Wonder Tales

by Marina Warner

  Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy’s is an exceptional story in its detail, but not in its general drift; the Comtesse de Murat was denounced for unruly behaviour, including lesbianism, by her husband and his family, and after long petitioning, only succeeded in returning to Paris from exile a year before she died. The account of the ogre Rhinoceros in ‘Starlight’ and of parents who oppose their son’s wishes in ‘Bearskin’ and renege on their promises, springs from the same social arrangements as D’Aulnoy’s tales, which for all their high-spirited fun, can sound a dark note at times: ‘Such a marriage becomes slavery if it is not formed by love.’

  These successors of the précieuses were combating aristocratic complacency and determinism: tenderness and interior worth rather than title and goods were what they urged in a prospective husband. It’s a matter of historical irony typical of women’s lives that these women should be known by their married names and titles – but the situation is difficult to reverse in library catalogues and other reference works. L’Héritier, by contrast, like one or two other contemporaries whose work is still little known (Mlle de Lubert and Mlle Bernard) resisted marriage throughout her life, following the example of her friend and mentor Mlle de Scudéry.

  Men and matrimony were not the only issue to which the women developed responses in common. The ironical picture of Quietlife Island in ‘Starlight’ comments for instance on Louis XIV’s ruinous wars and the cult of military might. But their storytelling presented a united front in other ways, too.

  Wonder tales and fairy stories do not have onlie begetters, but are reworked from tradition and other sources, and crystallised in one form at one time by one teller for one audience, then by another with different listeners or readers in mind. The stories here share a declared origin in tradition: D’Aulnoy claims in one place to have gathered her material from ‘an old Arab slave woman’, L’Héritier invokes more intimate memories of her own nurse and governess telling her stories by the fire, and she urged her friend the Comtesse de Murat to follow her example and set down on paper the ancient tales which had come down in French from the voices of the people; Murat caused a commotion in Paris when she went out wearing the Breton peasant costume she favoured. The conte was characteristically transmitted orally, and when Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier and Murat made their claim to popular roots, they were defying the tradition of high-flown classicism, pompous odes and allegorising mythologies. Fables, old wives’ tales, proverbs, the handed-down, well-used, anonymous culture did not require an education to be understood or an aristocratic audience to be heard; the writers shared it among themselves, and echoes sound between the stories, as the imagery recurs, of white cats, disembodied hands, rudderless boats, while the motifs return with modular differences: cannibal ogres, jealous old fairies, bad mothers, rivalrous brothers. ‘The White Cat’ for instance recognisably combines the plots of ‘Rapunzel’ and ‘The Three Feathers’, two of the best-known Grimm Brothers’ tales, published much later, in 1812.

  The popular, unwritten provenance was often – almost always – fictive. D’Aulnoy drew on Greek romances, medieval legends of Mélusine, on Tristan and on Merlin, on fabliaux and the Lais of Marie de France, on her contemporary La Fontaine, as well as finding plots and much narrative incident in the down-to-earth and vigorous fantasies of story collections like Boccaccio’s Decameron and Le Piacevoli Notti by Giovan Francesco Straparola (‘The Babbler’). L’Héritier, too, for all her protestations about her beloved childhood nurse, also drew on printed literature, especially Giambattista Basile’s Lo Cunto de li Cunti, published in 1634–6 in Naples. She chose to pass on Basile’s tale ‘Sapia Liccarda’ because it features a heroine of spirit resisting her given fate. But she made changes. The wicked brother does not figure in the earlier Italian story, and all the heroine’s tricks are only her ardent way of testing her lover. L’Héritier’s rather gruesome additions – in the Basile, the dummy is made of sweetmeats, in ‘The Subtle Princess’, of animal lights – confront the existence of unregenerate, male wickedness. Although the flavour of her style and her friends’ and colleagues’ remains unequivocally literary, even flowery, it is also garrulous; repetition and hyperbole, cascades of detail in description, and circles within circles of plot devices are all part of the bazaar storyteller’s stock-in-trade. These authors further laid claim to an oral context of origin, by framing several of these tales within a novel, in which one of the characters is given a turn to tell a story aloud. To keep this particular stylistic flavour, dialogue has been set out in this collection as if the stories were being told by one voice.

  The hard and fast distinction between literature and orature breaks down in the tradition, because the written versions nourish the spoken and vice versa. ‘Starlight’ rings changes on the medieval chante-fable of ‘Aucassin and Nicolette’, including the topsy-turvy land, Quietlife Island, where the women do the fighting (with crab apples) while the menfolk lie around in bed. Variations on the theme of the trickster princess who lives on her wits, dupes her adversaries with dummies and masks in order to win her true love, appear all over the world and are still being told aloud today. A story recently collected in Palestine relates with similar glee the clever ruses of a certain Sahin, to win herself and her sisters well-trained husbands.

  The point of recalling the oral connection was twofold: as women writers and fairy tales were sneered at by members of the Académie française like Boileau, they made common cause by identifying themselves with the vulgar people against the establishment authorities, who debarred them. In the prolonged and bitter Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes (The Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns) women and wonders were fiercely, definitely Modern; men and gods Ancient. Madame de Lafayette, even though her chaste restraint tends to the ancien style, was influenced by the circle of modernes in which she had earlier moved, to catch an atmosphere of wonder here and there.

  But also, by pleading native, Gallic tradition, the storytellers could include anything and everything they pleased, breaking all the rules of classicism, of the unities, of linguistic purity, of decorum – what was called bienséance or seemliness. Hence the pleasure in the grotesque, the unlikely and the incongruous, the mixture of tragedy and comedy, the frank eroticism, the casual cruelty and the topsy-turvy bizarreries in these tales of wonder: nothing could be further from the austere tenor and proportion of a tragedy by Racine.

  The challenge issued by the form of the conte or wonder tale itself has been overlooked in the subsequent domestication of the genre; when the child audience was singled out by the newly flourishing market in juvenile literature, fairy tales began to be adapted to suit a nursery setting, with patent moralities adjusted to train children in what is expected of them. This trend started in the chapbooks of the eighteenth century but was established in the first quarter of the nineteenth. D’Aulnoy remained the most successful of the writers in the new, fashionable genre, but her work was continually abridged and bowdlerised – with the paradoxical effect of making it seem all frills and furbelows and bo-peep bonnets. ‘Mother Bunch’, the sobriquet she was given in eighteenth-century England, became a portmanteau name, like Mother Goose, for a fairy storyteller; when she was still alive, Mme d’Aulnoy tried unavailingly to unscramble the false attributions and the pirated editions. Though the tradition of storytelling should entail a continual return, reclaim, revision, and maybe repudiation, it is a pity when the palimpsest becomes so dense that the text beneath is obscured.

  Perrault is today much more famous than Madame d’Aulnoy or the other writers published in this collection, partly because he too was adapted, modified, and carefully selected over centuries of popular publication. The cannibal ogress in ‘The Sleeping Beauty’ has been cut from many later editions, for instance, and the tale included here has never been included in a collection of Perrault’s Contes even though the best scholarship has attributed it to him. Though Perrault’s ambiguous approach to the nursery tale was always clear to the reader, he became a favou
rite uncle because his jocular tone pokes fun at the material itself (when the ogre’s wife in Hop O’ My Thumb finds her daughters’ throats cut, she has a fainting fit – ‘most women faint in similar circumstances’ remarks Perrault). This sprightliness covers up the darkness lurking in his stories (the cruelty to Cinderella, the incest in ‘Donkeyskin’), in a way that Madame d’Aulnoy’s fantasies never do. Her ironies reinforce the viciousness or indifference of her wicked characters rather than work to blur their impact.

  The writers collected in Wonder Tales were anthologised in Le Cabinet des Fées, first published in three volumes in Amsterdam in 1731, then rearranged and increased to forty-one volumes and appearing from 1785 in Paris and Amsterdam and then in Geneva, after the Revolution interrupted their appearance. The attributions were muddled, and have continued to present some problems: ‘The Subtle Princess’ for instance was given to Murat in 1731, to Perrault in 1785, though the editor there admitted he was not sure Perrault had written it; the first edition of Murat’s novel, Les Lutins du château de Kernosy (1710), does not include the two tales printed here. D’Aulnoy’s tales filled one volume in the 1731 edition of Le Cabinet, and nearly four in 1785. Jack Zipes, the American folklore scholar, has recently retrieved many of these neglected authors for the contemporary, English-speaking audience with his collections; this book owes a great debt to his pioneering work. ‘Bearskin’ and ‘Starlight’ have never been reprinted in French, let alone translated, as they were not collected with Murat’s stories in Le Cabinet des Fées, where she fills the first two volumes of the 1731 edition.

  Terence Cave, who has made a subtle and impeccable translation of ‘The Princesse de Clèves’, by Mme de Lafayette, seemed the appropriate choice for these urbane and ironic romances. Gilbert Adair, who enjoys intertextual games, responded to Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier; three hundred years ago she ended one story with the self-reflexive comment: ‘If, like many travellers in the land of Fiction, my fate is to get lost in this land, more difficult to cross than people think, it’s as well that I get lost on the path I’ve chosen, than on another.’ Ranjit Bolt, who has turned such adroit versions of plays by Perrault’s contemporaries like Molière, has translated the Perrault–Choisy, with its dramatic disguises, mistaken identities and climactic final curtain. A. S. Byatt, who in Possession explored the serpentine lore of the fairy Mélusine, and even named her heroine the poet Christabel LaMotte, has written fairy tales herself, and in her recent novella, ‘Morpho Eugenia’ in Angels and Insects, played her own enigma variations on the butterfly imagery of Cupid and Psyche; D’Aulnoy might have scried Byatt in a magic glass when she was writing ‘Le Serpentin vert’. At a launch of his book of poems, Flow Chart, John Ashbery revealed that he was translating ‘The White Cat’ for the sheer delight of it – a piece of strong and magic luck which set this book on its way, as the first volume, it is hoped, of a new library of the wonder tale.

  MARINA WARNER

  Kentish Town, 1993

  The White Cat

  Translated by John Ashbery

  MARIE-CATHERINE D’AULNOY

  THERE WAS ONCE a king who had three sons, stout and courageous lads; he feared lest the desire to reign might overtake them before his death; there were even rumours that they were seeking to acquire vassals, so as to deprive him of his kingdom. The king felt his age, yet he was still sound of mind and body, and by no means inclined to surrender a position he filled with much dignity; therefore he concluded that the best way to live in peace was to tease them with promises which he would always be able to avoid fulfilling.

  He summoned them to his chamber, and after having spoken to them in a most kindly manner, he added: You will no doubt agree with me, dear children, that my advanced age no longer allows me to pursue affairs of state with the zeal of times gone by; I am afraid that my subjects may suffer because of this, and wish to place my crown on the head of one or another of you; but it is only right that, in view of such a prize, you seek various ways of pleasing me, even as I prepare my plans for retiring to go and live in the country. It seems to me that a little dog, one that is faithful, clever and pretty, would keep me company very well; hence without choosing my eldest son, neither my youngest, I declare to you that whichever of you three brings me the most beautiful little dog will at once become my heir. The princes were surprised by their father’s inclination to have a little dog, but the two younger ones might turn it to their advantage, and accepted with pleasure the commission to go to look for one; the eldest was too timid or too respectful to argue his rights. They took leave of the king; he gave them money and jewels, stipulating that they return without fail in a year, on the same day and at the same hour, to bring him their little dogs.

  Before setting out they betook themselves to a castle at only a league’s distance from the city. They brought their closest confidants with them, and, amid much feasting, each brother swore eternal loyalty to the others, that they would proceed to act without jealousy or bitterness, and that the most fortunate would always share his fortune with the others; finally they went away, promising that on their return they would reassemble in the same castle before going together to meet their father; they wanted no one to accompany them, and changed their names so as not to be recognised.

  Each journeyed by a different route: the two eldest had many adventures; but I am concerned only with those of the youngest. He was gracious, with a merry and witty temperament and a handsome mien; his body was nobly proportioned, his features regular, he had beautiful teeth, and much skill in all the activities that befit a prince. He sang agreeably; he plucked the lute and the theorbo with a delicate touch that people found charming. He knew how to paint; in a word, he was highly accomplished; and as for his valour, it verged on fearlessness.

  Hardly a day passed without his buying dogs, big ones, little ones, greyhounds, mastiffs, bloodhounds, hunting dogs, spaniels, barbets, lapdogs; no sooner had he found a handsome one than he found one handsomer still, and parted with the first so as to keep the other; for it would have been impossible for him to travel with thirty or forty thousand dogs, and he wanted neither gentlemen-in-waiting, nor menservants, nor pages in his retinue. He kept pushing forward, with no idea of where he was going; suddenly he was overtaken by darkness, thunder and rain, in a forest whose paths he could no longer make out.

  He took the first road he came upon, and after walking for a long time he spied a dim light, which convinced him that there must be a house near by where he might take shelter until the morrow. Guided by the light, he arrived at the gate of a castle, the most magnificent one that could ever be imagined. The gate was made of gold, studded with carbuncles, whose pure and vivid glow illuminated the whole vicinity. It was the one the prince had glimpsed from far away; the castle walls were of translucent porcelain in which various colours were mingled, and on which was depicted the history of all the fairies, from the creation of the world down to the present: the famous adventures of Peau d’Ane, of Finessa, of the Orange Tree, of Graciosa, of the Sleeping Beauty, of the Great Green Worm, and of a hundred others, were not omitted. He was delighted to recognise the Goblin Prince, for the latter was his first cousin once removed. The rain and the stormy weather prevented him from tarrying further while getting drenched to the bone, besides which he could see nothing at all in places where the light of the carbuncles didn’t penetrate.

  He returned to the golden gate; he saw a deer’s hoof fastened to a chain made entirely of diamonds; he wondered at the negligence of those who lived in the castle; for, he said to himself, what is there to prevent thieves from coming to cut away the chain and rip out the carbuncles? They would be rich forever.

  He pulled on the deer’s hoof, and at once heard the tinkling of a bell, which must have been gold or silver judging from the tone; after a moment the door opened, but he saw naught but a dozen hands that floated in the air, each holding a torch. He was so astonished that he paused at the threshold, and then felt other hands pushing him from behind with s
ome violence. He went forward in trepidation, and, as a precaution, placed his hand on the hilt of his sword; but on entering a vestibule all encrusted with porphyry and lapis, he heard two ravishing voices singing these words:

  Fear not these hands in the air,

  And in this dwelling place

  Fear naught but a lovely face

  If your heart would flee love’s snare.

  He could hardly believe that such a gracious invitation would bring him harm; and feeling himself pushed towards an enormous gate of coral, which opened as soon as he approached, he entered a salon panelled with mother-of-pearl, and then several chambers variously decorated, and so rich with paintings and precious stones, that he experienced a kind of enchantment. Thousands of lights attached to the walls, from the vaulted ceiling down to the floor, lit up parts of the other apartments, which were themselves filled with chandeliers, girandoles, and tiers of candles; in sum, the magnificence was such that he could scarcely believe his eyes, even as he looked at it.