Persinette

by Laura Christensen

  It was here that Persinette gave birth to a little Prince and a little Princess. It was here that she nurtured them and had all the time in the world to weep for her misfortune.

  But the Fairy’s vengeance was not yet complete. She had to have the Prince in her power and punish him as well. Upon leaving the unhappy Persinette, she returned to the Tower and endeavored to sing in Persinette’s manner. Deceived by this voice, the Prince, who had come once more to see his love, asked to climb up her hair as he was wont to do. To this end the deceitful Fairy had cut beautiful Persinette’s hair. She secured the braided rope and dropped it down to him. The poor Prince appeared at the window where he was not merely astonished but agonized to discover his mistress was not there. His gaze searched for her, but the Fairy, regarding him with fury, said, “Reckless young man. Your crime is infinite; its punishment will be as great.”

  But he, ignoring the threats that concerned only him, said, “Where is Persinette?”

  “She is yours no longer,” the Fairy replied.

  Then the Prince, moved more by the furor in his heart than constrained by the power of the Fairy’s arts, cast himself from the height of the Tower. His body should have broken a thousand times over. Instead, he fell with no other harm than losing his sight.

  He was greatly astonished to discover he could no longer see. He dwelt for a while at the base of the Tower, groaning and crying Persinette’s name a hundred times.

  He walked as best he could by groping his way forward, then his steps grew more assured. He went on like this for some time without meeting anyone who could assist him or guide him. He took nourishment from herbs and roots that he found when hunger drove him to it.

  One day at the end of several years, he found himself more haunted by the memory of his love and his loss than usual. He lay down beneath a tree and turned his thoughts over entirely to his sorrowful reflections. This pastime is cruel to those who think they deserve a better fate, but suddenly the sound of an enchanting voice startled him from his reverie. The first notes went straight to his heart, pierced it and made it tremble in a way he had not felt in a long time. “Oh gods!” he cried. “That is Persinette’s voice!”

  He was not deceiving himself. He had stumbled blindly into her woods. She was seated at the door of her hut, singing the sad tale of her love. Her two children, more beautiful than daylight, were playing a few feet away from her, and, wandering a little, they drew near the tree under which the Prince lay. They had no sooner seen him than they were throwing their arms about his neck and kissing him a thousand times, saying over and over, “It’s my Papa!” They called their mother and shrieked and shouted so much that she came running, not knowing what it could be. Never until this moment had their solitude been disturbed by any chance encounter.

  What was her surprise and her joy when she recognized her dear husband? The answer is impossible to describe: she gave a piercing cry, and throwing herself down next to him, she was so overwhelmed with shock that she quite naturally burst into tears. But—oh, wondrous miracle—the moment her precious tears fell into the Prince’s eyes, his blindness was washed away. He saw as clearly as he ever had. He received this token of Persinette’s tender love and took her in his arms and caressed her a thousand times more than he had ever done.

  It was a truly touching sight to see. The handsome Prince, the enchanting Princess, and their delightful children enveloped in a joy and a love that transported them to another world.

  The rest of the day passed delightfully, but when evening came, the little family had need of some nourishment. The Prince thought he might have a biscuit, but it transformed into stone. Shocked by this marvel, he gasped with pain, the poor children wept, and the afflicted mother tried to at least give them some water, but it changed into crystal.

  What a night! It went rather badly. A hundred times they believed it would last forever.

  As soon as the day dawned they arose and resolved to pick some herbs, but alas! the herbs transformed into toads and venomous creatures. The most harmless of birds became dragons and harpies that flew about them, terrifying to see.

  “So this is it then,” the Prince cried. “My dear Persinette, I found you only to lose you to a more terrible fate.”

  “Let us die, my dear Prince,” she replied, embracing him tenderly, “and make our enemies envy even the sweetness of our death.”

  Their poor little children, held in their arms, were weak and two fingers from death. Who wouldn’t have been moved by the sight of this family heartbroken and dying like this? Then a miracle occurred: the Fairy was touched and, remembering in that instant all the affection she had once felt for the kind-hearted Persinette, she arrived resplendently at Persinette’s hut in a chariot gleaming with gold and precious stones. She had them mount up, placing herself between the fortunate lovers and arranging their lovely children at their feet on the magnificent tiles. She drove them in this fashion to the palace of the King, father of the Prince. There the joy was overflowing. The people welcomed the handsome Prince, whom they had believed lost this long time, as if he were a god. He was so relieved to find respite after having been so battered by the storm that nothing in the world could compare to the happiness with which he lived with his perfect wife.

  Affectionate lovers, learn from their example.

  It is advantageous to always be faithful.

  Every pain, every effort, even the sharpest worry,

  Can all find sweet relief

  When passion is mutual:

  Fortune is braved, a Fairy’s spell overcome,

  When two lovers are as one.

  Some Notes on the Authoress, Mlle de La Force

  Sorting through fact from fiction while researching Mlle de La Force’s life was a difficult, if immensely rewarding, puzzle. Charlotte-Rose de Caumont (de) La Force (or Mlle de La Force) is not nearly as well-known as her contemporaries Perrault, Mlle de Scudéry, or Mme d’Aulnoy, and most of the information available in English emphasizes the many rumors and scandals (often mistakenly) associated with her. For example, it turns out it was not Mlle de La Force who was implicated in the witchcraft Poison Affair and had an affair with the Dauphin, but Mme de Murat, her cousin by birth and marriage and fellow fairy-tale writer.

  Charlotte-Rose was born in 1650 into an aristocratic family with a rich Huguenot history in the old province of Guyenne, now in the Aquitaine region in southwest France. Huguenots were French Protestants, mostly Calvinists, at the time of the religious Reformation and upheaval in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the 36 years between 1562 and 1598, there were eight wars of religion between the Catholic majority and the Protestant minority in France, resulting in the deaths or forced exile of thousands. Peace finally came in the form of King Henri IV’s Edict of Nantes in 1598, which forgave the blood spilt in the past and granted Protestants certain rights by law, including the freedom to practice their religion and to hold political positions.

  Charlotte-Rose’s grandfather, a Huguenot who lived with her until his death when she was two, was Jacques Nompar de Caumont. He had survived the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in 1572. The massacre started as a planned assassination of a few key Protestant leaders during the celebration of Henri IV’s marriage, but it spread into a slaughter of some four thousand Huguenot victims. Though his father and brother were killed, Mlle de La Force’s grandfather lived to become a loyal friend of Henri IV and a Marshal of France. He spent the last years of his life recording his experiences, which Mlle de La Force later used as a reference when she wrote her Secret History of Henri IV, King of Castille.

  In 1660, when Charlotte-Rose was just ten years old, she met King Louis XIV, the Sun King, when he came to stay at her home at the château de Cazeneuve. When she was sixteen, she was appointed maid of honour to the queen until 1673, when she became lady-in-waiting to Marie de Lorraine, Duchess of Guise. These positions kept her at court and put her in the center of aristocratic literary culture. She had friends and connections who
were writers, actors, blue-stockings, and précieuses.

  In 1685, King Louis XIV revoked his grandfather’s Edict of Nantes and established Catholicism as the only true and permitted religion, denying Huguenots their right to practice their professions, to be judged fairly by their peers, and to practice their religion, on threat of violence and harassment by the king’s dragoons. Though forbidden by law to leave the country, some 200,000 Huguenots fled rather than be forced to convert. Mlle de La Force, however, like most Huguenots who remained behind, converted to Catholicism and joined the ranks of the “new converts” who, though technically Catholic, were not necessarily faithful to their new religion and were known for subverting it. As part of the king’s court, she received a yearly pension of 1,000 écus (approximately $75,000 by 2007’s conversion rates) as a reward for her example, and, like the rest of the court’s “new converts,” was monitored far more strictly than the rest of the populace to be certain she remained loyal to her new religion.

  Little has been written about Mlle de La Force’s personal beliefs, but 10 years after the revocation, she began publishing secret histories about the historical figures at the forefront of the previous century’s Wars of Religion, and towards the end of her life she wrote a collection of Pensées chrétiennes (Christian Thoughts) that were never published. Whatever her beliefs or thoughts may have been, her family’s history and the tumult of her grandfather’s and her own religious times made their mark on her.

  Then in June 1687 (it is important to note she was 37), she met and fell in love with a young man—kind, handsome, and handsomely rich—by the name of Charles Briou and promptly married him upon his reaching his majority at age 25. Their married bliss lasted a full ten days before his unhappy father caught up with the happy couple to demand that the king annul their wedding (they were living under the king’s protection in Versailles). The elder Briou then kidnapped his son and locked him away in Saint-Lazare until he would agree to the annulment. Charles Briou was let out in December six months later, and after a trial by parliament that lasted two years, Charles and Mlle de La Force were forbidden from seeing each other.

  Yet some good came of that heartbreak. At the trial, the writer La Fontaine came to sit beside the weeping Charlotte-Rose and distract her from her tears, and a lasting friendship was born.

  Mlle de La Force was both a poet and a novelist, but she is best known for her fairy tales and her “secret histories” (a term she coined), which were an early form of historical fiction. She wrote largely for her friends, but explicitly kept in mind the general public who might not be as well versed in the histories that were her sandbox. Her secret histories became quite popular. In fact, most of her early works were secret histories, two of which focused on prominent figures of the Wars of Religion, which you can see from the following list.

  • Les Fées, Contes des Contes, 1692

  Fairies, Tales of the Tales, also known as The Fairies, the Tale of Tales. Rumored collection of fairy tales, either lost or never originally existed. Posthumously, this title seems to have replaced by or been combined with the title of her two volumes published in 1698 as Les Contes des Contes. This combination is my theory, since her contemporaries never mentioned a previous collection when the 1698 collection was published, despite the fact that historians refer to the title often. In my search for answers, I found a volume entitled Les Fées, Contes des Contes published unsigned in 1708 but attributed to her, and Charlotte Trinquet referred to a volume with this title published posthumously in 1725 and accredited to Mlle de La Force. In other words, there is much extant confusion on this subject. Did this volume of fairy tales exist in 1692 or is this title simply an alternative to the original title of her 1698 volumes? No one seems to know for certain.

  • Histoire secrète de Marie de Bourgogne, 1694 (2 volumes)

  Secret History of Mary of Burgundy, also known as The Secret History of Burgundy, follows the love affair of Marie, only child and heiress of a duke, with Charles d’Orléans during the reign of Louis XI in the fifteenth century. This secret history immediately became popular and was hailed to be well researched and plausible, even if the story emphasized the love and character of Marie over the events in which her story was placed.

  • Histoire secrète de Henri IV, roi de Castille, 1695

  Secret History of Henry IV, King of Castille. Henri de Navarre played a huge part in ending the Wars of Religion and establishing religious tolerance with his Edict of Nantes in 1598, though he himself had reconverted to Catholicism in order to take the throne. He married Marguerite de Valois, a marriage he annulled in 1599, citing childlessness. He then married Marie de Medici, but he was also known for his many lovers, seven of whom had children by him. He was assassinated in 1610 by a religious fanatic. Mlle de La Force’s treatment of his life and loves became quite popular, and with her family’s history and stake in the Wars of Religion, it is unsurprising that she was drawn to write about him.

  • Histoire de Marguerite de Valois, reine de Navarre, sœur de François Premier, 1696 (2 volumes)

  History of Margaret of Valois, Queen of Navarre, Sister of François I, also known as The History of Marguerite de Valois. Daughter of King Henri II and Catherine de Medici, Marguerite de Valois was the sister of kings François I, Charles IX, and Henri III. Her marriage to Henri de Navarre made her queen of Navarre and later queen of France when he ascended the throne and became King Henri IV. It was during the celebration of her marriage to Henri that the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre erupted. With her family Catholic and her husband Protestant, Marguerite took an important role in the Wars of Religion. Mlle de La Force was not the only writer to be drawn to her story. Two centuries later, Alexandre Dumas was also inspired by her life, loves, scandals, and conflicts when he wrote his famous myth La Reine Margot. Like Dumas who wrote after her, however, Mlle de La Force took more artistic license with the facts and events of history in her work about Marguerite de Valois than she did in her work about the life and loves of Henri IV.

  • Gustave Vasa, Histoire de Suède, 1697

  Gustava Vasa, History of Sweden features Christine de Danemark (Christina of Denmark), the great-granddaughter of Marie de Bourgogne, about whom Mlle de La Force had previously written. This novel departs from France, taking its readers into a Sweden Mlle de La Force had never visited.

  In 1697, several satirical and widely circulated poems called Les Noëls scandalized the court with their critiques. Though they were unsigned, they were attributed to Mlle de La Force, who published most—if not all—of her fiction anonymously and who’d already had scandalous and subversive marks against her with her status as a “new convert” and her elopement with the much younger Charles Briou. Although she never claimed these poems, the king forced her into exile from Paris and the court on pain of losing her pension. She fled to live with the Benedictine sisters at Gercy Abbey, not far from Paris, and remained there until she received a pardon and permission to return in January 1713.

  The year 1697 was also when she wrote to and shared her fairy tales with her friends, who, it is said, compiled and published them in 1698 without her consent as the book Les Contes des Contes.

  Though much of what she wrote during her exile remained unpublished until after her death, her exile from Paris did not keep her from writing or staying abreast of the highly fashionable intellectual and literary salons. She wrote extensively, although she wrote far fewer secret histories.

  • Histoire d’Adelaïs de Bourgogne, 1698 (Never published)

  Unfortunately, I was unable to find a summary or description of this manuscript in the resources available to me, but my best guess would be this is a secret history of Adélaïs of Burgundy, wife of Louis II, the Holy Roman Emperor who lived in the early tenth century. If so, this would be the furthest Mlle de La Force delved into the past in her secret histories, but its time period would roughly correspond with the mythical past of her fairy tales, which were published the same year.

  •
Les Contes des Contes, 1698 (2 volumes)

  The Tales of Tales. The first volume includes “Plus belle que Fée” (“Fairer than Fae”), “Persinette,” “L’Enchanteur” (“The Sorcerer”), and “Tourbillon” (“Whirlwind”). The second volume includes “Vert et Bleu” (“Green and Blue”), “Le Pays des Délices” (“The Country of Delights”), “La Puissance d’Amour” (“The Power of Love”), and “La Bonne Femme” (“The Good Woman”). I will discuss her fairy tales more further on.

  • Les Jeux d’Esprit, ou la Promenade de la princesse de Conti à Eu, 1701, (published posthumously in 1862)

  The Games of Wit, or the Cloister of the Princess of Conti at Eu. Set in 1615 at Eu in a fictionalized cloister where the princess of Conti resides in exile, it contains the only contemporary depiction of a literary game of French salon culture. The game consists of a pass-along story, where one participant begins and the next picks up the story where the last left off, which is a storytelling game familiar to us today. However, in this instance each participant pretends that they were eye-witnesses to their joint tale, elaborating on what they each recollect of “what happened,” which has the effect of making the story feel seamless and real. The story the characters tell, however, is one none of them saw, for it too is set in the past, in 1349, in an idealized time where, as in Mlle de La Force’s fairy tales, women had more freedom and power to follow their hearts and minds.

  • Anecdote galante, ou Histoire secrète de Catherine de Bourbon, duchesse de Bar et sœur de Henry le Grand, 1703

  Remarkable Anecdote, or Secret History of Catherine of Bourbon, Duchess of Bar and Sister of Henry the Great. “Henry the Great” is another name for King Henri IV, about whom Mlle de La Force had previously written. His sister Catherine was born Huguenot but forced to convert to Catholicism at the time of the massacre, but she reconverted to Calvinism at her earliest opportunity and was instrumental in convincing other Huguenots to accept her brother’s Edict of Nantes. Although this novel was indeed published, I was unable to find either an accessible copy or a summary of Mlle de La Force’s take on Catherine’s life. Perhaps, since the word galant can mean “lover” and well as “remarkable,” Mlle de La Force told the story of how Catherine wished to marry a Catholic, but when the Pope refused to give her a dispensation (since Catherine refused to convert back to Catholicism) her brother the king bullied the Archbishop of Reims into marrying Catherine to her duke instead. Henri IV likewise tried to convince his sister to reconvert, but Catherine remained steadfast to her religion until her death not long later.