy (which is little different to a hatred born of envy) or whether one is tormented by the feeling oneself, she shows how jealousy produces a kind of dull anguish, a feeling of having been deprived of an identity that one thought had a firm basis, even in the highest spheres of power. Jealousy thus exposes the fact that any belief in an unchanging identity is an illusion and reveals the anguish underlying the apparently most solid roots of identification.