Gossip and fairy tales have in common a cavalier relation to accuracy; the truths they seek to pass on do not report events with the veracity of a witness in court. They are partial, tending to excess in both praise and blame; tale-bearing is a partisan activity. Though both forms of speech tend to be practised by the least advantaged members of society, they can achieve considerable, even dangerous, influence by such means. Defamation, scandal, hearsay, all aspects of gossip, reappear metamorphosed in fairy tale’s plots, featuring wicked stepmothers, false brides, bloodsucking ogres, and predatory suitors. Children, of whatever rank, who play around the women gossiping are learning the rules of the group; fairy tales train them in attitudes and aspirations. This can be a conservative influence: the old can oppress the young with their prohibitions and prejudices as well as enlighten them. But the tale-bearing will in either case pass on vital information, about the values and beliefs of the community in which they are growing up, will instruct them in who is trusted and who is not, about what is considered praiseworthy and what is condemned, about alliances and enmities, hopes and dangers. Stories function in a similar manner: they chart the terrain. Some directions are urged, but the signposts are not entirely coercive. Gossip and narrative are sisters, both ways of keeping the mind alive when ordinary tasks call; the fictions of gossip – as well as the facts – act as compass roses, pointing to many possibilities.
The literary women who wrote fairy tales, the sophisticated milieu in which ‘Cinderella’, ‘The Blue Bird’, ‘The Subtle Princess’ and ‘The Sleeping Beauty’ were produced, mounted a critical attack on many prejudices and practices of their day, which confined and defamed women in their view and coarsened the minds and manners of all members of society. Paradoxically, gossip was one of the battlefields on which they engaged their enemies, one of the weapons they seized. The culture of the salons in the second half of the seventeenth century fostered the art of conversation as one of the foundation skills of civilization.
The Marquise de Rambouillet (née Catherine de Vivonne de Savelin, 1588–1665), found the court of Louis XIII rather too rustic for her taste, and started receiving at home instead. As a hostess, she made many innovations of a startling kind, which in themselves developed in form and style the custom of the lying-in.55 She invited her guests to attend her in her chambre bleue, her blue bedroom, and she refashioned the interior of the Hôtel de Rambouillet so that they approached this inner sanctum through a sweeping enfilade of rooms, until they reached their hostess. In this ‘alternative court’ the lady lay in bed, on her lit de parade (her show bed) in her alcove, waiting to be amused and provoked, to be told stories, real and imaginary, to exchange news, to argue and theorize, speculate and plot. The Marquise de Rambouillet sat her favourite guests down to talk to her by her side in the ruelle – the ‘alley’ – which was the space between her bed and the wall. Ruelles became the word for such salons, which sprang up in imitation of hers in the city; those who attended were called alcovistes, privy to the alcove. This arrangement of social space, both public and private at the same time, was presided over by women and it lasted until the Revolution. The word ‘salon’ itself came into use only after the practice had died out.56
Ruelles were the frames in which the most familiar fairy tales of the modern nursery were sown and carefully tended, as part of a conscious project to overturn prejudices and refashion conventional values and attitudes. Among these, some of the most lively and refreshing experiments focussed on the pursuits and powers of women, especially in private matters. Gossip was transformed in the ruelles into an art of cosmopolitan finesse; stories were elaborated to entertain and instruct; relationships were defined and refined through exchanges of intimate intensity but unbesmirched decorum. Madeleine de Scudéry, the most successful novelist of the day, devised the Carte de Tendre, or Map of [the land of] Tenderness, which charted the journey true lovers must take across a symbolic landscape of seas of enmity, lakes of indifference, wastelands of betrayal in order to discover tenderness, in its varied forms, loving friendship as well as ardent passion.57 If the académies, controlling the written word, were dominated by male authors and thinkers, then the ruelles were the sphere of women, where they presided over the spoken word and its uses.58 The grammarian Claude Favre de Vaugelas even conceded them this territory when, in his almost scriptural Remarques sur la langue française of 1647, he noted, ‘in case of doubt about language, it is ordinarily best to consult women’.59 The ruelle was a space created by noblewomen in the image of the humbler, more chaotic gathering, the gossiping, and among its varied pastimes it strove to give new value to that traditionally despised pursuit and talent of women, old and young: to give tittle-tattle its due as an art of communication, as an aspect of storytelling.
Strong measures for rattling tongues: Mexican postcard, c. 1985.
CHAPTER 4
Game Old Birds: Gossips III
The goose was sacred to the Goddess of Love, Aphrodite, who occasionally settled herself sidesaddle in the crux of the bird’s neck and wing to travel through the air LEFT. (White ground cup attributed to the ‘Pistoxenos Painter’, c. 460 BC.) A millennium or two on, and ‘Old Mother Goose when she wanted to wander,/ Would fly through the air on a very fine gander. ‘(Arthur Rackham, ‘Mother Goose’, The Old Nursery Rhymes, 1913.)
Storks were descending in slow circles in the direction of the river, soon to hold their first parliament before flying off to warmer lands. Helena suddenly recalled the local superstition – if a young woman sees a stork in a meadow it means that she’ll become pregnant soon. What has happened, she thought. What have I done? But she was in a state of sleepy bliss.1
Tadeusz Konwicki
DURING THE CLOSING, valedictory session of Les Evangiles des quenouilles, one of the hags, Dame Berthe de Corne, tells the company that she is going to give away ‘a marvellous secret few men know’. She then reveals, ‘I tell you true: storks, which keep themselves in these parts in summer and in winter return to their own country near Mount Sinai, are creatures just like us.’2
Another member of the company, ‘vieille à merveille’ (wondrously ancient), with the cod name Dame Abreye l’Enflée (Dame Put-down Over-the-top), confirms this secret, relating that she had often heard how her uncle Claus from Bruges had been to the monastery of Saint Catherine in the Sinai and had become separated from his companions.3 But then he had met a creature, and when he addressed her in Flemish, she had immediately answered him in his own language and showed him the way. She also told him that she was a stork in his own part of the world, and made her nest in Flanders on the roof of one of his neighbours. Then she gave him a ring which he recognized – it belonged to his wife Mal Cenglée (Badly Beaten). The stork returned the ring to him on condition that he forbade the members of his household to maltreat his wife any longer ‘as they were in the habit of doing’.4 He agreed, and on his return kept his promise. And so, the old woman goes on to say, he died fat and happy – with a waistline of fourteen hands in breadth.
At this happy outcome, all the matrons laugh and put away their distaffs. The scribe then rounds off the whole book by describing how the ladies, suddenly conscious again of his presence, wished to reward him, and offered him his pick amongst them. But he declines, with a ‘facétie joyeuse’ (a merry jest).5 His réintroduction of himself into the story, and his clearly underlined merit, protests too much, but his chastity does draw attention yet again to the off-colour character of the stork-ladies’ solicitations.
Contes de la cigogne (Tales of the Stork) was an alternative French phrase for fairy tales. In 1694, the long awaited Dictionnaire of the Académie Française offered the following remarks by way of defining the word conte:
Le vulgaire appelle conte au vieux loup, conte de vieille, conte de ma Mère l’Oye. conte de la cigogne, conte à la cicogne, conte de peau d’asne. conte à dormir debout, conte jaune, bleu, violet, conte borgne, Des fables ridicules telles que sont celles dont les vieilles gens entretiennent e
t amusent les enfants.
[The common people call ‘old wolf’s tale’, ‘old wives’ tale’, ‘Mother Goose tale’, ‘tale of the stork’, ‘tale in the stork style’, ‘donkeyskin tale’, ‘tale to fall asleep on your feet’, ‘yellow, blue, violet, one-eyed tale’ all those ridiculous fables the like of which old people tell to entertain and amuse children …]6
The phrase conte de la cigogne could also be related to another early term for a folk tale, conte de la quelongne – an alternative spelling for quenouille, used by Martin Le Franc some time before 1461; this term creates a wonderfully rickety but possible morphological bridge for a medieval gossip to cross, from a distaff to a stork.7
The dictionary intensified the gender distinctions of the term in a related entry under oye, goose: giving as an example, ‘This nurse tells Mother Goose tales’, and adding, in counterpoint, ‘It is also said that “A man tells Mother Goose Tales”, when he says things in which there is no semblance of reason.’8 What was speech proper to a nurse turned into fribbles on the lips of a man. When the preacher Olivier Maillard sententiously attacked Les Evangiles des quenouilles, he warned: ‘All those things that will do nothing for the salvation of those to whom one speaks, are considered fables, those tales one makes up to while away the time, those tales of the stork, as people say.’9 Rabelais also uses the phrase to characterize popular narratives.
Christine de Pizan was stern, as we have seen, about the power of contes to present false dreams and foster illusions about love; the author of the Evangiles mocks the tattle of women while remaining agog about its supposed mysteries. The lubricious character of much of his material does not however succeed in concealing altogether certain harsh realities and the role of storytelling in resisting them. Readers of Les Evangiles might be expected to laugh at these old women with their foolish notions and their lascivious know-how, but they also communicate revealing material about women’s areas of complaint, and stratagems of redress: the story of the stork with the wife’s ring seems to threaten a husband that she will run away and refuse to come back unless things change at home. The old wife telling the tale is shown to be pressing her own case and the case of women who are like her under duress.
As if it were a folding ruler, the text attempts to collapse many different angles of view on to a single ribald level, yet through the voice of the male scribe transmitting his scorn and mockery, his fear and contempt for the old wife and her foolish husband who is so gullible, we can nevertheless also catch a woman’s genuine plea for self-respect, and the respect of others; Mal Cenglée does not want to be badly beaten any more. Fairy lore and contes – the women are dubbed fairies as well as storks, one of them is even called Gombarde la Faée (Gombarda the Fairy) – can help women to defend themselves. Mother-wit can be wised up to a great deal – however foolish it may appear.
The knowledge conveyed is twofold, at least: about women’s experience, and about men’s perception of it, about women’s defences and men’s retaliation too. Mal Cenglée, the obliquely mocked object of this jest, yet establishes herself as an exemplary subject of such narratives: the badly beaten wife, in one way or the other, tells her story through the layered tragi-comedies of fairy tales. The author of the Evangiles might present the tale as the height of nonsense – whoever heard of a husband agreeing to such terms? – but his nonsense can still read as another man’s – or woman’s – good sense.
In folklore flourishing in countries where storks returned in the spring to nest on house chimneys, the bird became a symbol of birth; in the nineteenth century, children were told that storks fetched new babies from wells and marshes, and then delivered them to their human parents. (Ida Rentoul Outhwaite, ‘A Mothers’ Meeting’, Melbourne, 1916.)
In classical mythology, which is particularly rich in bird metamorphoses, storks were believed to migrate to the Isles of the Blessed when they died, there to change into human form.10 The story in Les Evangiles des quenouilles only faintly echoes this belief, displacing in the manner of fairy tale the afterlife with the present time; and merging the comic figure of the story stork with the old wife, gossip, peddler of tall tales and foolish wisdom. Pierre Jannet, the bookseller-publisher who reissued Les Evangiles in 1815, added that the original was a manuscript in the collection of M. Armand Cigongne (sic), proof that the French can nudge and wink as well as any British panto dame. Both large birds familiar in the domestic setting who yet remain untamed, the goose and the stork became the imaginary authors of children’s fairy stories.
II
The title Contes de ma Mère l’Oye first appears in print as a title of a collection of stories in 1697, in the frontispiece of Charles Perrault’s Contes du temps passé; not on the title page, but in a panel hanging on the wall behind the engraved image of a crone telling stories to three children (p. ii).11 The same year, the commedia dell’arte players at the Hôtel de Bourgogne staged a burlesque romance called Les Fées ou Les Contes de ma Mère l’Oye, which was set in ‘a cave of ogres’ and featured Harlequin and Pierrot as well as all the stock figures of fairy tale: a weeping and about-to-be-ravished princess, her beloved prince, the ogre who wakes up at the scent of ‘the fresh meat’ of the prince and says that the princess can have a haunch if she loves him so. The script throws in seven-league boots, an old wife who tells a tall tale as well as lots of metamorphoses. The princess is originally imprisoned in an iron tower, but the ogre captures her with a magnet, ‘And made her follow after him like a little spaniel.’ It all ends happily, of course.12
The company of Italian players was closed down by order of the king that same year; Louis had come under the pious influence of Madame de Maintenon and they had made fun of her. Their frivolity was deemed improper and they were banished.
Contes de ma Mère VOye were referred to before this date, but in passing in earlier literature, as in Loret’s La Muse historique of 1650. The term was often coupled with the phrase contes de Peau d’Ane, or ‘Donkeyskin tales’, after the heroine of the fairy tale: Cyrano de Bergerac called the works of his fellow poet Scarron ‘a pot pourri of Donkeyskin and Mother Goose tales’, and Scarron himself imagined the young Astyanax in Troy being entertained by his grandmother Hecuba’s tales, among which he also included ‘Donkeyskin’.13 Mme de Sévigné, writing to the king’s sister in 1656, told her the story of la cane de Montfort, a kind of precursor of Jemima Puddleduck. This was a ninny who forgot to say her prayers to Saint Nicholas, changed into a duck and so was ever afterwards obliged on his feast to leave her pond with her ducklings and offer them all up in expiation at the altar. Mme de Sévigné adds that this was not exactly a tale of Mother Goose:
Mais de la cane de Montfort,
Qui, ma foi, lui ressemble fort.
[But of the duck of Montfort who, upon my soul, strongly resembles her.]14
She thus projected the foolishness of the protagonist on to the type of story in which she figures, significantly transposing the character of the teller to the subject of the tale.
The terms for contes were interchangeable and their tone at best bantering, at worst contemptuous, and both the image of the goose and that of the stork prove on examination to be richly compacted of belief and fantasy. The goose serves as the emblematic beast par excellence of folly and, more particularly, of female noise, of women’s chatter. The anonymous sixteenth-century lyric which begins ‘The silver swan who living had no note …’ ends with the couplet:
Farewell all joys, O death come close mine eyes,
More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise.15
The sinister Cesare Lombroso, in his pseudo-scientific La Femme criminelle et la prostituée of 1896, argued that women’s foolish tongues were biologically determined, and he used traditional proverbs in Latin as well as modern languages to prove that their nature had been understood since time immemorial. But many of these sayings, from all over Europe, focus on geese as gossips’ emblematic creatures: ‘Deuxfemmes et une oie font une foire’ (Two women and a goo
se a fair make), or again, according to the fifteenth-century English proverb, ‘Many women, many words; many geese, many turds.’16 La Fontaine, a contemporary of Perrault, tells in one of his Fables, ‘Les Femmes et le secret’, how a husband, as a test of his wife’s discretion, cries out in the night that he has laid an egg; she immediately rushes to her neighbour and the egg grows four times the size, the neighbour runs on, and the egg increases to three in number, and so forth, until the whole town marvels that he has laid more than a hundred.17 The metaphor of laying a giant egg, used here for telling a whopper, animates the image of the storytelling goose who believes the tall tales she passes on.18
Birds’ language inspired a large body of stories in classical myth: the most popular form of metamorphosis, they were credited with the invention of many aspects of human culture, as well as hidden, lucid foreknowledge, both ominous and wonderful; what was apparently random, opaque and unreflecting could become transparent and eloquent. In one myth their tracks, writing a natural cuneiform in the sand, lay at the origin of the alphabet; Hermes, watching the flight of cranes in wedge formation, hit upon the idea of letters (in this, he becomes a rival pioneer to the Sibyl of Cumae); their twittering followed a code which seers like Tiresias could crack, and Odysseus was warned of danger by the cries of swallows and herons.19 Later, in Rome, state augurs interpreted the omens of wing and beak, liver and innards. Later still, in the Narrenschiff or The Ship of Fools, the German poet Sebastian Brant would inveigh against diviners who fancied they could read the future in the heavens and their portents – starry or avian. In German folklore, too, ‘birds converse together’, wrote the Grimm brothers, ‘on the destinies of men, and foretell the future’. The noise of birds was occasionally easy to understand: ‘the crane with his trumpe’ gave warning of rain, and geese made excellent sentries, famously raising the alarm on the Capitol at the approach of the Gauls.20, 21 But in spite of this august historical role, the goose was traditionally graded among the lower creatures, associated with low functions.
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