Part 51

_L'Enchantement Impossible_ is an amusing story with one blemish, which I have ventured to correct by the omission of half a dozen lines, and the suppression of an unnecessary indelicacy. Unlike the last, this is a mere work of fancy, without any particular object--a sort of illustration of the old song and saying, _Love will find out the way_. The Mer-man and his sister would seem to point out a Breton origin for this story, as the belief in these marine marvels is strong upon the coast of Brittany, where the females are called Morgan (sea-women), or Morver'de (sea-daughters), and are supposed to draw down to their palaces of gold and crystal, at the bottom of the ocean, those who venture imprudently too near the edge of the water; but the Count de Caylus was too well acquainted with the classical Tritons and Syrens to render it necessary for him to draw upon the legends of Armorica for such materials, and it is probable the story is entirely of his own invention.

The absurd fashions in hair-dressing, glanced at in this story, by the introduction of a fairy with her hair dressed _en chien fou_, are commented upon in a little volume called _Histoires des Modes Française_; Amsterdam and Paris, 1773. "The number of these _frisures_," says the writer, "is almost infinite. Every year, every month, produces new ones. We have seen, in succession, hair dressed _en bequille_ (crutch fashion), _en graine d'epinards_ (spinach fashion!), _en baton rompu_ (broken stick!); yesterday it was _en aile de pigeon_, to-day it is _en débacle_."

BLEUETTE AND COQUELICOT.

_Bleuette et Coquelicot_ is a charming fairy tale of the pastoral order, unexceptionable in its style, and salutary in its instruction. I have only to add, in further illustration of the head-dress of Arganto (p. 360), that "Foreign _Marshalle_ Powder" was advertised in 1781 at sixteen shillings per pound, by R. Langwine, at the sign of the "Rose," opposite New Round Court, Strand; and that receipts for making it occur as late as in Gray's _Supplement to the Pharmacopœia_, in 1836. The author of _L'Histoire des Modes Française_, quoted above, says he does not "despair of one day seeing rose-coloured hair powder, blue heads," &c.; and in _Plocacosmos_ (1781), we actually find receipts for making yellow, _rose-pink_, and black hair powder; while Goldsmith, in his _Citizen of the World_, Letter III., mentions both black and _blue_.

MADEMOISELLE DE LUBERT.

Of this lady we have but very meagre information. She was born about the year 1710, and is said by some writers to have been the daughter of a President; and by others, of a "Trésorier de Marine." She appears to have led a studious and retired life, her love of literature indisposing her to marriage. Her _Contes des Fées_ were commenced about 1740; and several have been attributed to her pen which she disavowed. Those she acknowledged were:--_Terserion_, _La Princesse Lionette et le Prince Coquerico_, _Le Prince Glacé et la Princesse Etincelante_,_ La Princesse Couleur de Rose et le Prince Celadon_, _La Princesse Camion_, and _La Nouvelle Léonille_. She was also the author of a translation of _Amadis des Gaules_, _Les Hauts Faits d'Esplandian_, and _Anecdotes Africaines_, published in 1752. Voltaire and Fontenelle called her "Muse et grace." She was living in 1772, and died before 1779. She had disappeared from society for some time previously, and was presumed to be still living at that date; but a letter written by some one who knew of her decease, inserted in the _Journal de Paris_ of that year (No. 69), addressed to the author of _L'Almanach des Dames Illustres_, by "l'Ombre de Mademoiselle de Lubert," and dated from the "Mille et unième Bosquet des Champs Elisées," seems to have been considered sufficient authority; though as no precise time or place is mentioned, the letter might have been written by the lady herself had she wished to deceive the public. She had, however, reached a very respectable age, and it is probable that she was dead at that period.

"Her _Contes des Fées_," remarks one of her critics, "are not nearly equal to those of Mademoiselle de Murat and other ladies who have written in that style. They have less of moral purpose and allegorical allusion." This is quite true; and my object in publishing the two I have selected is to illustrate, as I have mentioned in my preface, the decline of the Fairy tale. Mademoiselle de Lubert is one of the latest of her class. Her stories are only designed to amuse. The publication of _The Thousand and One Nights_, by Galland, and the immense popularity that work immediately obtained, evidently affected the composition of fairy tales. Wild, extravagant adventures, unconnected incidents, transformations without point or object, a straining after the merely marvellous, and a total abandonment of the laughing philosophy and the unaffected morality which distinguish and immortalize the stories of Perrault and d'Aulnoy, were the first effects of the circulation of the _Arabian Nights Entertainments_. The next was the Orientalizing of every tale of enchantment. Dull Caliphs and Sultans deposed the merry old Kings who "once upon a time" ruled in Fairyland. The amours of the seraglio and the harem were substituted for the innocent courtships of princes or shepherds. The manners and dresses of the time, those delicious anachronisms which impart so much pleasantry--ay, and instruction--to the fairy tale, were carefully avoided; and the characters, arrayed in what the writers flattered themselves were Eastern costumes, were seriously placed in situations compared to which that of Molière's _Monsieur Jourdain_ as _Mamamonchi_ was a nearer approach to reality. Even those that had some claim to Oriental origin were so altered and "manufactured for the European market" that they were said to appear--

--en sortant de chez Barbin[60] Plus Arabe qu'en Arabie.

_Le Mercure Galant_ was flooded with these productions. _Almanzor et Zehra, Conte Arabe_; _Almerine et Zelima, Conte Oriental_; _Balky, Conte Oriental_; _Zaman, Histoire Oriental_, _&c._ Then we have _Contes Mogol_, _Contes Turcs_, _Contes Chinois_, _Contes Tartares_, _Contes Persans_, _&c._; but we are forgetting Mademoiselle de Lubert and her

FOOTNOTES:

[60] Barbin was the publisher of the _Mille et une Nuits_.

PRINCESS CAMION.

A translation of _La Princesse Camion_, much abridged and altered, was published in the _Child's Fairy Library_ some twenty years ago, under the title of _Princess Minikin._ The plot of this story is intricate without being ingenious. The persecution of Camion by Marmotte is purely capricious, and her contrivances are of the clumsiest description. In the original, Zirphil is commanded to "take off, one by one, the scales of the whale;" but a whale has no scales that it could feel the deprivation of. It is skinning the fish alive that would be a cruel operation, and I have therefore rendered "_écorcher_" in that sense, and not to scale, as it had been previously translated, in accordance with the specific direction quoted above. The transformation of the unfortunate Princess into a crayfish, and her being shelled instead of pounded as Marmotte had decreed, is all of the same character. The long story told by her in that state to the other crayfish in the plantation is a lame way of enlightening either Zirphil or the reader, and has to be continued in as lame a manner by Citronette. The pounding the crayfish for the King's soup, and the disappearance of them in flames when they are put into the mortar, seems to point to an Eastern origin. The latter portion reminds us of the black man flinging the fish into the fire, in the story of "The Fisherman and the Genius," in the _Arabian Nights_, where there is also a city changed into a lake, and all its inhabitants into fishes, and re-transformed in the end and restored to the rightful monarch, the young King of the Black Island. The crayfish broth may be an allusion to the well-known _Bisque d'Ecrévisse_, but it is also an Oriental dish; for while this book was passing through the press, a morning journal announced that "the eldest royal son of his Majesty the First King of Siam," on his arrival at Claridge's Hotel, "after satisfying himself that due provision had been made for the comfort of his staff, retired to rest, having first partaken of a frugal repast, prepared by his own _chef-de-cuisine_, consisting of _crabfish pounded_ with various Eastern condiments."--_Morning Post_, October 31st, 1857.

The eagerness with which the nobles of the Court sought for the servile office of filling the King of the Whiting's bowl with sea-water, is the only stroke of satire in the story, and evidently levelled at the candle-holding and similar ceremonies of "le grand et le petit coucher." To stand and hold a "bougeoir allumé," while Louis XIV. undressed himself, was, says St. Simon, "une distinction et une faveur qui se comptait, tant le Roi avait l'art de donner l'être à des riens."

In a note to the expression, "shrieks like Melusine's," page 398, I have suggested that some portion of _Princess Camion_ might have been founded on the romance of _Melusine_. This romance was composed towards the end of the fourteenth century, by Jean d'Arras, at the desire of the Duke de Berri, son of John, King of France, and was founded on an incident recorded in the archives of the family of Lusignan, which were in possession of the Duke. It is briefly as follows:--

THE LEGEND OF MELUSINE.

A King of Albania, named Elinas, had married the beautiful Fay Pressine, by whom he had three daughters at a birth, Melusine, Melior, and Palatine. Fay had stipulated that he should never enter her chamber during the period of her confinement; but the King having broken his promise in his anxiety to embrace his newly-born children, the Queen cried out that she was compelled to leave him, and immediately disappeared with her three daughters. She retired to the Court of her sister, the Queen of the "Isle Perdue," and as her children grew up, instructed them in the art of sorcery. Melusine having learned from her mother the conduct of her father, determined to be revenged on him, and proceeding to Albania, by means of her newly-acquired art carried off the King and shut him up in a mountain called Brandelois. The Queen, who still retained some affection for her husband, on becoming acquainted with this unnatural act, punished Melusine by sentencing her to become every Saturday a serpent from the waist downwards, till she should meet with a lover who would marry her on condition of never intruding on her during the time of her transformation, when she was ordered to bathe; with a promise that if she strictly attended to this injunction, she might eventually be relieved from her weekly disgrace and punishment. Melusine was excessively beautiful, and Raimondin, son of the Count de Forez, having met with her in the forest of Colombiers,[61] fell in love with her so deeply that he married her without hesitation on the prescribed conditions. She built for him, near the spot where they had met, the Castle of Lusignan, and bore him several children; but her husband's jealousy being excited by a cousin, who suggested to him that Melusine had a criminal object in secreting herself on a Saturday, he made a hole with his sword in the door of the chamber to which she was wont to retire, and perceived her in her state of transformation. The various versions of this legend differ in the details of the consequences; but all agree in stating that Melusine, reproaching him with the breach of his word, disappeared, and left him to end his days as a hermit on Montserrat. The popular belief was, that she appeared on what was called the Tower of Melusine when any of the lords of Lusignan were about to die; and Mezeray assures us, on the faith "of people who were not by any means credulous," that previous to the death of a Lusignan, or of a king of France, she was seen on this tower in a mourning dress, and uttered for a long time the most heart-piercing lamentations. The Duke de Montpensier destroyed the castle in 1574, on account of the resistance made to his arms in it by the Huguenots; but the family of Lusignan, till it merged in that of Montmorency-Luxembourg, continued to bear for its crest a woman bathing, in allusion to the story of Melusine.

Ange par la figure, et serpent par la reste.--_Delisle._

PRINCESS LIONETTE AND PRINCE COQUERICO.

_La Princesse Lionette et le Prince Coquerico_ is an infinitely better story than _La Princesse Camion_: but, like that, its aim is no higher than to excite the interest and awaken the wonder of its readers. As a work of fancy, however, it is one of the best of its class, and I believe is now for the first time translated into English.

I do not recollect any story on which it could be said to be founded; but at the end of _La Tyranine des Fées détruite_, by the Countess d'Anneuil, is a story, entitled _La Princesse Lionne_, in which a princess is changed into a lioness, and persecuted by a fairy called La Rancune; but there the similarity ends. Mademoiselle de Lubert edited an edition of the _Nouveaux Contes des Fées_ of the Countess d'Anneuil, and may have taken an idea from that particular incident.

The model of the globe in which Prince Coquerico saw and heard all that passed in the universe, and witnessed the opera, the play, and the orations at the _Académie Française_, reminds one of the room in the Palace of the Beast, the various windows of which afforded Beauty similar entertainment.

The Fairy Tigreline's employments of spinning and threading pearls, is in strict accordance with the manners of the sixteenth century. "Passons avec les dames," says Rabelais, "nostres vie et nostres temps _à enfiler les perles ou à filer_, comme Sardanapalus."--Livre i. chap. 33. I have mentioned (p. 438) that the opera of _Armide_ was considered the _chef-d'œuvre_ of Quinnault. The music was composed by Lulli, and it is reported that he made Quinnault write the last act over again five times, which so disgusted the poet that he ceased to write for the stage from that period. The incident of the shield is that in which Ubaldo holds before Rinaldo his adamant or diamond shield, in which the latter sees himself reflected in his effeminate attire, is awakened to a sense of his degraded situation, and abandons the enchanted gardens of Armida.--Book xvi.

FOOTNOTES:

[61] At a spring called the Fountain of Thirst, or the Fountain of the Fays, "corruptly called 'La Font des _Sees'_" (says a writer in 1698), and every year, in the month of May, a fair is held in the neighbouring mead, when the pastrycooks sell figures of women '_bien coiffées,_' called 'Merlusines.'

MADAME LEPRINCE DE BEAUMONT.

JEANNE LEPRINCE DE BEAUMONT was born at Rouen, in 1711, and commenced her literary career in 1748, by the production of a romance, called _La Triomphe de la Vérité_; shortly after which she came to England, and resided in London for a considerable time, occupying herself as a governess, and in writing works for the instruction as well as the amusement of youth. That which acquired the most popularity was _Le Magazin des Enfans_, in which appeared her abridgment of _Beauty and the Beast_, and her original _Fairy Tales_. She was twice married. Her first was an unfortunate union, annulled almost immediately afterwards. Her second marriage took place in England, but to a Frenchman; and in 1762 she returned to France for the benefit of her native air. In 1768, she purchased a small estate, called Chenavoi, and died in 1780. Her miscellaneous works amount to seventy volumes; but even _Le Magazin des Enfans_ is scarcely remembered in the present day, and the four short fairy tales which terminate this volume are, with the abridgment of _Beauty and the Beast_, the only effusions by which she is popularly known in England. The best of them is

PRINCE DÉSIR AND PRINCESS MIGNONE.

It is more like one of the good old Breton stories--pleasant, short, and with a sound moral.

PRINCE CHÉRI,

Corrupted into "Prince Cherry" in our children's books, exhibits the influence of the importations from the East. But that it has so manifest a moral, it might pass for a French alteration of an Oriental tale. The names of Suliman and Zélie would encourage the suspicion.

THE WIDOW AND HER TWO DAUGHTERS.

_La Veuve et ses Deux Filles_ is better known by the title of _Blanche and Vermillion_, under which it has been frequently printed, and was also produced on the French stage by Mons. Florian, in March, 1781. The moral of the story is declared by the Fairy to be that excessively trite and common-place axiom, that happiness consists in content, or, in the words of the author, the possession of things only that are necessary without wishing for more; but the author forgot to show us that Blanche was discontented. It does not appear that she wished for superfluities, or to be a "great Queen," or that such an idea ever entered her head till the Fairy promised her she should become one, "not to reward," but "to punish," her for begrudging to give away her plums. Poor Blanche is therefore made an _unhappy_ queen; her low birth renders her an object of contempt at Court; the King is a worthless person, who neglects the innocent girl his passion induced him to place upon his throne, and who is the mother of his children; and at length the miserable wife exclaims that "happiness is not to be found in magnificent palaces but in the innocent occupations of the country." Now this is foolish--it is worse, for it is false and injurious. There is as much happiness in palaces and on thrones, thank God, as there is in cottages. The occupations of a virtuous sovereign are as innocent as those of a husbandman, while the power to do good, existing with the will, must make the balance of happiness greatly in favour of the former. The cares of State are burdensome enough, no doubt, and the more conscientious the monarch, the weightier the sense of responsibility; but has the countryman no cares, no sorrows, no _vices_? The legal occupations of all classes are "innocent." Is it only kings and nobles who yield to temptations or indulge in the evil propensities of our common nature? There has been too much of this fallacy infused into what are called moral stories, and at the risk of being accused of breaking a butterfly on the wheel, I have singled out this particular instance, as _Blanche and Vermillion_ is to be found in almost every child's story-book. That the author's intention was laudable, I do not doubt; but to read a wholesome lesson, she should have shown Blanche to have been discontented with the lot assigned to her by Providence, pining to mix in society for which she was neither fitted by birth nor education, and dreaming that happiness consisted solely in rank, wealth, and luxury. The moral should have been, not that such possessions were incompatible with virtue and happiness, but that their owners were not exempted from the frailties and sufferings of humanity, and that unequal marriages were rarely fortunate ones. All this, it will be said, she might mean, but it is not evident; and the only impression made upon a child's mind by this story, if any impression can be made by it whatever, is the very absurd and objectionable one, that all kings and queens are wicked and unhappy, and all farmers and dairy-maids virtuous and contented.

PRINCE FATAL AND PRINCE FORTUNÉ.

This is another of the moral Fairy Tales of Madame de Beaumont, and, as _Fatal and Fortuné_, a great favourite with the compilers of children's story-books. It is healthier in tone than the preceding: the value of adversity is difficult to impress on a young mind, and it is pointed out in this little tale as well, perhaps, as it could be; but there is one observation I must venture to make in reference to a point of taste. The writers of the old Fairy Tales never mix up the Almighty with fairies and enchanters. The superior powers are invariably the mythological divinities of ancient Greece and Rome. Their heroes and heroines pray to "the gods," not to "God." The introduction of the sacred name is, I am well aware, too frequent in familiar French conversation, to render it a matter of criticism in the original language; and I fully acquit Madame de Beaumont of any intentional irreverence; but it is a fact worthy of remark, that in an age and at a Court which are described as particularly licentious, the writers for youth or entertainment carefully abstained from an unnecessary profanity of which they had examples enough in the older fabliaux and romances, not only of their own country, but throughout Europe; and that although the majority of these authors were in the highest ranks of society--members of the circle that surrounded the throne of one of the most despotic monarchs in the civilized world--they never spared the foibles or the crimes of princes, or the hypocrisy and treachery of their parasites.

The fearless frankness, indeed, with which they satirized the follies and inveighed against the vices of the great, is as honourable to them as their perfect freedom from that questionable morality which would deny in any class the existence of virtue and the enjoyment of happiness founded upon it. Madame de Beaumont's admission that such may be the case concludes her story of _Fatal and Fortuné_ more satisfactorily than her insinuation to the contrary does that of _The Widow and her Two Daughters_.

So much has been said in this Appendix about _Peau d'Ane_ and _L'Adroite Princesse_, that although, as in the case of _Prince Marcassin_ and _Le Dauphin_, in my former volume, I have not included them in the body of the work, I think it may be as well, as in the above instance, to give in this place an analysis of their plots, they being undoubtedly two of the oldest fairy tales of their class on record.

PEAU D'ANE.

A Princess, in order to escape the persecution of the King, her father, on a point of conscience, consults a fairy, who is her godmother, and by her advice successively requests her father to give her three dresses--the first of the colour of the sky, the second of the colour of the moon, and the third of the colour of the sun, believing he will be unable to fulfil his promises. He succeeds, however, in procuring for her the three dresses; and she is then instructed to ask him for the skin of a marvellous ass in the royal stables, which supplies the King daily with an ample quantity of gold coin, under the impression that his Majesty will never consent to such a sacrifice. The infatuated Monarch, however, does cause the ass to be killed and flayed, and the Princess, on the receipt of the skin she has requested, is reduced to flight. The Fairy tells her to put the three fine dresses and all her jewellery, &c. in a large trunk, which by magical power is to follow her underground, and appear whenever she needs it; and begriming her face and hands, and wrapping herself up in the ass's skin, the Princess escapes from the palace, and travels into the dominions of a neighbouring monarch. She there obtains employment in a farm as a scullion and keeper of the pigs and poultry, her only pleasure consisting in occasionally locking herself up in her miserable room, and putting on her fine dresses and jewellery, which appear at her wish, as the Fairy promised her.