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In a previous article in this series (“Tales of the Fays: The Comtesse De Murat and the Origins of Fantasy,” NYRSF #347), I offered a brief sketch of the work done in the genre of contes de fées [defined there for operational purposes as “tales of fays”] by the Comtesse de Murat, claiming that it was the most influential work done in the genre by any of its five originators in terms of its influence on subsequent writers who attempted to carry it further, even though it was never as popular with other readers as the work of Baronne d’Aulnoy.
In referring to “five originators” I am, of course, only referring to the five writers who contrived to publish work in the genre during the brief period of possibility that lasted from 1696 to 1699, the other three being Mademoiselle L’Héritier, Catherine Bernard, and Mademoiselle de La Force. (Perrault does not count, for reasons explained in the previous article.) There would, of course, have been other women in the salons where the stories originated who dabbled in writing them but who did not achieve publication during that brief period. It seems highly probable that the one significant writer who made her debut in the genre in the first decade of the eighteenth century had also been a member of the coterie, but she contrived to keep her identity completely secret for understandable reasons, and she is now known to bibliographers by a completely fictitious name, one which has a curious history of its own. Her posthumously attached pseudonym is surely not the only nonexistent person with an entry in the catalogue of the Bibliothèque Nationale and a Wikipedia entry, but her “history” must be one of the most peculiar.
The author in question made her debut with a volume entitled La Tyranie des fées détruite, nouveaux contes, dédiez à Madame la Duchesse de Bourgogne par la Comtesse D.L. [The tyranny of the fairies destroyed, new tales, dedicated to Madame la Duchesse de Bourgogne by Countess D.L.], published in Paris by Jean Fournil under royal privilege in 1703. She followed it up with a second, Les Chevaliers Errans et le Genie familier par Madame la Comtesse D** [Knights errant and the familiar Genie by Countess D**], published by Pierre Ribou, similarly under royal privilege, in 1709. At some point in the mid–eighteenth century the name “Madame d’Auneuil” seems to have been suggested as the possible author of the former collection, probably by someone who could not spell “Aulnoy” (Madame d’Aulnoy was definitely not its author), but Joseph de La Porte, the scrupulous historian of eighteenth century female authors, who published his exhaustive work in the 1760s makes no mention of the author in question, and although Charles Meyer, the editor of the Cabinet des fées, compiled in the 1780s, cited the name, it was only to express his conviction that no such person had ever existed.
In spite of that skepticism, the name was reproduced, and it was given an official endorsement of sorts when it was included in Antoine-Alexandre Barbier’s 1806 Dictionnaire des ouvrages anonymes. More recently, the Bibliothèque Nationale’s catalogue has expanded it to “Louise de Bossigny, Comtesse d’Auneuil,” and a Wikipedia entry attached to that name adds the dates 1670–1730, although the Bibliothèque Nationale does not, and the figures are obviously purely conjectural. In spite of the Bibliothèque Nationale’s acceptance and expansion of the name, however, there is no surviving evidence of the existence of a Comte or Comté d’Auneuil in the relevant period, and the commune of Auneuil in the département of the Oise in Picardy never had such a title attached to it. Nor does the surname “de Bossigny” seem to exist anywhere else than in the BN attribution. In view of those circumstances, I am strongly inclined to trust the judgment of La Porte and Meyer and conclude that “Madame d’Auneuil” is entirely fictitious.
Whoever was actually responsible for them, however, the two works in question are certainly the work of the same author; the stylistic eccentricities that they have in common leave no room for doubt. The collection Les Illustres fées (1710), credited to Auneuil in some modern sources, on the other hand, is certainly not by the same author; that confusion arose because the collection in question was reprinted in the same volume of Meyer’s Cabinet des fées—the fifth (1785)—as a later version of La Tyrannie [sic] des fées détruite, which had been edited for republication in 1756 by Mademoiselle de Lubert.
The two volumes were among a mere handful of collections of new contes de fées that appeared after 1700, although several of those produced in the initial boom of 1696–99 were reprinted frequently after the turn of the century. As explained in the previous article, by 1700 the clique of salon writers initially responsible for the vogue had disintegrated spectacularly. Of the original coterie, only Catherine Bernard and Mademoiselle L’Héritier remained in Paris after 1700. Only the latter attempted to publish any more fantastic fiction after that date in a collection of which only one volume appeared (two were planned and advertised) and which does not feature fays, although one of its novellas became the basis of a famous “fairy story” after an abridged German plagiarism was collected and further rewritten by the Brothers Grimm. The scandal surrounding the group had cast such a dark shadow over the genre they created that it made the royal privileges required for publication of new works of that kind direly difficult to come by in spite of their manifest popularity with the burgeoning reading public.
Against that background, perhaps the wonder is that Comtesse D.L., whoever she was, obtained a royal privilege when they were so difficult to come by, but that becomes far easier to understand when one actually reads the title story of La Tyranie des fées détruite (tr. as “The Tyranny of the Fays Abolished”) which is, in essence, an exercise in egregious flattery. Flattery of the royal family was, of course, extremely commonplace in all the literature produced by Louis XIV’s courtiers, but Comtesse D.L. went to an unprecedented and highly unusual extreme in the novella is question; the appendix to the title, “dédiez à Madame la Duchesse de Bourgogne” is no commonplace dedication, as the Duchesse de Bourgogne not only features as a character in the story but plays the role of a messianic redeemer who abolishes the seemingly unassailable tyranny of the evil fays simply by means of her charismatic and majestic presence.
La Force and Murat had already pointed out to their colleagues that, seen as a narrative device, fées were a modern substitute for the deus ex machina of ancient Greek drama. Comtesse D.L., who must have been aware of that remark, was consciously employing a real person as a deus ex machina in order to abolish others of a different breed, tacitly declaring the end of an era and perhaps of a genre—although the author spoiled that effect slightly by continuing to publish more contes in which fées have not only not been abolished but are represented in the full glory of their empery. Indeed, although she might have chosen her title in order to suggest to the royal censors that she was celebrating the assassination of the salon coterie and the genre they had invented, her actual ambition was to carry forward their work and specifically the work of elaboration and diversification begun by the Comtesse de Murat in her 1699 collection, Histoires sublimes et allegoriques par Madame la Comtesse D*** dédiées aux fées modern, especially the two novellas “L’Isle de Magnificence (tr. as “The Isle of Magnificence”) and “Le Turbot” (tr. a “The Turbot”).
Comtesse D.L. had obviously read Murat’s collection, and although she was not nearly as polished or as imaginative a writer as Murat, she was certainly trying to take over where Murat had left off. The title novella of her first collection employs a method of story construction developing portmanteaux of interconnected tales that soon became known as the “Galland method” because Antoine Galland made such extravagant use of it in Les Mille et une nuits (1704–17), although it was Murat who had actually done the initial groundwork. The adaptation of that method in “La Tyranie des fées détruite” is crude and tentative, but in “Les Chevaliers errans” (tr. as “The Knights Errant”)—which is her most impressive story, in spite of a certain clumsiness and disorganization—it is carried forward very extravagantly.
Another significant innovation introduced by Murat in her 1699 collection was to provide datable references establishing that three of her stories are not set in a pseudohistorically distant “time of the fays,” as previous contributions to the genre had been, but in the present day, so that the imaginary world of the fays becomes a kind of parallel world coexistent with and occasionally overlapping our own. All those references are to a single specific event viewed at a distance by the characters in the stories with the aid of fay magic: the wedding at Versailles on 7 December 1697 of Louis XIV’s grandson, the Duc de Bourgogne, then 15 years old, and his cousin, Marie-Adélaïde de Savoie, a result of the Treaty of Turin, by virtue of which Savoy switched sides in the Nine Years War and became France’s ally. The marriage was preceded by several days of magnificent fêtes and was the high point of court life during the brief boom in contes de fées—a genre whose imaginary world is, in effect, Versailles and its cultural satellites as seen through a distorting mirror. Murat was present at those celebrations and so, presumably, was the Comtesse D.L. Murat diplomatically does not mention in her references to the event that the bride was just eleven years old, and neither does “La Tyranie des fées détruite.”
Presumably, the young duchess, who was several years older by the time La Tyranie des fées détruite was published, and must by then have come into contact with contes de fées, appreciated the role she played in the story; the royal censor must have checked with the Duc’s household before granting the privilege for its publication. She was not to know, of course—and neither were Murat and Comtesse D.L.—that her tenure would not last long. Shortly after her husband became the Dauphin of France, following the death of his father in 1711, the duchess died of measles, in February 1712; he insisted on staying by her bedside throughout, caught the disease, and followed her to the grave within a week, followed in his turn by his eldest son, leaving the younger one to succeed to the throne as Louis XV after the death of Louis XIV in 1715. Nobody has ever suggested, even in jest, that the fays might have been striking back in response to the insult, but what is certain is that after 1711 new contes de fées virtually disappeared from the French literary scene for a generation until they made a spectacular comeback in the context of a boom in publications whose authors and printers simply decided to do without the royal privilege and publish anything for which there was a public demand—an inherently perilous strategy, as it put a huge sector of the publishing industry outside the law, but one that had an enormous impact on French culture and literary history.
Les Chevaliers errans was one of the last volumes produced in the first phase of the history of contes des fées when the genre already seemed decadent, if not extinct. It is by no means one of the finest in terms of its literary quality, but it is one of the most adventurous and enterprising, still attempting to push forward a pattern of progress that, when it was eventually taken up again, continued to lay important groundwork for modern fantasy fiction. The title novella not only attempted to take Murat’s narrative strategy of interwoven portmanteaux to a new extreme, but deliberately attempted to reconnect contes de fées with the their most important precursor genre, that of twelfth- and thirteenth-century prose romances.
It is not an accident that the best and most adventurous writer active in the renewal of contes de fées in the 1730s and 1740s, Mademoiselle de Lubert, not only took her principal influence from the same novellas by Murat that provided Comtesse D.L. with her inspiration but edited a version of La Tyranie des fées détruite for republication, attempting to tidy up some of the clumsiness of its composition. That version remained the only practically accessible version for the next two centuries and more until Google Books and gallica recovered the original, as well as the long-lost Les Chevaliers errans. It is only now that the nature of their contribution to the evolution of the genre can be clearly seen and properly evaluated.
The subsidiary stories in the 1703 collection are undistinguished, although “Agatie, princesse des Scites” (tr. as “Agatie, Princess of the Scyths”) is interesting in its attempt to connect “the time of the fays” to actual history and geography, introducing a dose of realpolitik into its storyline. It is not surprising that when she continued her quest, she elected to do so with the aid of a robust model of post-Quixotic knightly perfection, Elmedor of Granada, and although one or two of the fellow knights errant he picks up along his way are considerably less perfect, he is careful to tell them to stand back and look after the ladies and the horses when the time comes for his climactic confrontation with the forces of evil.
The second portmanteau in the later collection is interrupted, like the final story in the first collection, and rudely aborted; the mock-Oriental frame narrative containing the interpolated stories is simply abandoned as if forgotten. Nor does “La Princesse Patientine dans la forest d’Erimente” (tr. as “Princess Patientine in the Forest of Erimente”), the interpolated story that actually concludes the printed text, fit that pseudo-Gallandesque frame, seemingly having been transplanted from an alien fictional world, that of the allegorical sector of the classical conte de fées. It is, however, a striking work in its fashion and perhaps the most brutally honest work produced within the coterie.
The story’s representation of contemporary marriage as a matter of innocent young women barely out of childhood falling into the brutal hands of disgusting ogres who abuse them horribly is only par for the course. What is unusual is the conclusion of the tale in which Prince Courageous, eager to do battle against the monsters protecting the cave where his beloved princess is being held captive, is sternly told to put away his unnecessary sword, this particular rescue being women’s work. When the rescue is complete, the prince is graciously permitted to continue adoring the princess, provided that he never lays a finger on her, while she enjoys a perfect bliss with her steadfast female best friend under the tutelage of their benign protectress, the fay Clementine.
Tales produced at Louis XIV’s court, whether in writing or in action, were not usually allowed to end like that because it was not an ending to which royal and customary privilege was usually granted, but that one sneaked in in disguise. Comtesse D.L./Comtesse D** then disappeared from view completely, censored out of history, if not completely out of print, and to this day, she has only been replaced in the official record by a phantom who probably originated as a spelling mistake.
The writer who rescued La Tyranie des Fées détruite from oblivion half a century after its publication appears to have been baptized Marie-Madeleine de Lubert (1702–1785), but she was also known as Marguerite de Lubert, perhaps to distinguish her from her mother, who was also named Marie-Madeleine. She was one of the more prolific writers of eighteenth-century contes de fées, publishing several long novellas in the form of booklets. All of them were published anonymously and illicitly, devoid of the royal license required for authorized printing, and advertising false places of publication on their title pages.
Mademoiselle de Lubert was the daughter of a lawyer attached to the Parlement de Paris, Louis de Lubert. She is known to have exchanged correspondence with Voltaire, who wrote a poem about her in 1732 addressing her as “Muse et Grace.” Otherwise, little appears to be known about her life; Joseph La Porte, in volume 4 of his invaluable Histoire des Femmes Célèbres dans la littérature françoise (1769), states that he cannot comment on her character, not having the privilege of being acquainted with her, but describes her as “retiring and studious” and comments that she “has preferred liberty to the engagements of marriage.”
Lubert’s first fantastic tale to be published, in 1737, was Tecserion, (tr. as “Tecserion; or, The Prince of Ostriches”). It was reprinted in 1743 as Sec et noir, ou la Princesse des Fleurs et le Prince des Autruches (the replacement title unpacked the anagram of the earlier one), along with five other separately published novellas: La Princesse Lionnette et le prince Coquerico, (tr. as “Princess Lionnette and Prince Coquerico”), Le Prince Glacé et la princesse Étincelante (tr. as “Prince Frozen and Princess Sparkling”), La Princesse Camion (tr. as “Princess Camion”), La Princesse Couleur de rose et le prince Celadon [roughly, Princess Pink and Prince Blue], and La Princesse Sensible et le prince Typhon. Like many other unlicensed publications in the same genre, the 1743 volumes appear to have been designed to be sold primarily by colporteurs (itinerant salesmen) rather than in bookshops. Treated as ephemeral publications, most of them soon disappeared from view and are now phenomenally scarce; even the Bibliothèque Nationale does not have a complete set.
The author published a few other items similar to the 1743 batch of novellas later in life, but most of her subsequent literary work consisted of editing earlier works for republication, including a four-volume edition of the Spanish Romance Amadis de Gaules (1750) and a new version of the Comtesse de Murat’s 1710 novel Les Lutins du château de Kernosy (tr. as “The Goblins of Kernosy Castle”) as well as the new version of La Tyrannie des fées détruite. It was Lubert’s version of the last-named title, published in 1756, that was reprinted in Charles Mayer’s 41-volume Cabinet des Fées in the late 1780s, along with La Princesse Lionnette et le prince Coquerico, Le Prince Glacé et la princesse Étincelante, and La Princesse Camion, just as it was Lubert’s version of the Murat title that was reprinted by Charles Garnier in his similar multivolume set of Voyages imaginaires, songes, visions et romans cabalistiqes (1787–89).
Two further fantastic novellas subsequently reprinted in the Nouveau cabinet des fées, one of them signed “histoire traduire de l’arabe par M. Degdacobub” have also been also attributed to Mademoiselle de Lubert, but the anonymity of unlicensed publications often made subsequent attributions dubious, and those may not be reliable. The scarcity of reprints of her works meant that they remained relatively obscure until the end of the twentieth century when Gallimard reprinted Tecserion in 1997. The publication in 2005 by Honoré Champion of a definitive collection of tales attributed to her, simply entitled Contes, edited by Aurélie Zygel-Basso, then sparked a flurry of academic interest.
Although she was not the most commercially successful of the writers who attempted to continue the Comtesse de Murat’s quest to elaborate contes de fées in the 1740s, in artistic terms Lubert succeeded more fully and more extravagantly than any of her contemporaries with the partial exception of Madame de Villeneuve, author of the novella “Le Belle et la bête” (1740; tr. as “The Beauty and the Beast”; cf. NYRSF 338), also very obviously modeled on Murat’s work, which is the classic of the period, although it suffered the ignominy of being overtaken in popularity and renown by a much inferior abridged plagiarism, which is the basis for most English versions of “Beauty and the Beast.” Villeneuve’s other long fantasy, “Les Nayades” (tr. as The Naiads), was only published posthumously in 1765, and does not feature fays. Like both Murat and Villeneuve, however, Lubert did not receive much encouragement for her ambitious experimentation, and after the striking originality of Tecserion she seems to have reined in her imaginative exuberance somewhat. However, both La Princesse Camion and Le Prince Glacé et la princesse Étincelante remain flamboyant and intent on defying conventional expectations, and La Princesse Lionnette et le prince Coquerico, which satisfies those expectations in its ultimate conclusion, certainly takes a baroque scenic route in getting there.
Although the stories making up the 1743 set were presumably written over a period of time, they were still the product of a relatively short interval in the author’s long life and must represent a narrow phase in her literary and intellectual development. Unsurprisingly, therefore, they have certain motifs and preoccupations in common, particularly the fascination extravagantly displayed in three of them with metamorphoses of humans into animals, further reflected in the ambiguous naming of realms and individuals—usages employed abundantly in Murat’s 1699 collection. Such metamorphoses were and remained a common motif within the genre as part of its standard repertoire of narrative devices, but no other writer ever deployed it with the same bizarre variety and fascination as Lubert does in Tecserion, La Princesse Camion, and La Princesse Lionnette et le prince Coquerico.
Although Le Prince Glacé et la princesse Étincelante is slightly exceptional in its neglect of metamorphosis as a plot lever, it nevertheless has much in common with the others in its employment of erotically motivated fays and enchanters to harass the young lovers whose awful tribulations provide the core substance of the plots, as well as in the remarkable convolution of its storyline, and in its determination to provide a conclusion in some way distinct from the stereotypical formula. It has particularly close connections with Tecserion, carrying forward that story’s slightly peculiar fascination with the spoliation inflicted on amorous relationships by coquetry and infidelity.
Tecserion begins with an explanatory “preliminary discourse,” but the apology for contes de fées provided by the brief essay is deliberately disingenuous, and it would probably be a mistake to regard it as if it were an honest reflection of the author’s attitude to the genre. The preface claims—as prefaces to works of fantastic fiction are often prone to do—that the story is intended purely for the frivolous amusement of readers, and contains no “mystery” or “allegory” warranting further critical analysis or decoding. No one who reads the story sensitively, however, especially its elaborate description of the strange utopian society of the planet Venus, could possibly believe that claim for an instant. There are doubtless aspects of Tecserion that are there simply because they are colorful and decorative, delighting in the free play of the imagination for its own sake, but the narrative muscle and momentum of the story, as in Lubert’s other novellas, is provided by their ironic celebration of and skeptical commentary on the mythology of Amour.
Like several of the other leading writers of contes de fées, Lubert never married—and those who did, most notably Aulnoy, Murat and Villeneuve, had woefully unsuccessful and exceedingly unfulfilling marriages that disintegrated long before they wrote their stories—but she clearly had solid experiential grounds for an intense appreciation of the many difficulties involved in the actual rather than the fictitious contrivance of “happy endings.” She knew perfectly well that the reason why many of the readers at whom her works were aimed found such stories a delight to read was precisely that they provide parables of the operation of an imaginary ideal Amour, ritualistically affirming convictions that actual experience could not possibly support. In defending contes de fées against the frequent charge of absurdity Lubert had no other practical resource than the apologetic claim that their absurdity was essentially unserious, but the actual rhetoric of her work is far more sophisticated than that, and that is what made it genuinely experimental and exploratory, precisely because of its “mystery” and its “allegory.”
Because Tecserion is the most ambitious of her works, it is also, arguably, the most flawed in terms of its confusion and its inconsistency; it gives the impression very strongly of having been made up as the author went along with no certainty as what conclusion she actually wanted to contrive, let alone how to get there, but for that reason it has a unique fascination. Several of her other stories are more coherent and more competently organized, but the sacrifice of the sheer bizarrerie of Tecserion had costs as well as benefits. It is arguable that “La Princesse Camion” strikes the best balance between quasi-surreal extravagance and narrative discipline; there is a certain justice in the fact that it is now the best known of Lubert’s works by virtue of its more frequent reprinting. The expectation-defying conclusion of Le Prince Glacé et la princesse Étincelante is also a strong recommendation, however, and although La Princesse Lionnette et le prince Coquerico is more conventional, the unusual elaboration of the character of the aged fay Cornue and her doomed quest to win the heart of Prince Coquerico gives it an exceptional narrative energy. That quest is, in essence, a recapitulation of the confused efforts made in Tecserion by le roi des Autruches (the King of the Ostriches) and Ranuncule [Ranunculus, or Buttercup] to seduce Belzamine and Melidor respectively, but the consistency of its obsession in La Princesse Lionnette et le prince Coquerico gives it a greater narrative force.
By virtue of such interrelationships, Lubert’s work in the genre constitutes a whole greater than the sum of its parts and presents a multifaceted insight into the mind and method of one of the most ingenious and enterprising writers of her era. The fugitive publication of her works prevented her from receiving in her lifetime the critical attention and acclaim that she merited, and provided a considerable barrier to subsequent historical interest, but its recent rediscovery has paved the way for a reappraisal that can only work to her benefit.
The most prolific of Mademoiselle de Lubert’s contemporaries in the endeavor to carry forward the Comtesse de Murat’s quest published two volumes of Féeries nouvelles anonymously in 1741, allegedly (but falsely) in The Hague, which were subsequently attributed to the author whose full name is nowadays said to have been Anne-Claude-Philippe de Tubières-Grimoard de Pestels de Levis, Comte de Caylus, Marquis d’Esterhazy, Baron de Bransac (1692–1765) but who only used the title Comte de Caylus for purposes of identification and was known to his relatives and friends as Philippe. He published a third volume, Cinq contes de fées, also anonymously, in 1745, without any indication as to its publisher or place of publication.
Some 30 years later, two more stories were published by the widow Duchesne in a small volume, Tout vient à point à qui peut attendre, ou Cadichon, suivi par Jeannette, ou L’Indscrétion, contes par feu le comte de Caylus [“Everything Works Out for Him who Can Wait; or, Cadichon,” followed by “Jeannette; or, Indiscretion,” tales by the late Comte de Caylus] (1775), which contains a preface that must have been written with the intention of publishing the volume while the author was alive, probably in 1760 or thereabouts. Although it is unsigned, it confirms that he was the author of the two previous volumes, and also refers to his exploits in Egyptology in a fashion that renders his identity recognizable.
It is possible that the four volumes in question do not contain the full set of the Comte de Caylus’s endeavors in the genre of contes de fées, but the preface to the final volume implies that they do, and the other stories featuring fays that have been sometimes been attributed to him by various speculative bibliographers are probably not his. The catalogue of the Bibliothèque Nationale notes that Cinq contes de fées had been speculatively attributed (before 1775) by Joseph de La Porte to Madame de Villeneuve, but La Porte was very hesitant in that suggested attribution, and the point is only worth mentioning to illustrate the difficulty that contemporary bibliographers routinely had in identifying the authors of anonymous works published without a license from the royal censors. A famous and well-connected man with a considerable reputation as a scholar, Caylus thought it politic to publish many of his works anonymously and illicitly with false title pages often claiming publication outside France, although they were certainly printed in Paris. The bulk of the fiction attributed to him, including all of his contes de fées, was reprinted under his name in a twelve-volume set of Oeuvres badines complettes [“Complete Playful Works”] compiled in 1787 by Charles Garnier, and that became the definitive compendium of his illicit works, but the accuracy of Garnier’s bibliography is inevitably open to slight doubt.
It is not always easy to see from the viewpoint of today what might have deterred the royal censors from granting any of the works in Oeuvres badines a license for legal publication—probably discouraging the author even from submitting them to that filtration—but there is enough veiled eroticism and political satire in the doubles entendres of which Caylus was fond to alarm men who always had the stern representatives of Church and State looking over their shoulders. Many royal censors were impoverished writers who needed the income that the positions provided, and they were therefore very careful in the exercise of that profession. Many of them also published works of their own illicitly, some of which were far more scandalous than the amiably tongue-in-cheek works attributed to Caylus. The case of his contes de fées is, however, somewhat different from that of the more licentious works collected in Oeuvres badines, because, in spite of their relative inoffensiveness, the entire genre was still in bad odor, even after forty years since the repression of the original coterie of its inventors.
Philippe de Caylus came from an aristocratic military family, his father having been a general and his mother the daughter of a vice-admiral. His orphaned mother, Marthe-Marguerite de Mursay (1673–1729), had been brought up by the redoubtable Madame de Maintenon. Marthe-Marguerite’s significant memoirs of that court were edited for initial posthumous publication by Voltaire; she might well have been acquainted with the members of the salon coterie who invented and popularized contes de fées, but not one of them is mentioned in her published memoir—an absence that might signify diplomatic avoidance rather than ignorance. What she might have told her son about them we cannot know, and we can only speculate about the possible influence she might have had on his liking for contes de fées in general and the works of the Comtesse de Murat in particular.
Caylus had a distinguished military career himself between 1709 and 1714 but abandoned it after the death of Louis XIV and devoted himself thereafter to antiquarian studies, especially studies in Egyptology, in which academic pursuit he was an important pioneer. He carried out important research on ancient painting techniques and was very active himself as an etcher, leaving behind a rich legacy of engravings as well as his prolific writings. He acquired a posthumous reputation for riotous living, but that was greatly enhanced by a set of licentious fake memoirs published in 1805 and by scathing comments by contemporaries who did not like him, the most oft-quoted of whom was Denis Diderot.
Like Lubert and Villeneuve, who preceded him into print, Caylus tried to take up where Murat had been cruelly forced to leave off, trying to develop further the narrative strategies, key themes, and imaginative inventiveness of the genre. Like Lubert, with whose work Caylus’s has a marked affinity, he had a flair for the bizarre that continually edges into the surreal, and he never entirely forsook the spirit of parody in which he had apparently commenced.
By the time the second wave of contes de fées found the market space that had been denied to it, the genre had been supplemented, and to some extent displaced, by a species of mock-Oriental fantasy pioneered spectacularly by Antoine Galland’s Les Mille et une nuits (The Thousand and One Nights) (1704–17) which featured tales of a similarly fanciful sort, often written in a similarly buoyant spirit, but which used a different lexicon of fantastic images, drawn from Arabic literature. That genre was fused with its predecessor in Charles Mayer’s classic 41-volume Cabinet de Fées, ou Collection choisie des contes de fées et autres contes merveilleux [“The Cabinet of Feys, or, a select collection of stories of feys and other marvelous tales”] (1785–89), but Mayer was only acknowledging a process of overlap that had begun even before the first wave entirely petered out in Les Chevaliers Errans et le Genie familier. Caylus wrote a collection of Nouveaux contes orientaux (1743), which is distinct from his collections of contes de fées, but the creeping overlap between the two genres is already evident in Féeries nouvelles and the subsequent collections, in which the male counterparts of fays are not called enchanteurs as in the first wave stories, but génies [genii, in the sense of spirits], a term extensively employed by Galland as a translation of the Arabic jinni, which gave rise in further translation to the bastardized English term “genie.”
Prominent among the motifs that Caylus picked up from the Comtesse de Murat and elaborated somewhat is the notion that the community of fays has a kind of parliament or legislative council which regulates their activity, something he might have taken more directly from “La Belle et la bête” where the activities of such an assembly shape the subplot. That notion is closely connected with the distinctive use by Caylus of the term Féerie [Faerie] as a proper noun as well as a trivial noun meaning “enchantment,” so that it comes to refer, more portentously, to the Art of Enchantment, or to the polity of the fays, and, on one late occasion, to a kind of parallel world in which fays and other supernatural beings live as it often came to do in later phases of the evolution of contes de fées.
It is unarguable that the fées themselves were already in their period of decadence in the 1740s, and the Comte de Caylus is the author who seems most aware of that decadence in his works, the scathing sarcasm and casual bizarrerie of which often show traces of a kind of quasi-apologetic contempt. His work also has an overripe exuberance closely associated with the attitude that he is trafficking with absurdities that are already past their sell-by date. That rhetorical stance is also, however, partly derivative of the fact that Caylus was the leading male practitioner in a genre whose other leading practitioners were almost all women, and the contemptuous edge of his work also reflects the unthinking sexism deeply endemic in the society in which he lived.
Caylus’s work is various in tone and manner, including such exercises in earnest allegory as “Le Palais d’idées” (tr. as “The Palace of Ideas”)—which seems to be trying to make a serious point about the psychology of Amour, probably not one that many readers would have recognized—and such forthrightly conventional moralistic fantasies as “Bleuette et Coquelico” (tr. as “Bleuette and Coquelicot”) and “Jeanette, ou L’Indiscrétion” (tr. as “Jeannette; or, Indiscretion”). The curious “Fleurette et Abricot, cadres” (tr. as “Fleurette and Abricot: A Frame Story”) poses as the frame of an imaginary collection of tales set in a land where the art of faerie has determined that people must change sex every year on their birthday and aspires to the status of a Voltairean conte philosophique. The real strength of Caylus’s contes de fées, however, is in the longer and more distinctive stories and in their phantasmagorical elements.
The longest of all Caylus’s contes de fées, the ebullient “Le Prince Courtebotte et la princesse Zibeline” (tr. as “Prince Courtebotte and Princess Zibeline”), covers an enormous amount of colorfully diverse narrative ground at a rapid pace, while the most impressive inclusions in his first two collections, “L’Enchantement impossible” (tr. as “The Impossible Enchantment”), “La Princesse Azerolle ou L’Excès de la confiance” (tr. as “Princess Azerolle; or, Excessive Confidence”), and “Bellinette ou La Jeune vielle” (tr. as “Bellinette; or, The Young Old Woman), achieve a spectacular abundance of hectic bizarrerie. Although “L’Enchantement Impossible” is more heavily dependent on motifs borrowed from Murat than any of the others, it benefits greatly from a brief but spectacular climactic battle to move into unexplored narrative territory in a cavalier fashion. “Azerolle” similarly makes use of the vengeance of a nasty fay as a productive plot lever, but complicates it intriguingly by juxtaposing her with two other fays whose benevolence is compromised. “Bellinette” reverts to a more straightforward contest between good and wicked fays but enhances its plot with some intriguing allegorical episodes. All of the stories are slapdash, obviously improvised as the author went along rather than being planned, but their improvisation is so buoyantly inventive as to compensate abundantly for a certain lack of coherency. Caylus did not seem to be able to maintain that cavalier spirit later in life, and his imaginative reach does not have quite the same effect or charm in the belated “Cadichon ou Tout vient à point à qui peut attendre” (tr. as “Cadichon; or Everything Works out for Him Who Can Wait”), although that story still retains an admirable eccentricity in parts.
It has to be admitted that Caylus was a rather casual writer, and his work gives the impression not only that he was making up his stories as he went along but that he might have been dictating them to an amanuensis at high speed rather than writing them steadily in his own hand. That imprudently informal methodology has rewards as well as penalties, and if, as the author admits in his humorous “advertisement” of his first collection, some of the stories could have done with being tidied up somewhat, most of them have a reckless brio that that is very appealing. No other writer of contes de fées of his or any other period gives the impression so strongly of dabbling in the genre purely for fun, and he was clearly enjoying himself in the process even if he does take time out occasionally to add a literary flourish, to make a shrewd observation, or to insert a serious argument. Because of that, in spite of its manifest literary flaws, his work remains very entertaining.
Of the three authors who continued Comtesse de Murat’s work most evidently and most prolifically, therefore, two seem far less accomplished prose stylists, Comtesse D.L. presumably because she could do no better, and the Comte de Caylus because he was being deliberately casual. Both of them, however, added to and aided Mademoiselle de Lubert’s crusade to carry forward the martyr’s quest, and all their efforts must be reckoned heroic, given that they were working in such uncomfortable and hostile market circumstances. The wonder is not so much that they did not do better work and did not receive a better reception, but that their work exists at all. It can now be appreciated better than at any time in the past with relative ease, thanks to the advent of gallica and other online archives, which have provided a valuable service in making the tentative mapping of a fugitive and persecuted genre practicable for the first time.
Brian Stableford lives in Hadleigh, Essex. The Tyranny of the Fays Abolished and Other Stories by Comtesse D.L., Princess Camion and Other Tales of Enchantment by Marie-Madeleine de Lubert, and The Impossible Enchantment and Other Tales of Faerie by the Comte de Caylus will be published in the later months of 2018 by Black Coat Press. The project is ongoing.
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