{"id":156474,"date":"2021-12-21T11:41:10","date_gmt":"2021-12-21T16:41:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=156474"},"modified":"2022-01-03T16:39:24","modified_gmt":"2022-01-03T21:39:24","slug":"fairy-fatale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/12\/21\/fairy-fatale\/","title":{"rendered":"Fairy Fatale"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

An illustration by the painter Natalie Frank for The Island of Happiness. <\/em>One of Frank’s favorite tales is \u201cThe Green Serpent,\u201d in which the prince is a snake, though only literally. \u201cI love the image where you have to get into bed with this creature but you can\u2019t look at him, and of course you look at him.\u201d
<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville was born into a rich family in the fall of 1652. At thirteen, she was wed by her mother to the middle-aged Baron d\u2019Aulnoy, who had purchased his title. Three months pregnant that same year, in the summer of 1666, she inked a\u00a0jinx<\/a> in the margins of a fifteenth-century religious play from their library:<\/p>\n

It has been almost 200 years since this book was made, and whoever will have this Book should know that it was mine and that it belongs to our house. Written in Normandie near Honfleur. Adieu, Reader, if you have my book and I don\u2019t know you and you don\u2019t appreciate what\u2019s inside, I wish you ringworm, scabies, fever, the plague, measles, and a broken neck. May God assist you against my maledictions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

Madame d\u2019Aulnoy would bear six children. (The first two died young.) But she\u2019d also become the mother of a best-selling genre in early modern France: the literary fairy tale, in which her curses would be very much at home.<\/p>\n

In d\u2019Aulnoy\u2019s stories, heroines cream dragons and enemy armies. They run away from home, crossdress, shape-shift; they outwit, slay, rescue, lead. Occasionally, they faint or sob or splash their sisters\u2019 ball gowns with mud. According to Jack Zipes, the doyen of folktale scholarship who recently translated a new collection of d\u2019Aulnoy\u2019s tales under the name of\u00a0The Island of Happiness<\/i>, at least two-thirds of seventeenth-century fairy tales were written by women. And though d\u2019Aulnoy has historically taken a backseat to Charles Perrault, the author of \u201cSleeping Beauty\u201d and \u201cLittle Red Riding Hood,\u201d she published her first fairy tale in 1690, some seven years before he did. (The two writers had no contact, and ran in very different circles: he a well-connected Parisian bourgeois, she an outrageous aristocrat from the sticks.)<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Tale of Mira\u201d is exemplary of d\u2019Aulnoy\u2019s refreshing style. Tucked into a novel, as many of her fairy tales were, it\u2019s presented as a lady\u2019s letter or diary entry, relating a story she has heard while traveling. Once upon a time, a king and queen produced a daughter so beautiful that people couldn\u2019t help but stare\u2014they called this princess Mira, the Spanish for \u201cLook.\u201d \u201cAnyone who saw her fell desperately in love with her. However, her pride and indifference made all of her lovers die,\u201d d\u2019Aulnoy writes. \u201cConsequently, she depopulated her father\u2019s kingdom.\u201d She adds: \u201cMoreover, the surrounding countries were full of dead or dying lovers.\u201d An oracle said that Mira would have to go\u2014the fates would teach her to be more considered with other people\u2019s hearts. So Mira roamed the globe dressed as a shepherdess, leaving expired men in her wake, until one day she met a shy, young, and possibly gay count, whom she adored. Finding him immune to her charms, Mira died of grief at his castle, where locals afterward claimed to hear the \u201cdeep sighs\u201d of the man-eater\u2019s ghost.<\/p>\n

These seventeenth-century fairy tales, Zipes told me, \u201chad to do with women\u2019s real lives, and I don\u2019t believe d\u2019Aulnoy\u2019s life was so different from a lot of the women in her time.\u201d That\u2019s hard to prove in great detail. D\u2019Aulnoy\u2019s biography is, as Volker Schr\u00f6der, a scholar of Louis XIV\u2019s France at Princeton, told me on a phone call, full of gaps, gray areas, and gossip. Schr\u00f6der, who discovered the teen bride\u2019s threatening marginalia a few years ago, has puzzled together some of her life story from archival documents, and he\u00a0blogs<\/a> about his findings.<\/p>\n

D\u2019Aulnoy\u2019s marriage was no success. \u201cI have it from her that he was a terrible husband\u2014a violent husband,\u201d Schr\u00f6der said. In 1669, d\u2019Aulnoy and her mother framed the baron for bad-mouthing the king, a crime punishable by death, but their plot came apart in court, and d\u2019Aulnoy is said to have gone to jail with a babe in tow. Over the next fifteen years, the d\u2019Aulnoys didn\u2019t make peace but didn\u2019t divorce, either. Then, in December 1685, the baron, unable to put up the dowry for their eldest daughter\u2019s marriage, forced his wife to give the fief she had inherited to her prospective son-in-law. \u201cAnd this\u201d\u2014Schr\u00f6der inhaled sharply\u2014\u201cshe didn\u2019t like.\u201d Though the baron, who worked a day job and did stints in debtor\u2019s prison, promised to compensate the baroness with an annuity of 1,000 livres (about $35,000<\/a>), the money either came irregularly or not at all. Lawsuits ensued, as did some unspecified mauvaise conduite<\/i> (\u201cbad behavior\u201d) on the part of Madame d\u2019Aulnoy. In 1686, she was arrested by order of the king (presumably at her husband\u2019s urging) and pushed first into a convent in the Loire Valley, then another in Paris\u2014not as a nun, but as a detainee. She stayed there until at least February 1695, and we don\u2019t know what her decade of lockup looked like, only that she retained access to her daughters, her lawyer, and her publisher. (Not bad.) In fact, it was during this period of imprisonment that her first fairy tale appeared in print.<\/p>\n

Her first book of stories, Les contes des f\u00e9es<\/i>, coined the new genre\u2019s name. <\/i>The earliest of her tales, \u201cThe Island of Happiness\u201d\u2014in which a dude voluntarily leaves his darling to go and make war, then dies in battle\u2014has no happy ending, only the poetic justice she favored above all else. D\u2019Aulnoy\u2019s fairy tales run long and are not addressed to children. She marbles fantasy with realism, and burnishes it with vim and wit. Often, the narration is scathing: one stepsister is \u201cless noble than an oyster in its shell.\u201d D\u2019Aulnoy\u2019s most reliable crowdpleaser is \u201cBelle-Belle, or the Chevalier Fortun\u00e9,\u201d in which three sisters, one \u201cbrave amazon\u201d after the other, attempt to pass themselves off as knights. Only the youngest is made of the right stuff. It\u2019s a Shakespearean romp in which Belle-Belle becomes the king\u2019s squire and then his wife, but not before (s)he has taken the reins and saved the day. In this way, D\u2019Aulnoy dethroned the reigning image of female nature. Her heroines are three-dimensional portraits of women trapped between rocks and hard places, doing pretty much their best to hold on to their virtues. As the feminist painter Natalie Frank<\/a>, who illustrated the new collection, told me: \u201cEvery female character feels real and burdened and formed by what they have been through.\u201d In \u201cThe Ram,\u201d the heroine\u2019s nonhuman boyfriend dies of heartbreak. \u201cD\u2019Aulnoy here says maybe that\u2019s the better ending for the woman: to control the kingdom and not care about husbands,\u201d Schr\u00f6der suggested. \u201cThe explicit moral doesn\u2019t say that, but the implicit message does. She has these tales where things are a bit more complicated.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Frank\u2019s jewel-bright drawings suggest Mary Cassatt if Cassatt had allied not with Degas but Goya. They fit d\u2019Aulnoy\u2019s cast-like couture.<\/p><\/div>\n

In \u201cThe White Cat,\u201d a princess has been turned into a tiny, sweet, and extremely resourceful mouser. The story is full of precious miniatures that defy belittlement, including a ruby-encrusted box that opens upon a walnut, inside of which is a hazelnut, then a cherrystone, a kernel, a grain of wheat, a millet seed, and, finally, a four-hundred-yard-long cloth, resplendently embroidered. \u201cThat\u2019s a conscious choice when the prevailing discourse\u2014especially around Louis XIV\u2014is one of total grandeur,\u201d Rori Bloom, a scholar at the University of Florida, told me. \u201cIt\u2019s an upset about what you value.\u201d \u201cThe White Cat\u201d itself impearls a larger novel whose hero, Dandinardi\u00e8re, a concussed wannabe knight based on Don Quixote, betroths himself to a dreamy girl who has no dowry but whose storytelling talent rivals Scheherazade\u2019s. D\u2019Aulnoy often points to a strong alliance being the most important thing. From the poem that ends her tale \u201cThe Blue Bird\u201d:<\/p>\n

Better to be a bird of any hue
\nA raven, crow, an owl, I do protest,
\nThan stick for life to a partner like glue
\nWho scorns you, or whom you detest.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

D\u2019Aulnoy managed to write herself a happier ending. By January 1698, she was legally separated from her husband and had a place on rue Saint-Beno\u00eet in Paris. There she hosted one of the era\u2019s more interesting literary salons, sometimes appearing in costume as characters from her fairy tales. Schr\u00f6der believes that she had already composed her catalog at the convent, and not in the midst of these raucous parties. \u201cShe still saw herself as a noblewoman,\u201d he said, \u201cand nobles aren\u2019t supposed to be serious professionals. It all has to look so<\/i> effortless<\/i>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even so, today it\u2019s tempting to frame the mother of fairy tales as some sort of radical. Bloom, who is at work on a book about d\u2019Aulnoy and another conteuse<\/i>, has an allergy to reading too much into their lives, yet she still hears a protofeminist tone in the tales of Madame d\u2019Aulnoy. In \u201cThe Little Good Mouse,\u201d for example, after Queen Joliette\u2019s husband and jailer dies, a fairy urges her, \u201cLet us not waste any time, we must organize a coup d\u2019\u00e9tat; let us go to the castle\u2019s big assembly too and address a harangue to the people!\u201d Fairies\u2014typically fairy godmothers\u2014are always stirring the pot, altering fate, dishing out help and harm. (How else did all those people become birds and rams and cats?) The world of d\u2019Aulnoy\u2019s fiction is governed by powerful women.<\/p>\n

According to some of the bavardage, d\u2019Aulnoy helped her friend Ang\u00e9lique Tiquet hire a hitman to kill Tiquet\u2019s abusive husband, a member of parliament who had wooed her with bouquets peppered with real diamonds but whose fortune turned out to be fake. Things went sideways<\/a>: the husband survived the hit and Tiquet was executed. There\u2019s no reliable source for d\u2019Aulnoy\u2019s involvement, yet it\u2019s easy to believe in\u2014because Marie-Catherine d\u2019Aulnoy often comes off as just the kind of fairy fatale she liked to make up. Woe to the fool who forgets that a woman invented the literary fairy tale, and that fairies are not to be fucked with.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Illustration by Natalie Frank for The Island of Happiness<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

<\/div>\n
Chantel Tattoli is a Paris-based culture journalist. She has contributed to <\/i>Wired, the <\/i>New York Times\u00a0Style section, <\/i>The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Harper\u2019s, The Believer, and the\u00a0Porsche journal<\/em> 000.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

D\u2019Aulnoy\u2019s heroines run away from home, crossdress, shape-shift; they outwit, slay, rescue, lead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":873,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7554],"tags":[68325,68324,7265,2417,19867,1907],"class_list":["post-156474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history-2","tag-chanel-tattoli","tag-daulnoy","tag-fairy-tales","tag-feminist-art","tag-feminist-history","tag-french-fiction"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nFairy Fatale by Chantel Tattoli<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"December 21, 2021 \u2013 D\u2019Aulnoy\u2019s heroines run away from home, crossdress, shape-shift; they outwit, slay, rescue, lead.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/12\/21\/fairy-fatale\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Fairy Fatale by Chantel Tattoli\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"December 21, 2021 \u2013 D\u2019Aulnoy\u2019s heroines run away from home, crossdress, shape-shift; 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