She hurried to the end of Rue Saint-Benoît, turning into Rue Saint-Germain. The street was suffused in the soft pink glow of twilight, the lanterns burning on the walls of the palatial residences and occasional coffeehouses glowing brightly. A week had passed since the execution of Nicola Tiquet, and the residents of Paris had resumed their evening outings, dressing carefully to attend the theatre, gathering afterwards at a tavern or coffeehouse to dissect the entertainment and enjoy a meal with a glass or two of wine.
Angelina glanced along the familiar street, feeling a great affection swell inside her for the city she had started to call home. How far she had travelled. Living with Marie Catherine, even if for a brief period, had enabled her to forget the ritualised, mostly silent existence she had passed at the convent. How narrow and restricted it had been, upon reflection. How grateful she was to have discovered that it was merely one road of many that she would travel.
Angelina made her way along the rows of chestnut trees to the coffeehouse where she had met Alphonse to drink lemon cordial and discuss a story he was writing all those weeks ago. It was hard to believe how much had changed. How differently she felt. No more bound by the opinions of others, as to how she might direct the course of her life. Stepping inside the door, it took but a moment to find her dear Alphonse. Yes, there he was. Her heart swelled as she watched him a moment unobserved, seated at a small table decorated with a vase of flowers. There was a bottle of wine and two glasses set out, a platter of bread and cheese. He was reading from a small, green-covered book, as if it were a normal evening in Paris.
She had been writing to Alphonse throughout the week. Lise, sworn to secrecy, had couriered their letters back and forth. After Nicola’s execution, Angelina had found her anger about their argument vanished. It no longer seemed important. Her mother’s observation – what she had noticed with her writer’s eye Angelina would never know – that Alphonse was her kindred Prince Aime, gave Angelina the courage, the permission even, to be true to her real feelings.
As soon as she was able, she had again read through Alphonse’s unanswered letters. In them he apologised profusely for his criticism of her family, vowing to never mouth such inconsiderate words again. She wrote that she had thought about what he said in the carriage, and that she believed his observations were true. Indeed, he had helped her to consider the problem of working as her mother’s secretary. He had made her realise that she was not, after all, suited to the task.
As for herself, she had vowed not to repeat the mistakes made by her mother and father. What irony that her real parents’ forbidden relationship had shed light on her own confused desires. When Alphonse first confessed to her that he was writing an historical novel about the Baron and Marie Catherine, she had been too surprised to formulate a response. She had felt shocked, and not a little betrayed, to discover that he had been investigating Baron d’Aulnoy’s incarceration at the Bastille with a view to transforming the details into a riveting tale. He promised her that in the final version, he would disguise names to protect the reputations of those involved, and the book would not be printed in Paris. She accepted his decision to contact Cornelius Alberts with the proposal. Although she had justification, she did not position her relationship with Marie Catherine as an obstacle to his ambition. Indeed, she was even somewhat relieved that he was withdrawing the fairy tale manuscript that Marie Catherine had submitted on his behalf. It allowed her to reclaim ‘The Clever Deception’ as her own. The international publisher had responded to Alphonse’s suggestion by inviting him to visit him in his native city – perhaps they might figure out a deal together?
‘Alphonse,’ she called.
He glanced up from his reading. She quickened her steps, rushing towards him. Alphonse met her gaze and held it. Shutting the book and placing it beside his plate, he rose to stand. She felt her chest fill with warmth, the corners of her eyes and mouth pulling into a glorious smile.
What sweet relief to know that she had not imagined the inclination she felt towards Alphonse. It had been there from the moment they first met at her mother’s salon, just like the attraction between the heroine and hero in ‘The Bee and the Orange Tree’. Although Princess Aimee had been separated from her parents as an infant and had to out-manoeuvre the family of ogres who had raised her, lest they serve her up for dinner; although she dressed in a tiger-skin cloak and spoke in a savage tongue that Prince Aime could not initially understand, they had nevertheless recognised immediately that they shared a kindred spirit, and had worked to overcome their differences.
‘Angelina!’ cried Alphonse, gazing at her with naked adoration. He had taken her fingers into his and was squeezing her hands. He drew her close, kissing her cheeks several times, and it required all her steely resolve to not collapse into his embrace. Perhaps later, in the carriage, while they travelled to the port of Paris, she might give in to her desire to trace her fingers along the line of his jaw, to kiss his eyelids, to breathe in his scent.
‘My love!’ said Angelina, blinking back tears.
‘You are a sight!’
‘Thank you,’ she replied, pulling a brief face, her voice teasing.
‘An inspiration! A blessed vision!’ Alphonse allowed his eyes to roam hungrily over her face, her hair, her neck and décolletage, a devilish sparkle lighting his cheeks. ‘Come, take your seat with me. We must eat while we can. The wind is up; they say the sea will be rough tonight.’
Unsure what to do with her travelling valise, Angelina placed it beside the table. A waiter would find somewhere to stow it while they ate. Alphonse drew out her chair, and she sat down. Resuming his place opposite her, he picked up the bottle of wine and filled their goblets to the brim. ‘ Sante!’ he said, lifting his glass.
‘ Sante!’ she replied, touching the rim of her glass to his. ‘To health. To life. To us!’
Author’s Note
I first discovered the incredible Baroness Marie Catherine d’Aulnoy while researching a master’s degree in creative writing. I was trying to adapt a Grimms’ fairy tale, ‘The Girl Without Hands’, into a contemporary novel. While the novel ended up in the proverbial bottom drawer, my fascination with the French writer and her amazing life story had dug in its hooks. Like many people outside France, while I had heard of Charles Perrault, author of ‘The Little Glass Slipper’ and ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, I knew nothing of his contemporaries nor that there had been a golden age of French fairy tale publishing between 1690 and 1725, long before the Brothers Grimm. What’s more, the majority of these authors were women. In fact, it was Marie Catherine who coined the term ‘fairy tale’, and who published the very first fairy tale – ‘The Isle of Happiness’ – in 1690, interpolated in her novel The History of Hippolyte. She burst onto the Parisian salon scene at age forty, a fully formed writer, and during the next decade, along with holding a salon in her home on Rue Saint-Benoît, she published thirteen books, comprising novels, courtly histories, travel memoirs, two volumes of fairy tales and two sentimental pamphlets. The sentimental pamphlets expressed her repentance for mistakes made and sins committed; canny documents that were circulated in the salons to bolster her reputation and win the approval of the Royal Censor, who decided who did and who did not have permission to call herself an author.
Marie Catherine attracted my attention as a possible protagonist because of a beguiling entry in her biography. At the age of nineteen, heavily pregnant and with a toddler in tow, she fled Paris with her mother, Judith-Angélique, under fear of being thrown into prison. A warrant had been issued for both women’s arrest, as they were accused of masterminding a conspiracy to entrap Marie Catherine’s husband, Baron François d’Aulnoy, for the crime of lèse-majesté (speaking seditiously against King Louis XIV). Not only had François been spending Marie Catherine’s inheritance, he had also committed a fraud against Judith-Angélique, falsifying a note for 108,000 livres in her name. The women hired two men – in some histories said to be their lovers – Lamoizière and Courboy
er, and prepped them to entrap the Baron in the midst of one of his speeches against the King. While François was thrown into the Bastille to await trial, he fought back, using his connections to uncover the architects of the plot against him. Ultimately, Judith-Angélique and Marie Catherine’s plan to rid their lives of the spendthrift Baron backfired. Although not covered in this novel, Lamoizière and Courboyer were captured by the authorities, imprisoned, tortured and executed for their crime against the Baron.
Interpreters of the historical archive – there are records of all three men’s imprisonment in the Bastille, as well as the confession and trial records of Lamoizière and Courboyer – lay most of the blame for the conspiracy against the Baron on Judith-Angélique. Marie Catherine is positioned as less willing; she is young and vulnerable to her mother’s persuasions.
The Bee and the Orange Tree is a work of fiction, and I have made my own interpretations with respect to Marie Catherine’s culpability in this affair. I have also had to make choices about her movements between the imprisonment of her husband in the Bastille and her debut as a published author in 1690, as there is no historical record of this twenty-year period. Historians continue to argue over whether Marie Catherine moved to Spain after her brush with the law – following in the footsteps of Judith-Angélique – or to England, or more simply, as I have chosen, left the city of Paris but stayed in France.
Marie Catherine became utterly irresistible to me as a character when I discovered, some years after first learning about her fairy tales and notorious youth, that in 1699, nearing fifty years of age, she was involved in the scandal of Madame Nicola Carlier Tiquet and her subsequent arrest, imprisonment and execution. While historical sources are scant, there were two particularly fascinating publications detailing this chapter in Marie Catherine’s life, upon which I drew to create my fictional interpretation of events. One important source was the writing of Marguerite du Noyer, a journalist and contemporary of Marie Catherine, who published a detailed expose of the case of Madame Tiquet seventeen years after the event; another was the lengthy Gallick Report: An Historical Collection of Criminal Cases, Adjudged in the Supreme Courts of Judicature in France.
Marie Catherine had five children, two of whom died as infants. The words ‘father absent’ on the baptismal certificates of the daughter born after the Baron’s imprisonment in the Bastille, and the child she had six years later, led me to invent the fictional characters of Theresa and Angelina d’Aulnoy. In the records I came across a reference to one of Marie Catherine’s daughters becoming a fairy tale writer, and I gave this lovely detail to Angelina. I invented Father Étienne as Marie Catherine’s mysterious lover, inspired by a story in the histories, repeated over and over, that Nicola Tiquet was visited by a Thietan monk who tried to have her ferried out of Paris before her arrest. Marie Catherine’s parish was Saint-Sulpice, and there is a fairy tale-like anecdote that she hid behind a painting inside its cathedral, fearing arrest. I explored this connection, thinking it not unreasonable that she had an ally within the Catholic Church.
I have changed some of the dates of Marie Catherine’s publications to help the plot, most importantly, her second volume of fairy tales, which was actually first published in 1698.
I was fortunate enough to receive a grant to spend three months as a resident at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris in order to carry out research. There I discovered the rich literary history of Marie Catherine’s street, Rue Saint-Benoît: Marguerite Duras, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Voltaire and many other great authors all wrote in literary cafes in the area. I also met a fellow fan of Marie Catherine d’Aulnoy who shared an anecdote about Baron d’Aulnoy’s arrest. The Baron had taken refuge at Luxembourg Palace, which was under a special jurisdiction – one could not be arrested there, except by special decree of the King – but was lured into the lavish gardens, perhaps expecting a tryst. He was subsequently captured by police, because, as my contact suggested, the immunity he enjoyed in the palace did not extend to its gardens.
There are many academic and historical sources that I consulted in the research for this book, and it would not have been possible to write The Bee and the Orange Tree without them. While Marie Catherine was a bestselling author during her lifetime, and well into the 18th century, she became discredited and forgotten in the 19th century, and was even accused of plagiarism for parts of her popular travel novel, The Lady’s Travels to Spain. However, recent scholarship has revived her reputation, reconsidering her immense contribution to the history of fairy tales; she published twenty-six original fairy tales in her lifetime – all are very long – their intended audience adults, rather than children.
The response to Elizabeth Gould, the overshadowed heroine and protagonist of my first novel, The Birdman’s Wife, was extraordinary. Many readers approached me to share fond memories of their childhood membership in the Gould League of Birds, and several museums and libraries held exhibitions of their collections of her lithographs. Most recently, I was alerted on Twitter to the antiquarian bookseller Sothern’s catalogue ‘Rediscovering Remarkable Women’, which included a focus on Elizabeth Gould, releasing a limited-edition series of her prints. The forgotten contributions of Elizabeth Gould to the story of Australia’s birds now seems to have been redressed, and I can only hope that readers will respond with similar enthusiasm to Baroness Marie Catherine d’Aulnoy. As well as inventing the term ‘fairy tale’, Marie Catherine, along with her contemporaries, Madame de Le Fayette and Mademoiselle de Scudéry, made substantial contributions to the invention of the novel, a history that was elided and forgotten in the 18th century and beyond.
Acknowledgements
Important sources for the Tiquet case are Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie, Jeffrey S. Ravel, Paul Friedland, Lisa Silverman and Anne E. Duggan. I am indebted to the discipline of fairy tale studies for their immense work on the golden age of French fairy tales, including the scholars: Christine A. Jones, Lisa Brocklebank, Lewis C. Seifert, Adrienne E. Zuerner, Sophie Raynard, Marina Warner, Rori Bloom, A. S. Byatt, Donald Hase, Elizabeth Wanning Harries, Patricia Hannon, Jacques Barchilon, Allison Stedman, Jack Zipes and R. Foulché-Delbosc. Joan DeJean was an informative and entertaining source about 17th-century France under Louis XIV, and Wendy Gibson’s volume detailing women’s lives during this period was an indispensable aid.
I would like to thank the Australia Council, who funded my residency at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris for three months in 2017–18, enabling me to carry out important research and to let the city of Paris seep under my skin. I would like to extend heartfelt gratitude to my agent, Lyn Tranter, of Australian Literary Management, who pushed me to refine and redraft the manuscript. Thank you for staying with me. I want to thank my publisher, Martin Hughes of Affirm Press, for your commitment to supporting and developing Australian writers and their voices. I cannot believe how exquisitely beautiful this book is and feel incredibly fortunate to be working with such a generous and visionary team.
I cannot thank Keiran Rogers, Grace Breen and my patient, brilliant editor Ruby Ashby-Orr – enough for their dedication, support and passion.
Thank you to my husband, Brett Dionysius, for always supporting my projects and allowing me to read early drafts aloud. Your generosity and patience deserve awards and honours.
Melissa Ashley’s first novel, The Birdman’s Wife, won the Queensland Literary Awards fiction prize and the Australian Booksellers Association Booksellers’ Choice Award. She has published a collection of poetry, The Hospital for Dolls, as well as short stories, essays and academic articles. She facilitates workshops and courses in fiction and poetry at universities and writers’ centres. She lives in Brisbane with her family.
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