From the Beast to the Blonde

by Marina Warner

  Of the women writers of fairy tales represented in Le Cabinet des fées, Catherine Bernard and Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier were almost the only ones who, in the years of severe state censorship and autocratic controls, managed a quiet and private life. Neither married, and both found aristocratic female patrons to support them in their writing.24 Their colleagues, however, had much more troubled careers.

  Henriette-Julie de Castelnau, born in 1670, married to the Comte de Murat at the age of twenty-one, caused a stir when she arrived in Paris from her native Brittany and showed a preference for Breton peasant costume, thus anticipating Marie-Antoinette’s peasant make-believe.25 But Murat was acting in a different spirit, for she was writing fiction based on her own origins, and challenging her own peers and superiors. She penned a squib about the courtesan Rhodope that clearly targeted the king’s pious mistress, Mme de Maintenon, and her former husband, the poet Scarron, and in 1698 Murat was summoned as ‘une femme déréglée’ by the police, and ordered into provincial exile; she managed to resist – until 1702, when her family collaborated in putting her away as mentally disturbed. The rumours of her dérèglement included, from the angle of the purified, Maintenon court, blasphemy and lesbianism; it is very difficult to assess the truth of these accusations from this distance.26 However, Mme de Murat continued to raise eyebrows during her exile in Loches, by wearing a red riding hood to church and announcing loudly and exuberantly that she lived for pleasure. She had to wait until the death of Louis XIV and the Regency of Philippe d’Orléans before she was released and allowed to return to Paris, but she died soon after, of chronic kidney trouble, in 1716.

  Murat’s misfortunes were not unusual in the climate of courtly despotism. Charlotte-Rose Caumont de La Force (1650–1724) married the son of a highly placed official, the Président Briou, without the latter’s consent; the marriage was immediately broken by his family Later, she was also dismissed from court, where she was a dame d’honneur or lady-in-waiting to the queen and the dauphin, after she wrote some blasphemous poems; she had to face penury, as her pension was cut off, or enter a convent.27 She chose the latter, and wrote fairy tales from her exile in the nunnery, publishing them in the same year as Perrault’s Mother Goose Tales (1697).

  Like Mlle de La Force, Henriette-Julie de Murat wrote volumes of tales, as well as novels, while living in detention in the country; they often convey her bitterness about love and her caustic view of society.28 In one, even a powerful fairy cannot hold the love of her husband after she has grown old; in another, ‘Le Palais de la vengeance’ (The Palace of Vengeance), Murat turns today’s fairytale conventions upside down by warning that even unions born of love can turn sour.29 The evil enchanter Pagan had abducted the lovers and imprisoned them together in a delightful crystal palace, where they want for nothing; but after a time, the moral declares, ‘Pagan made them discover the unhappy secret,/ That happiness itself can become a bore.’30

  The three interpolated fairy stories of Les Lutins du Château de Kernosy (The Goblins of the Castle of Kernosy), Murat’s comedy of manners, set in Brittany, reveal how such material was made up or retrieved, embroidered and reworked in leisured company in the countryside to while away long evenings.31 The heroines are two sisters under the chafing tutelage of their aunt, the châtelaine of Kernosy, who, while looking for a lover for herself, is enjoying the wealth of her two orphaned charges. The two young women are desperately confined and indeed bored until the provident arrival of two young men: the company grows gayer, and rounds of dancing, musical entertainments and games of forfeits ensue, with each member of the company completing bouts rimés, writing sonnets, and telling stories. A certain M. de Fatville (fat meaning booby) who is a conseiller at the local parlement arrives: the abusive vicomtesse has picked him as a suitable match for one of her nieces because, it turns out, she owes him a debt of money he is prepared to waive in return for Mlle de Saint Urbain’s charms. M. de Fatville bears the brunt of the author’s précieuse distaste for the bourgeois, the businessman, the uncouth and unlettered. For his part, he reveals his dreadful limitations in two ways: out hunting with the gallant party, he insists on taking up a gun and shoots at something moving – his prey turns out to be a black Breton milch cow.32 But above all, he betrays his limited nature when one of the young men begins to tell the tale of ‘Peau d’ours’ or ‘Bearskin’, and he wants to know if it is a true story. Otherwise, he says, he is going to bed. He was assured, Murat continues, ‘that he could in all certainty take himself off to bed’.33

  A fairy tale to the académiciens was a vulgar amusement of old folk and children; to a writer like Murat, appreciating its qualities was a sign of temperament, intelligence, fineness and eligibility. A man who cannot see the point of a fairy story is a man who might well mistake a milch cow for a stag and shoot her.

  The tale of ‘Bearskin’ creates a double reflection en abyme of the situation in which the novel’s heroines find themselves – threatened by an arranged marriage to a monster.34 M. de Fatville, the unwanted suitor, takes the fearsome features of the King of the Ogres, Rhinoceros, who sends his ambassador to the neighbouring kingdom and demands the hand of Noble-Epine – Hawthorn – the princess. He declares: ‘That if he [the king] didn’t give his daughter away, Rhinoceros himself would come at the head of a hundred million ogres to lay waste the kingdom and eat the whole royal family.’ The king – grief-stricken of course – parts with Hawthorn his daughter. However, when Rhinoceros goes off to catch two or three bears for his wife’s supper, the princess’s selfless and resourceful servant, Corianda, sews her up into one of the bearskins lying about, and, magically, she is instantly transformed into ‘the prettiest she-bear in this world’. She is eventually captured by a Prince Charming out hunting (as in an earlier Basile story, ‘The She-Bear’), and after a few vicious turns of the screw, when Rhinoceros behaves like the evil stepmother of other traditional tales, all ends happily.35

  One aspect has faded from view in the popular recensions of this type of fairy tale today: the beauty is the beast – at least she is also changed into a beast, and the metamorphosis leads to her escape from a tyrant father as well as a tyrant husband. In a female protagonist’s case, shape-shifting also shifts the conditions of confinement: this principle does not obtain for men enchanted into animal form, like the monstrous Rhinoceros himself, or the more traditional Beast of the cycle.36 As a she-bear, Princess Hawthorn acquires more freedom of movement than as a young woman, and more freedom of choice. In animal form, she enjoys a tender and even abandoned flirtation with her prince:

  More enchanted than ever with his she-bear, Zelindor ordered that she was to be looked after with the greatest care, and gave her a delightful rocky grotto surrounded with statues; inside there was a bed of well-tended grass where she could retire at night. He came to see her at every possible moment … he was crazy about her.37

  It is a curious instance of fantasy turning out to be less fantastic than it appears that Charlotte-Rose de La Force, following the young husband from whom she had been forcibly separated, disguised herself as a bear and hid among a group of entertainers’ dancing bears in order to gain entrance to the castle where he had been sequestered by his father.38

  III

  The writer of fairy tales whose private vicissitudes reflect most dramatically of all the romantic and social tensions of the age of despotism was the prodigiously gifted, successful femme galante, Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy. Among the group of women who practised the genre, D’Aulnoy is the least connected to the court of Louis XIV; she is also one of the least veiled in her allusions to despotism’s frailties and caprices.39 None of Mlle L’Héritier’s effusions on military triumphs or simpering hommages to the king’s progeny fall from her witty, inventive pen. D’Aulnoy had put herself beyond the pale, and at the same time, it seems, secured a different source of revenue. Before she took up fairy tales, her career had been even more rackety than Henriette-Julie de Murat’s. The copious and rococo tales she comp
osed correspond to the violent upheavals in her own life, as well as responding, in a spirit of revolt, to the political conflicts and social constraints of her times.

  Until the mid-nineteenth century, she featured prominently in publishers’ lists, but in 1855 the impresario J. R. Planché, who translated many of the tales, and adapted others as fairy extravaganzas for the stage, baulked at her casual frankness about sex and violence, and her prevailing cynicism. In a preface he admitted he had dropped two stories, which ‘could not, without considerable alteration in their details, have been rendered unobjectionable to the English reader’.40 For encrypted in Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy’s many variations on the Cupid and Psyche plot lie the prevailing conditions of unhappy, forced unions between incompatible mates. And when the story of her own marriage is told, the many husbands who are beasts in her stories lose their fairytale outlandishness and become metaphorical, darkly humorous reflections on the circumstances of her life.

  The details of her youth are difficult to verify, as a mixture of hearsay, false memory, self-justification, writerly inventiveness and hyperbole have stirred a rich brew, but the story that survives describes how she was fifteen or sixteen when she was married to the Baron d’Aulnoy, who was thirty years older than her. He was a sidekick of the dissolute Duc de Vendôme, in whose service he had accumulated enough money to buy himself land and a title. The union was arranged by Marie-Catherine’s father: she may have been abducted by arrangement from the convent where she was being educated to live with a man she had never seen, though just to complicate the picture further, her Memoirs in which the story appeared are probably by Henriette-Julie de Murat.41

  But M. d’Aulnoy did not have a monopoly on ancien régime raciness, and the match soon disintegrated: in 1669, when Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy was nineteen or so, she and her mother, the Marquise de Gadagne, became involved in a personal scandal: they conspired with their lovers, or so it was alleged, to bring a charge of high treason against M. d’Aulnoy for speaking against the king. He had been overheard swearing in public against the taxes that had been imposed. In mid-seventeenth-century France, this amounted to lèse-majesté. Had M. le Baron d’Aulnoy been found guilty, he would have been executed.

  The attempt to defame him failed, and failed catastrophically for his accusers: after three whole years in the Bastille, M. d’Aulnoy managed to convince the court of his blamelessness, and bring charges in retaliation against his wife and her mother. Both the women’s alleged lovers were tortured; they confessed, and were executed.42 The archives of the Bastille provide reliable evidence for these accusations and counter-accusations, but the repercussions become more mysterious: the Marquise de Gadagne fled to England, and a warrant was served for Mme d’Aulnoy’s arrest. She managed to escape the officers by jumping out of the window at their early-morning summons, and hiding in a church under a convenient bier. Or so one version has it. She may have then lived as an émigrée in Holland, Spain and England, working as a spy with her mother on behalf of France. This period of her life becomes very shadowy indeed. However, in 1685 she was allowed to return to Paris, perhaps as a reward for services rendered. Her mother was given a pension by the Spanish king and stayed on in Madrid. Mme d’Aulnoy began to receive in her house in the rue St Benoît, and her salon became one of the leading social gatherings of Paris; cultivating the polite arts, she and her friends told fairy tales and, over raspberry or gooseberry cordials and hot chocolate, dressed up to play the parts. She began to contribute significantly to literary life: the Recueil des plus belles pièces des poètes français, a spirited and enlightened anthology which appeared in 1692, was edited either by her or by that sceptical sympathizer with the women’s party of the Moderns, Fontenelle.43 She also published a series of travel memoirs, giving the ‘inside’ story of court life in Madrid and London – significantly, not Versailles.44 Written with persuasive eyewitness immediacy, they enjoyed a huge success, and made D’Aulnoy money she badly needed to run her household and bring up her three fatherless daughters (not all born during her marriage). Her memoirs of court life have however been shown to be largely plagiarized and partly fabricated, so her real activities during this period remain a mystery.45 It is not entirely impossible that all her travels took place in the arms of the West Wind, as in her first fairy tale, ‘The Isle of Happiness’. But in the memoirs, unlike the tales, she assumed a first person voice to lend authenticity to her narrative, gossiping about kings and courts like an intimate.

  The make-believe in her recollections, in the tales and in the salons concealed the continuing realities of life and matrimony against which her extravagant romancing was protesting: in 1699, her friend Angélique Ticquet was beheaded in the Place de Grève after she had influenced a servant to make an attempt on her husband’s life. The servant, who had shot at Councillor Ticquet and wounded him badly, was hanged. The councillor had married her, a young and orphaned heiress, without her having a say in the union; he then maltreated her and she had retaliated, allegedly abetted by Mme d’Aulnoy, who was therefore fortunate not to be found guilty of being her accomplice.46

  The tumult of Mme d’Aulnoy’s circle reflects how difficult it was for a woman of independent spirit in the ancien régime to disencumber herself of a husband; and it is significant that both Mlle L’Héritier and she wrote fairy tales in which the heroine sets out alone in disguise on a quest like a man. The romancing of the salon involved contact with fancied means of illicit power – Circean powers of metamorphosis – which she craved. Here again, in a pervasive negative image of the lower-class woman, the gossip and the witch, the fairytale narrators found a sympathetic ally. But the theme to which Mme d’Aulnoy returned, almost obsessively, in a score of variations on beauties and beasts, was the animal bride and animal groom.

  Rams, serpents, boars, yellow dwarves, white cats, blue birds, frogs, hinds, shape-shifters of all sorts crowd her pages: Mme d’Aulnoy seized the opportunities which the mythological theme of animal metamorphosis offered her to create a world of pretend in which happiness and love are sometimes possible for a heroine, but elusive and hard-won.

  When Mme d’Aulnoy treats of beast husbands, she often offers them no quarter. In ‘Le Mouton’ (The Ram), the eponymous beast proves himself most delicate, during his union with the princess: subtle bisques and pâtés rain down in his gardens, he appears heaped in jewels and eats sherbet and plays shuttlecock with his courtiers like any noble prince. The Ram develops the Lear theme of the king who casts out the youngest and best-loved of his three daughters; the original folk tale that inspired Shakespeare ended with a reconciliation between the king and his daughter, but Mme d’Aulnoy, unlike Shakespeare, follows and extends her triumph in hyperbolic style: the beautiful young Princesse Merveilleuse actually ascends to her father’s throne by his side as his queen, and while the coronation is taking place the forsaken Ram her animal bridegroom expires of a broken heart.

  A reluctant bride takes a pair of magic scissors to her proposed husband’s diabolical beard. (‘The Yellow Dwarf’, after ‘Phiz’, Grimms’ Goblins, London, 1861.)

  The last lines of the story comment with some acerbity: ‘Now we know that people of the highest rank are subject, like all others, to the blows of fortune …’ The author then adds a rhymed morality, which twists the tail of the story against its audience:

  How different from our modern swains!

  Even his death may well surprise

  The lovers of the present day:

  Only a silly sheep now dies,

  Because his ewe has gone astray.47

  The princess sobs over his body, and ‘felt she would die herself’. But unavailingly, in this case; her tears do not revive him, or transform him.

  It would be crude to make a direct comparison between the stormy biographies of Mme d’Aulnoy, her mother and her friend, but nevertheless the insouciance the storyteller first shows to the Ram, then the contrast she makes with spouses of her own time cannot be overlooked: there is a bitter
challenge in those final lines. The dénouement itself patently proposes – against Salic Law and the French practice – the right of daughters to inherit their patrimony rather than be handed over into another man’s keeping as his childlike dependant.

  ‘The Ram’ is filled with D’Aulnoy’s touches of knowing humour and deadpan heartlessness, bedecked with details of worldly frippery and dainties, and slowed down by its pleasurable reiteration of sophisticated games and pastimes; the combination achieves a slightly sinister atmosphere, the authentic recipe of frivolity, dreaminess, blitheness and sadism that we now recognize as the essential tone of fairy tale.

  In another of D’Aulnoy’s blithe tales of wreckage, the heroine tries to free herself from her promise to marry the Yellow Dwarf, as we have seen, but fails, and dies in the attempt; in ‘Prince Marcassin’ (Prince Wild Boar), the eponymous monster marries – and murders – two sisters before the third outwits him.48 These tales play on the Bluebeard theme; in ‘Le Dauphin’ (The Dolphin), the injustice takes a different direction and a haughty princess, Livorette, disdains her ugly suitor, until he changes himself into a canary and becomes her pet. Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy’s more optimistic variations on the Beast, in which she does restore him to full, innocent, erotic humanity, still illuminate the woman’s lot within contemporary marriages. ‘Le Serpentin vert’, recently translated as ‘The Great Green Worm’ by A. S. Byatt, directly revises ‘Cupid and Psyche’ by Apuleius, but D’Aulnoy dreamed up ever more protracted and atrocious torments for her Psyche-like heroine before she allowed, in this case, a happy ending to the lovers.49 Interestingly, it is in this story of a fulfilled love between a Beauty and a Beast that the author also emphasizes, at numerous points, the importance of equal conversation between men and women, as proposed by the salonnières.