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In an earlier article in this series [“The True Story of Cinderella,” NYRSF 345], I sketched the origins of the French genre of contes de fées in the pioneering work of Mademoiselle L’Héritier and its prehistory in the salons associated with Louis XIV’s court and the work of Mademoiselle de Scudéry, L’Héritier’s mentor and protector. In that article I suggested that contes de fées could be more accurately translated as “tales of enchantment” than the conventional rendering of “fairy tales,” the word fée being derived from féerie [enchantment]. There is, however, an argument to be made for a narrower definition as “tales of fays” on the grounds that what the genre’s originators meant by fée was something more idiosyncratic and more distinctive than merely an agent of enchantment.
That might seem a trifle persnickety, especially given that the members of the coterie did not make it clear exactly what they meant by fées or why they were placing them at the heart of the genre they invented—an omission that was deliberate. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify a set of stories that are contes de fées in that specific sense, which can and perhaps ought to be separated out historically from the wider spectrum of fantastic fictions with which they were swiftly surrounded. The translation of fée that I employ—fay—is justified because one of the principal models of the fée adopted by L’Héritier and her collaborators for their revised version was the enchantress featured in various French Medieval romances as Mourgue, Morgue, or Morgaine la Faye, rendered into English by Thomas Malory as Morgan le Fay. Their fays are, however, by no means mere copies of that character and others judged to be similar.
Of the five members of the coterie of female writers who collaborated in the design and development of tales of fays in the years 1696–99, two—L’Héritier and Catherine Bernard—published such stories within broader assemblies before Charles Perrault published his Contes de ma mère l’Oye (tr. as Tales of Mother Goose) in 1697, the tremendous success of which prompted a stampede of printers applying for royal prerogatives to publish collections of seemingly similar works. That race enabled the three most prolific members of the group, Mademoiselle de La Force, Baronne d’Aulnoy, and the Comtesse de Murat, to publish their existing stocks of material and for the latter two to produce more stories with the possibility of publication already in mind.
Perrault’s collection became, in English eyes, the archetypal collection of “fairy tales” definitive of what the genre could and ought to feature, but it was not a collection of contes de fées. It did borrow heavily from the work of the salon writers, basing two of its eight stories on L’Héritier’s “Les Enchantments de l’éloquence” and plagiarizing Bernard’s “Riquet à la houpe,” but it also included stories that do not feature fays at all, most famously “Barbe-Bleue” (“Bluebeard”) and “Le Petit chaperon rouge” (translated as “Little Red Riding-Hood”). The only story in the collection in which fays feature that was not stolen from the coterie was “La Belle au bois dormant” (usually translated as “The Sleeping Beauty”) which followed a common practice of the writers of contes de fées by adapting a story by Giambattista Basile, “Sole, Luna, e Talia” [Sun, Moon, and Thalia] that does not contain fays, substituting fays for the seers featured in the original.
Perrault’s stories are short stories adapted for reading aloud to children, equipped with explicit morals after the fashion of the many fables adapted from classical sources by his friend Jean de La Fontaine. Many of the stories produced by the salon coterie were, however, considerably longer—“novelettes,” in the conventional terminology of modern American genre fiction—and, to the limited extent that the members of the coterie were able to develop the genre when the opportunity for publication became briefly available, they did so by making them even longer, the most significant endeavors becoming what modern American terminology terms “novellas.” Only a few of those longer works ever made it into later collections of English “fairy stories,” but in France, at least among the purist writers who attempted to carry the genre forward after its initial demolition, they became the key exemplars, especially those penned by the Comtesse de Murat, whose tragic career encapsulated the fate of the genre’s pioneers.
Henriette-Julie de Castelnau, Comtesse de Murat (1670–1716) was the daughter of Marquis Michel de Castelnau, the son of a famous Maréchal de France; Michel de Castelnau had followed his father into a military career and died of wounds sustained in battle in 1672. Henriette-Julie was married by arrangement in 1691, apparently against her will, to Nicolas de Murat, the colonel of an infantry regiment. She gave birth to a son a year later but fled the marital home not long thereafter—a scandalous thing to do in those days—and went to live in Paris. There she frequented the salon of the Marquise de Lambert, to which she was probably introduced by her cousin, Mademoiselle de La Force, and where she met Baronne d’Aulnoy, Catherine Bernard, and Mademoiselle L’Héritier, also joining the salon that L’Héritier was then hosting on behalf of the aged Mademoiselle de Scudéry.
Murat and Aulnoy were the most prolific producers of salon contes de fées and as soon as Perrault had opened the door to the possibility of publication, they must both have had printers flocking around them, begging to put their contributions to the genre into print while the going was good. Murat responded with alacrity, swiftly adding to her initial assembly of tales, published in two separate volumes in 1698, and a third and markedly different collection issued in 1699. The latter collection almost certainly consisted of work done after Perrault’s success, written with the certainty of publication very much in mind.
These collections of contes de fées were not Murat’s first publication; in 1697 she had published a two-volume work whose first title page bears the title Mémoires de Madame la Comtesse de M***, although there is a second title page that relegates that description to the subtitle, after the title La Défense des dames [The Defense of Ladies] which was probably Murat’s first choice, the other having been given priority by the printer. Many people, perhaps not surprisingly in view of the marketing move made by the printer, seem to have assumed that the book really consisted of memoirs and read it as if it were autobiographical. Indeed, many subsequent accounts of the author’s biography borrowed from it freely, even in the knowledge of considerable contradictions between the narrative of the text and actual documentation of the author’s life.
That confusion still persists today; the author of the French Wikipedia article on Murat points out numerous “inaccuracies” in the narrative but still appropriates other sections of the story as if they were accounts of Murat’s own life. In fact, Mémoires de Madame la Comtesse de M*** is a work of fiction, pure and simple, and although its fundamental argument—that it is sometimes entirely justified for wives to leave their husbands—was evidently one in which Murat had good reason to take an intense interest, the details of the life of the story’s narrator are entirely different from the details of Murat’s life, so far as they can be independently ascertained. The narrator is married at 16 (Murat did not marry until she was 21) at the insistence of her tyrannical father (Murat’s father died while she was a child) and eventually flees domestic abuse with her daughter (Murat fled her marital home with her son). Etc., etc.
It is worth noting in this context that most of the authors involved in the boom in contes de fées including Aulnoy, Bernard, and La Force, had previously published other works, including other prose fiction, all of it historical fiction and much of it belonging to the curious genre of “secret memoirs,” in which first-person narratives were attributed to real (but safely dead) individuals, supposedly relating incidents in their lives that they had been obliged to dissimulate at the time, usually because they were of a mildly scandalous nature. Murat was obviously very familiar with that genre, and her own “memoir” has a great deal in common with it—but in setting it in the recent past rather than the remote past, she was breaking new ground in a slightly risky fashion.
We are now, of course, entirely familiar with the literary strategy of cultivating verisimilitude by passing works of fiction off as “true” memoirs, and few people, even at the time of publication, were likely to mistake the adventures of Robinson Crusoe as a factual memoir, let alone those of Moll Flanders or Lemuel Gulliver. But those were a generation after the publication of Mémoires de Madame la Comtesse de M***, when almost all contemporary works published as memoirs were indeed actual memoirs—which is to say, deliberate self-justificatory lies pretending to actuality rather than works of fiction in search of an essentially ironic verisimilitude. Did Murat realize that her work of fiction would be mistaken by some readers as an account of her own life, and if so, did she come to regret it? Perhaps. One thing that is certain, however, is that it made a considerable contribution to the scandal that followed her around for the rest of her brief life at court and long thereafter. Colorful as it is, though, it is considerably less so than the reports on her conduct compiled by the Lieutenant-General of Louis XIV’s police, some of which still survive. Although innocent of anything that would be acceptable as evidence in a modern court of law, the reports dutifully repeat hearsay that accused Murat of persistent libertinage and lesbianism—and those reports, too, have been incorporated into the accounts of her life compiled by other speculative biographers.
In fact, the scandal surrounding Murat also involved her cousin, Mme. de La Force, and Baronne d’Aulnoy. de la Force had already been banished from the court before her own collection of contes de fées was published in 1697, exiled to a provincial convent where she spent the rest of her life protesting her innocence of the unspecified accusations that had led to her imprisonment. Baronne d’Aulnoy left Paris in 1699 after being implicated by rumor in a plot to murder the abusive husband of a friend. She had been banished from Paris before—and, indeed, from France—after allegedly framing her husband for attempted murder, although he eventually contrived to obtain his release from the Bastille and turned the tables on his accusers. Aulnoy was, however, permitted to return to Paris in 1690 as a result of “services to the crown”—probably rendered as a spy while in exile in Holland. Like Murat, Aulnoy had been forced into an arranged marriage, but she had found a more spectacular fashion of quitting it.
Murat might have been forced to leave Paris in 1700 by the financial ruination of her family rather than the scandal surrounding her—the Marquisat de Castelnau had been sold in 1699—but either way, she resided for a while in Limousin with an aunt on her mother’s side of the family. She was, however, arrested in 1702 following the last of the Lieutenant-General’s reports and imprisoned in the Château de Loches, then one of the largest of France’s state prisons. (In the Age of Louis XIV there was no need for such trivia as formal charges or trials.) Although the conditions of her imprisonment appear to have been moderately lenient, she nevertheless attempted to escape more than once, and she was transferred twice in 1706 before returning to Loches under conditions that seem to have allowed more social interaction. She was eventually allowed to return to Limousin in 1709 in order to live with her aunt, albeit under a kind of house arrest.
Murat did resume writing during her second sojourn in Loches, and she published three further works of fiction in 1708, 1709, and 1710, but none of them was licensed by the royal censors or printed in Paris; all three had a very limited circulation. Two of them have effectively disappeared without a trace; the third, Les Lutins du château de Kernosy (tr. as “The Goblins of Kernosy Castle”), which contained the last two of her contes de fées to be published in her lifetime, survived only by virtue of being reprinted in 1756 by Mademoiselle de Lubert, one of the handful of writers who attempted to resurrect and continue the genre of contes de fées when illicit publication became commonplace in the late 1730s. Murat was in very poor health by the time she was released from Loches, and she published nothing more before her death in 1716. Her career was effectively annihilated by the king’s police—as, in fact, was the genre of which she was briefly the heart and soul.
The first volume of Murat’s first collection of stories was issued by Claude Barbin—the same printer/bookseller who had pushed the Mémoires—as Contes de fées, dédiez a Son Altesse Serenissime Madame la Princesse Doüarière de Conty, par Mad. la Comtesse de M***—the authorial attribution, probably added by the printer, doubtless encouraged the confusion regarding the authenticity of the Mémoires. The dedication is significant as evidence of the protection that Murat enjoyed at the court, which probably prompted the surreptitious police investigation intended to undermine it. There were two Princesses de Conti at the Court in 1698, both the same age, but the one who had been married to the late Prince de Conti, Louis-Armand de Bourbon, was known as the “dowager princess” to distinguish her from the one married to the present Prince, Francis-Louis de Bourbon, the younger brother of his predecessor. Both princesses appear to have been enthusiastic participants in literary salons, including Scudéry’s and Madame de Lambert’s, and both feature extensively in dedications of works by writers associated with the court.
The first volume of Murat’s initial collection contains three stories: “Le Parfait amour” (tr. as “Perfect Love”), “Anguillette” (tr. as “Anguillette”), and “Jeune et belle” (tr. as “Young and Beautiful”). The version of the second volume, Les Nouveaux contes des fées par Madame de M**, that is reproduced on the Bibilothèque Nationale’s gallica website is an edition dated 1710, and there are several other undated editions of the collection in the Bibliothèque Nationale catalogue, presumably also reprints, some of which have variant contents, but other bibliographies record that its original publication was in 1698, surely the correct date; it contains three stories, “Le Palais de la vengeance” (tr. as “The Palace of Vengeance”), “Le Prince des feuilles” (tr. as “The Prince of Leaves”), and “L’Heureuse peine” (tr. as “The Fortunate Penalty”), plus a brief narrative poem.
The first of the six stories can be regarded, along with L’Héritier’s “Les Enchantements de l’éloquence,” as an archetypal conte de fées, one of the primary models that the writers in the genre followed and which established the foundation-stones of its essential mythos. It certainly established the basic pattern and theme of almost all of Murat’s contes and those of the later writers whose inspiration she provided. The “perfect love” to which the title refers is the kind of amour held up by Mademoiselle de Scudéry as a supreme ideal: emotionally and morally absolute, sentimentally all-consuming, and indomitably faithful. In Murat’s story and its many clones, however, the sentiment and the fidelity are subjected to enormous stress applied by relatives and/or jealous rivals intent on breaking the amorous bond between the hero and heroine.
The plots of Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s “novels”—actually multivolume serials—are levered almost entirely by the continual abduction and incarceration of their heroines, and the same is true of contes de fées; in “Le Parfait amour,” as in many of its clones, the heroine is imprisoned from the very beginning by a powerful guardian prepared to move heaven and earth to keep her apart from the hero who loves her, for whom she has plans of her own. The hero is, however, aided in his difficult quest of liberation by a benevolent fay, albeit under conditions that prove awkward to fulfill. Murat takes the melodrama to an extreme; when the hero and heroine are eventually captured by the villainous queen, they undergo ingenious mental and physical torture intended to break their commitment to one another, which brings them both to death’s door. But they do not waver, and they are rescued in the nick of time by a deus ex machina provided by the benevolent fay.
From the very beginning, Murat was intent not only on elaborating that basic schema but also on varying it. The longest of the three stories in her first volume, “Anguillette,” is one of the very few tragic variants of the basic pattern, ending not with the union of its protagonists but with their deaths, following a plot that had first drawn them apart and then confronted them with one another when both are married to other people and their union has thus become impossible, so that their unconquerable attraction can only lead to annihilation. It is significant that having done that once, Murat never did it again, accepting that the conventional “happy ending” was an essential and inviolable part of the formula.
Nevertheless, presumably recalling that her own marriage had been anything but a happy ending, Murat retained a certain subversive cynicism that she appears to have had difficulty setting aside. “Jeune et belle” follows the basic pattern, save for a role-reversal element in which is the “hero” is a young fay and her inamorata a hapless but beautiful shepherd abducted by an ugly, old, and lustful fay—an archetype who was to crop up in many more tales. Although his release is obtained after the customary ration of tortures, the point is explicitly made in the story’s finale that the reunited couple live together long and happily without the intervention of “Hymen”—i.e., without ever getting married.
Murat never did that again either—at least, not so explicitly—but the first story in the second volume of the initial set, which was later singled out as her finest by one of her most enthusiastic followers, the Comte de Caylus, “Le Palais de vengeance,” contrives a more ingenious subversion. After the customary routine of pressure and ordeal, the evil enchanter who has tried everything to break down the resolve of the lovers finally throws in the towel and allows them to be together—but he obtains his revenge by imprisoning and isolating them in a glass palace where they have no alternative but to see one another, and only one another, as long as they live, the suggestion being that the passage of time will eventually transform the anticipated paradise into a kind of hell or at least a purgatory. Once again, having made that skeptical point once, Murat refused to belabor it.
“Le Prince des feuilles” is content to reproduce the basic formula of “Le Parfait amour” in a more elaborate fashion, but the essence of the story lies in the manner of that elaboration. The complication of the plot of “Le Parfait amour” had been obtained by introducing a subsidiary cast of elemental spirits—gnomes, undines, sylphs, and salamanders—who are distinct from fays and enchanters but allied with them. That hypothetical schema is reproduced in other stories by Murat and other members of the initial coterie, with a measure of ambiguity that unites undines with the sirens of classical mythology and adds other nymphs drawn from that source as well as a selection of classical gods—primarily and quintessentially Amour—thus constituting a syncretic supernatural hierarchy.
The complication of “Le Prince des feuilles,” by contrast, is secured by pure invention: the elaboration of a colorful web of unprecedented supernatural inventions that is admirably bizarre, exotic in its deliberate symbolism, and tending in its display to calculated surrealism. In that regard it follows precedents set, a trifle half-heartedly, in “Anguillette,” but it does so more scrupulously and more intensively. Murat apparently decided she had now mapped the way to go in the future; that she did do again and again; and that was what made her, in the view of such enthusiastic successors as Mademoiselle de Lubert and the Comte de Caylus, the principal architect of contes de fées, even more important as a model for later endeavor than the more prolific and more commercially successful Baronne d’Aulnoy.
The final story of Murat’s initial set, “L’Heureuse peine,” is perhaps the weakest of the group although it is certainly not lacking in innovative supernatural apparatus, and its subversive element is a trifle tokenistic, tacking on to a conventional conclusion a comment suggesting that perhaps the marriage will not be happy after all for the simple reason that marriages never are. Perhaps she felt obliged to add that observation to a story presumably composed before Perrault changed the nature of the playing field, and her next set of works, evidently written with the likelihood of publication in mind, is content to employ the convention without challenging it in such a straightforward way. She never abandoned the subversive element in her work, but she refined its ironic rhetoric very considerably as her career advanced.
In 1699, Murat published a portmanteau work, Le Voyage de campagne [An Excursion to the Country], in which a group of travelers tell one another stories in the course of a discussion of various matters of interest to them. Most of the stories are allegedly drawn from their personal histories, but they include one item of fantastic fiction, “Le Père et ses quatre fils” (tr. as “A Father and His Four Sons”), whose teller represents it explicitly as an experiment of sorts: a conte from which fays are deliberately excluded although the other accumulated apparatus of contes de fées remains. Further interest is added to the experiment by the comments surrounding it in the frame narrative, including brief remarks on the appeal and literary propriety of fantastic fiction. The frame story is not as anodyne as the capsule description might make it seem; it is subtly subversive in both political and religious terms, and the characters have utopian aspirations. It is perhaps surprising that it was granted a license but less surprising that it remained one of the author’s most popular works, reprinted several times in the eighteenth century and reproduced in Charles Garnier’s multivolume compendium of Voyages imaginaires, songes, visions et romans cabalistiques (1787–89) along with Mademoiselle de Lubert’s version of Les Lutins du château de Kernosy.
Literary experiments of a far more extravagant kind feature in Murat’s masterpiece, Histoires sublimes et allegoriques par Madame la Comtesse D*** dédiées aux fées moderne—a dedication whose textual expansion suggests strongly that what she means by “modern fays” is her fellow writers rather than their characters—published later that same year. It contains four stories: “Le Roi porc” (tr. as “The Swine King”), “L’Isle de Magnificence” (tr. as “The Isle of Magnificence”), “Le Sauvage” (tr. as “The Savage”), and “Le Turbot” (tr. as “The Turbot”). Although Mademoiselle L’Héritier used the terms conte, histoire, and nouvelle interchangeably, Murat probably had a distinction in mind in choosing to label the stories in her 1699 collection histoires rather than contes, the label she invariably used elsewhere, and she surely meant to imply more than the fact that the stories are longer than those in her 1698 collections. Whereas all the stories in the earlier collections are set in “the time of the fays,” a remote mythical past, only the first of the four stories in the 1699 collection follows that convention; the other three all contain references establishing that they are set in the year 1697 and that the lands in which fays operate are only separated pseudogeographically from contemporary France—a modification that has corollary implications regarding the slightly ambiguous nature of their fictitious fays.
Title page of Histoires sublimes et allegoriques
from gallica
The second and fourth stories in Histoires sublimes et allégoriques are peculiar novellas, portmanteau works less orthodox than Le Voyage de campagne, in which several narratives are carefully interwoven in a fashion that later became known as “the Galland method” because of its elaborate use in Antoine Galland’s Les Mille et une nuits (12 volumes, 1704–17). Portmanteau works had been common for a long time before 1699, and such packaging could even be regarded as the principal mode of presentation of prose fiction prior to 1700, but most previous examples of its use had simply inserted stories into a frame like beads on a string, rarely overlapping and entangling them as Murat did deliberately and intricately in “L’Isle de Magnificence” and “Le Turbot.” Both stories are also remarkable for the imaginative extravagance of some of their subplots—an extravagance that is also evident in the other two stories in the collection but has far more scope in the novellas, and thus exceeds considerably the inventive adventurousness of “Le Prince des feuilles.”
“L’Isle de Magnificence” features, among other innovations, an elaborate depiction of a civilization contained in caves beneath the sea bed, devoid of light and also of women, necessitating a highly unusual biological mechanism of reproduction. The society is barely sketched out before its observer—one of three brothers exiled from the titular island for having carelessly violated an injunction of its fay queen—has to return to the surface in order to complete his part in the intricate frame, but it is a superbly surreal invention. In “Le Turbot,” the manner in which the fay queen of the Isle of Rocks contrives to counter the improbable conditions imposed by a rival for the liberation and re-transformation of a Prince metamorphosed into a butterfly is a tour de force of intricate absurdist plotting.
In both novellas, and also in “Le Sauvage,” the deliberate linkage of the stories to the year 1697 relates to a specific event in that year: the marriage of the Duc de Bourgogne, the son of the Dauphin, to Princesse Marie-Adelaïde de Savoie, arranged by a clause in an important political treaty, which became the excuse for the most lavish party ever held at Versailles, extending over several days. It was the great social event of the brief heyday of contes de fées and was coopted not only by Murat but formed the centerpiece for one of the few contes de fées to obtain a royal prerogative after 1699 as part of an exceedingly curious aftermath of the genre’s abortion, the bizarre and significantly titled novella La Tiranie des fees détruite (1703; tr. as “The Tyranny of the Fays Abolished”)—but that is a story I shall take up in the next article in the present series.
We can, of course, only speculate as to how Murat’s literary career might have developed if it had not been for the personal disasters that afflicted her after 1699, but it is a safe assumption that she could and probably would have continued the pattern of elaboration begun in Histoires sublimes et allégoriques and produced even more complex and adventurous works of fantastic fiction. In any event, her production was completely disrupted although some bibliographies credit her with an exceedingly elusive work entitled Un Dialogue des morts [A Conversation with the dead] (1700), that might be a phantom title. When she did return to literary endeavor, it was in a markedly different vein. Histoire de la courtesane Rhodope [The Story of the Courtesan Rhodope] (1708) and Histoire galantes des habitants de Loches [The Story of the Gallant Inhabitants of Loches] (1709) presumably have more in common with the salacious secret memoir genre than her contes de fées, to judge by their titles. The latter is reported by J.-M. Quérard in La France Littéraire (1829) to be a satire inspired by and imitative of Alain-René Lesage’s Le Diable boiteux (1707), while he simply annotates the former as “unfinished.” (The conscientious Quérard also observes in his annotations that Mémoires de Madame la Comtesse de M*** is a work of fiction, not an autobiography, but the observation went largely unheeded.)
Les Lutins du château de Kernosy is, however, a fascinating portmanteau novel which provides a more interesting context for its two interpolated contes de fées, “Peau d’ours” (tr. as “Bearskin”) and “Étoilette” (tr. as “Starlet”), than Le Voyage de campagne had done for its much slighter inclusion. The juxtaposition of the second story with its supposed author’s account of his own experiences offers an interesting comparison between narratives that contain and exemplify elements of common sentiment, and the embedding of both those exemplary tales in the more elaborate frame adds a third layer to the comparative dimension, making up a unique and intriguing whole that raises many questions regarding the functions and the appeal of storytelling. It is not clear whether the two contes de fées were written after 1699 or whether they were recovered from the initial phase of the author’s career, but the latter seems more probable.
Other stories were belatedly added to Murat’s canon; the first of them to be published, in an unsigned illicit 1718 collection entitled Nouveaux contes de fées, was “Le Buisson d’épines fleuries” [The Flowery Thorn-Bush]; none of the other stories in the collection appear to be hers, but a manuscript version of that particular story was apparently found among Murat’s papers, where it bore the title “La Fée Princesse” [i.e., a fay named Princess] (tr. as “The Fay Princess”). The attribution is surely correct; appearances suggest strongly that the story belongs to the earlier phase of Murat’s writing of contes de fées, and it is possible that it was not included in her first collection because the portrayal of the King in the story might have seemed a trifle risky to the author and printer alike in terms of granting it a license. Like “Peau d’ours” and “Étoilette,” it is typical of her work in many ways, featuring her characteristic imaginative extravagance, the extreme stress to which she routinely subjects her heroes and heroines, and its deliberately anomalous conclusion.
It is impossible now to determine whether there was any truth at all in the scandalous gossip that circulated regarding the initial coterie of writers of contes de fées, and it would be very dangerous indeed to jump to any conclusions as to what that truth might have been. The reports issued by the Lieutenant-General of police, however, confirm that two charges in particular were central to the accusations: libertinism and lesbianism. The former is not particularly significant; given the ambience of the court and the examples set by the royal family, there could have been very few members who were not suspected of libertinism. In terms of its etiquette and ostensible standards, however, the court was effectively ruled in the 1690s by the redoubtable Madame de Maintenon, no longer the king’s official mistress but still his most trusted advisor and—it now seems—secretly his wife, whose personal circumstances could make her moral posturing seems a trifle hypocritical. Nevertheless, the general rule seems to have been that people could get away with anything but that they must not, as the Victorians later said, “do it in the street and frighten the horses.” Private vice and public decency was very much the order of the day—in the clergy as well as, if not more so, than the laity.
In those circumstances, it was perfectly possible for Mademoiselle de Scudéry always to call herself by the nickname “Sapho” and to maintain her close relationship with her protégée, Mademoiselle L’Héritier—who likewise never married—without generating any considerable breath of overt scandal. Catherine Bernard, who also never married, was similarly little affected by overt scandal although she had found it politic to convert ostentatiously to Catholicism when her Huguenot faith became a liability; she kept a lower social profile than her fellows although she was the one with the most securely founded literary reputation. Mademoiselle de La Force, similarly unmarried, was not so fortunate. But the real problem that attracted unwelcome attraction to the coterie was the more flamboyant misbehavior of Baronne d’Aulnoy and the Comtesse de Murat, both married but both long estranged from the husbands they had acquired against their will, in unusually defiant circumstances. In their cases, the charge of libertinism seemed easy to sustain as both women bore children long after their separation from their husbands, but the accusations of lesbianism could not be subject to any such confirmation and had to remain speculative although the Lieutenant-General recorded some highly suggestive incidents in his account of Murat’s rumored conduct.
It is, of course, perfectly possible now to take the view that whatever the members of the coterie might have done in private was entirely their own affair, and they probably thought the same—but they were living in a society that doggedly maintained a glossy surface of intolerance and in which the Church, no matter how corrupt it might have been, was still a very powerful source of legally enforceable moral censorship. It was extremely dangerous for the members of the coterie, if they were doing anything of which Madame de Maintenon and the Church might disapprove, to allow that surface to crack let alone to shatter. Some of them, evidently, ran that risk—Murat most of all, although La Force and Aulnoy were the first ones penalized—and they paid the price.
They pay the price personally and also took the genre they had created down with them, at least in terms of obtaining royal prerogatives for publication. It was still in bad odor 30 years later when it was necessary for the writers who continued its evolution most ingeniously and most interestingly—Mademoiselle de Lubert, Madame de Villeneuve, and the Comte de Caylus—to publish their work anonymously and illicitly. They were able do so because illicit publications had swelled from a trickle in the early 1700s to a veritable flood by 1730, thus creating a market space that was essentially perverse and hypocritical, able to contain all the literary and philosophical masterpieces of the era and to contribute far more to the legacy of literary and intellectual history than the vast majority of what the royal censors were prepared to license.
From the viewpoint of literary analysis and criticism, however, the strange situation in which the original contes de fées were produced and the awkward evolution by unnatural selection to which they were subjected, raises certain interesting questions. Even before they were published, and certainly afterwards, contes de fées constituted part of the surface that their authors presented to society, parading and exemplifying an explicit morality that deliberately went beyond the apparent standard, in calculatedly ironic contrast to the behavior of which they were suspected. In those circumstances, one can hardly avoid wondering whether, beneath their own glossy surface, subtexts might be lurking in the stories, all the more so in view of the frequent symbolism and occasional surrealism of the genre.
In any sophisticated reading of contes de fées, therefore, it is good to remember that they were initially conceived by a group of writers who were at the very heart of French aristocratic society, on the fringes of the court—and not just any court but the legendary court of Louis XIV—but that there is a sense in which they did not feel that they really belonged to that society. They were writers and feminists, and however they might have organized their private and sentimental lives, they definitely did not fit the conventional stereotype of the virtuous aristocratic wife. In their stories, they established that stereotype as the ultimate goal of all their beautiful heroines, for whom the only conceivable fulfilling ending is a happy marriage to a handsome prince—but there is an important sense in which they did not identify with their heroines but with their fays. Murat was not the only member of the group to point out that a fay is, in essence, a deus ex machina—which is to say, an arbitrary intrusion whose function is to contrive the prescribed ending of a story—and she knew that that observation entailed the assertion that a fay is the representative of the story’s author, operating in a calculatedly brutal but essentially deceptive fashion.
That observation does not exhaust the interesting question of what the fays of contes de fées are supposed to be, and why they are the way they are, which might well need further elaboration in the future. Another point worth making here is that one of the most distinctive features of the original contes de fées is not something present within them but something extremely conspicuous by its absence: the Christian religion and its God. Much supernatural fiction—indeed, most of it—finds that inclusion perfectly natural and fruitful; indeed, many “fairy tales” derived from contes de fées substituted witches for nasty fays, and many of them found the Devil a very convenient plot lever. If contes de fées had, in fact, been based on folktales, as they have sometimes been thought to be by willfully blind commentators, they would have been replete with the Devil and his minions, but there is no trace of them in the original and authentic contes de fées, and it is a highly significant omission. The only god featured therein is Amour, occasionally supplemented by his mother and such minor symbolic deities as Flora and Zephyr, but the world of the fays has no need of any other redeemer, and it has no ultimate tyrant but an impersonal Destiny. That is one reason, of course, why the Church disapproved of them at the time and thereafter, but the genre’s utter and flagrant contempt for that disapproval was in place beforehand, built into the plan.
The original composition of the authentic contes de fées was a private and clandestine activity, a kind of salon game, but as such, it still had to be subjected to a careful diplomatic censorship. As soon as the tales crossed the dangerous frontier into the realm of print, braving its customs posts, that censorship became extreme; the acquisition of the licenses required to reach print, even when it became possible, was awkward and difficult. All works that hoped to acquire such licenses were, of necessity, conscientiously coated in thick layers of diplomacy, flattery, hypocrisy, and artificiality. In that context, the fashionability of contes de fées, both before and after Perrault opened the loophole of publishing opportunity, needs to be considered with a severely ironic eye and a deep suspicion of their superficial rhetoric. Because the Comtesse de Murat’s work is the most varied, most adventurous, and most sophisticated oeuvre within the first flourish of the genre, it is the most interesting in that regard.
Murat’s stories are fundamentally stories written by an aristocrat for an audience of aristocrats about an imaginary world that is in large measure a transfiguration of Versailles in its heyday, full of princes and princesses who have absolutely nothing to do but watch “fêtes” and “spectacles” and fall in love with one another under the ever-lurking threat of ennui. But they are stories written by a clear-sighted renegade aristocrat for an audience of clear-sighted renegade aristocrats who knew perfectly well that all the fêtes and spectacles in the world cannot hope to keep ennui at bay for long and that falling in love, no matter with whom, will always let you down one way or another—and precisely because they knew that, they also knew the full value of pretending that it might not be so within the fictitious world of an absurdly fantastic story. No one handled and embellished the rhetoric of that consciousness better than the Comtesse de Murat, and that is why the most determined and most clear-sighted of the writers who attempted to continue the genre of contes de fées after its deliberate assassination chose her as their primary exemplar.
Brian Stableford lives in Hadleigh, Essex. The Palace of Vengeance and Other Tales of Enchantment by Henriette-Julie de Murat, containing translations of all the stories cited above, will be published by Black Coat Press in the autumn of 2018, following The Robe of Sincerity and Other Stories by Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier de Villandon and The Land of Delights: Tales of Enchantment by Charlotte-Rose Caumont de La Force. The project is ongoing.
Cover to the Black Coat Press edition of
The Palace of Vengeance and Other Tales of Enchantment
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