From the Beast to the Blonde

by Marina Warner

  As her family had connections with Normandy, it has been suggested that the governess or nurse who told L’Héritier her tales was communicating Norman oral tradition. One commentator waxed lyrical at the thought: she ‘had gathered honey from the lips of nurses and mothers, [she] had drunk from the source in the hollow of her hand’.31 However, it is clear that L’Héritier’s immediate sources are literary: Basile and the romances of chivalry, as in the case of her fellow writers, like Henriette-Julie de Murat and Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy. But they are vernacular sources, popular, even low, ranging from the Milesian tales of Apuleius to the Italian Basile’s collection which she shows signs of knowing at first hand. Moreover, the symbolic dimension of L’Héritier’s retellings holds more interest than their putative geographical origin. She needs to declare that she is speaking for her old nurse, to claim that she is passing on the wisdom of employed staff, women of lower social status to herself, and she makes manifest her identification with her nurse in her chosen narrative form, the fairy tale: this is the most persuasive disguise she can assume for her chosen task of narrative seduction.

  The governess looks in at the game of her charges: this oblique relationship, often deeply affectionate, provided a vital conduit of information and stories. (After Sofonisba Anguissola, The Artist’s Three Sisters and their Governess, Italian, 1555.)

  In two of Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier’s fairy stories, ‘Ricdin-Ricdon’, an early version of ‘Rumpelstiltskin’, and ‘La Robe de sincérité’ (The Robe of Sincerity), a predecessor of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, the author evokes the world of medieval romance to provide the genre of the fairy tale with a noble pedigree. The tales are embedded in her novel La Tour ténébreuse (The Dark Tower), where they are told by no less a hero than Richard the Lion Heart in order to while away his captivity. His audience consists of the troubadour Blondel who has smuggled himself in in disguise, and who then commits the stories to memory to recount them later. This frame carefully sets up L’Héritier’s theory of the national, Gallic matrix of the fairy tale, in the middle ages, among the troubadours and storytellers of Provence.32 She propounded it fully in the preface to her most famous fairy tale, ‘L’Adroite Princesse, ou les aventures de Finette’ (The Subtle Princess).33 She declares firmly that she wants neither prose nor verse, but instead a tale told anyhow, and as one speaks.34

  The genealogy from troubadour to nurse which L’Héritier puts forward differs from Perrault’s; while he placed himself in line of descent from Latin fables and Milesian tales, she disclaims all kinship with such material (in spite of her manifest debt) and insists instead on their source in the national turf The dedication of her first book of fairy tales, to her friend the Comtesse de Murat, stresses the national tradition and urges her to follow suit:

  L’antique Gaule vous en presse:

  Daignez-vous mettre dans leurs jours

  Les contes ingénus, quoique remplis d’adresse,

  Qu’ont inventé les Troubadours.

  [Ancient Gaul expects it of you: deign to put in a favourable light the artless tales, yet so cunningly wrought, which the troubadours invented.]35

  Her plea won a warm and lasting response in the circles of fairytale writers: the story ‘Etoilette’ (Starlight), framed by the Comtesse de Murat’s novel Les Lutins du Château de Kernosy, recognizably rings changes on the exquisite thirteenth-century chantefable, Aucassin et Nicolette, which had only just been rediscovered in a single manuscript and was published in 1752, in the Mercure de France, in a modern French version. ‘Starlight’, a bittersweet tale of lovelorn woe and final triumph, is recounted in the novel to the company by one of the guests in the manner of a troubadour, except that he relies on his own notebook; the scene represents vividly the early fairytale writers’ methods of working back and forth from traditional material to variations in the contemporary, ornamental, ironical, and orientalizing style. The author could have known Aucassin et Nicolette from oral sources – or, which is more likely, the finding of this medieval romance, with its unsurpassed lyrical charm, was a source of tremendous excitement and instantly inspired in the ruelles homages in the form of retelling and variations. The discoverer, the antiquarian La Curne de Sainte-Palaye, probably circulated the news, and may have shown aficionados the manuscript itself.36

  L’Héritier was, however, keen to put some distance between her writings and the comic, bawdy and even indelicate character of so many medieval stories, and she went to some pains to explain her position: the language in which these ancient stories had been transmitted down the centuries had to be altered – had to be cleansed. For whereas, in the picture she paints of the genre’s early days, bards travelled from castle to castle ‘chez les personnes de qualité’ (calling on the quality) until no royal entertainment was complete without a troubadour, the passing on of narrative had since sunk down the social scale, and immoral characters and improper happenings and other unseemliness had befouled the tradition:

  These stories became filled with impurities as they passed through the mouth of the common people; in the same way as pure water becomes defiled with rubbish as it passes by a dirty culvert. If the people are simple, they are also coarse: they do not know what propriety is. Pass lightly over a licentious and scandalous event, and the tale they tell afterwards will be filled with every detail. One told these criminal deeds to a good purpose, to show that they were always punished, but the people, from whom we receive them, report them with no veil to cover them, and indeed have linked them so tightly to the matters they reveal that one is hard put to tell the same adventures and keep them under wraps.37

  The voice of experience sounds through this rather plaintive argument, in which poor L’Héritier, committed to believing in the virtuous simplicity and good faith and perfect manners of a pure French tradition, finds herself continually face to face with its vital and rude adulteration, and struggles to legitimize it again as courtly literature fit for retelling in the gracious company of the ruelles. L’Héritier’s style could never be read as the voice of the people; she writes the flowery and learned prose of a précieuse from the aristocratic salons of the Sun King’s Paris, directed at the entertainment of her coevals, the group of friends. The fairy tale is, in this sense, a game of charades.

  Behind the mask of the nurse whose storytelling she quotes, the minstrelsy of a gracious and noble past still can be heard, she pleads. Her quandary as she both denies and confronts the character of the gouvernante (Mother Goose) takes us to a deeper ambivalence in the fairy tales that she and Perrault wrote, about magic and the people, about the grotesque and lowlife, about women’s lore and men’s, women’s speech and men’s, about truth-telling and fabrication.

  In the fairy tale ‘Ricdin-Ricdon’, L’Héritier’s villain is called Songecreux (Idle Dreamer) and he is hand-in-glove with an evil goblin, the Ricdin-Ricdon of the title. Together they are trying to take over the Kingdom of Fiction, whose queen is called Riante Image (Smiling Image). Throughout, L’Héritier balances one kind of tale-spinning against another, good fiction against bad, until at last the spinning princess and her true love – and her mother – struggle free of the wicked Idle Dreamer and his wiles. However, what is intriguing is that L’Héritier adds, as an afterthought, that she knows she might also be guilty of dabbling in such dreams as Songecreux. Fairy tale must always be a fabrication, she acknowledges. There will always be those guilty of peddling empty dreams. ‘I myself’ she reflects, ‘talking here to you, I am perhaps foremost in the party of the Idle Dreamers, as I amuse myself rescuing from oblivion these ancient, foolish stories …’38

  But she evinces continual pleasure in seductive uses of language, as an aspect of feminine cunning. From the standpoint of an unmarried literary woman like herself, the principal issue at stake was intellectual rather than physical or material survival. L’Héritier’s concern with language and storytelling, and women’s access to narrative, both as tellers and receivers, was bound up with her self-esteem; she was al
so preoccupied with the relationship between magic and language that the idea of the magic spell expresses, and her stories about female triumphs against the odds, like ‘The Subtle Princess’, focus on fairy tale as an art akin to conjuring, on its potential benefits to heroines in their struggles. Utterance and freedom are linked, as verbal charms and spells are too in the very composition of the stories.

  Whether her contact with the past store of tales be a servant or an educated woman, fairy tales originate in what L’Héritier calls romans – novels – or even, citing the Spanish term, Romances. Their authenticity is confirmed by direct contact with a speaking woman to whom they are second nature; their nobility on the other hand is guaranteed by their birth. The pattern of the legacy reappears: the near source is female and plebeian and ancient, but the origin is noble, French, male and youthful. Like a fairytale heroine, the story on the lips of Mother Goose is somehow in disguise, and is, under the simple, or even uncouth exterior, a radiant and well-born princess, like Cinderella, like Donkeyskin.

  Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier recognized that her role in this transformation was to provide beautiful raiment. With a touch of defiance that looks forward to Romantic assertion of self, L’Héritier introduces one of the stories Richard the Lion Heart tells with an apology which, as apologies can be, is also a boast: ‘It is therefore not King Richard, who is speaking, but me.’39

  Mother Goose conceals many ancestors beneath her skirts – kings, troubadours, poets – but her voice remains proudly that of the contemporary writer, masking and unmasking herself.

  Within the tales themselves, however, L’Héritier’s disguises are more dashing. Her salon name – Scudéry’s had been ‘Sapho’ – was Télésille.40 Telesilla appears in Pausanias’ description of the sanctuary of Aphrodite at Corinth, where her statue had been put up. She was a poet and songwriter and – even more significantly with regard to L’Héritier – she had defended Argos against the Spartans: after the massacre of many Argive men on the field and the treacherous murder of the remaining force which followed, Telesilla rallied the Argive women and led them into battle.41

  The desired passage into an exalted sphere of action, normally marked out as a male preserve, corresponds, in L’Héritier’s tales as in other writings of her contemporaries, with the fairytale theme of metamorphosis: the heroines change their fates, move themselves by magical combinations of words or appearances, through verbal or visual deceptions. Unlike many of her contemporaries, L’Héritier does not introduce animal metamorphoses in her fairy tales, but like them, she does explore, as in the romances of chivalry, the flexibility offered by male disguise; her heroines prove themselves, like Telesilla, at traditional men’s ordeals.42

  Counterfeit and masquerade lie at the core of many of L’Héritier’s tales; they convey her own preoccupation with literary roleplaying. ‘Marmoisan, ou l’innocente tromperie’ (Marmoisan, or the innocent trick) is dedicated to Perrault’s daughter, with a preface asking her to include it in the family’s collection of tales.43 The story was not taken up by Perrault; but the reason is not known. It is a story of male disguise: the heroine goes to war in the place of her twin brother after he has been accidentally killed in a shameful erotic adventure – he falls off a ladder trying to enter a girl’s bedroom without permission, and is run through by her father. In her brother’s shape, Marmoisan distinguishes herself and heaps honour on her household; she struggles not to be revealed, though many traps are set for her by jealous courtiers who suspect her of being a girl, and by the prince who has fallen in love with her and longs for her to turn out not to be a boy. She maintains feminine decorum too, throughout, refusing to join in the rough ribaldry of the court at women’s expense. In the end, she is wounded in the lists at a tourney, and her travesty uncovered – to rejoicing all round.44 L’Héritier discriminates within the category of maleness between virtues she affirms – courage, action, altruism – and characteristics she repulses: dirty talk among them. The virtues are not sex-specific, her story implies and claims, though the female objects of masculine attacks, both sexual and discursive, confer a more specifically male character on these faults. Social organization lies at the root of these evils.

  In this, L’Héritier foreshadows the ironies of her fellow fairytale writer in ‘Starlight’, one of the stories interpolated, as we have seen, in a novel by Murat. There, Murat describes the topsy-turvy land of Quietlife Island: ‘Not a sound was to be heard there; everyone spoke in whispers and walked on tiptoe.45 There were no quarrels, and hardly any wars. When it became absolutely impossible to avoid engaging in combat, only the ladies fought, throwing crab-apples from a distance. The men kept well away: they slept till midday, plied their spinning wheels, tied pretty bows, took the children for walks, and made their faces up with rouge and beauty spots.’ When the manly hero, Izmir, finds himself in this company, he becomes enraged, and plunges into battle, laying about him with his sword until the dead and dying lie about, to the horror of the Quietlife Islanders. ‘What on earth do you think you’re doing?’ cries the king. ‘Stop for goodness’s sake. You can’t kill people like that without mercy. It would be a fine thing if you taught them to kill as well …’ This tale criticizes the male cult of military gloire, and unlike the medieval World Turned Upside Down, does not scoff at the inversion of norms, but holds it up in gentle, humorous reproach.

  Murat’s and L’Héritier’s tales issue strong attacks on the feminine realm as traditionally prescribed, and this sets them against women who wield power by its rules; these collaborators are transmogrified into vicious fairies and wicked stepmothers and idle, addle-pated, babbling girls – but always in a spirit of challenging limits on women’s expectations.

  The recurrence of male imposture in women’s fairy tales might arise simply from the device’s splendid narrative possibilities; but there could be more to it. As a woman writer, L’Héritier identified with the travestied Marmoisan; she wanted to prove through her heroine that she could be a valiant knight and a completely feminine woman, who inspires love. Likewise, she could play a man’s part in the world of letters and win approval and renown. Her fairy tales tend to validate the inferior category against the superior, the vernacular folk literature against the classics, oral tradition against book learning, the female against the male, by skilfully imitating the style of the dominant category, its learning and its refinement, by performing a successful masquerade.

  In ‘La Robe de sincérité’, she adopts a central device, the titular motif of the story, to develop her defence of women and of fiction, in a world antagonistic to their skills, their arts, and their traditions, among which storytelling features prominently. She also uses it to press her concern about true and false love on the one hand, and to play again with the character of true and false art on the other; when truth is served at the conclusion, its witnesses are the pairs of lovers and their marriages: no fewer than four weddings are necessary to tie up the tale.

  A Robe of Sincerity has the power, the wizard Misandre (advisedly named) claims at the beginning of the tale, to reveal to a married man whether his wife is faithful, to a brother his sister’s chastity, to a son his mother’s, and so forth: if the woman in quesion is pure, the pictures of virtuous women will be visible in light on the black cloth of the robe when she puts it on. If the embroidery remains invisible, she is guilty. The King of Crete, before whom Misandre has been demonstrating his magic tricks – ‘the kind of thing you see at the St Germain fair’, puts in L’Héritier condescendingly – instantly orders him to make such a robe. Herminie, the wizard’s daughter, and her mother, start to weave it together, offering unheard protests to Misandre, who, as his name implies, is hell-bent on stirring up trouble at court. He succeeds: his erotic version of the Emperor’s New Clothes drives every man crazy with suspicions about their wives and sisters.

  L’Héritier shows her dark comic gifts when she describes the robe’s mischief: the men in question all pretend of course that they can see the em
broidery, and then rage with jealousy in secret afterwards. One court favourite, in a fit, mistakes a maid in the corridor at night for his wife and assumes she is stealing away to a secret assignation, manhandles her so that she spills the water she is carrying, which he then howls is his own blood; later, he gives chase in the dark to a dog, convinced that he has caught his wife and her lover in flagrante, and manages to crack his skull on the stairs. Giving an interesting glimpse into married life in those days, the author then describes how the innocent wife indignantly refuses to stay in the matrimonial bed and shuts herself up in her study to sleep in the armchair.46

  The theme of women’s art resonates strongly throughout the tale, for Herminie, the weaver, also has a fairy godmother, a learned and rich widow, who paints portraits, and she becomes Herminie’s patron and encourages her in her work (though she won’t hear of her earning her living) until, in the way of romances, she is captured by pirates. Many different pictures featured in the story are wonder-working to different ends: at the conclusion, the many weddings are mirrored in the drawings Herminie has made, and her mother embroidered and woven, all on the theme of chaste, faithful women, like Penelope and Halcyone who could not bear to outlive her beloved husband.

  L’Héritier is here taking up a thread in feminism which goes back to medieval ripostes to the Roman de la rose and Boccaccio. Above all, the narrator vindicates the robe itself, in a clever inversion: the instrument of deception and misery becomes a true instrument of discernment, distinguishing truth-tellers from liars, flatterers from honest folk, humble men from proud ones, since only the honest and virtuous spoke out that they saw nothing, that the robe was nothing but a trick. As in ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, the famous version written by Hans Andersen in 1837, the fabricated artefact, itself an act of seduction and falsehood, turns out, like the scenes on Herminie’s drawing and painting, to have genuine theurgic powers to tell true.