Rabelais’s Tiers Livre begins with a utopian political setting gone awry, a situation that would seem more anti-heroic than heroic. Indeed, the perpetrator of this dystopia, Panurge, embarks on the anti-heroic quest of finding a resolution to his conjugal preoccupations. The characters of Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron have similar concerns as they engage in the ambitious endeavor of establishing a community based on the principles of Christian charity. In the setting of a locus amśnus, they exist in an egalitarian community characterized by fraternal love. Such fraternal love also illustrates the relationship between Panurge and his heroic counterpart, Pantagruel, even as Panurge becomes obsessed with his own interests rather than the interests of his community. The ability of these characters to engage in a relationship based on charity while being faced with external concerns suggests the universality of charity and the integral part it plays in building an exemplary society. Attempts at building an ideal community founded on charity reveal the obstacles that arise when disrupted by phenomena that are not defined within a community. If charity describes a way of existing in the world, by what means does one engage in a relationship of charity outside the Christian community? If charity is universal, how can it at the same time distinguish Christian society? Even the most exemplary characters of the Tiers Livre and the Heptaméron, linked by the bond of fraternal love, are subject to the baffling aspects of the human condition and the inexplicable events of their surrounding environment. Often personnified as Love, Nature and Fortune, phenomena linked to physical symptoms and the external world interfere with the social structures described in these texts. The unpredictable outcome of events that are linked to these forces affects the most codified interaction and is emphasized through the contrast between heroic conduct founded on the ideal of charity and anti-heroic behavior that results from the weakening of these structures. In spite of recurring encounters with such obstacles, charity is nonetheless represented in and Rabelais and Marguerite’s texts as a fundamental aspect of Christian society and essential to the survival of a community.